By Dr. Sudipto Chatterjee PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3
Coming from a ‘state’ that has always had a very ambivalent relationship with the Indian nation, Ratan Thiyam is cognizant of how that continues to inform
and structure the political import of his theatre. His theatre reflects the tenuous, and often contentious, relationship between his Manipuri identity and his national
identity as an Indian. Thiyam's theatre is already bespeaking Manipur's fraught placement within the vexatious self-fashioning of Indian nationhood. Thiyam’s theatre embodies
his discomfiture with a forked identity via negativa (if we may borrow the concept of the ‘neti’ from ancient Sanskrit philosophy). Compounded as it were in a double
negative, Thiyam seems to be both not-Indian and not not-Indian—a paradox as real as his multimodal, multilayered theatrical praxis. The heteroglossic expressivity of
Thiyam’s work situates itself in a dense world of subtexts where a panoply of images and sounds, colors and movements, engulf the audience, eliciting sensory responses that
in time become palpable tools of reflection and thought. At the end, it is Thiyam’s capability to keep his productions going on in the heads and hearts of his audience that
gives life and longevity to his work, making it worth celebrating. The same visionary genius that allows him the belligerent nonchalance to smirk at the obdurate transience
of the most fleeting member of the arts, the performing arts, where the only hope of permanence lies in whether it will be recorded in/as recollected memory, however elusive
and slippery the proposition. Memory is the only hope for great performative art to gain any permanence. And Ratan Thiyam has made a habit of making memory his ally—the
memories that his audiences keep for a very long time. Thiyam returns theatre to its basic function of being great art that lives well beyond what is immediately purported on
the stage. Thiyam has always traveled beyond the here and the now of literal seeing.
Nine Hills One Valley, his latest work, is no exception in that regard, but at the same time, it comes with an apparent difference. It marks Thiyam’s recent attempt to
bespeak the condition—socio-political, cultural, and historical—of Manipur directly, with sincere candor, through his theatrical work. In Nine Hills One Valley, Thiyam still
continues to employ his creative synergies in delineating on stage the same vigor and rigor of light, color, ritualistic sound and physical movements, dance, and a skilled
management of stillness and traffic. However, this time he presents in his known and proven (to those already familiar with his work) format a subject he is known mainly to
have dealt with at a symbolic level: the subject of Manipur.
Nine Hills One Valley is part of a trilogy of plays that contextualize the present condition of Manipur within the larger picture of the changing face of Indian politics,
that in turn is affected by the turn of global events predicated under a new world economic order. Thiyam’s effort with this trilogy is to place the travails of Manipur
comparably next to the various crises-ridden locations around the world. In doing so, Thiyam inverts his usual modus operandi of speaking through narrative metaphors
apparently dissociated from the immediate issues affecting Manipur, bereft of any sense of immediate urgency. In the not-too-distant past, as recently as 2004–05, Thiyam went
so far as to create a ‘negative’ space in which the absence of any reference to violence and collective trauma speaks through silence and purposeful denial of it in the face
of Nature’s beauty. Ritusamharam, a theatrical adaptation of an ancient Sanskrit poem by Kalidasa, depicted the beauteous violence of the changing seasons. The Hindu, a
Chennai-based English-language daily said in 2005, “There are no reminders of army atrocities in a State that has repeatedly cried out for the withdrawal of the AFSPA (Armed
Forces Special Powers Act); an Act the playwright too decries. Instead, Ritusamharam is almost magically removed from the conflict Thiyam describes painfully as routine.”
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