Sanjay Iyer is a Bangalore-based actor and writer, and a cultural activist. A regular contributor to Indian newspapers on social and cultural issues, Iyer is a member of the Shakti Bhatt Book Prize committee.

Until recently, he also headed the Arts Education funding programme at the India Foundation for the Arts. Books&Authors caught up with Iyer to talk about parallel cinema, the transformational power of the arts, and his experiences at the Karachi Literature Festival (KLF).

You’ve been a theatre actor for decades. Can you tell me what it was that drew you to theatre?

My short, simple answer to you is theatre is an addiction and one never leaves the theatre. Theatre is a compulsion; once you taste it, you can’t leave it. I suppose the situation is the same in Pakistan — that you make absolutely no money doing theatre but you do it anyway.

You acted in and were very closely involved in the award-winning Kannada indie hit, Lucia. Can you tell us a bit about your experience and what it was like to work with a filmmaker like Pawan Kumar?

Pawan Kumar was always a rebellious theatre personality in Bangalore — which is where I live. He’s known to take a lot of risks with theatre. And he moved onto films about 10 years ago and worked as an assistant for an important director called Yuvraj Butt in Karnataka, so he paid his apprenticeship dues, and he made a feature film called Lifeu Ishtene which loosely translates as ‘life, that’s all’.

And he then devised the story and the screenplay for Lucia over a period of two years. It is the story of a boy who comes from the village to the city, and has dreams like anyone who comes to the city, and discovers this miracle drug by which he can control his dreams. So a lot of the film is about the false distinction between imagination and reality, and so on.

No producer was willing to touch his story even though he had a track record of doing alright so he decided to fund the film in a really innovative way. He wrote a blog called ‘Making Enemies’ and he put up his project on Facebook and he raised money in a matter of weeks. And he choose actors like myself who were willing to take a chance, work for very little, and believe in the project, and all of the rest of it is a success story. It got made, it got shown at the London International Festival, it won the audience award there, it ran for a 100 days in India, and it was supposed to have a Pakistan release, but I don’t think that happened.

Do you think social media and the internet will ‘rescue’ alternative cinema? Is there a space for alternative cinema in this day and age of multiplexes and big-budget movies?

The answer is an overwhelming yes. Yes, it is possible; yes, it is necessary; and yes, it will happen that films will go in two different directions. What is happening worldwide with the big films — let’s say the Hollywood films, not even the Bollywood films — is that they are moving towards more action, more CGI, more computer, more special effects, and that will continue because our greed and our taste for spectacle keeps on increasing. And that nobody can touch.

So what do you see from Hollywood? Superman vs. Batman, Iron Man 4. What you don’t see are human stories. Whether you like it or not, the family dramas you see on TV and on the small film are about human lives and human aspirations, and our petty jealousies and loves and so on.
To see Iron Man 4, you have to go to the Imax or something like this. But people are also watching on their iPhones. So the scales, even in the physical sense, are at both [extreme] ends.

To answer your question, new modes of technology mean new modes of fundraising, new modes of marketing, new modes of delivery, new respect for people’s taste. If I know 30 people are going to like my little psycho film, I’ll make it. I won’t be worried that ‘oh man, I can’t fill the theatre so I better put a song in here, I better have Katrina take off her clothes there’. You can negotiate these things.

What is the one thing that you’ll take away from your visit to Karachi and your experience of KLF?

I am from Bombay so the fact that this is a sister city is what hits you. I feel like I’ve gone back home. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s everything: the sea, the smell, the people, the vibe.

The second important thing from being at the KLF is to see and feel the hunger for cultural activism. [It is] a way for people to go forward, to believe their ability to change things through literature, specifically, but as you can see from the panels we’re not confined to literature. Evenings are full of music, we’ve had important panels on films and television so its culture across the board. That makes any artist’s heart happy. That a country which is portrayed as so one dimensional by the media in terms of just being a political hotbed is actually such a complex, nuanced balance of aspirations and forces.

There was a lot of discussion in one of the panels that it is an actor’s responsibility to be an ‘agent of change’. Do you agree with that?

I would phrase it differently. To state it as a responsibility makes it [come across] like finger wagging, keh yeh karna chahiye. I think one does it. For instance, I have a radical view on the role of television where most people say, ‘what is this junk, regressive family values’ and all that? But in fact, popular entertainment media such as films, even when they seem to be regressive, can actually be transformational over time.

I think that [the actor should be] using common sense. If you have films like the Indo-Pak conflict and aggression, and both sides show their side as being superior — then that’s a crude form of art. But any sort of art that even has the slightest bit of subtlety or nuance will be transformational. So rather than saying that it is the actor’s duty or the artist’s duty to transform society, I think if the artist stays even 90 per cent true to himself or herself, there will be a change.