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 archeological 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.
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