The Colossus That Was Bapurao Naik

(Arun Naik, Bapurao Naik's elder son speaks at the Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh kickstarting Bapurao Naik's centenary year celebrations).

The Sahitya Sangh had these annual festivals and Mama Warerkar and my father proposed that there should be a tamasha show. Now this was unheard of in those days. Mama and father even paid a visit to Pathe Bapurao, a famous practitioner of this art form. His Mumbaichi Lavani is famous. He agreed to do a show. Mama Warerkar even wrote a short scene featuring this visit. The scene was not only enacted, but it was done by Mama Warerkar, Bapurao Naik and Pathe Bapurao.

In 1951 Bapurao was sent to England by the government to study further at the world-renowned London School of Printing. He studied there for two years and obtained the diploma and also passed various other advanced exams. He became a member of the reputed Institute of Printing Management and also a fellow of The Royal Society of Arts. He stayed on in England for a further six months and trained at the Monotype and Linotype factories. These were the two most famous and in fact the only mechanised type casting and composing machines in the world then. This was the foundation of the book Typography of Devanagari about which I shall talk later.

Dr Bhalerao had in the meantime purchased a good piece of land in Kelewadi. This is where we are sitting now. This land was just adequate for a theatre.

The scholar-researcher Shri Na Banahatti and Bapurao put forth the concept that the first Marathi play was Vishnudas Bhave’s Seeta Swayamvar in 1843. This statement was not completely accepted. It became controversial. My father much later wrote a booklet (1967) for the Maharashtra Information Centre, New Delhi, titled The Origin of Marathi Theatre. Shanta Gokhale acknowledges this as a source in her comprehensive note in the Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre pp 255-260. This is now the accepted version of the first Marathi play. It is true that we had folk forms like Dashawatar in Konkan and Yakshagana in Karnataka. Vishnudas Bhave, so say Banahatti and my father, took his idea from Sanskrit theatre in ancient and medieval eras and English language plays being done by the Britishers in Mumbai, as well as from the folk forms. Some other people cite the Tanjavur plays of Sarfoji Raje.

Be that as it may, the fact is that my father was a key figure in establishing Vishnudas Bhave as the aadya natakkar then and again in 1967 when he wrote this booklet. This article and those of Vasant Shantaram Desai, K Narayan Kale and Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni were published as booklets by the Centre and again as a book by Popular Prakashan. I did not find these publications in my collection. The Sahitya Sangh had already begun the annual drama festivals after 1944. These were huge affairs and the Catholic Gymkhana ground was used for this. A temporary open-air theatre was constructed every year. It was an open ground and there was no dearth of space. The open-air auditorium was fanned out to cover almost a quarter of a circle. We have a drawing which will come up later.

Bapurao would be in charge of various functions during this period from 1943 in Sangli and then from 1944 to 1951 in Mumbai on Kennedy Seaface. There he oversaw operations from the construction of the audience and stage, to lights, sets, sound system etc.

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The Colossus That Was Bapurao Naik(Arun Naik, Bapurao Naik's elder son speaks at the Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh kickstarting Bapurao Naik's centenary year celebrations).

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The Colossus That Was Bapurao Naik

(Arun Naik, Bapurao Naik's elder son speaks at the Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh kickstarting Bapurao Naik's centenary year celebrations).