vancheyar kandem drama

- A Daily Paper

For well-known theatre-person Pralayanshanmugasundaram Chandrasekaran — he goes simply by Pralayan — theatre wasn’t part of his plan. “It took over, like a contagious disease,” he says.

The playwright and director of street plays in Tamil Nadu was in the city recently in connection with the staging of his latest play, Vanchiyar Kaandam . His group, Chennai Kalai Kuzhu, produces political street theatre.

Pralayan completed a degree in Mathematics, and jumped straight into full-time theatre. Over the 30-year engagement with social theatre that followed, his preoccupation has been with political theatre — “most of my plays try to explore our social reality.”

So his plays have dealt with themes such as the Bhopal gas tragedy and custodial violence.

Vanchiyar Kaandam , his latest play, takes one episode from the Tamil epic Silapathikaram , and expands that to suggest an alternative story, told through “ordinary characters, on the sidelines of the epic”.Silapathikaram , often credited to Elango Adikal, tells the story of Kannagi’s revenge on the Pandyan king for wrongfully sentencing her husband to death. At the end of Silapathikaram is a celebration at a newly built temple. Vanchiyar Kaandam picks up at this point, taking as its protagonists three briefly mentioned women characters. As these characters — Kaavarpendu, Thevanthi and Aiyai — visit the temple festival and make their way down from the hills, they share their memories of Kannagi; they slowly realise a conflict between the deified and the lived experience of Kannagi. This conflict is at the heart of the play.

Pralayan points to a previous work, Paari Padukalam , which reflects his preoccupation with social history. Here, the story of how a popular village chieftain was annihilated by the mighty Chera, Chola and Pandya empires, is examined from the villagers’ point of view. “There is a lot of glorification of the past. There is a need to question and understand it: this is an attempt in that direction.”

If Paari Padukalam focuses on the ‘other side’ of history and wars, Vanchiyar Kaandam is preoccupied with the figure of the woman as a repository of virtue, says Pralayan. “How do we understand women in a modern context? How did this cult of the ‘patni’ arise? It’s a very 20th-century understanding to paint Kannagi as a heroine because of her passive devotion to her adulterous husband.”

Their resonance

While there might be plenty of matter to analyse in his plays for academics — notions of retelling history, the hierarchical structures of class and caste in dominant versions, and so on — does Pralayan think his works resonate with the average theatregoer? Does the flashback format used in Vanchiyar Kaandam , for instance, offer enough drama to sustain the production? Pralayan thinks so. “Truths are interesting. Enlightenment is entertaining. People enjoyed it.”