Episode 04
A Working Position — Raja Bundela
The character actor’s Lakshman Rekha, and the room he changed from its edge. A conversation in three parts with NSD alumnus, director, and Bundelkhand statehood campaigner Raja Bundela, recorded in Hyderabad.
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There is a moment early in our conversation where Raja Bundela does my job for me.
We are talking about the fight for Bundelkhand statehood, a fight he has carried for three decades, and he is explaining why he refuses to burn buses or stop trains the way older movements once did. He says the people he is fighting for are not the hero of this story. The government is the hero. He is the character artist working underneath, the one who must criticise the lead without ever upstaging him, who has to find the small seam where his point lands and nobody is humiliated. And then he looks at the empty recliner beside him and says the thing I had been circling for an hour without naming.
हम सेकंड सीट पर बैठे हैं। आप फर्स्ट सीट पर नहीं हैं। फर्स्ट सीट हम खाली रख रहे हैं कि भगवान आ गए तो तुम बैठ जाओ और हमारा काम कर दो।
Raja Bundela, on the second seat
He had no way of knowing he was describing the show. He had not been briefed on the name’s philosophy. He arrived expecting, in his words, a normal talk, a place to say his piece and move on. What he gave instead was the cleanest articulation of the second seat I have heard from a guest, and he gave it about his own life, which is the only place it has ever really lived.
This essay is about a man who chose the chair beside the hero and built a region’s cultural life, a marriage, three festivals and a forty year career out of that one decision. The host who introduced him called him a living archive. I want to complicate that, gently. An archive is finished. Raja Bundela is not finished. He told me his journey is still running, that he has not reached the stop where a person sits back and decides he has arrived. A living archive that argues with you, that is still fighting its own state into existence, is not an archive. It is a working theory of how to be useful without being the centre. So let me try to write it as a theory, because that is what he handed me.
01 · The slur, and the school that fixed his back
He is from Lalitpur, the part of Bundelkhand that the maps assign to Uttar Pradesh, born into one of the Thakur houses of the district. He told me a small thing about that house that turns out to be the whole engine. In the world he grew up in, the man who danced and sang for the raja was called the nachaiya, and the word was an insult. A boy who wanted the stage had already gone wrong.
मौड़ा बिगड़ गया।
The verdict on the boy who wanted the stage
So the first audience he ever lost was at home. He left. Gwalior first, a little study, the sense that Gwalior was not the city either. Then Delhi. In the gap between the two towns came a Naxal phase, the young man’s certainty that the whole country could be turned over by force of feeling. He is honest about where it left him. You change nothing, he said. The storm stays inside you and you fight it out within your own ribs. Police cases came, and then the certainty broke. I want to stop on this, because it is the first time he refuses the loud lever and keeps the fight inside himself instead, and he never once takes it back up. The man who would not burn a bus for Bundelkhand thirty years later, who would not run the gutter film at his own festival, who would not act one inch over the hero’s head in a frame, is already here in the boy who tried the storm, learned it changed nothing, and set it down. A friend told him about the National School of Drama, and the door he had been refused at home opened in a classroom.
He passed out of NSD in 1977.<Ref n={1} /> He and Raghuvir Yadav, two Hindi belt boys with no English, ran what he calls an andolan against the English language and then had to do the work in it anyway. I like that he keeps the andolan and the surrender in the same breath. He did not pretend he arrived ready. He arrived furious and underprepared and stayed.
What he absorbed at NSD was less a style than a spine, and the spine has a name. Ebrahim Alkazi ran the school until the year Bundela left it.<Ref n={2} /> Bundela tells the Alkazi stories the way everyone who passed through that building tells them, as scripture. The one about the play that began at seven and the Prime Minister who arrived late and was made to wait outside the dark until the first scene change. The one about the new teachers being handed books and sent away for six months to read before they were allowed to teach. He gets a detail or two wrong, which I will come back to in the notes, but the doctrine he took from it is exact and he has never put it down. Time is a moral fact. What you say is your responsibility and nobody else’s. When the other actor forgets his line, you keep going. We will need all three of these later, because he spends the rest of his life applying them off the stage.
