Rajni Anand Luthra: Shakthidharan, congratulations on your new play The Wrong Gods. Your earlier works (Counting and Cracking and The Jungle and the Sea) were expansive in scope. With The Wrong Gods, you’ve opted for a more intimate setting and a smaller cast. What inspired this shift in scale and focus?
S Shakthidharan: I became interested in the idea of a play which had a call and a response. I think that modernity and systemic changes that a community might go through often begin in very small ways, and then once you’re in that system, it’s hard to extricate yourself from it.
So, this very simple [dramatic] form of a place and a gift from a stranger, and then that gift becoming something else in a second act really appealed to me. It wasn’t a conscious decision to have a smaller cast. It was just that I suddenly struck upon being able to tell a story from pre-modern times to now in two scenes, all based around one gift from a stranger. The simplicity of that really appealed to me. I’m always led by what the story needs, and it felt to me like that’s what this story needed.
Set against the backdrop of India’s Green Revolution and the Narmada Dam Project, The Wrong Gods delves into the tension between tradition and modernity. What drew you to this particular historical period, and what’s its relevance today?
S Shakthidharan: I spent some time living with that community in the Narmada Valley about 10 years ago, while they were still in their protests. It was an incredible time that’s still seared into my mind; I met a lot of people that inspired these characters in The Wrong Gods.
What I found so fascinating about the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) was the way in which so many women were taking leadership roles, I loved that. I met women who had a firm understanding of their way of life; their ancestors have been living that way for tens of thousands of years. And yet, when the dam started being built, they had to learn how the rest of the world worked, because it was affecting their world in horrific ways. These women were open to that and faced it. They tried to understand how the rest of the world worked to save what they could in their own community. Those women were the inspiration for Nirmala. I also met people who were middle class activists from Delhi and Bangalore and yet were at this satyagraha; they were committed to staying there, even if they drowned, alongside the people from the community. It really stayed with me, that solidarity alliance.
Climate change proposes this existential threat to us; the planet is slowly getting to a point where it can’t survive us. I was thinking about why we can’t act on it to the level we need to – I think it’s because we are inside a system and a way of thinking that we don’t know how to get out of, even if we want to.
I thought for a long time about what the right setting was to explore these ideas, and I realised the NBA was perfect, because what happened in the NBA is not just the story of there – there have been battles like that for every city in the world.
I was quite happy to see an all-female cast; it’s women who typically bear the brunt of transformation in societies.
S Shakthidharan: Absolutely. I think that a female cast allows us to look at the whole picture. Nirmala has to figure out who she is as a mother to Isha, but also who she is as a leader of her community. Isha has to think about what her duty is to that place, but also what her duty is to herself.
Unfortunately, men can often feel like they’ve only got a duty to their work or to their goals or their dreams. It’s the women in a community who think about everything and have to weigh up the pros and cons and all the responsibilities.
Yes, and in the Narmada Bachao Andolan we saw the women rise up – they were the ones that became negotiators and first-time political actors, leading the marches and fasts.
S Shakthidharan: Yeah, it’s a wonderful thing; I think we see that again and again in history. In Sri Lanka, it’s now the women who are leading the charge to find the bodies which haven’t been found. They’re leading the protests and looking at initiatives to rebuild their communities post-war. It’s the women who find the solutions because they understand how the whole system works.
The title The Wrong Gods is striking – it suggests cultural misdirection, as well as misplaced faith in progress. But it also evokes reverence, not just rupture. Is that the South Asian in me speaking? Why are we always seeking gods, even in broken places?
S Shakthidharan: I don’t know, it’s the South Asian in me too! I think I wanted to figure out a way to both rekindle how important it is to have God and be reverent because none of us are everything – we’re all one small part of a massive world which is mostly non-human.
The moment we are in our history is about what gods we believe in. I question the idea that progress should be a god. Progress is something we can get good things out of – it becomes, for me, dangerous when we become reverential towards it and allow it to dictate everything.
