BWW Interviews: Rahul Varma Talks BHOPAL

I talk to Rahul Varma, Canadian playwright and Artistic Director of Teesri Duniya Theatre. We discuss his play BHOPAL, now for a limited time at Houston's own Shunya Theatre. He talks critiquing India, critiquing Canada and spinning the messy straw of life into first words on a page, and then people on the stage.

BWW: I know you favor writing political plays (like BHOPAL). Could you give me some insight into why?

Rahul Varma: It's, sort of, a big answer. Essentially, I think that the play is very political. The play, as an artform, is the most political of all other artforms, and because it is performed with a sense of beauty, we can convey much more difficult ideas.

Late Indian poet Sahir Ludhianvi used to always say that whatever he learned from a society in the form of experience, he returns it in the form of art. People used to ask him, "Why do you write these stories and songs of deprivation and problems and so on and so forth?" His answer was, "If every child had food to eat, every woman had safety with which she can walk on the street, there was no poverty, and people were not killing each other, then he will also write about the moon, the mountains, and the river." [We Laugh]

I take the cue from that. Art is a form in service of people and communication.

BWW: Do you think plays like this bring about change?

Rahul Varma: I don't think so. [Pauses] The play does not bring about the change. It's not like a physical act that will bring some kind of physical change, but it definitely prepares us and makes us aware that there is a need for us to have a change. You can see this. Just two or three days ago, there was a major victory for the [Bhopal tragedy] survivors. The government of India has finally agreed that the compensation people will receive is going to be based on the documentation presented by the Indian Medical Association and not Union Carbide. This was made possible only because people were struggling for it. That kind of thing, a play cannot achieve. But awareness toward it, it can.

BWW: With that in mind, what were your intentions when you began writing BHOPAL?

Rahul Varma: I was in Montreal when it happened. I was sitting in a restaurant, and I saw it on a television screen pinned on the wall of the restaurant. The images of disaster began to come and I realized I could identify with those people. I came home and saw the news and learned that this major accident had happened. So the idea that "something has to be done" came right then and there. But at the same time I think it was so enormous, and there was so much pain and so much misery. Within a few hours, more than 600 people had died. By morning 3,000. And by the afternoon, numbers had no meaning. People were dying like flies.

When I returned to India, I happened to see this child named Zarina - the one that I mention in the play but I have never shown. She is supposedly the baby of Izzat. This was a real child. And she was the first recorded birth after the explosion. She died when she was 18 days old. The way I describe her in the play is more or less how I saw her. One of the questions that I posed to myself at the time, because I thought "This child is in amazing pain" was, "If she by any chance can speak, what would she tell me of her pain?" And then I realized it was a very stupid question on my part. What is an 18 day old child going to say? She doesn't speak. But her silence was saying everything that needed to be said. I realized that if I could articulate that pain behind her silence, then I would have a play. She also led me to realize that the pain was absolutely indescribable and that if I chose to do a documentary play, then I would not be able to go into the depth of what people are going through. Therefore, I chose not to go into documentary plays. I don't like documentary personally. [I Laugh] I like fictional plays. Fiction allowed me to use my imagination and take the story and construct the story that will allow me to find the deeper truth behind this issue.

BWW: How long did it take for you to write the play?

Rahul Varma: It took a long time to write. I had to really, really struggle to learn how to articulate all those difficulties in the form of a story. I started writing in 1984 and finally managed to produce it in 2001. I had coaching in the meantime with the late Habib Tanvir, an iconic director from India. He paid me a visit here, I showed him the script, and he guided me through that. In between, I wrote many plays that became part of my training.

BWW: How did those plays contribute to your training?

Rahul Varma: The process of writing is not that critical. Every playwright has his or her own process. Some people write collectively. I don't. I write based on my own imagination and readings. At the time, I had to stop reading fiction. For example, Dominique Lapierre's book Five Past Midnight in Bhopal came out and I did not read that book, because I did not want to impact my own thinking.