02 · The golden rule
I asked him about the supporting roles. Most of his screen life was spent in them, the friend, the brother, the man one step to the side of the star, and I wanted to know whether he resented the position or read it as craft.
His answer was a complete grammar, delivered as if it were obvious.
The first rule of the character actor, he said, is that you never act better than the hero, however bad the hero is. You stand inside a Lakshman Rekha and you do not cross it. He named the line he descends from, the actors who lived their whole lives inside that rule and made it look like the lead role anyway. Balraj Sahni. Motilal. Then Gurudutt. Then Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, the men who were always character and never star. The Jeetendras and the Rajendra Kumars, he said flatly, were never actors at all. He is unfair there, and the unfairness is the engine of his whole rulebook. For him a star and an actor were incompatible trades, and the men who tried to split the difference belonged to neither. There is a producer waiting at the edge of every scene, he said, ready to decide that the side man is getting clever, that he is going over the hero’s head, and to have him cut. So you cannot underplay yourself into invisibility either, or you will simply not be noticed. The work is to find the few moments where you come alive without breaking the rule that keeps you in your place.
जीवंत दिखें।
The rule of the character actor
This is not a sad description. He does not offer it as a complaint, and I refuse to receive it as one. It is a discipline with its own difficulty, harder in some ways than carrying a film, because the constraints are external and unfair and the artist has to make beauty inside them anyway. He worked out, somewhere around Shola Aur Shabnam, that the men he shared the screen with were growing into stars while he stayed exactly where he was placed, and that the cage was not going to open for him. That is the moment most actors get bitter. He did something else. He decided that if the cage would not open, he would build a different building, where the subject was his, the finance was his, the release was his, the character was his. He went from the rule to the exception by leaving the system that needed the rule.
He directed Pratha, the film about a village girl installed as a living goddess so the men around her could use her under cover of her own sanctity, with Irrfan Khan in it years before Irrfan was Irrfan, playing the sadhu, and in making it he set himself against the religious power of his own Thakur belt.<Ref n={3} /> He directed and produced Kisne Bharmaya Mere Lakhan Ko, about the joint family coming apart and everything that was lost when it did. He had starred in Brij Bhoomi years earlier, his first film, rooted in the Braj country.<Ref n={4} /> He shot a fifty episode serial for Zee across the same Jhansi and Lalitpur belt. He made two films with an American house, work that took him into the independent circuit there.<Ref n={5} /> When he says he became a director, he does not mean he changed jobs. He means he stopped asking permission to be the centre of his own frame.
And then, having earned the first seat, he gave it up.
03 · The movement is a character role
This is the part of the conversation where the theory stops being about cinema.
On the first of November 1956, the year India redrew itself, Bundelkhand was cut in two and parcelled into Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh without, in his telling, anyone asking the land it was done to.<Ref n={6} /> He recites the wound the way people from a place recite it, as inventory. Seven rivers and still the region is called drought struck. The best wheat, the best peas, the lemons, all of it grown there and sent out. Four power stations and the current goes to light Agra and Kanpur and Noida and the Taj Mahal while children study under the lamp post. He calls it manmade poverty, a hunger manufactured and then blamed on the soil. Four different parties have governed the region across the years and each one claims to have done everything for it, which leaves him with one clean question. If you all did so much, why is it hell. Bring a white paper to the assembly. Let us see who did what, and for whom.
He has been pressing that question since, by his account, the fifteenth of December 1995. The record fills in the rest. He took over the Bundelkhand Mukti Morcha from Shanker Lal Mehrotra, the elder who first called him back to the soil and reminded him he owed it a debt. He stood for the Lok Sabha from Jhansi in 2004 and lost. He moved through the Congress, then his own Bundelkhand outfit, then the BJP, and now sits on the Bundelkhand Vikas Board.<Ref n={7} /> Thirty years, four parties, no state.
