Playing Manto
Richard McGill Murphy on playing a British soldier in the dramatisation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Naya Kanun”:
Manto’s soldier embodies colonial arrogance, which is more or less the opposite of the cultural sensitivity that I tried to maintain in my everyday life as an ethnographer. As a tall white man, I looked the part, and the costume was easy: jodhpurs, riding boots, a white linen shirt, and a swagger stick. But at first, I found it difficult to really get inside my character. In rehearsals, the director would urge me to act more arrogant. “Remember, you’re a sahib,” she would say. “These people are your servants!” She encouraged me to ad lib abuses such as “you bloody insolent black bastard,” which started rolling off my tongue with alarming fluency as the rehearsals progressed…Murphy’s translation of Toba Tek Singh here.
seems, they dont want my comment to appear here…i posted a somewhat lengthy one, but now that i’ve read majority of your posts till nov 7 in one go, i’m thankful that i stumbled here :)
m game for more.
Comment by adi — December 9, 2006 @ 12:28 pm
Well, you know it would have been fun if you had given some dialogues to the servants, or rather given them the freedom to reply spontaneously, then that would have been worth watching.
Comment by rahul — December 12, 2006 @ 10:01 am
Well, you know it would have been fun if you had given some dialogues to the servants, or rather given them the freedom to reply spontaneously, then that would have been worth watching.
Comment by rahul — December 12, 2006 @ 10:03 am
this is best article ever i read
Comment by nitin — December 12, 2006 @ 1:42 pm
People keen to read Manto are requested to read him in urdu. Rajkamal publications has a fabulous 5 volume set of Manto’s works in urdu (script devnagari). The volume set is titled ‘Dastavez’.
Comment by shoummo from kolkata — December 14, 2006 @ 5:38 pm