A perfect example is that of Sultan Mohammed Tughlaq, who ruled India for twenty-six years between 1325 and 1351 AD. We learned through our text books that the Sultanate of Delhi attained its maximum size under Tughlaq. Not until the reign of Akbar, the great, -- two hundred years later -- would so much of India be united again under one ruler.

Tughlaq was a highly cultured and generous king, a most accomplished calligrapher and well-versed in Persian poetry. He also had a thorough knowledge of mathematics, logic, physics and Greek philosophy.

We were taught all this in our text books, but when we read Ibn-e-Batuta (Classics) whose antecedents as a historian are as valid as Herodotus, we discover that contrasting with all these brilliant qualities was a dark side which made him terrible and incomprehensible. Describing his court, Ibn-e-Batuta records -- and I quote:

"To reach the interiors of his palace one had to pass through three doors. Outside the first door was a number of guards and also trumpets and flute players…Outside this door were also the platforms where the executioners sat. When the Sultan ordered a man to be executed, the sentence was carried out here, and the body left lying for three days and three nights. Thus anyone approaching the palace would come first on corpses; heaps and mounds of them were always lying there. Everyday hundreds of people, chained, pinioned and fettered, are brought to this hall and those who are for execution are executed, those for torture tortured and those for beating beaten."

Thucydides too, has given us a powerful account of the failure of Athenian democracy. He denounced Athens as a ‘Tyrant city’, fed on extortion and responsible for wholesale massacre of fellow Greeks and, when expedient, cynical genocide.

* * * * *

It is entirely because of the pursuit of classicism that certain arts, be they visual, fine or those related to live performances, have been pursued and nurtured throughout the centuries.

I find it heartening to note that, notwithstanding the disregard of classics in our country, some institutions are still engaged in studying classical art and its influence on the present. The faculty of Indus Valley School, for example, inculcates not just the importance of imbibing the best of the classical traditions of the past, but forging a new, synthesised future of aesthetic disciplines. I know that the standard of acting in our country is abysmal and yet I insist that theatrical arts must be studied and practiced. We cannot give up what we think and believe is right.

There is no denying that we have talent in our country. I have always maintained that talent needs talent to blossom. All you need to do is to instil confidence and a sense of pride among those who seriously wish to pursue a career as performers. Our society has a lingering suspicion that actors - and musicians too, for that matter - do not have a proper job and therefore do not do any ‘real’ work.

The fine arts include painting, etching, architecture and sculpture; the performing arts are drama, music and dance. Film is a different art form and it partakes of both the visual and performing arts. The visual arts deal solely with what we can see and feel and they exclude sound.

The performing arts have several characteristics in common. They require interpreters as well as creators. A playwright writes a play but actors perform it. A composer scores a piece of music which is performed by singers and instrumentalists. Another quality shared by the performing arts is that they require an audience. A play and a film both need an audience, but when watching a film there is no interaction between the audience and the performers. No matter how closely a film follows the story, no matter how involved we are with the people on the screen, we are always in the presence of an image, never a person.

If we pause to consider how often we use theatre as a metaphor to describe our activities in daily life, we would be forced to believe that the theatre is the liveliest of human activities. Everyday we think or say, "so and so is highly theatrical" or, melodramatic, or, "he behaves like a prima donna." When we are unable to enter children’s world we say they are play-acting. We refer to battlegrounds in which war is fought as its theatre. Indeed, theatre is an activity that we use to describe how we live.

As an art form, the theatre has its own characteristics, its own quality, coherence and integrity which a concert by a rock or pop star -- no matter how theatrical -- can never achieve. Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means, a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

An audience does not participate physically in a performance; it does so vicariously. So real become the events on stage that in a sharp and believable performance we forget who we are and where we are. We enter the imaginary world we see before us. We can be transported to another country, to another century. The experience comes about because of the phenomenon that Samuel Taylor Coleridge called "willing suspension of disbelief". We want so much to believe in what is happening on the stage that we put aside all literal and practical considerations in order to enter into the world of drama -- drama not just as in drama, but drama inherent in music, in words, in speech and in movement. This is what makes art. This is what gives the performing arts the ability and the power to enrich our lives and make us more human, more accommodating, more tolerant.

Most people in our country have been exposed to seeing the so-called DRAMA ‘shows’ on television where a receptionist or a model, a seamstress or a housewife is launched on to the screen as a leading actress. In most of these ‘shows’ the words D.R.A.M.A., in bold capital letters, appears on the upper right corner of your screen throughout the programme to keep reminding you that you are watching a dramatic presentation and not a cookery programme. I cannot imagine a bigger insult to a viewer’s intelligence.

I am aware that our efforts can only bear fruit in a less intolerant society. I see no way out of the mediocrity, which currently rules our perceptions and our imagination, unless we give up making compromises. And so, we have to go on plugging and working, no matter how despondent we feel or how woebegone the state of affairs.

This is the second and last part on the topic. Read the first part here.