Miscellaneous
SUBVERSIVE SIRU
There is a line the protagonist delivers during the second-half of the play Sirumarani, which can roughly be translated from Nepali as,Timothy Aryal
There is a line the protagonist delivers during the second-half of the play Sirumarani, which can roughly be translated from Nepali as, “This shows how male chauvinistic constructs crumble when a woman strikes out on a quest to secure her dignity in this patriarchal world.” This particular line perhaps best summarises Sirumarani, a play written by Sarubhakta and directed by Dayahang Rai, which is currently being staged at Mandala Theatre.
In the opening moments of the play, we are introduced to a middle-aged fisherman (played by Bijay Baral) throwing fishing nets into a river. Suddenly, the fisherman traps a goldfish. Once the fisherman gets home with his prize catch, he learns to his astonishment that the goldfish can actually talk.
Disconcerted by the fish’s ability to talk, the fisherman throws it onto the porch of his house. The goldfish metamorphoses into a human avatar—a beautiful lady—‘Sundari’ (played by Prembarsha). “I am a cursed snake-fairy,” she says to the fisherman. “Only if I get married will I be able to get back to my own world,” she says.
This intrusion of this magical-real moment into the heretofore mundane setting marks the enlarging of the play’s plot to include narrative strands that will, through the play’s progress, bring to light the many assumptions on which are built the patriarchal worldview that many of us have come to regard as incontestable facts.
The snake-fairy-turned-beautiful lady ultimately marries the fisherman, and after being happily married for a year, Sundari gives birth to a baby girl—Siru.
The play then picks up the surrealistic strand that was introduced with the snake-fairy’s first appearance, when she leaves the marriage and a barely one-year-old daughter behind with the hopeless fisherman.
Siru, played by Nisha Karki in her stage debut, is a baby who according to a fortune teller is supposed to marry King Chakravorty Maharaj (played by Somnath Khanal).
From here on, the story is all about Siru, an everywoman that most people in the audience should have no problem relating to.
As the play progresses, Siru falls in love with a villager named Gore (played by Jivan Bhattarai). As destined, however, she marries the king, succumbing to demands of her father and the wishes of the king. In doing so, she gives up her budding romance with Gore, and although we cannot determine how much of her will determines this new union, the rupture in the plot shows how patriarchs (both in the household and in society) can rewrite the fates of women.
The couple is happily married for a while, before it is revealed that the king had actually ‘borrowed’ his son’s youth in order to be appealing enough to Siru. When Siru learns that the king is anything but a virile youth, she decides to separate from the king. But owing to the patriarchal notions of how women should behave, she has to remain confined within the palace boundaries—in a loveless marriage.
Although the play is set in ancient Nepal (there are no exact dates proffered), much of what happens in the play speaks to the woes of women even in present-day Nepal. Even today, for example, it’s easier for a man to divorce his wife and find other options for himself than it is the other way round. It also explores how a male in a powerful position can toy with a woman, all so that he can satisfy his lust. And if we were to transpose that element of the narrative to today’s Nepal, the reading would still hit home. The magical-realism tropes employed in the play are not surreal for the sake of being surreal. The ideas that inform their design are taken from the empirical evidence that can gleaned from Nepali society. For example, the central thesis of the play, that even today a woman’s fate can be determined by men and then ascribed to have been a product of the law of nature (this is one reading of fate) when explored in granular detail—the way Sirumarani does—reveals that free-will and determinism in society is free-will as ascribed by the patriarchy.
Towards the end of the play, the narrative brings full circle the basic lesson of this morality play, and we see a male-dominated society collapse under the heaviness of its own weight. The material is not as complex as most modern and post-modern renderings of a similar subject matter might have been, the surrealistic intrusions and bits of comedy notwithstanding. And in the hands of a lesser director, the 100 minute long play would have probably barely limped along to its denouement.
But because the story is directed by the seasoned Dayahang Rai, the cast, made up entirely of novice theatre students trained by Mandala Theatre, are able to successfully capture the essence of the original Sirumarani, as probably envisioned by the inimitable Sarubhakta.
The play will be on till September 20.