We think we’re a multi-faith or secular society, but we’re not. We’re just as religious as we’ve always been, and we pray to different gods now, I think.
Displacement and identity are a central thread in your work. How do you navigate the balance between your personal history and collective memory in your storytelling?
S Shakthidharan: I think being a migrant, it’s impossible not to have this idea of a split identity put to you. There’s the homeland of your ancestors, and there’s the place that you call home now. When I was younger, I tried to behave as the mainstream did, by letting go of myself. In my 20s and 30s I figured out how to live two worlds; behind closed doors, I knew my full self, and I could be who I really was culturally and spiritually. I didn’t necessarily show that to people I wasn’t close to.
Counting and Cracking really changed me; that play forced me to put a lot of personal material and the collective memory of my community on the stage. Collective memory is an interesting idea, because if you’re going to be honest about it, it means memories that have clashing truths in them. Collective memory means people might have different memories of the same incidents – I think that’s true [to] life. Part of what theatre can do is put them side by side and say, ‘this is what it means to be human’.
What I really learned through that [play] was true belonging is only belonging in public. Though the play was so embraced by the wider Australian community, Sri Lankans would come and say to me, ‘I don’t understand why everyone else likes this show’. I think it’s because we as migrants are so used to the idea that only certain people understand the full version of ourselves, and we’re not used to putting the full version out in public and having that be embraced. I think that means we’ve put conditions on ourselves; only a public, vulnerable belonging is a true belonging, where we’re accepted by mainstream society after they’ve understood the fullness of who we are. If they accept us based on the conditions they give us, that’s not acceptance at all, is it?
I think there’s a thread that runs through all my work where I try to push that and find ways to show the beautiful and the ugly sides of us – the conflicting truths and the messiness of our identities – to get to a point where we go, ‘no, we don’t have to be split, we can combine the wisdom of our ancestors and our new home in a full self that just exists here in Australia’. That’s going to take generations, but I hope I can contribute a small part to it with the work that I do.
Do you find that telling these stories helps you reclaim parts of your own identity, or perhaps heal what was lost in generational silence?
S Shakthidharan: I think there’s a couple of levels of silence. One is what comes from displacement and trauma. Any violent rupturing creates silence; it’s very hard as a human to deal with it by talking about it. My own mother, and many people in my community dealt with what happened in Sri Lanka by burying it and trying to get on with it. The act of migration only encourages that – just set up your new life in your new country, forget the past. But of course, that’s both impossible and not fair to our children. At a certain point, we need to share all of who we are with them. I think theatre is one of the few ways we can allow that.
I think there’s another silence which is the result of British colonialism. South Asian communities are so vociferous and open with community joy and with guilt and shame and anger. But we’re not very good at sitting down and being vulnerable and quiet with each other. My theory is that it’s a hangover from communities trying to emulate the British, but maybe there’s something deeper there – someone else can tell me where it comes from. I hope that theatre works on [that silence] as well, providing space for families and friends to be vulnerable with each other.
Many reviews of your work use the word ‘powerful’. What are your thoughts on this?
S Shakthidharan: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve got no idea [why], but I can only guess. Something I try to do is not separate intellect and heart, politics from the personal, past from the present. When we feel all the layers combine – when a moment in theatre can be both political and personal, when we see the past inside that present moment, when we can feel both our heart and our brain working at the same time – I think that is powerful.
It’s hard to appreciate all the layers of life; to have a discussion with someone and take them in visually and take what they’re saying in. Whereas with theatre, we can get life reflected to us and have time to take in all the layers of it. Strangely, through the falseness of performance, we get a feeling of what life really is like, because we can’t feel it while we’re living.
What responsibilities do you feel when representing South Asian stories in predominantly Western spaces?
S Shakthidharan: What’s tricky is dealing with the success of Counting and Cracking. The South Asian community is so diverse; I hope that these works help the industry have more faith in supporting other South Asian works, because I can’t do it on my own. What that allows is for each artist to not have to shoulder the burden of a generalised representation, because that only does us a disservice.
