Mummy Tu Aavi Kevi: The Play Where Adults Perform the Children

There is a moment in Mummy Tu Aavi Kevi where a child asks his mother who Saraswatichandra and Bhadrambhadra were — brothers, or cousins? It is the funniest line in the play and also the most alarming one. Saraswatichandra is the four-volume novel that more or less invented modern Gujarati prose. Bhadrambhadra is the language's greatest comic creation. A Gujarati child not knowing them is a Gujarati child who has lost something without noticing, and the play is entirely about that kind of loss.

Dhiruben Patel wrote it. She was seventy-four when Ideas Unlimited opened it in 2010, and by then one of the most decorated writers in the language: the novels Vadavanal and Andhali Gali and Agantuk, the play Bhavni Bhavai that Ketan Mehta turned into his landmark 1980 film, the Ranjitram Suvarna Chandrak in 1980, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2001. She had also spent decades writing for children — the much-loved Anderi Gunderi Tipari Ten, Gujarati translations of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn — and had founded a publishing house and edited a journal along the way. She died in Ahmedabad in March 2023, at ninety-six.

Manoj Shah directed it for Prithvi Theatre's summer programme for children. Pidilite, the makers of Fevicol, sponsored it. The company advertised it as a play for children aged six to a hundred and six.

It is worth pausing on that. Ideas Unlimited's flyer for the play billed it, accurately, as coming from the maker of Master Phoolmani, Mareez, Siddhahem, Vastupal Tejpal, Apurva Avsar and Amarfal — a Bhangwadi elegy, a poet's biography, a play about a twelfth-century Jain grammarian, another about the brothers who built Dilwara. Shah's repertoire is unusually dense with scholarship and unusually short on children. Then, in the middle of it, a comedy about a mother's hairdresser.

The premise is domestic and merciless. Aparna is forty, a conservative Gujarati mother in an urban flat. Her husband Shrikant is forty-five. Her children — Saloni at fifteen, Vyom at twelve, Vismay at eight — are embarrassed by her. Not by anything she does wrong; by what she is. She wears saris. She serves shrikhand and puri and dhokla. She does not know what peer pressure is. She has, in Vyom's assessment, no social awareness whatsoever, and her hairdresser is a disaster.

The dialogue is where the play does its real work, and it is almost untranslatable. The children speak Gujarati so thoroughly colonised by English that the sentences come out as hybrids: it's not my fault, my friends don't like kids, you are so outdated, mom, move with the times please. Vyom does not want his birthday at home; he wants it in a hotel, with hangama. When his little brother says he'll come anyway, Vyom's answer is that his friends don't like kids — a twelve-year-old disowning childhood itself. Aparna's replies stay stubbornly in Gujarati, and the gap between the two registers is the generation gap, made audible.

The production's own ticket named the mechanism outright. Across the top it promised the dhingamasti — the romp — of the konventiya, the convent kids, who turn a mummy into a mom. Konventiya is not a neutral word. The English-medium convent school is where the children in this play learned to find their mother provincial, and the play is honest enough to say so on the ticket stub.

So the children arrange a make-over. They take their Desi Mom and return a 21st Century Mom, and the second half of the play is the bill arriving.

The new mother is a magnificent monster. She detests tragedy and is allergic to tears, because tears spoil her enigmatic, ever-glowing, out-of-this-India skin. She requires absolutely ear-defying, peace-loving, pin-drop silence in order to concentrate on her beauty-rejuvenating sleep. Asked for a drink, she specifies a freshly brewed, non-adulterated, environmentally friendly, non-calorie-fattening, reverse-osmosis, ozonised, bacteria-treated, pulp-filtered glass of pumpkin juice — not, she adds, that hazardous, germ-infested, human-averse Ganga-Jamuna, and not Kachra Shankar either.

Kachra Shankar is the cook, forty-five, and one of the play's better jokes: by the end he is producing American Chopsey and sweet-and-sour alongside the sukhpavani, because that is what the household now requires. Everyone in the house has been upgraded. Nobody is happier. Whether the children are pleased with their Ultra-Chic Mom, the production's flyer said, is a question that will only be answered after savouring the play, which is a polite way of saying you already know the answer.

Underneath the farce is the argument Dhiruben Patel had been making for fifty years. Her novels are about women's inner lives, and critics reading her have kept returning to one idea in them: that the root of a woman's diminished position lies in her own mental conditioning. Mummy Tu Aavi Kevi puts that idea in a child's hands. Nobody in this house forbids Aparna anything. Her children simply persuade her that who she already is will not do — and she agrees with them. The make-over is consented to. That is what makes the second half uncomfortable rather than merely funny.

What makes the production more than a well-made moral is the form it chose. Ideas Unlimited staged it as GRIPS theatre.

GRIPS is a specific thing, not a general word. The GRIPS Theater in Berlin, built around the writer Volker Ludwig, spent the 1970s abandoning the fairy tale as the default mode of children's theatre and replacing it with plays about the actual conditions of children's lives — school, money, parents, cities, unfairness — performed for children but not condescending to them. The other rule is the one you notice first from the stalls: the children are played by adults. From the 1980s the model travelled, and it travelled particularly well in India; Theatre Academy in Pune staged Marathi adaptations, Shrirang Godbole became the movement's central writer in Marathi, and in 1994 Ludwig himself ran a ten-day writers' workshop in Bangalore. GRIPS plays are now performed, as the Berlin theatre's own history puts it, all over India.

Casting adults as Saloni, Vyom and Vismay does something a cast of children could not. It removes cuteness from the equation. When a grown actor delivers a twelve-year-old's line about his mother being outdated, the audience hears the sentence rather than the child, and the sentence is genuinely ugly. It also lets the play be watched two ways at once: the children in the audience laugh at the kids, the parents laugh at themselves, and both halves of the house are being told off.

The staging was contemporary and unsentimental. The set is a printed modern flat — a boy's room with a Manchester United poster and a bunk bed, a living room, a fitted kitchen with a steel fridge — furnished with bean bags and folding director's chairs. The mother works in an apron over her sari. The children wear school uniforms. There is nothing in the design to suggest a fable; it looks like a Mumbai two-bedroom, which is the point.

The play was a considerable hit, running to more than sixty performances on the Gujarati circuit, and it kept coming back. A 2016 poster — a face split down the middle, one half bare and green, the other made up in orange with a pink mouth — advertises a performance on 9 June that year, with Darshan Pandya, Bhamini Gandhi Oza, Ishan Doshi, Pratik Kothari, Prarthi Dholakia and Ankit Bhatt. The earlier cast recorded by MumbaiTheatreGuide was Rinku Patel, Darshan Pandya, Pratik Kothari, Ajay Nawadia, Swati Das and Ishan Doshi. Six actors, six characters, and a house that fits on a folding frame.

In December 2016 the story reached the screen. Ashish Kakkad's Gujarati film Mission Mummy, released on 9 December, takes its story from Dhiruben Patel and keeps the family exactly as she wrote it — Aparna, Vyom, Saloni, Vismay — with Aarti Patel as the mother. The film reframes the question slightly, towards a woman deciding whether to go back to work now that her children are grown. The play is harder on the children than that.

Its title is the best summary of it. Mummy tu aavi kevi — mummy, what kind of a person are you? It is a complaint, and it is what a child says when the answer they actually want is: you are the kind of person I need you to be in front of my friends. The play spends two hours giving them exactly that, and then lets them look at it.