PIONEER | SEEMA
AT THE EDGE of the Absurd Filmmaker Shashwati Talukdar tests the limits of language and expression in her work ALPANA VARMA
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hashwati Talukdar, already a reputed documentary filmmaker, is now getting noticed as a playwright. Now living in Taipei with her husband P Kerim Friedman, an anthropology professor at the University of Taipei, she is pleased with the artistic activity in the area, which helped her rediscover her love for the theater she dabbled in while at college. “Taipei has a small but vibrant theater scene, incredibly well-trained actors and a lot of people from all over the world,” says Talukdar. It helps that normal life was not affected by the pandemic, thanks to the deft handling of the situation by the island’s government. Talukdar’s latest foray into theater, however, was a livestream play reading event held in New Delhi, London and San Francisco, in October 2020. Organized for the Same Boat Collective, at an event dubbed “Earthquake,” the idea was to move the earth with human voices for environmental justice. The one-act play, “Hari and Ramesh get Flooded in Mumbai,” is a comedy about two characters on opposite sides of the globe and how they deal with a crisis. “It’s about global warming and
26 | SEEMA.COM | APRIL 2021
Filmmaker Shashwati Talukdar
people being brainwashed by conspiracy theories,” Talukdar says. “What draws me to plays,” she says, “is the symbolic space, and the basic raw material of theater … in threedimensional space, and how I can use language – bend it in ways that one doesn’t while making films.” Talukdar finds working with theater actors to be very different than dealing with them in films. “The psychological and sensory experience is very different, almost painful actually. But one is always glad for it,” she says. Born and raised in Dehradun, India, Talukdar earned her bachelor’s degree at Lady Shri Ram College, and then her master’s degree in mass
communications at Jamia Miillia Islamia University, both in New Delhi. She also attended Temple University in Philadelphia, where she earned a master’s degree in fine arts. Talukdar has written a series of plays around Indian freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose, called the Bose Cycles. “Your Country Needs You” is about a politician, a secret service agent and a person of an impossible age, wrestling with the question, “Who are you.” These were produced by Alicia Haddad and John Brown in 2019. The second play, “The Memory Stratagem,” was staged the same year. “The Return of the Hero” has Bose traveling between old memories
