Archival Tales: Meet Playwright Anuja Ghosalkar

July 25, 2017

Since the time of Shakespeare, male actors have been impersonating and playing the parts of female characters. The same has followed suit even in India in Marathi theatre with renowned actors like Bal Gandharva essaying the roles of women on stage.

Anuja Ghosalkar, a Bengaluru-based playwright, director and researcher, heard many stories of her great-grandfather, Madhavrao Tipnis, while growing up. He was a female impersonator in Marathi theatre in the late 19^th century. It is his ghost that haunts Ghosalkar’s character in her documentary theatre performance, ‘Lady Anandi’.

“When I was growing up I was really fascinated by the stories I heard of him. Since I was a child, I didn’t find it odd, that he was playing women. In fact, I thought it was fantastic. I went to an all-girls’ school so I always played a boy on stage. It is only when I became an adult that I began to think more about this, in terms of gender,” explains Ghosalkar, who in this one-woman show, plays her grandfather impersonating female characters.

Madhavrao Tipnis (right) as Lady Anandi in the play Bhaubandaki

Looking at old pictures, one can notice that Madhavrao Tipnis as Lady Anandi, looking very graceful and elegant, giving in to the archetype of a woman. Ghosalkar challenges this and does not give in to the archetype while playing her great-grandfather. “He exaggerated the notion of being female. He gave in to it. He was a perfect woman and I’m not. I bring out this inability in my performance. Gender is a social construct and I fully agree that an actor’s body is neither male nor female. I’d be happy to play a man but then I would avoid the archetype. That is a trap many fall into!”

As a researcher, Ghosalkar has worked extensively with archives which resulted in her project that documented and archived the life of her grandfather, the oldest living make-up artist at the time. In ‘Lady Anandi’ too, she has used archival material to find out more about her great-grandfather. She uses this to artistically weave her research with fiction. She further adds, “You can use archives in a number of ways. When I started looking for my great-grandfather, he wasn’t a part of theatre history which is why he’s a ghost in the play. We can’t control what becomes a part of history and what doesn’t. Archives shouldn’t just be a repository but also a place from where we can receive material and use it. I found an interview with my great-grandfather but I didn’t use it as it is. One of his plays was banned by the British and they had planted spies in the audience, I used this incident to write fiction around it. We must question our history because we use the archives to remember.”

The play is described as a work-in-progress and has changed a lot over the course of 30 shows around India. This is due to the interactive session that Ghosalkar has with her audience at the end of the play. “The last show I did in Pune was 30 minutes long but this time the duration is 50 minutes. I take a lot from the audience feedback. I incorporate some of it in my shows. This is a form very new to me but now I own it. I can work on the performance aspect apart from the writing and research.”

‘Lady Anandi’ will be staged at TIFA Working Studios on July 28 | Find out more here