Golpo Productions was established by Sharodiya Chowdhury in 2019, with the aim to bring contemporary stories to the stage. With Sarthak Sharma as creative producer their first production, PAPERWALLS, is running successfully, and also raising very relevant issues about abuse and mental health. Sharodiya, writer and director of the play has picked the idea of intergenerational trauma, that has not been dealt with on Mumbai's stage.
By Deepa Gahlot
Sharodiya is an entertainment lawyer, specializing in IPR laws, but theatre is where her heart lies. "I'm Bengali so from a very small age, my parents put me into art and culture training. I remember I was always performing, I was always on stage, dancing or something like that. Some years, my parents used to take me to this teacher called Ramnath Tharwal, who does a lot of children's theatre. That's actually my first training, because he was very rigorous. I used to perform at Prithvi Theatre as a child artiste, and I think my parents had fun with the idea that I like to be on stage. So, we used to come to Aram Nagar (where casting agents have their studios) drop photographs and I would do auditions. I've done a few short films as a child and a couple of ads. But then it started getting a bit weird because of the sort of remarks that people made about my dark skin. And I decided that I just want to study. I come from a very middle class upbringing, so my parents always told me that education is important. The second thing that I could love and really passionately chase was law, and I did it very seriously. But then in my first year I met Jehan Maneckshaw (who leads Drama School Mumbai). I was doing Ismat Chughtai's LIHAAF. He watched that and said, 'You have potential, you should come to Drama School.' And I didn't know this idea of drama school, the very concept that you just study theatre for another year was very exciting to me. I was always involved with cultural extracurricular activities in college. I founded the cultural festival in my college and ran it for three years, before handing it over to my junior. I was convinced that theatre is what I want to do. Then, I had a job offer at a law firm, and I had my DSM scholarship. And I had to choose between the two. I'm an only child, so I decided to take responsibility and be there for my parents. Then my mother, I remember, very strictly, she looked me in the eye and said, 'We have not struggled so much so that you don't pursue your thing.' So I went to DSM and I never looked back. I still do consultations for artistes' agreements, because five years of legal knowledge, I don't want it to go to waste. I've taken up a few things you have to do to keep paying rent and to be able to do theatre.
"During the pandemic is when I wrote PAPERWALLS," she says. "That was before DSM actually. That happened because Thespo approached me saying that in the pandemic, they wanted a full length play to be written. The National Student Drama Festival, London also has a similar Thespo-like flagship. They wanted to collaborate across the globe and have an under 25-writer from India co-write a play. That's how PAPERWALLS came to be. While DSM was happening also, I was constantly looking at my training, as after this, I was going to become a theatre maker. Because until then there was no confidence, as to how to go about it.
"In law school also, I was writing plays, and I would direct, but I would never be on stage. I never thought that I was a writer, but during college festivals, the stakes are very high. That's when I started taking it seriously. I wrote my first play for Thespo, and that got selected by Shernaz Patel, who was doing this project with her theatre company, Rage, where she selected 10 playwrights across the country under 25, to do a playwriting workshop with Irawati Karnik, Abhishek Majumdar, Arghya Lahiri, and that was my first proper training into writing. I submitted my first play, PRODUCT OF THE SYSTEM, that was from a very personal narrative of not being able to choose between your ambition and your passion. The workshop gave me the vocabulary of structure, skills, style and all of those things. It was actually my first acknowledgement or confidence that I'm a writer. I won the best writer award at the CINTAA inter-collegiate festival and I was so shocked. That's when I realized that it was serious; once I wrote my first play, I realised that I enjoy writing also because earlier, I thought I liked directing and acting, but I wasn't clear about the writing bit. Once the workshop happened, I felt also equipped that, okay, now I know if I have to tell a story, what are the ways I can use to do that."
During the pandemic, she was assigned by Thespo to write a play with Flora Wilson Brown in London. "I had never written something with somebody. So I was also excited about that idea, but also knowing that this person is an absolute stranger, and I will probably never meet her, because she's in London. But then we were given carte blanche to write about anything we wanted, as long as it was full length. That made us very confused, because we needed a starting point. It felt too real to write about the pandemic because we were experiencing it then and there, even though we were all bursting with so many emotions and confusion. And then we did this fun thing where we played a playwrights' version of 21 Questions to understand each other; what we like about this one playwright or what are the kinds of themes we like? And then we came to the conclusion that we are very interested in the mother-daughter dynamic. This is very interesting because it's such a complex relationship. Once we realized, okay, mother daughter is what we're interested in, then we had to decide what we wanted to explore. Before the pandemic, the #MeToo movement had just started fading. I'd started seeing people make fun of it, and the conversation had drifted from whether this movement is effective or not. What I thought when I remember reading the stories from the #MeToo, was that it's great that people are at least talking about consent. It's taken lightly and that is the root problem of this whole issue of sexual harassment, that you don't understand that another person has their own space, and you think that you have the power to violate it? I could not come up with my #MeToo experiences, because I didn't have the courage to write about it publicly. But I was very affected by reading about how rampant it was and how regular it was for most women. I was in one of my meetings with my co-writer, Flora, she just mentioned something bad that had happened to her. And similarly, I had got eve teased that evening or something like that. And I was like, you know, this is usual, you get out of the house you're prepared al, you get out of the house, you're prepared that something like this will happen, and you don't let it affect you. But then we discussed how this is about survival, this instinct to know what to do. Like, my mom never had the good touch, bad touch conversation with me. But when it happened to me the first time, I vividly remember that I could take care of myself and I got home from that bus. And I just didn't know how to say anything, but I knew how to take care of myself, though no one taught me this. So, it was very interesting to me that how do we as women just know how to take care of ourselves when they go through something like an assault or harassment? And I started looking at trauma. I was reading this book called The Body Keeps The Score, and that spoke about how trauma resides in the body. Then that brought up the topic of intergenerational trauma, but when I started researching it, intergenerational trauma was only in context of war and partition. So, World War Two, India-Pakistan Partition, Bangladesh Partition, well researched on how third generation and second generation are affected. There are people who have claustrophobia; there are people who are scared of light or sound. And this is basically genetically passed on from one generation to the next, so you don't have a sense of it in your everyday modern life, but it's coming from your ancestors. So then I thought, if sexual abuse is so rampant, and women go through it so much, then where is all of this trauma going? That is when I researched intergenerational trauma in respect to sexual abuse. You won't believe I found only four research papers across the globe on sexual abuse and I realized, of course, who is interested in female body?
