A lady, like her grandpa

Anuja Ghosalkar embarks on a journey to rediscover her great-grandfather through archives and documentary theatre

When Anuja Ghosalkar started working in theatre, she was told that she stands and sounds like a man, before being requested to “be like a woman”. This got her thinking, what are the makings of a woman Does it mean being soft spoken, delicate and fragile It’s this thought exactly, that led to the genesis of Lady Anandi, a one woman theatre performance, written, directed and performed by Bengaluru-based actor Anuja, under her banner, Drama Queen.

“My great grandfather, Madhavrao Tipnis, was a Marathi stage actor who pretended to be a lady perfectly — he acted coy, graceful, even wore a sari right. I found it really interesting,” she says.

Anuja wrote Lady Anandi when she was an artist-in-residence at The Kontsfack University College of Art, Craft and Design in Sweden. “The story is about an actress in her 30s, who sees her grandfather’s ghost every time she gets on stage. My great grandfather routinely performed as a female impersonator in the theatre industry, which at the time had no space for women. My performance revolves around this — a male impersonating the other gender seemingly flawlessly and a woman who simply cannot play her own gender right. We are two different actors from two different ages playing the same gender,” she tells us.

To get a better understanding of Anuja’s performance, one needs to know of her long-standing interest in archives. Her first brush with the idea of archives was when she worked as a film researcher on stunt films in India. It makes her more inquisitive about her place in theatre and also the works of her grandfather. “The story is my search for my grandfather,” she says. She went through personal and theatre archives, looked for images and interviews to find nuggets of her grandfather. “I stitched all of it together, and added fiction to close the gaps,” she informs.

The idea first came to Ghosalkar when she was reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which Woolf writes about Shakespeare’s imaginary sister Judith — would she be given the chance to be a playwright “This made me question my role in theatre, the roles I was given. The lines I was asked to narrate,” she says. When on stage, Anuja literally reads from a script in hand — “something that is expected to be a practiced characteristic,” she says.

She believes that her performance is a work in progress. “It is my personal exploration of the family archive. It is a piece in which the seams of the process are visible,” she explains. But along with that, it is also a medium through which she looks at gender and feminism through the lens of theatre.

You can go for Anuja’s show Lady Anandi today at 6.30 pm, At G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture, G5A Laxmi Mills Compound, Shakti Milla Lane, RSVP to ladyanandi@pointofview.org