Content area
Full text
Often called the "Grande Dame" of Marathi theatre, Shanta Gokhale is a novelist, journalist, translator, and cultural/theatre critic in Mumbai, India.1 She graduated with a degree in English language and literature from the University of Bristol, UK. In addition to a variety of films and documentaries, Gokhale has published a number of books, including Playwright at the Center: Marathi Drama from 1843 to the Present (2000), Satyadev Dubey: A Fifty-year Journey through Theatre (2011), Veenapani Chawla: Theory, Practice and Performance (2014), and The Scenes We Made: An Oral History of Experimental Theatre in Mumbai (2015), as well as her translation of Lakshmibai Tilak's Smritichtre: The Memoir of a Spirited Wife (2017). The Engaged Observer: The Selected Writings of Shanta Gokhale, edited by Jerry Pinto, was released in 2018, and her autobiography, One Foot on the Ground: A Life Told through the Body, was published in 2019.
I met Shanta at her home in Shivaji Park, Mumbai on April 18, 2014. She was one of the twenty-eight female Indian artists I chose to interview during my Fulbright that year. I was primarily interested in Indian women playwrights, but as we drank tea and munched on cookies, Shanta shared with me her stories of the rich history in Marathi Theatre and culture, as well as her perspective on the current state of the art, which confirmed much of what I had been hearing from the broad range of interviewees I encountered in Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Pondicherry, and Calcutta.
Familiar with the history of classical Indian dance/drama, its origins in Sanskrit, and its primary influence from Hinduism as depicted in The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, I set out with a series of questions regarding contemporary Indian women playwrights based on that knowledge, as well as my awareness of the significant role that feminism has played in the history of India as a nation. What I discovered, however, was the remarkably diverse array of artistic challenges the artists encounter, many of which are discussed in the following interview (for example, the lack of education in playwriting throughout the country, the prevalence of censorship, and the limitations caused by the diverse languages spoken throughout the country). The playwrights also spoke of...