MUMBAI: There is a moment in ‘Bhirrr…’, staged at The Tamaasha Studio recently, when the lights fade out and two saris, suspended in the air above the actors, seem to hold the entire weight of the play.
Mayuri Ravindra, the deviser and performer behind the work, says she saw those saris long before she had a script, a cast, or even a title. “I kept seeing two saris suspended in space,” she recalls. “I knew they belonged to this world.”
Because i wanted to understand how someone with no formal education could look at the world with such astonishing clarity, simplicity and imagination, “I was reading her. Mayuri Ravindra’s route into the material was not academic, though the research, once it began, was extensive. It started with a single book, ‘Bahinachi gani’ (The songs of Bahinaibai) picked up by accident during a film shoot near Nandurbar, close to the birthplace of the poet Bahinabai Chaudhari. One afternoon one of them, Malu aaji, stayed with her – an elderly woman who sang with total, unhesitating confidence, until Mayuri asked if the verses were her own compositions. That single, quiet correction became something like the play’s thesis.
“I wasn’t reading her because she was part of the syllabus,” Ravindra says of her second, adult encounter with Bahinabai, whose lines she’d absorbed unknowingly as a child from her grandmother’s speech. Before she could answer, the men in the room interrupted: no, they said, she’d only learned them from bhajans and kirtans. When the women spoke for themselves, Mayuri remembers, almost all the women said, ‘No… these are mine’. “That is patriarchy,” Mayuri Ravindra says. “Not only denying women authorship, but making them doubt it themselves.”
What rescued the work, she says, was a single note from her mentor, the choreographer and singer Sanjukta Wagh, who had first introduced Mayuri Ravindra to the ovi tradition years earlier during a singing module at drama school: “Locate it. Onstage, that hard-won clarity belongs largely to Janhvi Marathe, Ravindra’s co-deviser and co-performer. That process nearly broke the production before it found its shape. They scrapped it. Make it as local as possible. Wagh later walked into a stalled rehearsal and, instead of asking the company to write or improvise, simply asked them to breathe and feel their own spines. Marathe travelled with Ravindra to Abdullat, sat with the ajjis, and absorbed the rhythms of their labour before ever setting them to movement. Why ‘Bhirrr…’ is an important play is the question about the boundaries of literature itself. “Who decides whose voice gets recognised and whose not? Mayuri Ravindra asks, echoing a line she gives to a character in the play.
A month and a half into devising, Ravindra and her collaborators had, by her own account, “a play”. “For the first time in days, I wasn’t thinking about the play,” Ravindra says. “Does that mean we were nothing before we got the award?”
