playwrights-from-india

"Shiva struggled out of Raje’s embrace and said, ‘Raje, there are many people who cry when someone dies. But very few who are willing to cry for a living person. Maharaj, you are shedding tears for someone like me. What more can I ask for? I am willing to give my life for each one of your tears. Don’t weep for me.’"

"Raje hugged Shiva tightly and did not say a word. His tears drenched Shiva’s shoulders. Raje said, ‘Shiva, I hate what I must do. I have to sacrifice people like you at each step. You are willing to embrace death for me, and here I am, putting earrings on you! What will I get finally? What an irony!’"

"I now invite to address you, “The Merchant of Death.” The “merchant of death” to terrorism, the “merchant of death” to corruption, the “merchant of death” to nepotism, the “merchant of death” to official inefficiency, the “merchant of death” to bureaucratic negligence, the “merchant of death” to poverty and ignorance, the “merchant of death” to darkness and despair."

"Her first day in Bombay wilted her. If she stepped out of the air-conditioned hotel room, she drooped, her head hung, her eyes glazed, she felt faint. Once she was back in it, she fell across her bed as though she had been struck by calamity, was extinguished, and could barely bring herself to believe that she had, after all, survived. Sweating, it seemed to her that life, energy, hope were all seeping out of her, flowing down a drain, gurgling ironically."

"I think everything one reads tends to linger on in one's writing, even after one's forgotten the book one's read. (The Massachusetts Review, 1988)"

"I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth. (Baruch College Class Interview, 2003)"

"Although she had fled the blood-spattered scene and fled the collected crowd of identical individuals — one-legged, nosepicking, vigilant-eyed — and hurried down the street at a speed uncommon for her, a speed no one would have thought possible on those high red heels that were no longer firm but wobbled drunkenly under the weight of her thick, purpleveined legs, Lotte slowed as she neared her door. Her body seemed to thicken and clot, her actions slowed till she was nearly at a standstill. She opened the door with fumbling, ineffective movements as though she had forgotten its grammat, her fingers numb, tongue-tied as it were. Entering the room, she shut the door behind her heavily, taking great care with the locks and bolts and chains, afraid the crowd might follow her, may even now be approaching her room, preparing to shoulder its way into it. When every lock was in place, she leant against the door in the theatrical manner that came naturally to her — pressing a packet of letters to her breast as years ago she had pressed a flower against a bosom still plump and warm, flounced with white lace and spotted with red spots, singing all the while to the stage-lights, her mouth open, a tunnel of red from which might issue either a trill or a howl. Pressing the bits of paper to her now shrunken and flabby bosom, she breathed long harsh breaths that rasped her throat."

"...why am I constantly writing about the past? Well, I probably couldn't approach the present directly, because I was carrying all of this past with me."

"Anita Desai packs worlds into pages, but keeps her eye close to the private, painful, funny humanity of her characters."

"She makes the apparently exotic . . . seem as universal, as vital and familiar, as the food on our plates."

"A lament, a protest, a statement. Those have to be made. I suppose that is what we write for. The human animal certainly has a need to make his statement, to retrieve something from the wreck of time. (The Massachusetts Review, 1988)"

"I definitely had a feeling, writing In Custody and Baumgartner's Bombay, of opening the door and stepping out into the street, walking, seeing, experiencing other places, other lives. If I'd lived my whole life in Old Delhi, I would feel so much frustration and anger that my world should be so limited by my very narrow experience. I wouldn't have wanted it otherwise. Was it wonderful? That is a different question. It was both wonderful and difficult."

""Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood? There are these long still stretches - nothing happens - each day is exactly like the other - plodding, uneventful - and then suddenly there is a crash - mighty deeds take place - momentous events - even if one doesn’t know it at the time - and then life subsides again into the backwaters till the next push, the next flood? That summer was certainly one of them - the summer of '47-"(I, p.42)"

"I do not recognise India of the present time where, under the banner of 'Hindutva,' intimidation and bigotry seek to silence writers, scholars and all who believe in secular and rational thought. (2015)"

"...the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being. (IV, p.159)"

"My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly. (Baruch College Class Interview, 2003)"

"When Salman Rushdie published Midnight's Children, it seemed to set tongues free in India in an odd way. Suddenly, younger writers realized that they didn't need to write correct and perfect English in the English tradition, but they could use Indian English and use it for any purpose whatsoever - for writing comic books, satiric books, or even for writing serious books. (Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, 1992)"

"It is a great influence on one's thoughts to be always on the outside, not belonging."