But I did see people. I went to India and I met many of those people. It became very overwhelming because anybody you talked to wanted their story to be told. Anybody they saw collecting data or collecting stories, people thought that this would become part of their conversation package. That was the kind of state that had been created at the time. I kept hearing the stories one after another. Very horrible. One horror story after the other. I realized that if I chose any one person's story, what am I going to tell the other person? That his story is not important? Therefore, I said I'm taking the documentation to create something completely fictional. That's the approach that I took. I think that one of the big lessons I learned from this is that the documentary play is not something for me. Fiction is what I wanted to do.

BWW: We talked yesterday about the characters' struggles to represent India each in their own particular way. I'm also interested in how you decided to portray survivors. It seems like a huge responsibility is on your shoulders.

Rahul Varma: I think that I did not have to be patriotic here, from the nationalistic point of view, or that I had to uphold India here. I needed to uphold the people. And I make no claim to be representing India in the play. I think the play is not representing India. It's about a certain aspect of it. In that way, my loyalty was to people who I was representing through fictional characters.

Now, if the question is, does it put India in a bad light, as I was talking to you yesterday, my sense is to critique India. It's a country that I was born into. I love it. I have a great admiration for this country, for what it's people have been, for what it's leaders have been, and the struggle it has gone through to decolonize itself. But I'm very affected by what it does. India is a very difficult country. It lives in several centuries at the same time. I've seen extreme poverty to extreme richness and that contrast, I never accepted. I did not accept it, because it did not have to happen.

I care for India because I was born there. My memories are from there. But my love for India is expressed in my love for people.

BWW: Could you talk some more about your characters? They're so nuanced. Minister Jaganlal Bhandari is more interested in preserving the image of India than taking care of his citizens. Dr. Sonya Labonté, a do-gooder, sees the Indians as citizens in need, but not people in need. What is your perspective on these characters?

Rahul Varma: There is something very personal about Dr. Labonté. My father is a doctor. He's a toxicologist. He worked at McGill University and he happened to be in India at the time [of the Bhopal disaster] and he began to carry out research on the toxicity of methyl isocyanate (MIC). The idea of Dr Labonté doing that work came totally because I saw my father doing that work. That said, I did not want her character to be any kind of a carbon copy of my father's work. You know, as I said, I don't like using many private and personal things. I like to have more political things in there. So, I needed to make Dr. Labonté's character complex and also different or opposite to the stereotype here. So many people from the West go to India for spiritual tourism, religious needs or yoga vacation. [We Laugh] Very few go to do social work. Very few go to do more socially conscious NGO kind of work. So I purposely made Dr. Labonté one of those people who break that stereotype. But she was not a straightforward person. In order for her to achieve her goal, she was very crafty. I don't necessarily think she was a do-gooder a hundred percent. She did manipulate the locals. She did try to control them. But that was her agenda.

BWW: Devraj is also an interesting character.

Rahul Varma: Devraj is a representation of the diversity awareness in the West. Earlier on, the white bosses would go and plunder. Now multinationals have non-whites returning back with the knowledge of their own culture and, therefore, a better understanding. But one has to see what they do in the end. Does their color prevent them from doing things any different? Any better? I guess not. Because multinationals have their own language. In this way, cultural awareness is used to the detriment of a nation that's outside of your own.

But I think that Devraj really felt for the country. When he speaks of his dream of going to the West and then coming back, when he recounts how he saw a servant's son seeing him off at the airport, I just wanted to make it believable that he had a good heart and he wanted to do good things except he just did not take into account that there is a danger. If the accident had not happened, Devraj would have been successful. But it just happened to happen and all his life fell apart and became a trick because the accident occurred.

BWW: Could you tell me the significance of Izzat?

Rahul Varma: I think that Izzat is a very important character, because the majority of the plays do not talk about the poor people or poor classes. So I really had to struggle with my dramaturg to introduce her into the play. Some of the dramaturges that I worked with had a hard time. How could a poor woman barge into the office of a multinational and begin to have a conversation with the top boss. I said that's the dramatic license I'm going to take. I create the situation that she goes. It is absolutely important that we do represent poor people in our play as comprehensive characters. She was a survivor. She was smart. She was cunning. She became very pivotal to the play. And I think the majority of the actors have a great time playing that character.

And you know that this is a person who, in order to survive, cheats everyone. She was kind of a connection to Devraj and Sonya [Dr. Labonté] from the very opposite ends. She manipulated both of them.