Here is what makes him a different kind of subject than a politician. He does not narrate the movement as a politician. He narrates it as a character actor, with the same rulebook he gave me for the screen.
You are fighting for people, he said, but you cannot wound them. Their children cannot go to jail for you. Their families cannot take the financial or social hit, because then they will not stand with you and they will not let their children stand with you either. And the government you are demanding from is, in the end, the one that will grant the state, so you cannot make the government the villain. You criticise it, you fight it, you list its failures, and you do all of it while telling it you are mai-baap, you are the parent, if you do not do this then who will. Both sides have to be heard and neither side can be turned into the enemy. He compared it directly to the spot a character artist has to find in a scene, the small space where his point gets made and nobody in the frame is destroyed.
He is sharp about why the old grammar is gone. Burn a bus today, stop a train, set fire to a government office, and the bulldozer comes to the house, and the words upadravi and terrorist and gangster attach themselves to you. He gestures at where we are sitting. So many died for Telangana, he said, in this very land, and that era is finished. The era now is this, two people talking, a thousand more watching later. The fight has become a war of ideas, and the character artist’s job in a war of ideas is to hold the seam.
If this were a hero’s fight, he told me, he would have gone to Delhi and made Bundelkhand a state already, killed the villain in the last reel and handed out the happiness. It is not that fight. The hero does that. He cannot. He is in the second seat, and he keeps the first one empty.
That is the line that lets the whole episode cohere. The empty first seat is not modesty and it is not defeat. It is a working position. From the second seat you can fight without becoming the thing you are fighting, and you can lose for thirty years without it curdling into the kind of bitterness that makes a man burn the bus.
04 · Going home, at a loss
He makes a brain drain argument that explains the return. If we keep exporting our talent, he said, the towns empty out. Everyone wants the city, whose capacity is fifty or sixty lakh while three crore arrive, so both systems break, the one you crowd and the home you abandon to the crows. He wants the film schools to carry a rule the way medicine does, a few compulsory years served in your own region, because a doctor does not open his dispensary only in the city when the sick are in the village. The roots, he kept saying.
So he took his own career home, and he is precise about the cost. He made three Bundelkhandi films on hard subjects, one against the practices of his own Thakur society, and he says he was buried for it. His house went. The market value of a film made in that soil, in that language, on that subject, is not the value of the thought you poured into it. He does not say this to be pitied. He says it the way a man states a price he agreed to pay.
There is a harder part of that story he did not tell me, and the record keeps it. Before the Bhopal screening of Pratha the warnings had already reached him out of Jhansi and Lalitpur and Gwalior, the towns the film was made from. At the screening he was attacked. Then came the cut that went deeper than the blows, the claim that he had arranged his own beating for publicity, which he has always rejected. A man can survive a bad release and even a bruised body. The accusation that the wound was a performance is the one that buries a film, and it buried this one. He had told the truth about the religious power of his own people, he was punished for it twice, once with the hands and once with the rumour, and he went back and kept making films on that soil anyway.
The story he does tell about that release is the truest thing in the conversation about what going home really means. It opened at the biggest theatre in Jhansi, a friend’s hall. They were having tea at half past five, the show was at six, and the manager called in a panic. The people had broken the doors. Bundela ji’s film, ours, made on our land, why would we buy a ticket. We will watch it free, it is our film. He had to run it free for a week. Nobody would pay. They had decided that since it was made for them, the money made no sense.
He laughs telling it, but listen to what it costs and what it gives. The financial logic of going home is ruinous. The emotional logic is total. They think I am theirs, he said. Whatever the fight is, it is theirs, it is for them, and I am doing it. He paid for that belonging in the only currency the work earns, and he does not want it refunded.
