“I wanted to shake up Indian society just as Henrik Ibsen had done in Norway” – Ila Arun

In 1993, Hindi film audiences were shaken up with the catchy and controversial lyrics of Choli ke Peechey Kya Hai (what lies behind the blouse), a song that went on to break records and make the film Khal Nayak a box-office superhit. The song thrust Rajasthani folk singer Ila Arun into the limelight of mainstream Bollywood. Her cocky facial expressions and the husky folksy timbre of her voice – along with the suggestive lyrics, of course – sealed her name in film history.

Arun went on to make a name for herself in every genre of the performing arts – film, television, theatre, and playback singing. Over a tremendous 50-year career, she worked with some of the biggest names in Bollywood and theatre. She has written five original plays and 10 adaptations of some of the world’s most famous playwrights. She now runs her own theatre group, Surnai Theatre and Folk Arts Foundation.

This month, she released her autobiography Parde Ke Peechey (Penguin Random House India, INR 699), co-authored by writer, actor and translator Anjula Bedi, who is also a co-founder of Surnai. The book chronicles Arun’s childhood and growing years in Rajasthan, her entry into Bollywood, and key episodes from her decades-long career.

She dedicates a chapter to her theatrical hero, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose plays were adapted to Hindi by Arun. In this excerpt, she shares why she connected so deeply with his works, and especially his female lead characters.

By Ila Arun

I had only read his words—once, twice, three times, then 10, and I kept reading them, sinking deeper and deeper into his stories. Every word he wrote drew me to him and through him to society, a society he had watched and observed all his life. He motivated me to be the voice of women, women who did not dance to my songs, women who suffered through no fault of theirs, women who needed to be empowered through his writings.

Who was this man? A simple, short man, with a tall vision, a Norwegian called Henrik Ibsen. I was introduced to Ibsen by Alkazi Sahib’s son-in-law, Nissar Allana, in 2010. He was holding an Ibsen festival in Delhi, termed ‘Ibsen in Tradition’. He needed to present at least one woman director at the festival and he contacted me. He knew me as a folk singer and actor who was well-versed in folk culture.

He tried to convince me to direct an Ibsen play. I was not ready to take on this responsibility. At the time I was not familiar with his plays. I had seen a version of A Doll’s House in Jaipur, in Hindi as Gudia Ghar, directed by a friend, HP Saxena. I learnt that it was written 150 years ago and had shocked the narrow-minded society of Norway at the time. He had shaken up their complacency and with it provided women the world over a new perspective on life.

At that time, Hindi theatre adopted plays of Anton Chekhov, Molière and Bertolt Brecht, adapted or translated into Hindi. Shakespeare, the most performed writer in the world was not as popular, perhaps because his English did not lend itself to easy translation.

I myself was more inclined towards the Indian writers since I was more familiar with them: Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Nemi Chandra Jain, Bhisham Sahni, Girish Karnad or Sanskrit playwrights such as Bhasa, Kalidasa, et cetera.

But once I started reading Ibsen, I could not stop. They say love is blind, but I can say that Ibsen opened my eyes and I hung onto every word of his. I was so fascinated that I took up the challenge and agreed to direct a play for the Delhi Ibsen Festival.

Devouring his plays, I went deeper into his mind, I felt myself being overpowered, submerged in his thoughts and ideas. He desired to change the concept of theatre. He steered the themes away from the innocuous farce of the French playwrights and brought the audience into people’s homes and exposed them to the dark secrets of realistic bourgeois families.

Many of his plays deal with the issues of women’s empowerment. I felt I owned his words, his thoughts and could read between the lines and I tried to interpret them as best as I could.

As I began understanding him, and accepting his thought process, I decided to adapt him in the Indian context, to the life of the Bhartiya nari in Indian society. My pen wouldn’t stop and, over reams of paper, Ibsen’s words, in Hindi, were dancing before my eyes.

I placed his characters in different locations, different costumes and mouthing Ibsen’s dialogues in different dialects of India. His words gave me a direction to address the problems women face, surprisingly the same problems that Norwegian women were confronted with, almost 200 years ago. It seemed as if nothing had changed.

I used his words to talk to women from every stratum of society, rural or urban, middle-class or royalty, working women and housewives, literate or illiterate, suffocating beneath the ghunghat, veil, or confronting a hostile world after having crossed the limits of so-called propriety. I used Ibsen’s language as a support to give full weight to my words. I wanted to shake up Indian society just as Ibsen had done, but would my words be the voice of women in India?

The stranger I fell in love with enticed me first with his play The Lady from the Sea. I called it Mareechika, a mirage. In the play, Ibsen’s lead character, Ellida, after years of subservience, revolts against her position as a wife and mother, saying that she has the right to choose her own destiny.

As we are aware, most women in our society do not have the freedom to take a decision on their own lives and actions. Not so long ago they did not even have a right to education. Now when they are being educated, it is the parents who decide which subjects they can take, something that will be an asset in the marriage market! After graduation, most girls are married off and have to accept husbands chosen by their families.

And this is in a country which we know from our epics allowed swayamvars, gatherings of eligible bachelors, from which a young girl could select a husband of her choice. We know from the Ramayana that Sita garlanded Ram and chose him as her husband from among several princes.

But slowly Indian society moved away from these traditions and with it came the change in the position of women. But just as Ibsen called out to the women of Norway, I too have tried to awaken the women of my country by calling out to them in Ibsen’s voice.

This excerpt is published with permission from Penguin Random House India.