The other thing I’m interested in is mixing up the spaces as much as possible. I love working with people like Belvoir but having more and more South Asian audiences and audiences who don’t come to the theatre normally. To go into a predominantly white space but then go: ‘you’ve built up a certain amount of power. You have a system here that works. We want an equal seat at a table. And you’re going to let us lead and do our community-centred approach in a way which uses all your power.’ It’s kind of what Isha has to do after the play.
For the first 15 years of my career, I was a community artist. I absolutely loved that time, never want to change it. But it means you’re always working with people who have less power and trying to build up things from the ground. There’s a different journey when you go into the more powerful spaces in the country, culturally speaking, and ask them to change. The risk is greater. When it goes badly, it goes badly. But there’s a valuable goal at the end of that, which is to actually have an equal seat at the table where the cultural power is and to change what they do. I want to be a small contributor to that process now at this stage of my career.
Excellent, I think you’re a major contributor there! But many of your close collaborators, like Hannah Goodwin or Eamon Flack, haven’t been from South Asian backgrounds. Was that a conscious decision, and how has that shaped the way your stories are told and received?
S Shakthidharan: Well, they’re co-directors. I don’t want to make work that only white audiences go to. I don’t want to make work that only South Asian audiences go to. And I don’t want to make work that only multicultural audiences go to. I believe our stories deserve mainstream exposure. I want to make work that the fullness of Australian society comes to.
How do you [then] make sure that each line of the play and each directing choice can speak to multiple audiences at once? I like that challenge. I like that someone can come to this show who was involved with the Narmada and see all the layers of it. But I like that someone might come to this show and their first entry point into it is the mother daughter relationship and [they] learn more about how South Asian communities look at that. I like that there’s multiple journeys happening at once.
Have there been any responses to The Wrong Gods that surprised you?
S Shakthidharan: One night I was sitting in front of a family of South Asian heritage and when the show finished, they turned around to me, and we started talking about it. They loved it, but the daughter who was there said, ‘I live in France. And I’m in Sydney at the moment to see my parents. They wanted me to come and see this show – I flew the nest just like Isha did.’ And then they started talking about it, you know – ‘why did you feel the need to go all the way to France? And what does it mean to come back?’ It’s important that theatre does that. When we’ve been through those kinds of traumas, we don’t have the tools to talk about it; theatre unlocks something in us.
What advice would you give to young South Asians who want to tell their stories but feel caught between two cultures, or afraid their voice won’t be heard?
S Shakthidharan: Speak from your heart and put forward who you are. I don’t think that’s as easy as it sounds because there’s a lot of forces in society which subliminally tell us to fit in in certain ways. It’s very tricky to sit down with yourself and go, who am I? What is my voice? But I can tell you it feels electric when someone is saying an idea that it can only be told by them. You feel the energy of it.
My advice would be to spend the time trying to get to the point where you’re developing ideas that can only be done by you. That doesn’t mean it has to be your personal story, but it has to be something that no one else on the planet could do. And if you’re not there yet just experiment, but when you arrive at something which can only be you, then put your full heart behind it.
When you’re receiving feedback on that [project], you have to differentiate those who are giving you feedback that makes that idea even more you – in which case you should listen. If they hear the heart of the story and they want to make it even more powerful, then take it on. Those giving you feedback that makes that story less you and makes the heart of the story drift away from itself, that’s [who] you step away [from].
Learning to differentiate between those two things is really important; you don’t want to become someone who just ignores everyone’s feedback and thinks you’re the best, because no one is the best. And you don’t want to be someone who puts forward an idea that becomes really successful, but that’s not actually an expression of yourself – people will expect more of that and then what are you going to do?
Be humble enough to figure out that there’s better ways of doing that than how you first thought. But don’t keep working with the people who don’t want the power of the story to stay there. We’re a beautiful community and our stories deserve to be told.
The Wrong Gods runs from May 3 to June 1 in Sydney, and then June 6 to July 12 in Melbourne.