BWW: What of Madiha?

Rahul Varma: I think that Madiha is a straightforward person. But she brings the greatest transformation in her personality towards the end of the play. If there is one person that gets transformed, that's Madiha.

BWW: How did you create the character of Warren Anderson?

Rahul Varma: Anderson is real (or close to real). Actually, I must admit that I was hoping that if I use his name, maybe Union Carbide or him or any of his lawyers will sue me and the play will become more popular. [We Laugh] But they did not do it.

The question has been raised all the time: "Why did I give him his real name when everyone else is not real?" The idea was basically that I did want to not keep him distanced or so imagined that he loses the reality. His name was purposely used in the play. I think that he is probably more flat in some ways because his language from beginning to end is the same.

BWW: Can you talk about Pascale Sauvé and Minister Jaganlal Bhandari as well?

Rahul Varma: Sauvé - he is a device. He or she. Either way. I needed to ground the play in Canada because, being a member of the diaspora, I don't need to write an expatriate play. I need to write Canadian plays that are diaspora experience. So the grounding of that play into Canada was very important. I did not want Canada to only be represented through Dr. Labonté. I wanted to show the opposite of it and how complacent the government is. Say, for example, right now if you follow this pipeline debate, you'll see how complacent our prime minister is. I needed to show those aspects of Canada, that despite the image of Canadian values, there was a very corporate agenda behind everything.

Of course there is our minister, Jaganlal. When he says, "The dead are gone. I need to worry about those who are alive," the public should be able to trust him on that. We cannot bring the dead back but at least we could look after those who are alive. But I don't think he is real. He makes changes every time in his duty and every time for totally opportunistic purposes. He is unconcerned about people.

BWW: Was was the role of language in this play?

Rahul Varma: 99 percent of the play is in English and most of the Hindi is in the form of songs. I think that songs are like a dramaturgical device to sensitize about the diversity, because you accept the songs because of how pleasant they sound to your ears. And actors have the ability to express those songs through music. I wanted to bring that kind of diversity. All across the world, we are becoming more diverse. And I think we need to bring some of those cultural expressions into the mainstream. But at same time, I didn't want to make it difficult for the public to understand. So the majority of the Hindi is used when the singing is going on. If a Hindi line is spoken, then I have made sure the line before and the line after have clarified the sense of it.

I think the play becomes very interesting because it brings some curiosity about, well, what else just happened. And all that adds to the beauty of the play. One of the things that I will not do - I don't bring exoticism into the play. I will not bring a scenario where people are worshiping the gods and going to the temple, pouring water and cutting the water stream - things of that sort. That's not necessary. But more artistic things such as singing and dancing and movement and more realistic metaphors, I keep using them because they beautify the play.

BWW: What sort of metaphors were you working toward in the song and dance?

Rahul Varma: The opening song is written by Dr. Habib Tanvir. It is a tradition in many or some of the Indian plays to start the play by singing. The first song, the way it starts is essentially describing. There is nothing being projected or questioned. It's simple matter of fact description that poison has taken over the city and people are dying.

The second one, which is in the middle of the play, raises lots of contradictions. It's the creation song, how we got created as a universe. It says that this imaginary, godly figure took some earth and threw it. The earth was consumed by a earthworm and then it was squeezed out, and a tree grew out of it. The tree got insects, and men invented the chemicals to kill those insects but then the same chemicals killed their children also. The second song is more of a storytelling, and I do see your point that this may be missed if the translation is not very clearly presented. But there is no way I could translate it into English that would make very clear sense. It's a tribal myth from India and the way it works is by showing two living contradictions and challenging us as to how we navigate our way between those two contradictions. But I could not translate that into English. If I had translated it, it would not have sounded good. [We Laugh]

BWW: How have audiences responded?

Rahul Varma: The audience in the West was quite moved. I was very impressed by how they understood because, as I said, it's too often that the countries of the East or the countries of the Third World are understood only in the form of some of their exotic things - by costumes, by colors, by lifestyle of the people - and not by the reality of living. So for them to see this play in the form of a story and people talking about their lives and all, it was a quite enlightening process and the majority of them began to make connections. I think that this incident brought more conversation among the audience, not only about the play and the content of the play but also other incidents such as the oil spill that has happened with BP, Chernobyl and the gas leak in Nigeria.