"I found one academic paper on how when the mother is a survivor of child sexual abuse, her offspring, irrespective of gender, becomes prone to having a mental illness. That paper was the genesis of PAPERWALLS. I am very good friends with a clinical psychologist, so from the beginning, she was in the process of helping us understand how people respond in daily life because as a theatre maker, I was interested in the everyday of this trauma, not just in the one large event. And then we then we basically circled down to the idea that the body carries trauma from the previous generation. We have more access to information with the internet and everything, which is how we are more aware about it. But the fact that you're carrying trauma, and you're passing on trauma, with respect to sexual abuse is not as much highlighted.
"We always knew that we wanted to take it to colleges. We did shows with undergrad students of psychology who are currently studying intergenerational trauma. Because I also think that theatre as a medium becomes very holistic in understanding concepts. And we've had very beautiful sessions over there where the students have asked questions, they picked up on scenes, and they picked up on gestures of an actor, and then asked why this?"
Sarthak Sharma was Sharodiya's batchmate from DSM, who, like her, wanted to do their own work. As she says, "Because the (theatre) communities are so tightly knit, that everything happens on a reference basis, or if someone breaks through. But we decided that we can't wait for someone to notice us. We just decided to put ourselves out there, with our own work.
He is an engineer, born and raised in Noida. "I pursued mechanical engineering, and in my final year, I was also doing stand up comedy. " he says, "So I was interested in the stage, but I was not per se into acting. Automobiles and cars were my main thing. And then my love for comedy arose and I started doing stand up and then I got a job in Gurugram. I was working from nine to five and then doing open mics at night. My comedy journey started taking off and this was the time when stand up comedy in India was that train quickly catching up the pace of people who boarded it at that time. I also tried my hand, but I realised that stand up comedy is a very different craft from just making people laugh on a regular basis. And comedy writing is very difficult. Someone was coming from Mumbai, a casting director, and I thought, okay, let's try what this is. I really liked how they talked about actors, what the process is, and how to get work. And that's how I started auditioning in Delhi itself. I got ads, I got a film, a music video. At least I realised that I can't just show up in Mumbai, I need to learn what I'm doing, like how I have engineered my way till here. I researched about FTII and NSD and someone told me about Drama School. I resigned from my office in January 2020 and in March 2020, the pandemic! So I neither had a job, nor could I move to Mumbai. But luckily Drama School said that they were cancelling their course, but doing a digital version. Anyways I didn't know anything, so even the digital was like god's gift for me. After a year I shifted to Bombay. As soon as I landed, I had a few names in mind and I reached out to them. Luckily Sunil Shanbag responded and I started working at Tamaasha as programme coordinator. Then DSM announced its first grant. I knew that Sharodiya had written a play. So I said, why are we not applying for it? We have a play, I have a good technical sense of things, I can budget and do these things, I can handle all things which are not writing. We got together and collaborated to make PAPERWALLS. We luckily got the grant. Then we applied for another grant, which is the Kshirsagar Apte Foundation, Mumbai. So we had some funds, which actually helped us make this play a reality. And then our target is just to keep doing at least one show every month."
He believes that the play was the result of the alignment of many creative minds. Hopefully, we will be able to make the story reach people because honestly, we all feel that consent is something that everyone knows about these days. And it's because of social media. So it feels as if everyone knows about it and it's taken for granted. Unfortunately, within my friends circle also, I've seen so many people being violated, and we really feel that this story needs to reach many more people. And I also understand that this is not a regular, happy-feeling play, People don't leave the show feeling, oh, wow, it was a really good play, I'll go home, now I'll have a good dinner. It is something which we feel is deeper and makes you reflect and introspect as to what happened, why it happened. And, and so we have a thing after our play-- we always encourage the audience to write on a sheet of paper what they're feeling. I shiver every time I read something, because people really write very personal things also, how they felt that they were seen, how they felt that their trauma was not trivialised, and how they felt that they see their mother in a different light. These are things which we feel theatre can do, which film cannot, because it reaches you through the medium of a screen."
