Deepti Naval: An actor-poet’s exploration of life

Remember Deepti Naval? The actor best known in 70s-80s parallel cinema? Her debut as a young bride in Shyam Benegal’s Junoon? Naval records advice from Moushumi Chaterji in those early years. Sitting on a parapet and drinking tea during a shooting break the senior actor remarked, “Where is the need to go deep into the character and all that? Concentrate on one thing — looking beautiful in front of the camera at all times!” Naval sighs, “That was one lesson I could never learn… trade the inside for the outside!”

Vijay Tendulkar once remarked, “Shabana (Azmi) and Smita (Patil) are obviously brilliant, but Deepti is different, she conveys more by what she does not say.” Granted, the director and camera create such implications, but we cannot deny Naval’s skill in making us see “inside” the spoken word, beyond what the eye sees, in varying kinds of films — Ek Baar Phir, Chashme Baddoor, Kamla, Bawander, Firaaq, Leela.

Watching the actor in the play Ek Mulaaqat recently in Chennai, I realised how much more difficult it is to create the same effect on the stage. No manipulations of the frame, no playing around with varying shots, no intercutting, edits, retakes here. Also, the play had no simplistic realism. It was the unfolding of a serious writer’s mindscape in a series of stark vignettes. Naval plays the writer Amrita Pritam, knitting alone on the terrace, reliving her unrequited love for the mercurial poet Sahir Ludhianvi (while long-term partner Imroz keeps calling intermittently from below). The moods criss-cross from banter to shock.

How to spin this gossamer thread of romance and fantasy through Urdu dialogues weighted with sonorous compounds, and demanding poems in Urdu and Punjabi? Especially as Naval’s voice, in contrast to her robust co-actor Shekhar Suman, lacks depth and timbre? And with the director’s design remaining stodgy and predictable?

Yet Naval never trades “the inside for the outside”. We feel the horror of atrocities perpetrated on women, not so much in the recited lines of Pritam’s poetry — but in the following pause of her reliving the moment. We feel the heat in our veins when Pritam invokes the tactile image of touching Sahir as she applies pain-relieving balm on his throat… Or when she asks him with a guileless charm and seething passion, “Why can’t you accept me?”

Questions of sanity and insanity have always troubled living-on-the-edge artistes. In The Silent Scream, Naval’s poems from a mental hospital, you hear this cry through the smothering darkness and stench,“Do not be sorry for my world/ Within this confinement/ I live with freedom/ A luxury you cannot afford.” With the sensibility of the painter and photographer that she is, with an eye for the distant and the remote, as a poet Naval explores unfulfilled, yet-to-be fulfilled, never-may-be-fulfilled moments. They go beyond the specific personal into the universal human — as in her arresting poems to Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi (Black Wind).

Crowds swirl around them as Naval encounters her contemporaries, fleetingly, in the corridors of life — travel lounge, baggage claim, transit space. But Naval sees only herself and the other. In the verses for Shabana, Naval wonders tremulously — what had gone wrong between them, could they ever break the silence of the years? Shabana boards the flight without a backward look. Naval sighs, “A moment came, and was denied/ If only you had turned,/ And I had smiled…"

To Smita she says, “There must be another way of living life.” Smita snaps back, “There isn’t”. Naval pants on, “Today/You are gone/And I’m still running…/Still trying/ To prove you wrong!”

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist, writing on the performing arts, cinema and literature