Onslaught of the other

Shardul Bhardwaj

As the final call to enter the performance space at the Oddbird Theatre came, the audience (mostly familiar with each other through their affiliation to the community of the music and theatre artists in the capital) left the comfortable lap of Ornette Coleman’s ravishing saxophone playing to witness the play titled Mahish by the Third Space Collective. It was a full house on a Saturday evening, their second show that day.

On entering, one is greeted by an empty platform kept upstage with a life-sized outline of India’s boundary highlighted by green LED lights — a rough indication of what is to come. TSC’s set design always seems to hint at the ‘real’ and borders on the unfinished to create an interplay between fact and fiction. Perhaps the same liminal space that this group treads so well in, in terms of set design, is also implicit in the performance grammar of Mahish, which is an attempt at a seamless confluence of language and body, gaining primacy to articulate the story and characters.

The play is an adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959) that belongs to the repertoire of absurdist articulations of the rise of singular and exclusivist ideology of fascism that lead to multitudes committing themselves to mass genocides during WW-II. Thus, an adaptation of this play by TSC becomes crucial through the motif of ‘Mahishasur’, the buffalo-demon who was killed by Durga. In the context of navratra festivities in a small colony, Mahishasur threatens to take over each and every god-fearing citizen of India. Mahish manifests through bizarre episodes of ordinary citizens transforming into beasts, leaving the fold of humanity to be reported. 

The setting of the navatras soon shifts to a newsroom, equally plagued by misinformation and rumour-mongering based on individual opinions and subjective experiences with Mahishes.

As the play progresses, one can witness each and every character change into a Mahish, except the protagonist of the play, Vandana (played by New Delhi based theatre practitioner Dhwani Vij) who has insurmountable belief in her version of humanity. Her trauma is explicit in her lover’s gradual and painful conversion into a mahish. As her beliefs grow, she tries to create an idyllic world far away from her known surroundings with Chandini (embodied by Anannya Tripathi) where humanity shall win against the Mahishism on the streets. She dreams of starting from scratch and even envisions a world where she and Chandini would be able to have children of their own and save the human race. Vandana tries to hold her fort till the end despite knowing all her friends would turn to Mahishes.

The play tries to confront the dilemma of the characters to turn into Mahish or to stay human. The audience rarely gets to know who and what the Mahish is? Whether this other is an ideology, a figment of somebody’s imagination or a primordial beast from the mythology out to test a Hindu-crazed population. It might be all three and the beauty of these colliding thoughts played out beautifully until the actual transformations begin. The second half seems rushed and of one singular rhythm, but director Neel Sengupta clearly seems to want to maintain the plurality of the meaning of Mahish. This contradiction seems to eat up the beauty of the first half and seems to be hurriedly running towards its resolution. The marked increase in words and singularity of pace take away from the complexity the writer, Rajesh Nirmal, and the director had promised at the beginning of the play.

Some very crisp performances by Niketan Sharma, Rahul Tewari and Dhwani Vij don’t let audiences ever get comfortable in their seats. It is the text that stops supporting the beautiful range that the actors of this play traverse as various characters through various scenes.