Director Anamika Haksar's experimental depictions of 'the people on the streets' transition from theatre to cinema
This year, there has been lavish media coverage of a new experimental film, intriguingly named Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (I Am Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis), which is doing the rounds of festivals. It is the handiwork of Anamika Haksar, an accomplished theatre director who has an association of more than four decades with the performing arts. The film marks her cinematic debut and amply reflects the slow honing of sensibility and craft that Haksar is known for, even if it’s only now that mainstream audiences are discovering her métier.
Her father PN Haksar was policy advisor to Indira Gandhi during her early years as prime minister, while mother Urmila Sapru was a teacher. Haksar’s childhood in Delhi was spent amid the aspirational ethos of a country in the making, and while her upbringing was strict and austere, she was exposed to the works of theatre masters in their prime, like Habib Tanvir, Heisnam Kanhailal or Ebrahim Alkazi.
“The two things that I have always gravitated towards are social work and theatre, because being aware and sensitive to people was judiciously drilled into my sister and me,” she says. The dark years of the Emergency proved particularly calamitous for her family, because her father’s internal dissent fell foul of Gandhi. A country in flux contributed in no small way to her burgeoning world view. It was as a 16-year-old in 1976 that Haksar began a three-year socially-engaged apprenticeship with firebrand dramatist Badal Sarkar, known for his uncompromising theatre of resistance.
While at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Haksar participated in a couple of anti-Emergency plays, but her interest in theatre as a vocation only took off with her stint at the National School of Drama (NSD), under the tutelage of BV Karanth, the director of the institute from 1977 till 1982. Her class travelled extensively, studying Indian forms like Yakshagana and Kalaripayattu, developing a deep appreciation for rooted traditions.
Karanth had a profound influence on the young Haksar, who considered herself too city-bred to grasp folk idioms with the felicity he displayed. “He was unearthing notions of Indian ‘realism’ in theatre, which took me some time to fathom,” she says. After passing out of the NSD in 1982, she went to the Soviet Union to study at the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatre Arts in Moscow (now called the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts), where her five-year stint began in unfamiliar fashion. “The first year was all about contemplating the self—me, my world, my people, my region. The expression of it then came through multiple identities of yourself.”
After returning to India in 1988, Haksar and her contemporaries like Kirti Jain and Khalid Tyabji at the NSD, where she was now visiting faculty, were able to formulate and implement new methodologies that marked a radical shift in terms of theatre pedagogy. “We decentralised stage geography, brought in a new language of blocking that wasn’t tied to fixed parameters, and ushered in a more democratic functioning of sorts,” she elaborates.
(This story appears in the 13 September, 2019 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)