How A Marathi Play Was Built From Unrecorded Grindmill Songs Of Women

MUMBAI: There is a moment in ‘Bhirrr...’, staged at The Tamaasha Studio recently, when the lights fade out and two saris, suspended in the air above the actors, seem to hold the entire weight of the play. Mayuri Ravindra, the deviser and performer behind the work, says she saw those saris long before she had a script, a cast, or even a title. “I kept seeing two saris suspended in space,” she recalls. “I knew they belonged to this world.”

It is how playwrights make theatre (with an image rather than an idea). And that’s how the image of ‘Bhirrr...’ was born. It began in the fields and kitchens of a village called Abdullat, in Kolhapur district, where women have been singing for generations without anyone writing it down.

The ovis (short, unrhymed verses composed and sung by women while they worked) grinding grain at the jate, walking to the fields, rocking a child to sleep. They are, Mayuri says, “archives of women’s memories, struggles, resilience, wit, humour, and ways of looking at the world”. Except no one ever filed them as archives. They lived in the brain cells, passed throat to throat, and vanished the moment a generation stopped singing. ‘Bhirrr...’ is an attempt to catch them before they evaporate, forever.

Mayuri Ravindra’s route into the material was not academic, though the research, once it began, was extensive. It started with a single book, ‘Bahinachi gani’ (The songs of Bahinaibai) picked up by accident during a film shoot near Nandurbar, close to the birthplace of the poet Bahinabai Chaudhari. “I wasn’t reading her because she was part of the syllabus,” Ravindra says of her second, adult encounter with Bahinabai, whose lines she’d absorbed unknowingly as a child from her grandmother’s speech. “I was reading her because I wanted to understand how someone with no formal education could look at the world with such astonishing clarity, simplicity and imagination.”

One afternoon one of them, Malu aaji, stayed with her – an elderly woman who sang with total, unhesitating confidence, until Mayuri asked if the verses were her own compositions. Before she could answer, the men in the room interrupted: no, they said, she’d only learned them from bhajans and kirtans. When the women spoke for themselves, Mayuri remembers, almost all the women said, ‘No... these are mine’.” That single, quiet correction became something like the play’s thesis. “That is patriarchy,” Mayuri Ravindra says. “Not only denying women authorship, but making them doubt it themselves.”

None of this would have reached a stage without the Niloufer Sagar Alumni Production Grant, an initiative of the Drama School Foundation Mumbai set up in memory of the producer and arts manager Niloufer Sagar, who believed in giving artists room to fail before they succeed. Mayuri Ravindra, who is a 2022 graduate of Drama School Mumbai, went through an open call, feedback rounds, a resubmission, and a final jury before ‘Bhirrr...’ was one of the five projects selected. And then there were months of mentorship (Anupam Barve, Chanakya Vyas and Sanjukta Wagh), budgeting help, and check-ins that, she says, let her “take creative risks while being held by a rigorous support system”.

It is an unglamorous kind of support, more accountant than muse, and precisely the sort of infrastructure new work rarely gets. “The grant gave me the time to research, travel, fail, rewrite, question,” she says, “and keep returning to the work until we found the play we truly wanted to make.”

That process nearly broke the production before it found its shape. A month and a half into devising, Ravindra and her collaborators had, by her own account, “a play”. They scrapped it. What rescued the work, she says, was a single note from her mentor, the choreographer and singer Sanjukta Wagh, who had first introduced Mayuri Ravindra to the ovi tradition years earlier during a singing module at drama school: “Locate it. Make it as local as possible.” Wagh later walked into a stalled rehearsal and, instead of asking the company to write or improvise, simply asked them to breathe and feel their own spines. “For the first time in days, I wasn’t thinking about the play,” Ravindra says.

Onstage, that hard-won clarity belongs largely to Janhvi Marathe, Ravindra’s co-deviser and co-performer. Marathe travelled with Ravindra to Abdullat, sat with the ajjis, and absorbed the rhythms of their labour before ever setting them to movement.

Why ‘Bhirrr...’ is an important play is the question about the boundaries of literature itself. “Who decides whose voice gets recognised and whose not?” Mayuri Ravindra asks, echoing a line she gives to a character in the play. “Does that mean we were nothing before we got the award?”

Bahinabai Chaudhari wrote poetry of extraordinary philosophical voice without ever entering an institution that might have called it literature. Likewise, Malu aaji. ‘Bhirrr...’ celebrates the ovis in kitchens and fields. It doesn’t try to induct these wonderful women into a canon that overlooked them. It simply insists that the canon was always too small.

(Ramu Ramanathan is a Mumbai-based journalist, playwright and poet.)