The only other actor I might have thought for the part is Naseer. And Shreedhar Kulkarni needs intense economy - internalization. I get a feeling that there is hardly an actor in Indian cinema today whose range of gestures is as broad or wide as Amitabh’s. That equipment is, for example – well, let’s take a small thing to account as gestures. This may not be a very satisfactory reply to your question but I think it always matters what kind of equipment the actor has. That is my assessment of him as an actor. Why? Because of his image or that’s your assessment of him as an actor? Then I too laughed and told him that as long as he will permit me bigamy, I am okay.ĭid you see Amitabh Bachchan in the protagonist, Kulkarni’s role? Om (Puri) said ‘No no we won’t bring that girl in.’ He joked and told me, ‘Look, don’t fall so much in love with women’. So I have actually created three women in the script - even the third girl. In the last scene of Udhwastha there is a reference to the son’s beloved. The scenes with the two women are so relevant to the play’s political construction, not just as past romance. Of course the other thing about the play is, that because of its structure it did not permit us to work on the protagonist’s relationships with the two women - whereas a film can accommodate it. The question becomes that of the intersection between the power center and the individual.
That is all the more reason as to why the film should be made - precisely all the more reason. Today, the Indian Left is part of the political establishment.
Udhawastha Dharamshala, a seminal play, has been such a contemporary one post 1970s - for every time thereafter. Shanta Gokhale translated Udhwastha in English. There has never been a better translator for Marathi plays than Dev. So Udhwastha Dharamshala was translated even before I knew that it was being done - Vasant Dev translated it. There was a time between 1970s till about 20 or 25 years, when there was no problem in getting a play translated because even before you knew what was happening, some translator had shown interest and was busy working on it. It was the inaugural play of Shriram Centre - mera association dono theatres se hai.Īlways. I played the lead role of a simpleton king in that tamasha. The first play ever at Prithvi Theatre (Mumbai) was Udhwastha Dharamshala and when the Shriram Centre in Delhi came up, again the first play that was performed was directed by Sai Paranjpe - it was Tamasha, in which I was an actor.
I claim and very confidently you might say, that there are two major theatre halls in India, the opening of which I am connected with. I went there as a PhD student and continued teaching there. Eventually I retired as a professor of Chinese studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) – I was always at the JNU. I had earlier written a few short stories - nothing more than that as I was teaching. Udhwastha Dharamshala was the first play I wrote. The excerpt from the conversation that we had in the past, resonates topically, creatively and analytically in 2021. GPD’s talk while focusing on his work in theatre, television and films reflects on the socio-political times of that time and informs of a related past and future as also of his opinion on the medium he addresses. Here is an excerpt from my talk conducted on the 26 th June 2007. He was the recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Theatre - Playwriting (Marathi). He was a well-known commentator on literary and political affairs - an academic from Maharashtra. Noted academic, playwright, writer Govind P Deshpande (2 nd August 1938 – 16 th October 2013) was better known as GPD or as GoPu in the Marathi circles, writes Aparajita Krishna. Powerful People Gup-shup with GoPu by Aparajita Krishna March 2 2021, 12:00 am Estimated Reading Time: 18 mins, 19 secs