Now, I did the play in 2001 in Montréal and this play was presented in 2003 in India, in Hindi. I joined the protest there on the day of the anniversary of the accident and I saw people carrying the slogans and placards. And one of the placards, actually not one but several of the placards were very, very interesting. One placard read, "If you give us Anderson, we'll give you Osama". And incidentally I realized that these poor, illiterate people of India are quite educated. They are illiterate but their education by experience is quite big. The story was, as I began to talk, the story was that we know exactly who has caused this accident in Bhopal and that is Union Carbide and the boss of Union Carbide, that is Anderson, and we have not brought him to justice. On the other hand, we have hardly any idea as to who did this 9/11 - we have a suspicion but there is no proof - but an entire country has been destroyed, and that would be Iraq. So these people of India were able to make that kind of a connection.

But outside of the discussion about the play, was that in India they have written lots of plays on this theme but they were all very propagandist. Very, very propagandist. I mean it's a matter of fact thing that good things are good and bad things are bad. This play was perceived as something more comprehensive, something more realistic, something more complex.

BWW: OK, let's switch tacks. You're a professional writer, which a lot of writers would love to be. Could you tell me what your artistic journey has been? How did you start and how did you become Rahul Varma?

Rahul Varma: I came to this country in 1976. I was interested in theatre from before. And, for me, theatre in Canada was very white. It really was. I mean 18% of the population of Canada was communities of color. There were First Nation people. There were African people. There were Asian people. But theatre was totally missing them. They were not there on the stage and they were not there in the stories.

So, I started this company to bring a certain degree of more true representation of who we are as a community, but I ran into difficulty finding the plays that spoke of our life here. There were no written materials at the time, so in some ways I represent the first generation of South Asian playwrights who began to write about our experience. I think that need of and absence of our own cultural experience, of our own communities, prompted me to become a playwright.

But there was another factor and that was our own community itself. The South Asian diaspora that was living in Canada and, I believe, the same is true in the U.S., are very attracted to exoticism. They display the colors, how India is so colorful and how it is so full of custom and culture. You don't do that back in India, you only begin to do it, express them here. There's this tendency to try to gain something that they did not have with them when they actually were in India, and I think this tradition of exoticism and the tradition of food festivals and religious festivals - that was not culture. That was part of their life, yes, but it was not culture as in art. I reacted to that. I said we need to bring more of a social story that is more realistic than what is more exotic. So that led me into playwriting. That led me also into understanding English because I learned English by writing plays. Then I began to write not just about my own community, but also about other communities. I think that right now we are pretty good in Canada because there is a very sizable community of playwrights from the South Asian diaspora and they're very good, all of them.

BWW: In a previous discussion, I asked you if you had any advice for aspiring playwrights and theatre artists, which is broad so I'll ask something more specific. I'm a young writer and I try very hard to have characters of many different ethnicities in my stories. But I find it hard to know other cultures as well as I know my own. Do you have any advice for that?

Rahul Varma: My sense here is that it's sort of a hybridization of culture from all sides, which is affecting us, so I calI my plays more intercultural than ethnocentric.

I think that just like you I also know my culture more than other cultures and, therefore, my writing is influenced by what my cultural training has been and, more importantly, what my cultural awareness has been. But I'm also very dedicated to the issues that affect society as a whole, and I need an opportunity to learn another culture and to learn other cultures through social content, through their history and through their stories, through their interactions with others. This is important because learning the culture doesn't mean that I want to learn to represent that culture.

I believe in a culture of freedom. I abide by my culture but I also should have the right to write freely what I wish to, what I think is important. Therefore, I write about what is my cultural influence but at the same time how I interact with other people. You see it is very important for our identities right now not to be determined by who we are but also who we are in relation to other people.

Houston's own Shunya Theatre's production of BHOPAL runs November 13 - November 23, 2014; Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays at 8 pm; Sundays at 3 pm at Spring Street Studios Studio 101 (1824 Spring St., Houston, TX 77007). For tickets and more information, visit http://shunyatheatre.org/.

Production photos courtesy of Shunya Theatre