When I spoke to Heisnam Sabitri after the funeral of Heisnam Kanhailal on October 6, Ima cried over the phone, “Your Oja1 has left me. How can I live without him?” It was not a ‘silent scream’, which Sabitri as an actress is best at on stage. Yet, it was a hard, real question. I have no answer to it. Perhaps, it must be true to some extent what the local theatre fraternity says, “Kanhailal dreams and Sabitri transforms his dreams into action.” This brings into question the subtle relationship between directors and actors. However, on a personal note, I must rephrase this, “Both of them dream together and transform their dreams into action together.” Perhaps, in the case of Kanhailal-Sabitri theatre, it would not be incorrect to even say that all the actors dream together and come hand in hand to transform their dreams into action. Undoubtedly, Kanhailal was the artistic leader of the Kalakshetra Manipur (KKM) family. Moreover, the communitarian attributes make his theatre complete and powerful.

Professor HS Shivaprakash hints at these attributes when he writes, “(…)the best exposition of his theatre philosophy is his own practice of theatre.”2 He continues, “Kanhailal creates his own system of values and techniques necessary for his cathartic theatre practice.”3 Kanhailal had always talked about the lack of professionalism in Indian theatre, which entails a lack of regularity in the actor’s process of training and daily practice. He said most theatre activity on the part of groups is ordinarily directed towards productions/ performances/shows and rehearsals leading up to the same. His effort had always been to fill this gap with regular theatre practice and the day-to-day training of the performer in order to achieve an “organic process of acting”. He focused on the rigorous disciplining of actors. To a large extent, his theatre extended beyond the stage.

In 1968, after three months of stay, Kanhailal was expelled from the National School of Drama for his ineptness to cope with the languages of instruction (English and Hindi). His hopes were shattered. However, he embraced theatre even during his life’s most painful struggle with poverty and hardship. Coming back to Manipur, he founded KKM with some of his friends and his wife Sabitri in July 1969.

Since then, the group has been working to create a theatre idiom based on the physical, driven by instinct and intuition, and exploring the specific powers of theatre. They began to experiment. Kanhailal told us, “There was no manifesto as such, as it was experimental. However, there was a strong sense of conviction deep within us, though we could not express it in words. That conviction helped us to envision vividly the kind of play we wanted to create. It led us to detour from the conventional theatre and take a new approach.”4 The effect is one of simplicity, lyricism, and moving humanity. At its most fundamental level, Kanhailal’s theatre upholds the poetry of the human spirit, creating a synergy between an animated actor and a living spectator. In his last public speech on the occasion of staging his magnum opus Tamnalai in Imphal on March 12 this year, Kanhailal said, “If not for my ouster from the National School of Drama, I would not have become what I am today”.

Needless to say, Kanhailal excelled in creating a new form of theatre, socially and politically as sharp and incisive as the stroke of a fang. His theatre brought an unparalleled language in articulating the social and political turmoil of his habitus. Under his leadership, KKM has always been actively creating a theatre rooted to the socio-political context of its real existence. The theatrical journey of the group has convincingly engendered a voice of dissent ingeniously creating an “alternative dissident expression”. This form of creative expression took root in the dissident state of suffering. From time to time the group manages to find their way out in responding to the political problems in Manipur.

Led by Kanhailal, the group had crystallised the most crucial realities of oppression and resistance through plays such as Pebet , Memoirs of Africa , Nupi and Draupadi , making the spectators alert to the resilience of the human spirit. Each of these works marks a stage in the philosophical journey of Kanhailal’s thought, culminating with the ontology of the corporeal conceptualised in his later thought. His oeuvre embarks on the ritual of suffering, which he has described as a turning point in both art and ideology. Resistance had been his ritual; ritualised acts projected as weapons of resistance.

Commenting on Pebet , Rustom Bharucha writes, “The act of politics in theatre does not ultimately lie in the assertion of an ideology, but in the very being of the actor which incarnates resistance.”5 This is part of Kanhailal’s attempt to evolve a new ideological basis for artistic, social, economic and political life. His little seeds of innovative cultural production, artistic resistance and creative disobedience to the oppressive forces continue to sprout.

Kanhailal was a rare theatre personality from India whose work will be found alongside those by Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats, George Barnard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, TS Eliot and Herbert Blau. His is the lone Asian name to be included in the 100 critical essays written by the 20th century’s most influential playwrights, directors, scholars, and philosophers, in the anthology Theatre in Theory: 1900-2000 , edited by David Krasner. Kanhailal will continue to live through his works of art and our memories. One can only hope to carry on his legacy with more responsibility and power to redefine ‘theatre’.

1. Oja means ‘mentor’ in Meiteilon. We addressed Kanhailal as Oja.

2. Theatre of the Earth: The Works of Heisnam Kanhailal (Seagull Books)

3. Ibid.

4. The Fourth Memorial Lecture to commemorate the birth anniversary of Dr Thingnam Kishan: Imphal, June 30, 2013.

5. Rustom Bharucha, The Theatre of Kanhailal: Pebet & Memoirs of Africa (Seagull Books)

Usham Rojio is currently researching the Anoirol (art of movements) an ancient Meitei text

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