This is not the story of an overlooked man who deserved more. He had the screen, Swarg and Shola Aur Shabnam and the drawing rooms of the country for years, and he chose the loss. A man who walks away from the centre to stand with the people who will not even buy his ticket is not a victim of the industry.
05 · The tarpaulin cinema
The festival is where the theory becomes infrastructure, and it is the part I came in knowing least and left most moved by.
He founded the Khajuraho International Film Festival under his Prayas banner, supported by the Madhya Pradesh culture department, and its signature is a thing called Tapra Talkies.<Ref n={8} /> These are cinemas built like jhopdis, tarpaulin and bamboo on the outside, LED screen and surround sound on the inside, raised against the backdrop of the UNESCO temples. He chose Khajuraho for two practical reasons he is candid about. It is already internationally known, so the festival borrows an identity it does not have to manufacture, and he could not carry the children of Bundelkhand to Bombay, so he carried Bombay to them. Anupam Kher, Shekhar Kapur, Govinda, and a tribute each year to an artist who has died, Sridevi one year, Rajesh Khanna and Shashi Kapoor in others.
But the real reason is the third one, and it is a defensive one. What was reaching those small towns, in a sixty kilometre radius with no theatre and no money for Netflix, was, in his blunt description, the cheap double meaning product local operators had started turning out, films he placed barely a step above pornography. He wanted, at minimum, to put clean commercial films in front of families, the kind you can watch sitting with your parents, so that a seventeen year old would not grow up believing that the gutter was what cinema is. Our proverb says cinema is the mirror of society, he said, and if that were the mirror these children were handed, it would kill them.
His line is exact and he gave me the proof of it. Someone once came to him offering Rakhi Sawant for a title called Natkhat Nayika. He said the people there would beat them both, and he declined. He does not call duplicate artists and he does not run the double meaning product, however well it sells in that radius. The benchmark he keeps is a single sentence, a film he can sit and watch with his own family. Past that there is no bar. You may speak against the government, you may take on religion as far as logic allows, he has stopped no film for either. The only thing he refuses is the gutter, and refusing it is the second seat again, the discipline of not being the loud thing in the frame.
The Tapra Talkies were almost an accident. The first year he put the films in the five star hotel halls, the wedding banquet rooms, and nobody came. The culture secretary asked him where the thousands were. He went out into the villages to find out, and the answer broke and made the festival in the same sentence. Dau, the villagers said, why did you walk us all the way inside the hotel, the guard would not let us in, we came by bullock cart and did not have the courage to pass the salutes and the marble. So he remembered the touring talkies of his own childhood, the bioscope tent, and built three huts with LED screens inside, cinema you did not have to be brave to enter. By his count they show eleven now, one international, one national to the festival’s theme, one commercial, the rest for the local people, and vans that carry films out to the villages that still cannot come.<Ref n={9} />
The story he tells inside that story is the one I keep returning to. An American film called Sold came one year, an English language film with subtitles, about a Nepali girl trafficked into a Kolkata brothel and the journalist who pulls her out.<Ref n={10} /> He ran it in the hall for the fifteen or twenty people it was meant for. The producer who had travelled with it wandered into a Tapra Talkie by mistake, saw the crowd, the air of the place, and walked into his office afterward and said her film had to run in that hut. He warned her. The audience there is village women, the film is in English with subtitles, there is no cultural bridge, a Nepali girl sold in Kolkata and an American who saves her, three worlds with no thread between them. She stayed anyway. They pulled in women from an NGO, and they wept through the whole thing. Not one word of dialogue they could read, a culture not theirs, and the subject reached them through the tarp.
There is a thread inside that screening he did not pull, and I will. Sushmita Mukherjee, his own wife, plays a woman called Mumtaz in Sold. The film that crossed every barrier in that hut had her in it the whole time, and he told the story as if it belonged only to the women who came to watch it.
That is the show’s whole thesis, sitting inside his anecdote without him reaching for it. Different viewers extract different truths from the same film. He had built a room where that could happen, and the proof walked in by accident.
