Bansi Kaul: Master of stagecraft, explorer of humour

A grasp of stagecraft and portray and one of many designers of the opening ceremony of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, Bansi Kaul handed away on February 6 after a battle with most cancers.
Artists and artwork lovers recall his performs, corresponding to ‘Sidhi Dar Sidhi urf Tukke pe Tukka’ and ‘Kahan Kabir’ in addition to the well-known ‘Aala Afsar’, based mostly on Nikolai Gogol’s ‘The Inspector General’ and carried out within the nautanki model.
For practitioners of theatre, Kaul is very important for breaking new floor by exploring the politics of laughter. He studied clown traditions, wit, riddles and myths throughout India’s folks and tribal cultures, included these in his performs and turned the ‘vidushak’, idiot or jester right into a determine of particular consideration.
Kaul, nevertheless, was not a director by coaching. He graduated from the National School of Drama (NSD) in 1973 with a specialisation in stagecraft. His abilities as a stage designer received him broad acclaim and he labored as an artwork director at a number of necessary festivals, together with the Khajuraho Festival in 1986 and 1987 and the Festivals of India within the USSR, Switzerland and China.
As affiliate present director of the Commonwealth Games, his mandate was to convey an Indian flavour and color to the opening ceremony and, as he had mentioned on the time, “not let Bollywood come across as the only cultural identity of the country”.
“He came from a Kashmiri Pandit family and was interested in painting from an early age. It was in Kashmir that he also began to work with amateur theatre groups and continued to paint. He came to Delhi to study at NSD but did not qualify the first time. He tried again, the following year, and was admitted,” mentioned theatre director MK Raina.

Kaul would go on to turn into a professor at NSD’s division of extension and current greater than 100 performs and workshops throughout the nation.
For most of his working life, Kaul was a unbiased freelancer. In 1986, he based the Rang Vidushak Repertory in Bhopal, the place he labored with younger and seasoned actors, clowns and acrobats.
“His pain was the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. His last production, in 2019, was ‘Paglaye Gusse Ka Dhuan’, with Bhartendu Natya Akademi in Lucknow and based on the poets of Kashmir. He had told me, ‘Nobody talks about the tragedy of the exodus of the Pandits, except the politicians’. He seemed very upset about this,” says Raina.
But, his speech was additionally opposed by the events in energy in Maharashtra, primarily the Shivsena and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).