Master Phoolmani: The Theatre That Fired a Gun Before the Curtain

Before the play began, someone fired a gun into the air. It was loaded with potash powder, and it went off outside Bhangwadi Theatre on the corner of Princess Street in Kalbadevi, and when it went off the doors opened. That was how a night at the Gujarati musical theatre started, and it is one of maybe fifty things about Bhangwadi that nobody under sixty in Bombay now remembers.

Here are some of the others. The plays had no fixed running time. They began in the evening and, if the house was with them, finished the following morning. There were no microphones, so everything rested on lungpower and training. Each play carried dozens of songs, and when the audience shouted “once more” the actor sang the song again — with a new verse, improvised on the spot. A popular number could be demanded twenty times, and each “once more” brought a shower of coins and cash onto the stage; the bigger companies rigged nets above the actors to protect them from the money. Outside the theatre, vendors sold garlands of banknotes and flowers, designed to be thrown. The whole of Kalbadevi was lit with special lamps every evening, and audiences arrived in Victorias, by tram, or on foot. Special trains were booked from Kolkata, Chennai, Cochin, Vadodara and Surat, because families travelled across India for these plays. Legend has it that when a particular ustaad sang inside, Kalbadevi road came to a standstill.

The songs did not stay in the theatre either. The gaanewalis of the kothas learned them, sang them for their own audiences with their own musicians, and paid for every encore they were asked for. A good many Hindi film songs trace back through that channel — Mughal-e-Azam's “Mohe panghat pe” among them.

Bhangwadi Theatre was set up by the Desi Natak Samaj in 1874. It closed in 1968. Today the site is a shopping centre, and the entrance still has its two garlanded stone elephants and the old board.

Master Phoolmani is a play about two men left over from that world, and two men who never got into it.

Its structure comes from Satish Alekar's Begum Barve, written in Marathi in 1979 and one of the essential plays of modern Indian theatre. Chandrakant Shah — a Gujarati poet and playwright based in Boston, whose Ane Thoda Sapna took the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad's prize for the best new poetry of 1992–93 — adapted it for the Gujarati stage and spiked it with something Alekar's play does not have: the life of Jayashankar Sundari.

Sundari was the most celebrated actor-singer of women's roles the Gujarati stage produced, and he came out of the Bhangwadi tradition. In his time women were not permitted to perform, so the female parts belonged to men — and the boys who came to Bombay to play them were ten or eleven years old, living together like a repertory company for years on end. Sundari became so authoritative a woman on stage that he was engaged to teach young girls, and the wives of rich seths, how to wear a sari and hold themselves in a room. He had a wife and a son. Manoj Shah's summary of the arrangement is that Sundari was, in a mischievous sense, a little like Socrates.

So the play is a play within a play. Manilal is a Bhangwadi actor whose stage name was Master Phoolmani and whose theatre has been shut for thirty years. Sheth Vallabhdas Bhatia, once immensely rich, is still besotted with Phoolmani's music. Vasantlal and Sumanlal are unmarried government clerks with no prospects and a great deal of unspent imagination. The four of them build a fantasy between them and move in: Manilal becomes the heroine Vanlata, marries Sumanlal, and the two of them come to believe she is expecting a child. Then Bhatia Seth and Vasantlal take the fantasy apart, and the last movement of the play is not a comedy.

Shah has been explicit that the loneliness, not the sexuality, is the engine. “I have not underlined the physical relationship between the lonely out-of-work Bhangwadi actors and unemployed clerks in Master Phoolmani,” he told the journalist Subuhi Jiwani. “Their need to connect was more important than sex.”