And then the region did the thing he had been trying to make possible. The children there started making films back. He told me about a short from Katni, thirteen or fifteen minutes, a boy’s film about a notorious village kid who claims the goddess came to him in a dream and said the village would end within the year, and how the village, terrified, stops fighting, stops lying, becomes Ram Rajya, until they confront him and he tells them the old village did end, look, you are new people now. The same year, he said, a film at Cannes carried almost the identical premise, a world ending within a year. A friend who went every December to Khajuraho and every May to Cannes wrote to him, shocked, having seen the same content twice in two languages on two continents. Katni and Cannes, the same thought, and the one from Katni more authentic for having no urban mixture in it.
I had a Bundelkhand example of my own to give him, and I gave it. Khabar Lahariya, the all women rural news collective out of Banda, founded in 2002, mostly Dalit and Muslim women reporting in Bundeli on water and sand mining and caste violence, and the documentary made about them, Writing With Fire, the first Indian film nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary feature.<Ref n={11} /> He was floored. Regional, he kept saying, where to where these children are thinking. There is a quiet rhyme here that neither of us named in the room and I will name now. Khabar Lahariya, after the film carried their name to the Oscars, said publicly that the documentary showed only a part of what they do, that a part has a way of distorting the whole.<Ref n={12} /> Different viewers, different truths, even about the same women. The region he is trying to give a platform is already insisting on telling its own story its own way. That is not a problem with his project. It is the project working.
This is the second time the show has sat this long with a man who built cinema out of the soil he was born on. The first was Anuj Sharma in Chhattisgarh, the subject of an earlier episode I called <Link to="/episodes/episode-02" style={{ color: '#e8c47a' }}>Ramanuj, Before Anuj</Link>. Sharma chose to act and sing in Chhattisgarhi when the sensible career lay in Hindi, and he put a language the center had written off onto the screen. Bundela carried Bombay to Khajuraho rather than carry Khajuraho’s children to Bombay. Different states, different decades, the same refusal. There is one difference between them that matters. Sharma had a Chhattisgarhi cinema to belong to, an industry with its own stars and songs and audience. Bundela did not have a sustained Bundeli film industry to return to. Bundeli is folded into Hindi, kept off the Eighth Schedule, and split across two states the way the land is, so there was never an industry for him to carry home, only an audience to build from nothing. That is why his answer to the same problem was not a film but a festival, not a star system but a tarpaulin hut. Sharma could make films in his mother tongue. Bundela had first to make a place where films could be watched at all. Both men looked at the first seat, the Hindi mainstream the whole country is taught to want, and chose the chair beside it on purpose, because the work they had in them could only be done from there. It is the seat with the soil under it.
06 · Sabke apne Ram
We talked about Ram, and it became the clearest statement of the whole ethic he gave me on camera. He does not treat Ram as a thing to worship or a flag to wave. He treats him as a character you are meant to hold yourself against.
The Ram Mahotsav he runs in Orchha began with his own son. The boy, studying abroad, asked him one morning why he should worship Ram, who Ram even was, and Bundela took the question as a failure in the raising rather than a failure in the boy. The festival was his answer to it. For five years now he has run it, and the first thing he wanted me to understand is that they do not talk about religion in it. No pravachan, no kirtan, no jai. Those are happening anyway, everywhere. What he brings instead are the people who have written about Ram, who have done meemansa on Ram, vice chancellors and professors, the scholars from the Ramayana centres, the students from Bundelkhand and Chhatrasal universities bused in by the eleven o’clock. The thing he is trying to break, he said, is the slide into the merely religious. He wants the character returned to people as a character. Why do you say there is no brother like Ram, no son, no husband, no friend, and then never ask how much of that Ram is in you. He quotes a writer who argues that Kaikeyi, if she had wanted, could have taken a one year exile and crowned Bharat, that the fourteen years were planned, that Ram became Ram only by being sent, that a king who stayed a king would never have met the tribals, never built the army, never killed Ravana and then handed the kingdom to Ravana’s brother instead of keeping the gold of Lanka. He came back, Bundela noted, and went to meet Kaikeyi first, the one who by rights should have been his enemy, because he knew his whole transformation was her doing.
