Of the many selves
The Hindu :
No individual can be judged in isolation of the forces of his times: social, political and economical. Hence, he is largely a product of a period, of history. If on the one hand, the individual is shaped by his reactions and resistances to the world
around him, his story is also his response to the pressures of survival within a system. “Bahumukhi”, Vivek Shanbhag’s play, staged as part of the Ranga Shankara festival by amateur theatre group Sanchaya and directed by S. Surendranath, deals with these preoccupations.
The play, pitting the individual in the backdrop of a wide, powerful canvas – strangleholds of institution, authority, power – raises itself to a universality, while it gains its rootedness by locating the individual in a phenomenon that’s true of our times – a hyperactive media that menacingly invades private spaces and parades human emotions in the marketplace, the nouveau rich and their fashionable engagement with market-savvy spiritual gurus, failed relationships, and the disappearing fences between truth and untruth.
It all begins with a journalist (Sanjay) driven to produce a “head turning” story by his rather honest editor (Anand Birajdar), answerable to a management that cares only about selling figures. The editor, who intends no malice, is nothing more than a loyal mason, able to make very few claims about his professional life. In Sanjay’s desperate search for a breaking story, he stumbles upon a story, a story within a story, finally blurring judgments between history and myth, the real and the imagined. So much so, it suggests that in a complete collapse of ideological superstructures, the only recourse is to live in the world of the “story”, and sadly, even that is short lived (as in the case of Kempe Gowda). What is sadder is that it is unsympathetically perpetrated by Jakkuji, who himself is living out a story. But as Jakkuji himself observes, we live in a world…More
