"Beauty is the struggle for living, for survival. Through many struggles we have to create a sense of values." - Dang Tu Mai, Vietnam

It's hard to find much theatre heat and sizzle these days. But that doesn't mean the impulse to explore, invent, question and subvert has disappeared. Learning to expect the unexpected, after all, to discover something new even in a familiar context, is what makes artists and audiences want to get together in the theatre in the first place.

Within this space, the debate on the gender balance and the question of female aesthetics remains a non-issue. One of the big reasons for this is the absence of a movement. True there are innumerable women who are working in the theatre, but their work is scattered and cannot comprise a body of work.

For example, consider the array of names who are striving to chart a plot. These are: Maya Rao, B Jayashree (Bangalore), Vijaya Mehta (Mumbai), Sushma Deshpande, Jyoti Subhash (Pune), Anjana Puri (Bhopal), Saoli Mitra, Jayoti Bose (Kolkata), Mallika Sarabhai (Ahmedabad), Veenapani Chawla (Pondicherry), Neelam Mansingh Chowdhary, Balbir Kaul (Chandigrah), Kalairani (Chennai), Veenapani Chawla (Pondicherry); besides Delhi veterans like Kirti Jain, Amal Allana, Anuradha Kapur, Anamika Haksar and Tripurari Sharma.

To start with, the plays by these women do not always provide a feminine aesthetic and sensibility. It is true that some of these plays by the above, take up women's issues and their concerns in a relevant manner, but they are few and far between. But above all, what one detects is the absence of a rudimentary ideology. For women's theatre to proliferate, one will have to consciously contribute to a genre, which will have its own basic, underlying principles.

A lot of the practitioners are afraid to commit to such a thing. They fear that a rudimentary ideology may make the art of theatre, inflexible. Such a fear is unfounded. After all, one can evaluate women characters in the plays from two perspectives: traditional and feminist. This essay endeavours to look at woman characters from the feminist perspective, and as such a small theoretical note in the beginning is not out of place.

All the arts and sciences strive to understand lived human experience. Feminist theory brings the awareness that the construction of women's experience has never been adequate. Whether that experience was made trivial or enviable, sanctified or mystified, it was peripheral, described and explained primarily not by women themselves but by men. Since women's experience was so rarely a direct focus for theoretical consciousness, a whole range and spectrum of human life remains to be explored, depicted and understood.

One form of woman's consciousness is what we might call 'feminine consciousness'. The form of awareness is that of the 'other' in Simone de Beavoir's terms, the woman as defined by male gaze, construct and desire.

Which brings us to a second form of consciousness - 'feminist consciousness'. This is a consciousness developed and defined as we reflect on women's experience and on asymmetry in power, opportunity and situation that have universally marked the fortunes of women. It draws attention to the pervasive patterns of subordination, limitation and confinement that have hampered the development of the female half of humankind as far back in history as we can remember.

Some feminists say that women have been oppressed for 30,000 years. That is just about the time of the emergence of modern humans (H. sapiens), but those humans were not so different from older H. sapiens, physically or culturally, and not much like us in any cultural form. Instead, with nothing but the addition of tools and language (and religion), human life wasn't socially all that different in its forms even from the life of baboons or lions. All that counted was survival, since survival is all that counts in nature. Because survival was all that counted, the only human activity that really counted was reproduction, and so the only humans who really counted were women. That did not make them individuals. Nature simply doesn't care about individuals when the survival of the group or the species is all that counts. Herein there are two important concepts of gender and patriarchy that need definition and explanation, since there is a surfeit of it in most of our plays (the rare HAYAVADANA or KAMLA notwithstanding).

Patriarchy is founded on the prejudice and male superiority, which guarantees superior status to male, and inferior to female. It 'values' for male are aggressions, intelligence, force and efficacy. While in female passivity, ignorance and docility. This is complemented by a second factor; sex role, which decrees a highly elaborate code of conduct, gestures, attitude for each sex. In terms of activity, sex role assign domestic service and attendance upon infants to female, whilst the rest of human achievement, interest and ambition to male.

Gender is the primary identity any human being holds. Gender is a term that has psychological or cultural rather than biological connotations. If the proper terms for sex are 'male' and 'female' the corresponding terms for gender are 'masculine' and 'feminine'.

For instance, notice how literature is always short on comic female protagonists. Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, Falstaff and Oskar Matzerath, it's always a man who makes comic capital of despair, while the ladies perish in unrelieved tragedies. Mary Stuart or Electra, and Nora or the typical woman in a Vijay Tendulkar play, all are in love with their tragedy. Or they pine and sigh over their sentimentalities. Or madness drives them to the moors. Or sin gnaws at them. Or masculine power is their undoing - take Lady Macbeth. Utterly devoid of humour, they are handmaidens of suffering, saint, whore, witch, or all three at once. Or trouble turns them to stone, they are hardened and embittered, a wordless plaint. Sometimes their author allows them to go off the rockers like Ophelia and babble incoherent verses. Only the 'grotesque old crone' far removed from all pleasures of the flesh, and the flighty chambermaid might be cited as examples of the female humour that is supposed to be 'imperishable'. But whether old and grotesque or young and flighty, only minor roles fall to woman's wit. Probably, the time has come, as Gunter Grass states to "give the knight of the mournful countenance a woman's skirt and let her battle the windmills of male prejudice."

Depiction of women in Indian plays is very problematic, since there is an absence of feminine consciousness. Playwrights don't seem to be taking cognisance of the fact that women in this country are oppressed, and are victims of not only patriarchy but also caste, class and the joint family.

