Editorial»
A difficult journey to Harvard
NOV 04 - From Baltimore I was flying to Boston for my conference at Harvard University. It was a bright sunny day in spite of the freezing low temperature. I was visiting my family in Maryland and Carol Davis was also doing the same in Albany, and we had planned to meet at our conference venue that day at Harvard Square. My relative Dr. Mahendra Karki dropped me off at the airport and left for his office. I checked in and waited. The flight was delayed by two hours, they said. We waited. The plane was taxiing in Orlando airport and they would inform us after it took off. The plane never took off. The passengers were deplaned. Not once but a couple of times. Finally they announced that our flights were cancelled. In a strange way, it made me feel homesick. It seemed like back home. Well, not quite. They even took the trouble to inform us that no other airlines had spare seats, all were overbooked for that day and the next and Air Trans Airways had no option but to refund our tickets. We had to make our own arrangements. I called my bhinaju, “my flight is cancelled, I need to take a train!” Thank god, his office NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre is only twenty minutes away from the airport. He put me on a train, the Amtrak. It was the last train to Boston that day. I was lucky.
I entered the train. For a second I thought I was entering a train somewhere in Madras or Bombay. All the seats were full and people were sitting, reclining, squatting, in all varied postures possible - on the floor. Again my luck, I got a seat on the floor with the ticket in my hand. It was fairly comfortable except for the hot air that vented into my back. I was forced to lean against the hot air vent. I thought my jacket would melt. It didn’t. I was lucky again.
After about three and a half hours, I think it was at Princeton that I got a seat, that too because this guy and I happened to be reading the same book in the train, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, and he kind of liked the idea of giving his seat to me. I was lucky. Relaxed, I continued to read. The Amtrak slowly chugged to a halt at New Haven station. It was two hours before we reached Boston. We waited for the train to start again. It did not. Darkness engulfed us. Again an announcement- “The engine is dead. We have no electricity, we are sorry, please be with us!”. Where could we go without being with them? Finally, after two and a half hours of waiting-a shorter wait than at the airport-the train took off in full speed. Finally, at four in the morning-it took us eleven hours instead of eight-we finally alighted in Boston and took taxi ride to my hotel. I was lucky all over again.
After all that (mis)adventure any one can imagine my delight to see Harvard University that day. Harvard had occupied my imagination as soon as I got the invitation to send a proposal to present a paper on a panel with Carol Davis, Assistant Professor at Pomona College, California where I am a Fulbright post-doctoral scholar now. My subject of study is theatre, especially woman’s space in dramatic texts and performance arts. My dreams finally came true when I presented my paper on 25 October 2003.
It was a South Asian Studies Conference, and besides us there was one other person presenting a paper on Nepal, Anne Frechette of Hamilton College on “The Politicization of the Kyiduk and the emergence of Party Politics Among Tibetans in Nepal.” Carol and I were a panel. The main theme was Nepali theatre before and after the restoration of democracy in Nepal in 1990. Carol’s concern was with the analysis of how the street theatre played a role in the creation of an ambience of rebellion against the non-party Panchayat system in Nepal. Carol drew in her presentation from her own previous study of Nepali street theatre movement that started with Ashesh Malla and his friends Sunil Pokharel, Pushkar Gurung and others in 1982.
My interest lay more on the disillusionment of the people’s expectations in the aftermath of the restoration of democracy as reflected in the performative aspect of Nepali dramaturgy. The hopes raised by the movement for the restoration of democracy were gradually shattered in the aftermath of the restoration-with the failures of the political forces representing democracy and the growth in the militant insurgency.
The street theatre expressed this disillusionment on a small scale. But the shattered hopes were expressed in subtle and serious proscenium theatre. The Sama Theatre of the Aarohan Group was opened in 2002 by staging a play of Abhi Subedi titled Agniko Katha which I translated as Fire in the Monastery and is published as Three Plays. The treatment of the disillusionment is shown in these plays in a more subtle manner. In Fire in the Monastery monks and nuns do feel deep down that they suddenly feel rootless, powerless after the fire. A search for a new hope becomes the theme. The terrible situation in the land becomes manifest in their dialogues. A shy, muted nun played by Nisha Sharma, interestingly expresses the pain of the times; she hears the cries of agony and feels a need to help others. She leaves the monastery to serve the victims of this senseless bloody war. The journey and speech of this nun and the poet express this disillusionment. Journey into Thamel, Subedi’s next play, speaks about the guns to express the disillusionment in a subtle manner.
My feeling is that theatre artists got disillusioned with the very medium of saying it through the street theatre. We can see this in their emphasis on the proscenium theatre and the lessening energy of the street theatre groups, including Sarwanam itself. This shift in the interest will perhaps bring new changes in Nepali theatre. The theatre creators will use more subtle ways of speaking strongly about the political changes in Nepal. It is too early to predict now but we have begun to see the trends. Women have become the party in this expression of disillusionment, which I find a subject of interest.
The presentations elicited several queries. Besides many others two people stood out in our session who directed their queries again and again. One was Richard A. Frasca from the department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University and author of The Theatre of the Mahabharata: Terukkuttu Performances in South India. And the other scholar was Mary P Cullins who teaches theatre history at Harvard University and her questions were on how women and their positions in the society get reflected through theatre. It was a good and satisfying presentation and in the process, we got some nice feedback from the participants’ experiences with the street and proscenium theatres in other countries of South East Asia.
The panel discussion and the ambience of the seminar-a combination of the academic and human moments, at the Harvard University was a memorable event in my life as an academician and will inspire my works in the future.Posted on: 2003-11-03 09:33
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