[Reader-list] Vikram and Betal re-imagined

Ram Ganesh Kamatham ramganeshk at gmail.com
Fri Mar 16 17:56:01 IST 2007


Hi everyone!

The story of Vikram and Betal has fascinated me ever since I first
encountered it, either in the Amar Chitra Katha comics or the Chandamama
magazine, where I eagerly read it with a mixture of fascination, awe and
horror.

The story has called to me again and I will be spending the rest of the year
searching for a way to tell the story as I see it, within a dramaturgical
context. Before the words reinterpretation and retelling become leveled at
this venture, I must say that it is only mildly involved in an
archaeological effort to exhume a set of medieval folktales. I prefer to
view the whole process as a re-imagining of the myth within a modern urban
context – the end product being a play script.

Much of my initial efforts have been to immerse myself in the world that the
original text evokes with a view to finding useful points of departure. Once
this immersion begins the writing process has kicked off and that's where I
hope I can share all the excitement the process has to offer. This is
primarily a creative venture, an extremely personal one, but I hope to be as
inclusive as possible on this journey. I'll be documenting most of the
physical journeys with photos and will share notes that inform the creation
of the text.

At the outset I'll be looking to explore a few core issues. The relationship
between Vikram and Betal lies at the heart of the story. It sets up the
primary frame for the rest of the twenty five tales that follow. This
essentially antagonistic dynamic seems to me the engine that will drive the
entire content of the piece. Personally I always thought that the two
characters were twin sides of the same coin - dual personalities forming one
entity.

One is the king – the one who sits on the seat of all knowledge and as a
consequence must grapple with morality to ascertain his fitness to the
throne. The other is the ghoul – the undead force that teeters on the brink
of insanity and is above all moral considerations, but subjects the more
temporal aspect to its constant self-defeating inquiry. This duality is
fascinating when applied to larger systems and contexts, where so called
forward movement has stalled into cyclic degenerative patterns. Drawing the
appropriate parallels, with due regard to the suggested philosophic import,
at the same time keeping the aesthetic in mind, will be the challenge.

Additionally I'll be consciously exploring the form of the play and toying
with a dramaturgical technique known as polyvocality. Polyvocality uses
multiple linguistics strategies which simultaneously co-exist within a
single play. This form resists the notion of a single authorial voice in a
narrative, supplanting it with a number of variable discourses. This is an
attempt to resist categorization into a particular genre and at the same
time foreground the dramaturgical form as not merely a carrier of content.

The resultant piece I hope will do justice to the cyclic narrative of this
ancient frame within a frame story.
I'm really looking forward to it!

More about me at http://www.addledbraindump.blogspot.com/
(And for those of you in Mumbai, do come see the play I've just written,
showing at the NCPA - Experimental. Details on the link provided.)

Warm regards
Ram
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