The production reconstructs Bhangwadi's rules on a budget that would have embarrassed Bhangwadi. Only men act in it. The musicians are trained singers in the Bhangwadi and Bhavai styles, and they play live: tabla, dholak, and a folding organ made of beech wood, more than seventy-five years old, imported from America by film actor Ashok Kumar's company. It is one of very few such organs left in India, and it was used in the original Bhangwadi and in Marathi Sangeet Natak by Master Krishnarao Fulambrikar and Bacchubhai Merchant. Unlike a harmonium it draws air inward, which is why it needs hard wood and why it sounds deeper.

The band was three men and did not change for the production's first four years: Suryakant Pancholi on tabla, who was also its music director and composer, Madhubhai Pancholi on dholak, and a young organ player named Nilesh, a disciple of a guru called Choodamani. Choodamani himself came to the rehearsals, sat through two days playing nothing, and then began to compose. There are twenty-nine songs in the finished play, built on particular ragas, old folk tunes and traditional melodies, and every one of them is sung by the actors.

For the backdrop, Manoj Shah asked Bhupen Khakhar.

This is not a small fact. Khakhar was a chartered accountant from Bombay who taught himself to paint, moved to Baroda in 1961, and became the artist usually described as India's first Pop painter — the man who put shopkeepers and watch-repairers and middle-class Gujarati streets into serious Indian art, and later made some of the first openly gay imagery in it. He had the Padma Shri by 1984 and the Prince Claus Award by 2000, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid gave him a retrospective in 2002. He died in 2003. Tate Modern gave him the full retrospective in 2016. In 1999, he painted portraits eleven feet high for a Gujarati play about a defunct theatre.

“The original Bhangwadi had scenery as backdrop, not people,” Shah explained. “But we have used portraits to give an idea of the spectacle and the people.” The panels hang on collapsible folding frames, and a golden curtain halves the stage to make the scene changes possible. The whole thing is designed to travel and to cost nothing: when there are no tables, the actors sit on the property trunks. As for the costumes — Jayashankar Sundari and Bal Gandharva wore elaborate women's dress, and this company had neither the money nor, Shah said, the inclination. A dhoti is folded into a sari or a dupatta during the performance. The idea was to suggest the original to the audience without getting encumbered by the specifics.

Chirag Vohra played Manilal, and therefore Phoolmani, and therefore Vanlata. Utkarsh Mazumdar played Sumanlal, Parag Jhaveri played Vasantlal, and Manoj Shah played Bhatia Seth.

It opened at Horniman Circle Gardens on 15 November 1999, in the Prithvi Theatre Festival, and it did not stop. Utpal Bhayani wrote in Pravasi that the production proved again that Bombay's Gujarati stage — written off as commercial, as a trade — is, when it chooses, capable of matching the experimental theatre of any language in the country. Satish Vyas in Mumbai Samachar called it a notable experiment and said it was experiments like these that keep the art of theatre alive. Rajashri Mehta wrote in The Asian Age that among the plays enacted at the Prithvi Theatre Festival, Master Phoolmani stood out from all the rest. One group of older audience members left a line that the company printed in its own brochure: it raised the hair on our arms, it felt like sitting in the Princess Theatre watching a play, we have become fifty years younger.

In June 2002 the Times of India ran the film-maker Kundan Shah in its Critics' Choice column. He had seen the play, found it so outstanding that he went back the next day, and what struck him most was the encores: the audience shouting for a song again, and the actors adding a new verse each time so that it never got repetitive. Writing in Bombay Times in November 2003, Deepa Gahlot said the play could stand proudly anywhere among the best in the country.

Master Phoolmani ran from 1999 to 2015 — over a hundred performances, and the longest run of anything Ideas Unlimited has made. Its poster carried two lines. One was “ONCE MORE — shout it loud.” The other, along the bottom: we promote noise pollution inside the theatre since 1999.

Bhangwadi is a shopping centre. The organ is one of the last of its kind in the country. The man who painted the backdrop is dead, and his paintings hang in the Tate. For sixteen years, four men on a bare stage with a golden curtain and twenty-nine songs kept asking a Bombay audience to shout for one more verse, and the audience kept shouting.