It's just the occasional local theatre that attempts to tend the fire. The rendering of Yasmin Reza'a ART by three women in Europe whereby comedy gave way to pathos. Then there is Kalai Rani's new piece in which an outcaste Dalit tries to seek a haven for herself and a repressed world, albeit within the limits of a tiny temple. Sushma Deshpande's docu-drama Hoi Me Savitribai, which rethought the concept of a performance and tried to percolate the ideas of the reformer Savitribai by performing in informal, alternative spaces. But as mentioned earlier these are too few to constitute a women's movement. Which is why, discussions to women's theatre inexorably binds and confines itself to "smaller" subjects like dowry and female infanticide, leaving the "larger" issues to be handled by men.

Then there is the issue of patronage. Theatre needs support - from enthusiastic, risk-tolerant producers, first of all - to take chances. That's largely missing today, at both the national and local levels. Government support for theatre is largely patriarchal. Innovative local producers and presenters have departed or shifted focus.

The recent POORVA Festival in Delhi, a festival and conference of Asian Women Directors (January 3-14). The event was organised in New Delhi by Natarang Pratishthan, a theatre resource centre, and the National School of Drama, in collaboration with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. The festival of 21 plays, from Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia and India, became both a point of reference for the conference, and a reminder that practice is the axis of theoretical speculations. But such festivals are at best: one shot events.

Herein one must mention a few examples:

There is Sushama Deshpande's Teechya Aaichi Gosht. In this one-person play about Tamasha women, the actor reveals the relationship between a performer and her daughter. Besides exploring the emotional content of the mother-daughter relationship, the play also exposes the role of tradition with in our society. Deshpande made intelligent use of the one-person narrative. Furthermore due to intricate research (which included staying and travelling with Tamsha artistes in the interiors of Maharashtra) the play and its theme was: lofty. This is essential for any serious practitioner of women's theatre. An understanding of the dialectics of the man-women praxis and detailing the behavioral patterns, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, etc which enrich life.

Here the playwright-actor discusses a woman who performs Tamasha, which is a traditional form wherein women perform a dance called lavani for a predominantly male audience. These women also perform in private homes and they have 'patrons'; sometimes more than one who exploit them.

These women are an offshoot of the very same feudal, patriarchal system. Sushma Deshpande in an interview calls them "fully empowered". This is a dubious statement. Their empowerment emerges from their profession. They are generally speaking low caste women, and not educated. Their status in society, due to their profession, is lowly, and in a real sense they have no option of giving-up their profession. If they do so, they would be unable to sustain themselves or their lives, since they are neither educated nor wealthy. Nor has their so-called empowerment emerged from a conscious struggle for their rights.

In the same interview Deshpande explains the meaning of their empowerment, "the Tamasha woman's strength lies in her knowledge that she is being exploited. Armed with this knowledge she can use the situation to her advantage and she does quite ruthlessly. She knows for instance that she must fleece the patron who has fallen for her charms. She is not hampered by sentiments."

This is definitely a kind of empowerment. But it has huge limitations. To start with their identity, their lives, their sexuality is controlled by the male. And yet, this play is an achievement since Deshpande discuss the oppression amongst Tamasha women within the parameters of a contemporary sensibility. She conducted an extensive research, lived with Tamasha women, wrote the play and directed it.

Then there is Jyoti Shubash's play Karokachya Lekhi Kadun, which is an adaptation of Maria de Jesus' Child of Dark. This is an autobiography of a Brazilian rag-picker. The performance of this piece, highlighted the problem areas which women's theatre can lapse into. To start with the portrayal of the play was realistic in terms of details like torn sarees and such. This sort of microscopic realism rendered the play's symbolism superficial. To start with one can enhance the theatrical pay-off from these details, if one has first-hand and intimate knowledge about the socio-economic group of the class, one is depicting. It became a middle-class woman's perspective about a low-class, low caste woman. This was a bigger problem with Nadira Babbar's Sakhubai. It turned out to be elitist and superficial. Such a style in theatre, is dangerous. Besides being melodramatic, middle-class and quaint, it is very subservient to the male-model of theatre.

In the same breath, one must also mention the video snippets of PACHAI MANN (Voicing Silence, Chennai). This served as a prelude to director Mangai's moving account of touring villages with a play on female infanticide. But it threw up disturbing queries: what happens when urban actors depict scenes before those who actually live them out? How do they deal with the angst that such reminders may arouse in the viewers for whom the play is a slice of life? How are actors (whose lives are completely at variance with what their work depicts) trained to deal with them?

Other debates which have originated from actual performances are: Is the male director expected to be a central figure, commanding and infallible? Women directors admit vulnerabilities, but sometimes their openness to suggestion is mistaken for incertitude. Actors too carry the idea that "Dad is authoritarian, Mom is gentle". This sometimes leads to stereotypes of "the male" on the stage. Such a thing can be self-defeating.

And finally, a curious comment which caught my attention. Vinay Kumar, an actor working consistently with Veenapani Chawla, recently stated that no woman director had yet broken the traditional patriarchal mode of dealing with characters, male or female, to develop her own.

The point is, gender is found to be a learned quality, an assigned status. One is not born, rather one becomes a woman. According to our male playwrights and directors and actors, this woman is docile, soft, passive, vulnerable, weak, domestic, made for child-care, home care and husband-care. And those women who resist or fail, including those who never did fit - such as lower caste and lower class women, who cannot survive if they are passive, weak and docile - are considered less female, less womanly. Whereas women who comply are elevated and idealised, and portrayed in their proper place the kitchen, the bedroom, or as an adornment in the drawing room.

The enemies of feminism are, of course, those who believe in traditional society. Advocates of traditional society believe in the image of a female stereotype, which has been "culturally constructed". Above all, traditionalists, fear being proven wrong by the uncoerced, free, natural, and spontaneous behaviour of individuals living their own lives. The only way to counter such a tradition is re-education of our society!