"I still like to read poetry before starting my work. Rilke, Cavafy, Mandelstam, Brodsky...Poets go directly to what they want to get across – they don't amble around, they cut to it with a tremendous immediacy that affects one."

"Anita Desai and Jean Rhys, who over the years became favorite, influential writers."

"I don’t know of any writer who has responded so ardently — mystically — to that magical scenery and then got it down with such poetic exactitude."

"It is astonishing that now a whole generation has grown up reading Indian literature in English. Nothing was being read when I was a student. We read no Indian writers at all."

"(KD Do you find a pattern in your work when you look at it all together?) AD …Perhaps that line by Emily Dickinson sums everything up: "Memory is a strange bell – jubilee and knell." I suppose that's been ringing away in my head all these years. That is why I feel so alienated from the India of today, because it has so separated itself from the India of the past. (KD With deliberate effort?) AD Tearing itself, to destroy the past, to be rid of it."

"She was the tree that grew in the centre of their lives and in whose shade they lived. (III, p110)"

"Anita Desai is one of the most brilliant and subtle writers ever to have described the meeting of eastern and western culture."

"So often one's writing is prophetic. When you write, you are in touch with another force, not the everyday force you employ, you retreat so deep into yourself, you don't suspect those feelings had been there."

"(Would you get very angry if someone said you were the Virginia Woolf of India and you "mothered" the psychological novel in India?) Desai: No, I would be denying something which is fairly obvious. One is the influence of Virginia Woolf upon my own work, and the other is that there weren't very many women writers in India at that time writing psychological novels. (Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, 1992)"

"That was the way life was: it lay so quiet, so still that you put your fingers out to touch it, to stroke it. Then it leapt up and struck you full in the face so that you spun about and spun about, gasping. The flames leapt up all around, rising by inches every minute, rising in rings. (II, p78)"

"India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country. (Baruch College Class Interview, 2003)"

"For creeds, devotion has bias for none; love for Krishna is meant for everyone."

"In all beings as Hari I dwell; regard everyone as Vishnu in them dwell."

"When on me devotion do women and folks flippant shower, then know they are in wisdom’s bower."

"One has only to read Manu after a bit of Kant to be struck by the former's extraordinary lack of universality. He seems to have no clear notion of a universal human nature from which one can deduce ethical decrees like 'Man shall not kill', or 'Man shall not tell an untruth'. One is aware of no notion of a 'state', no unitary law of all men … The main tradition of Judeo-Christian ethics is based on such a premise of universalisation. Manu will not understand such a premise. To be moral, for Manu, is to particularise – to ask who did what, to whom and when … Each class (jati) of man has his own laws, his own proper ethic, not to be universalised."

"Whatever his context — birth, class, gender, age, place, rank, etc. — a man is a man for all that. Technology, with its modules and interchangeable parts, and the post-Renaissance sciences, with their quest for universal laws (and 'facts') across contexts, intensify the bias towards the context-free.'"

"Various taxonomies of season, landscape, times, gunas or qualities (and their material bases), tastes, characters, emotions, essences (rasas), etc., are basic to the thought-work of Hindu medicine and poetry, cooking and religion, erotics and magic. Each jati or class defines a context, a structure of relevance, a rule of permissible combinations, a frame of reference, a meta-communication of what is and can be done … Even the Kama-Sutra is literally a grammar of love, which declines and conjugates men and women as one would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, moods and aspects. Genders are genres. Different body-types and character-types obey different rules, respond to different scents and beckonings."

"Cultures may be said to have overall tendencies to idealize, and think in terms of, either the context-free or the context-sensitive kind of rules. Actual behavior may be more complex, though the rules they think with are a crucial factor in guiding the behavior. In cultures like India's, the context-sensitive kind of rule is the preferred formulation."

