Jagdish and Arundhati Raja: 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients — ASIAN AGE

While I write this I’m sitting at the cultural nerve centre of Mumbai — the Prithvi Theatre Café. It is an unremarkable place. Being open air, it is hot and humid. The seats are functional, not comfortable. The food is neither special nor cheap.

Being tucked away in a residential colony, it is not well located either. There are three “branded” coffee shops at less than two minutes walk from here. And yet it’s crowded. Why?
The café has a reputation as a theatrewallahs hangout. But as I look around the tables, I see students, business professionals and actors. So then what is it?
It is my belief, however naïve, that it is because of the theatre. Theatre brings people together — to work on a play, to watch a play, and then to make the performance complete. Maybe that explains this unquantifiable “vibe” that makes the Prithvi Café different from the other establishments.
An architecture student, who is sharing the table with me, is talking about his next year’s elective subject that looks at the influence theatre has on the culture of a community. Not just as a building but as an activity.
As practitioners, sometimes we forget the larger bearing that our one production or festival has on the cultural “health” of a society. Prithvi Theatre is a great example of that. In the past, institutes like the Bhulabhai Institute were exciting hotbeds of cultural activity in old Bombay where a young F.N. Souza or M.F. Husain would share tables with an even younger Vijaya Mehta or Satyadev Dubey. One would expect many more of these places to come up as Bombay grew, but unfortunately that has not happened.
Bengaluru, on the other hand, seems to have taken up that role. Ranga-Shankara is now an important catalyst for regional Kannada Theatre. The newly opened Jagriti is another example, and most likely to wrest the title of “Prithvi of Bangalore” from RangaShankara. At present it has a thrust stage and residential colony location, very similar to Prithvi, but in time, it should become a place where young theatre practitioners can share a café table with their greats.
As an organised extension of that, Thespo presents an annual Lifetime Achievement Award, which aims at introducing the works of past masters to a new generation. This year Arundhati and Jagdish Raja of the aforementioned Jagriti will be the recipients of the award.
I have known the Rajas for a while; mainly by their reputation, and a few interactions. But it’s only when you start digging into their life, that you realise their contribution to India’s cultural wealth. The weight of productions, the number of actors they gave “birth” to, the new initiatives they led, and just when you think they are winding up, they decide to open a theatre — the culmination of a lifelong dream that took almost two whole lifetimes. Unbelievable!
Jagdish will receive the Thespo for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre on behalf of both of them on Sunday at the Experimental Theatre, NCPA. And with it, surely inspire a new generation to take to theatre. Perhaps a table in the foyer will be set up, so that a rookie and a legend can share a cup of coffee.