He chose Orchha for a reason that sits under the whole festival. It holds perhaps the most famous Ram in the country worshipped as a king rather than simply as a god, kept inside a palace, given a daily armed guard of honour, received by his people with paan and ittar in place of sweet prasad. Even here the figure is a person to be met, not an abstraction to be chanted at.
I put the new film to him. Namit Malhotra’s Ramayana, arriving Diwali 2026, two parts, the tagline Our Truth, Our History.<Ref n={13} /> I told him that from where I sit, in Hyderabad, far from Orchha, it seems to me that everyone has their own Ram.
सबके अपने राम हैं।
Darshim Saxena, from where she sits in Hyderabad
How does a man who has spent five years insisting Ram is a character to study read a line that says our truth, our history, in the singular.
He would not take the bait, and his refusal was the most interesting answer he gave. Some subjects, he said, you have to leave to themselves.
कुछ विषय उनके भरोसे छोड़ देने चाहिए।
Some subjects you must leave to themselves
There are moments in a life where you have to leave the decision to God and above God, not to yourself. He moved instead to Krishna, the figure closer to my Braj heart and his, the one who told each person to see him in whatever form they needed to see him. We do not need to tell you what we are, he said of Krishna, that is why he is the complete avatar, and Ram the maryada one. He associates himself into both. How much Krishna is in me, how much Ram. That is his comfort zone, he said, because if God is always with you, then leaving a tap running or a light burning or speaking ill of someone is an injustice, and in that moment the Ram in you is not there.
I had noticed by then that he finds himself in everything he respects. Two kinds of people, I told him. The ones who know they ought to honour a thing and so they do, dutifully, from the outside. And him, who finds his own reflection in it.
अपनी परछाईं हर चीज़ में ढूंढ लेते हैं आप।
Darshim Saxena, on the man beside her
He agreed without hedging. I associate myself, he said. That is where the meaning of life is. I cannot pick and choose. Wherever I am, if I associate myself there, living gets easier and relating to others gets easier. It is, when you set it next to everything else, the same move he makes everywhere. He does not stand outside the thing and admire it. He climbs into the chair beside it and works.
He is starting another festival, in Mahakal’s city of Ujjain, and the principle under it is the same one. The person who brings a film there, he said, will arrive having thought about it, the way a man who drinks still leaves the bottle outside the temple, not because Mahakal stops him but because the mirror does.
आईना रोकता है।
Darshim Saxena, gloss on what Mahakal does not need to do
Do the work with full faith and honesty and Mahakal is in it. My father used to tell me a line, I told him, karm hi pooja hai, the work itself is the worship, done without fear of the fruit.
कर्म ही पूजा है।
Darshim Saxena, a line inherited from her father
He took it like a man hearing his own sentence read back to him.
07 · The second seat at home
The longest and most surprising stretch of the conversation was about his wife, and it is where the philosophy stops being a public posture and becomes the architecture of a marriage of more than thirty years.
Sushmita Mukherjee is an NSD actor the country still calls Kitty, after the role in Karamchand, and a writer with real books to her name, a novel that took her eleven years and a collection of stories about the incomplete lives of complete women.<Ref n={14} /> She runs Rudrani Kalagram, the art village in Orchha, as its sanrakshika.<Ref n={15} /> He described their two upbringings as opposite directions, a Delhi woman raised in English and a Hindi belt boy who ran an agitation against the English language, and then said the thing that explained the marriage. We live in a no man’s land, he said, where we do not disturb each other. Her place is hers, my place is mine. What is right for me need not be right for her. Two separate personalities, full stop. When people ask him to bring the wife along to talk, he tells them she is a separate personality, go talk to her separately.
