Ahi Karunaharan is a Kiwi playwright, writer for radio and director whose work delves into ideas of home and belonging.
A Fine Balance Photo: Q Theatre
His writing credits include; The Mourning After, Anchorite, Light vs Dark: The Adventures of Rama and Swabhoomi:Borrowed Earth.
Karunaharan premieried Tea onstage at the Auckland Arts Festival last year, bringing some of the Sri Lankan community out from the fringes, those who aren't often on the main stage, he says.
"Tea was like a love letter to my country.
"When you think of Sri Lanka you think of either cricket or tea, or the civil war and tea seemed like such a universal way to tap into my country."
A widely consumed drink like tea was a nice gateway into a community and a history, he says."And the beautiful thing about that is that the history of how tea was brought into Sri Lanka and then what it has done for our country, I was able to talk about the politics and the personal stories with that, giving me the wide landscape that I needed."
Born in the UK, Karunaharan and his family moved to Sri Lanka the day of the big riots, and seven years later they moved to New Zealand. Before writing Tea he went back to Sri Lanka.
"That was like a 28-year gap between leaving and going back and there was like a whole other journey in that and part of that discovery and kind of reconciliation and recollection informed a big part of the work."
Something that he remembers is floating through the tea estates. "There's something about that space being really open, so I just wanted to remind, I guess, those who haven't had the luxury to be able to go back home that we did have this, we still have this, and we can work towards that again."
Themes of home and belonging are important in his work but when he left drama school, Karunaharan was adamant not to be categorised as an artist that only made work about his identity and ethnicity.
"I tried so hard to make works that were so far away from me but inevitably it always came back to those fundamental questions which is about where do you stand, what is that whenua and more importantly, what is that idea of belonging. I'm drawn to work and artists that explore that."
It's a universal need - somewhere to call home, he says.
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Karunaharan is influenced by a range of films, among them is the 1975 Indian action-adventure Sholay. "It's known as the curry-Western because it's true to the forms of a Lone Ranger, A New Frontier and these epic, dramatic fight sequences."
It came out during an interesting time in India politically, but it was three hours of fun, he says. "Song sequences, dances, epic numbers, ridiculously dramatic villains."
R. D. Burman composed the films music and Karunaharan says he was hugely influenced by what was happening internationally; by groups like The Beatles and the psychedelic Indian trance coming out.
It's a film he goes back to now when he's wanting to have a bit of a laugh.
"Most of the Indian films, Tamil and Hindi, would travel across to Sri Lanka, so a lot of the iconic Hindi films did extremely well in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka's film industry is still building itself, so often the production value [in India] is much higher, they have bigger budgets and they have big stars."
Karunaharan is currently directing a play called A Fine Balance, which is in its third weeks of rehearsals.
Based on a book by Parsi writer Rohinton Mistry - it was written in response to an event that happened in the mid-70s in India known as The Emergency, when Prime Minister Indira Ghandi felt there were threats to her leadership and was accused of malpractice. In order to eliminate the threat, she asked the president to declare a state of emergency.
"Rohinton looks at this event and doesn't talk about the politics of it but looks at how people in different strata of India, different I guess, classes and castes, were affected by that."
It was a well-received novel with international acclaim and a monumental landmark work, he says. It was adapted into a play a few years ago, which Karunaharan saw in the UK. He says when he realised the rights were available here he jumped at the chance to direct it.
With about 25 characters in the play, Karunaharan says he loves working in scale and loves the specificity that can be achieved when you open things up wide.
So, why is a play about 1970s India relevant now? Karunaharan says a lot of the horrible things that happened to the characters in a rural part of India are things that still happen in Aotearoa now.
"I think the politics of it and how marginalised people are affected is something we can totally relate to and I it's really urgent and really important, these sort of stories but I think the lens of having a work in the past and it being a different nation allows us an ability to digest what's been put in there," he says.
Karunaharan's interested in what keeps us going in difficult times, when we question the politics and the policies.
"I'm interested in those voices that we don't often hear in literature or see in cinema because no one's writing those stories."
