A few hours before retreating to his favourite corner of the world, Mahesh Elkunchwar explains why he has deliberately stayed away from the hurly-burly of large metros.

He has watched many great talents destroy themselves trying to keep pace in Mumbai and though Calcutta has been like a second home, he prefers Nagpur above all else. “It is so cosy, I have been lucky, had a cushy job (he has retired as a professor of English), so I was able to experiment without worrying about public appreciation. My audience strength varies from 1 to 500 but that also means you can afford to fail as no huge investment is at stake. Writing has been like a leisurely canoe ride where one waits for the beauties and joys of the journey to reveal themselves in unexpected turns.”

Born in 1939, the Sahitya Akademi Award-winner has to his credit plays like Holi, Party (made into films by Ketan Mehta and Govind Nihalani respectively), the Wada trilogy and some others, including Vasanakand, Yatanaghar, Aatmakatha, Pratibimb, Sonata and An Actor Exits. Unlike most dramatist-actor-directors of Calcutta, Elkunchwar has never sought direct involvement in the production of his plays. He is even exasperated by “the number of agencies involved in theatre, it is like cricket” — so he has taken to writing essays, which is “like swimming, with just the water and me”.

“My essays can be as literary as they like, they are free to touch anything: personal experiences, philosophy, culture, metaphysics, psychoanalysis...” But even some of these essays, such as Necropolis and the anthology Maunraag, are inspiring productions.

The plays have often come to him as “images”. Virasat, for example, was sparked off by an image described by Satyadev Dubey — of an unused tractor owned by a feudal family slowly sinking into the courtyard as the family is being destroyed. An Actor Exits, which may be staged for the first time in December, resulted from his efforts to explain a dream of an actor screaming out in horror on seeing an unidentifiable heap covered in cobwebs.

According to Elkunchwar, “one image that keeps reappearing nowadays is that of an old well — the kind we had in our village, where I, like many others, took my first swimming lessons. This well in my vision has remained unused for over three decades and people have dumped torn shoes and all kinds of rubbish into it. Even the walls of the well are broken…. Who knows, someday this may grow into a play or an essay.”

Issues or hot topics of the day don’t interest him as an artist. “Contemporary reality demands we take a stand on issues from time to time, and I do, but as an artist, I aspire to go beyond topicality. I seek to address the basic human issues, the indefinable human experiences beyond the grasp of intelligence, the world of instinct that is not transient but continues to throb under our daily reality. I avoid being judgemental.

“One is so limited and life is so complex. Politics, all religions, all isms have never been able to comprehend it — they just remain as little things under the umbrella called life. So I prefer to deal with the umbrella instead.”

The playwright was in Calcutta to deliver the first Shyamanand Jalan Memorial Lecture on “The Art of Play Writing” on March 20 at the Padatik Buildwell theatre. He also presented the first Shyamanand Jalan National Youth Theatre Award for playwriting to Bangalore-based theatre worker Ramneek Singh.

Elkunchwar saw his first play during college, a Vijay Tendulkar play, directed by Vijaya Mehta. He went back to “to see how a playwright makes the point he does”. Yet, when he took to writing plays, he made a deliberate effort not to mimic Tendulkar, who then dominated the theatre scene. “There is no such thing as a born playwright, though. A playwright needs to do as much riyaz as a dancer or musician,” he warns. Even though “there can be no guru-shishya parampara for playwriting because theatre is always in a state of flux and one must learn to deal with complexities alone”.

Elkunchwar feels it is essential to have a course on playwriting (something that even the National School of Drama has ignored) because “one would like to share the discoveries one has made after many years of negotiation with the medium”.

Elkunchwar has many friends in Calcutta, his plays have been staged repeatedly in Bengali, English and Hindi, but he has a regret. “Fifteen years ago, I used to come so often, I knew what everyone was doing…. but now I have lost touch and it seems to me that there has been a lull in significant playwriting, nothing to touch the achievements of seniors like Badal Sircar, Mohit Chattopadhyay, Manoj Mitra…” he signs off.