I pushed on whether that took years to build, and it did. He had decided, after many girlfriends, that Sushmita was the one he could raise a family with, that raising children well was as important a job as any, and he is the first to say he could not have done it. She is the good mother, he said, the part he and his family background could not have provided, and the children grew up independent and thinking not only about themselves but about the country, which in this climate is a large thing. He gave her the credit without performing the giving.
The wedding is the proof of the whole theory, and it is funny. He never wanted to marry. The day a girlfriend raised it, he would walk her to the door. Then he came home one evening to find his own building strung with bandhanwar and flowers and a shehnai going, asked the watchman whose function it was, climbed the stairs, and found Sushmita waiting in full bridal dress with two friends beside her.
आज सात तारीख है। तुमने कहा था ना।
Sushmita, on the appointed day
The seventh, the date he had once thrown out without meaning it. She was ready for a yes and ready for a no. That is such a Miranda thing to do, I told him, because I came through Miranda House myself and I know the move. He asked for one drink to think it over. She told him to have it or leave it, the answer was due now either way. He married her that night, no horse, no procession, a few friends he had phoned in a panic to say he was in trouble, the fire lit, the two of them in front of it. The Delhi girl became a Bundelkhandi bahu who took the language and the soil so completely that his family, he says, now loves her more than they love him.
But the line he gave her that stayed with me is the one where he refused the easy word. Asked what is most Sushmita about her, he did not say wife. This is the most independent thing she could have pulled off, he said, she is rather than wife a very good friend, a reliable friend. In a wife you can find a thousand faults. She is a perfect friend and guide and your wellwisher. And the proof he offered was not sentimental, it was administrative. When the festival has to be planned and executed, the thing whole families spend years dreaming about, is the organisation guaranteed because Sushmita is on it. Absolutely not, he laughed. She steps back. Her one fault, he said, is that she will not take responsibility, especially in a social cause, because she is afraid of being answerable, and this work cannot be done without being answerable. The village man takes the decision, he said, the less educated man, because he does not calculate the repercussions. The calculative mind weighs the loss, the family’s opinion, the safety, and then says no. The collective decisions of Khajuraho he takes himself, in the end, and tidies the rest.
Now read that beside everything before it. In the marriage, he is the one who steps in front, who answers to the public, who takes the seat that can be blamed. At home, in this one arena, he is the hero and she keeps the first seat empty. The position is not fixed to the man. It moves, the way Venkat’s episode first taught me. The seats are interchangeable, and the whole art is knowing which one you are sitting in today.
He resisted her opening a theatre company once, and the reason is the cleanest window into his fear. Theatre, in his telling, makes you mature and then traps you in an inferiority complex you cannot climb out of, the big beard and the khadi kurta and the sense that the world owes you and never pays. He was scared of it for himself. Cinema lets you go to sleep believing you will finish Shah Rukh off tomorrow if you get the role. Theatre’s gauge is only the three hundred people in the hall, and you cannot tear through three hundred people into the kind of aura Naseeruddin Shah became. So he steered her toward a production company instead, toward the larger audience, and kept his Prayas and her stage work entirely separate, two independent lives that respect a border. He is, I think, a man who has thought very hard about the difference between the room that frees you and the room that closes around you, and he has spent his life choosing rooms.
08 · The closet writer
He said one thing about her he had never said anywhere else, and he knew it as it left him. I have never said this before, he told me, I am saying it today, Sushmita is my biggest competitor. He meant the writing. She is the better one, the one with the flavour, while he writes only what his own work needs, the way Raj Kapoor and V. Shantaram built their own subjects without ever calling themselves writers. He said it like a man conceding a match he is glad to lose.
