Gathariya: The Man Who Packed the World into a Bundle

A gathariya is a bundle. Not a suitcase — a square of cloth with the corners knotted, the bedroll a traveller slings over one shoulder and unties at the other end. Chandravadan Chimanlal Mehta wrote twelve volumes of autobiography and travel and called every single one of them a gathariya. Bandh Gathariyan, the tied bundle. Chhod Gathariyan, the untied one. Safar Gathariyan, the journey. Rang, Roop, Antar, Dhruv, Ganth. Natya Gathariyan, the volume on theatre, won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1971. Manoj Shah's play takes him at his word and puts two of them on stage.

Mehta — Chan. Chi. Mehta to anyone who read him — was born in Surat on 6 April 1901, took his primary schooling in Vadodara and his secondary in Surat, matriculated in 1919 and took a B.A. in Gujarati from Elphinstone College in Bombay in 1924. In 1928 he went to Bardoli and joined Gandhi's satyagraha, and edited the Navbharat daily. From 1933 to 1936 he taught at New Era High School in Bombay. In 1938 he joined All India Radio, and in 1954 became director of its Ahmedabad station, where he wrote and produced radio plays and, in the phrase his biographers use, developed the broadcasting culture of Gujarat.

He wrote more than twenty-five plays — Akho in 1927, Agagadi in 1933, a tragedy about railway workers that is still the one people name first, Narmad in 1937, Dhara Gurjari in 1944. He spent ten years compiling a Bibliography of Stagable Plays in Indian Languages. He translated Don Quixote into Gujarati. He wrote the anthem of M. S. University in Baroda, where he started the first diploma and degree courses in theatre in India. The Padma Shri came in 1962, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship — that body's highest honour — in 1984.

And he travelled, relentlessly, and went to the theatre everywhere he landed. That is the part the play is built on. Natya Gathariyan is a book of European playhouses seen by a Gujarati who kept going back. The travelling was not tourism; it was fieldwork for an argument he was making at home, that Gujarat should have a theatre education and a theatre literature of its own.

The play opens on a bare stage with two bundles. One is patchwork, the height of a man, stitched from scraps of every colour. One is painted as a map of the world. Pulkit Solanki plays Mehta and plays nobody else; there is no second actor and no chronology to hold on to. He unties the bundles and the life comes out in no particular order.

A doll made for a child. A name given. The first day of school, and then the first punishment in it. A marriage he did not want — the score has a cue called pan maare nahto jaavu, but I didn’t want to go — and a train to Surat. Uttarayan, and kites coming over the roofs from every direction. A film projector. Bardoli, and Vande Mataram. Ekla Chalo Re. Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and then New York jazz, because both of those were things a man from Surat heard and came home to describe.

And the Ila poems, which the production quoted on its own publicity and which move without warning between nursery rhyme and elegy. One moment a cat in a sari going down to the lake; the next: Ila, we will light the Diwali lamps — and what has come down here from the sky where you have gone? What sort of crackers are these, that burst the eardrums? Gujarati poetry has few turns as sharp as that one, and the play does not soften it.

Kanti Patel wrote the script — he had written Akho Akha Bolo for the same company in 2000, on the fifteenth-century poet Akho — and Satya Mehta made the dramatisation. Kabir Thakore built the set, which is to say he built the two bundles. Kanhaiya wrote a fifty-two-cue score that has to do the work of every character the single actor is not playing: a train whistle, a Greek flute, a radio station, a film projector, a minuet. Shekhar Phadke lit it. Janam Shah produced. The subtitle on the poster is Kaleidoscope, and it is the right word: the same fragments, turned, making a different figure each time.

The premiere date was chosen, and it is the best joke and the best argument in the whole production. Gathariya opened at four in the afternoon on 27 March 2016, at the Godrej Dance Theatre at the NCPA — World Theatre Day.

Mehta’s encyclopaedia entry states that at the Vienna conference of UNESCO’s International Theatre Institute he moved the resolution to celebrate 27 March as World Theatre Day. The International Theatre Institute’s own account of the date names the 9th ITI World Congress in Vienna in June 1961, where Arvi Kivimaa proposed the observance on behalf of the Finnish Centre and the Scandinavian centres carried it by acclamation; the date itself was fixed to mark the opening of the 1962 Théâtre des Nations season in Paris, and the first World Theatre Day was kept on 27 March 1962. The two records agree on the room. What an Indian delegate said in it is not something the minutes of Gujarati memory and the minutes of the ITI have ever reconciled, and the play does not pretend to settle it.

What is not in dispute is that C. C. Mehta was in those rooms at all — that a man who had been punished in a Surat schoolroom and had carried a bedroll through Bardoli ended up representing India at the international theatre fora, and then came back and wrote it all down in Gujarati so that people who would never see Vienna could. That is the movement the play keeps making, out and back, out and back, and it is why the luggage is the set.

Gathariya later played Prithvi Theatre in Juhu. It remains what it was on the first afternoon: one actor, two bundles, and ninety years of a man who could not stop packing.