"Wit, warmth and wisdom define Sai as a person and her writing is unfailingly pithy, perceptive and pulls no punches. (as a comment about Sai Paranjpye and her English Autobiography - A Patchwork Quilt: A Collage of My Creative Life)"

"Many filmmakers. In Malayalam, I love the films of Bharathan, Padmarajan and Sathyan Anthikkad, among others. Then, there are films of Balu Mahendra, and of many directors in Tamil. In Bollywood, Mukul Anand is an all-time favourite. I keep watching his films. I love films of Manmohan Desai, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and of course, Sai Paranjpe. Once on Twitter, there was a question – ‘which filmmaker’s universe would you like to live in?’ – for me, it would be Sai Paranjpe’s. (as an answer to who are some of his favourite directors)"

"I set out to assist two amazing filmmakers Sai Paranjpye and Kalpana Lajmi, both torchbearers of qualitative cinema. Through them I had a solid foundation to understand cinema and its intricacies. With Sai Paranjpye I learnt to use everyday humour, and with Kalpana Lajmi I learnt how to envisage a grand mise-en-scène. (After completing a course in film appreciation at FTII Pune)"

"I was very fat then, and Alkazi would scold me about my chubbiness. ‘An actor must look trim,’ he would tell me. ‘You will never get good roles if you don’t watch your weight!’ I was least interested in good roles. Writing and directing were my passions. But I did not tell him that. I kept nodding my head and agreed with him. I did not lose any weight, though. (sarcastic remark about her time training at the National School of Drama in Delhi, in the years 1962/63)"

"I guess I was born with a grin, I have this attitude or aptitude to look on the bright side. Pollyanna always looked on the bright side too. Somewhere, this must have had an unknown effect on me. We Indians tend to take life too seriously. We constantly pontificate and get philosophical about every little thing. Having fun is frowned upon, it’s almost sinful. I have done serious things, but I will not let go of that thread that keeps me bubbling along and happy and merry."

"Women actually have a fantastic sense of humour, better than men. Men tend to have crass and predictable humour. Women see human foibles and minute details, and they can laugh at eccentricities and peculiarities. They are also more understanding. Go ahead and quote me and let me make some enemies."

"I used my imagination to make up for what I lacked in physical swiftness"

"I am sure I speak for all my sisters when I say that we prefer to be known as directors, not just as women directors. To the eternal question that I am plagued with — what is the main disadvantage of being a woman director — my answer is: being endlessly harangued with this very question"

"I was shocked by the response to my adaptation of Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers, about a 50yish man who resolves to have flings with women. The audience roared with laughter but after the show, several people whose opinion I counted on, said, ‘This was not expected of you Sai. How can you bring up the topic of adulterous affairs?’"

"I always like to maintain that I am a writer first and then a director. But unfortunately, I am not known as much as a writer. I am a first-class writer and a second-class director."

"I am itching to get back to filmmaking. The industry has changed so much since I last directed a movie. Those days when my films like 'Ek Pal' and 'Rudaali' were so appreciated, now seem remote. We've gone from the era from Mahesh Bhatt to the era of Alia Bhatt. And I'm proud I know both of them as wonderful human beings. It's been a wonderful journey. I've enjoyed every minute of it. And I am not done as yet. (hopes of recovering from Kidney Cancer and returning to filmmaking after a long hiatus)"

"Well, my kidneys have failed. I haven't (laughs). (discussing her Kidney Cancer)"

"Kalpana was an amazing raconteur, who brought any incident or story to life in front of your eyes. It was visual, you could sense it and taste it. A passionate person, who had a great sense of humour and enjoyed laughing at herself and her own foibles. She was a people’s person and loved to make friends. She filled the room with laughter and positivity. (As to how the prolonged illness had not seriously dented Kalpana's vivacity till the end)"

"Situations like the one showed in Ek Pal exist in the lower classes and the upper classes and are more easily acceptable. It is the middle-class who gets horrified. It is the middle class who wants to act out, but can’t. (discussing the themes of adultery in the film and morality of the middle class)"