What he could not have known is how precisely her life answers the show’s quietest question, which is who gets to be named as the author of the work. For years, by her own account, Sushmita wrote for the family production house without the public authorship that later became central to her own work. She has said that the acknowledgment never came and that watching her own words move on the screen was joy enough, which is the most forgiving account of being uncredited I have read. She called herself a closet writer who kept the writing hidden so the acting would not end. One screenplay from those years did carry her name and won her an NFDC award, for Nati. The authorship she had handed away for two decades she took back in her own name only from 2018, the novel first and then Baanjh, eleven stories about the incomplete lives of complete women, the title lifted from the word flung at a woman who cannot bear a child, baanjh, barren, as though the lack were always hers to hold. A woman who spent half her writing life unnamed wrote a book about the women society will not call whole. She did her English at Miranda House, which is my college too, a thing I did not know until I went looking, and it rearranged how I heard him name her his competitor.<Ref n={16} />
09 · The discipline was always Alkazi’s
When I asked whether NSD ever helped the politician, whether the training showed up on the campaign stage, he corrected the premise. Politics taught him nothing, he said. He taught himself, from theatre, three things, and he counted them.
A commitment that is total, not the politician’s casual it will happen, we will come, we will take it tomorrow. A hundred percent or nothing, which is why the NSD lot, he said, will do three films a year when they could do ten, the way Nawazuddin says he barely manages three. Answerability, because what you say is yours and you cannot push it onto anyone else. And the last one, the best one, the one he saved. In theatre, when the actor across from you forgets his line or gives you the wrong one, you do not stop. You keep going. You learn to improvise and you carry the scene. In politics, the same. If the man across from you is wrong, is forgetting his responsibility, turning his face from it, you continue. You do not forget your aim because he forgot his line. You do your part and finish what you were called to do.
There it is, the whole inheritance, and it traces straight back to the seven o’clock curtain and the Prime Minister kept waiting in the dark. The man who taught him that time is a moral fact was the same man who built India’s modern theatre out of pure discipline, and Bundela took the discipline out of the rehearsal room and ran a thirty year statehood campaign on it, and a film festival, and a marriage, and a Ram festival that refuses to become religious. People say a corrupt politician is just acting, he told me near the end, and he would not allow it. Acting is an art. Acting is a technique. It is not available to everyone. He meant it as a defence of his craft. I heard it as the quiet boast of a man who knows the difference between holding a line and faking one, and has spent his life on the first.
10 · The first seat is still empty
I keep coming back to the empty chair beside him, and to the fact that he filled it with a theology without being asked.
The first seat is empty because that is where God sits, if God shows up to do the work. The second seat is where he sits, doing it in the meantime, never pretending to be the one who could finish it with a single reel. He has lost the statehood fight for thirty years and it has not soured him, because the second seat is built for a fight you may not win in your lifetime. He went home and they would not buy his ticket and he calls it love. He gave his wife the higher chair at home and the higher respect in the family and calls it the most independent thing she ever did. He climbs into Ram and Krishna and Mahakal and the supporting role and the divided region and finds his own face in each, and works from beside it.
A living archive, the introduction said. I will revise it now that I have sat with him. He is not the record of a finished thing. He is a man who worked out, very young, in a house where the word for performer was an insult, that the centre was never going to be offered to him, and who built an entire life on the discovery that the chair beside the centre is the one with all the leverage. The hero kills the villain and hands out the happiness and the film ends. The character actor stays after the lights come up, in the second seat, keeping the first one warm for whatever comes next.
When the cameras stopped he laughed that I had made him talk more than he had in his whole life, that nobody had ever held him in a chair this long, and that he would have to come back to Hyderabad to finish what we started. Then he did the thing that tells you who he is. He asked me to come to Orchha. I went, not long after, to the town that holds the only Ram who is a king, and the man who keeps the first seat empty hosted me with a warmth that asked for nothing in return. The host had become the guest. The seats had changed places one more time, the way he told me they always do.
That is the thing he handed me, in the end. A different account of what a career is for.
By Darshim Saxena · All Episodes