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“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
- Aristotle
Vasudevan Pillai was a person of humble origins. He belonged to a small village and to, still, a small home. His parents were of limited material means. The village Vayala where he was born on 22nd April 1945, was a backward part of the present southern Kerala, the then Travancore. Vayala, the village, had no basic amenities for education and Pillai, a promising student, had to go out of his village in order to pursue college education.
With the guidance of his school teachers and later with the blessings of the Principal Gee Varghese Panikkar of Mar Iavnios College, Trivandrum, Vasudevan Pillai completed his education with a degree in Chemistry and masters in English literature at Mar Iavnios and began to teach English, there. The period between 1963 and 1984 that Pillai spent in Mar Ivanios as a student and teacher helped enormously in moulding his interests in social service and developing his teaching into a commitment for imparting excellence to students. During this period, he worked for extending educational facilities for students in his village and succeeded in establishing a good High School in Vayala. A public library was also built in Vayala with the help of friends and organizations and it is going well with active public participation to this day. As a Professor of English, during the same span, he created many a batch of versatile students of English literature and art.
Vayala Vasudevan Pillai was enthusiastic about art and drama right from his days in school. He had occasions to demonstrate his talent by acting in plays and winning prizes at his high school. These interests were further nurtured during his teaching years and in 1980 he went to Rome on an Italian Government Fellowship to study theater. He came back after completing the studies in Italy with high merits.
The motivation or inner instinct, he developed from early adolescence for following the ideology taught by Gandhi also grew and flourished during this period of English teaching in Trivandrum. He had friends like Professor Manmadhan and Professor G. Kumara Pillai veteran Gandhians whom he used to accompany for public discourses to encourage prohibition of drinking liquor, especially among the downtrodden and unenlightened populace. The declaration of Emergency pained him and he fought against this totalitarian measure by writing and enacting the play ‘Thulasivanam’ with its emphasis on the zest for freedom and later translating into Malayalam J.P.’s famous ‘Prison Diary’.
He joined the theater department of Calicut University called the ‘School of Drama’ after leaving Mar Ivanios College in Trivandrum and after coming in contact with the veteran theater director and dramatist Prof. G. Shankara Pillai. Both, Prof. G. Shankara Pillai the Director of the School of Drama and his deputy Vasudevan Pillai , were so committed to their art that they hardly had, in those days, a life devoid of theater. They lived the lives of nomads sans a thought for material advancement or possessions just devoting their life for the cause of writing, teaching and directing plays. G. Shankara Pillai died untimely and Vayala succeeded him as director of the Drama School. He later married Valsla, his subordinate of the department, in 1988 and began to slowly settle down in life.
Like Principal Father Panicker early, G. Shankara Pillai was the later catalyst instrumental in changing Vasudevan Pillai’s life, outlook and career. It was a new Odyssey in the world of drama for Vayala that Shankara Pillai made for him to begin. Inspired from Shankara Pillai’s sabbatical, Vayala began a new journey with novel experiments and innovative applications of modern theater techniques into Malayalam drama. He began his theater teachings with such enthusiasm and zest that it resulted in the discovery of novel dimensions to create drama in the classroom.
What interested him, at macro levels, was offering dramatic solutions for the chaos and contradictions prevailing in the contemporary life. The resolutions mostly appeared from his deeply rooted philosophical and ethical views he had imbibed from ancient oriental writings, apart from the explicit impact of Gandhi. This rooting in ancient texts and the edifice he built on strongly established value systems prevailing in them, made some of his works like Kuchelagatha and Thulasivanam implicitly esoteric and deep reading experience.
Vasudevan Pillai at this stage was combining teaching with writing, directing and also learning! He undertook innumerable journeys for different destinations in India and abroad for conducting workshops, holding seminars, doing research and learning theater experiments carried out by foreign universities and dramatists. He found in the process, opportunities to see, learn and experience Greco-Roman plays, Irish Shakespearian theater, American theater performances, Japanese theater scene, Lorca’s Spanish theater, ‘quintessence of Ibsenism’, Russian classical works, Brechtian operas et al and succeeded intensely to interact with geniuses in the field such as Dario Fo, Grotowski, Julian Buck and Judith.
After teaching and theater, the other potential force that ignited Vayala’s living and thoughts was Mahatma Gandhi. Pillai’s simplicity in conducting his life, especially his very limited needs for sustaining himself was totally Gandhian, though he disliked wearing the chip of the Gandhian label on his shoulders. He was wedded to the Gandhian principles deeply and abhorred unprincipled political aggression and individual greed. Vayala was truthful to the core of his very being, and was committed to aiding and serving those who were in need of help and guidance. During the years of emergency, he protested and later translated J.P.’s Prison Diary into Malayalam. The then dictatorship of the state prompted him to creatively mark his feelings by writing and he produced the play Tulasivanam with deep undercurrents of fears for losing freedom. In other words, Vayala lived his life to the extent feasible, as a person and as an artist, a true and conventional Gandhian.
Vayala was creatively agile till his last days. It was during the process of giving final touches to the play Udambadi (Agreement) that he fell sick. He continued his teaching of performing arts in Kerala University till a month before he breathed his last on 29th August 2011. His premature death caused deep sorrow among all lovers of art in Kerala, and was cremated at Trichur with full state honours attended by a large number of admirers, the next day. There ended an era of committed theater and drama in Kerala.
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