Maya Krishnan brings Manjula Teacher to the stage with her debut solo special 'Pomblel'

The first show sold out before she started writing it. That is either complete chaos or complete confidence, and with Maya Krishnan, it is both.

Ahead of Pomblel in Chennai, Maya Krishnan talks satire, womanhood and Manjula Teacher

With Pomblel, her debut solo stand-up special, Maya brings Manjula Teacher to a larger stage. And if you’ve spent any time in Tamil internet circles recently, you already know that Manjula Teacher does not arrive to make you comfortable. She arrives to take attendance.

Maya is a kattaikkoothu artiste, theatre performer, musician, actor, and comedian who has spent years on stages across India and abroad. She is, by no measure, a newcomer. But Pomblel is something she has not done before, a solo show that is entirely, unambiguously hers.

Manjula Teacher was not built to get laughs. She was built inside a crisis. During her time on Bigg Boss Tamil, Maya found that speaking plainly about the misogyny inside the house got her labelled as an angry woman. “I had to use theatre,” she explains. “I had to become one of them to show what it feels like to be that person. That’s how Manjula was created, as their representative.”

What is interesting about Maya’s approach to this material is her relationship with laughter itself. She did not create Manjula to be funny. She says this plainly, without apology. “I created her to question. If people laugh, that is a gift. And I love gifts. I will receive every one of them with gratitude, without refusing even the tiniest among them.”

She starts every day of creation with Nina Simone’s Feeling Good. She is currently being made to laugh by her cat, Kalpana, and also by Chaplin and Buster Keaton, which is a combination that tells you everything about the range of her comic sensibility.

Pomblel sits at the intersection of satire and autobiography. The show examines the unwritten rulebook that governs women, how to dress, speak, sit, laugh, grieve, and take up space. “Countless incidents that all women would have faced,” Maya says, when asked what sparked the material. “At the workplace, at home, from neighbours, relatives, schools, and colleges.” The specificity is the point. The stereotype is that she would retire without ceremony, “Women are not the personification of sacrifice, of purity and motherhood. Women can be loud, ambitious, angry, funny, messy, certain, uncertain, and everything in between.”

The social norm she still cannot parse: why certain places belong to men and not to women. “If a woman is capable, respectful, and willing to be there, why should her gender decide where she can or cannot go?” She asks it without rhetorical flourish, the way you ask a question that genuinely does not have an answer that satisfies you.

What has her understanding of womanhood become through performing this material in front of different audiences? “It’s far more beautiful than I thought it was.” Four words that land like a whole paragraph.

About 70 per cent of the show is improvised, which is either a terrifying or thrilling fact depending on how you feel about live performance at its most alive. She announced the shows, they sold out, and then she started writing. The chaos is entirely intentional. “Find the state, go with the flow, and surrender to the process,” she says of her creation method, with the calm of someone who has been falling and landing safely for long enough to trust the fall.

What she wants you to leave with is not a conclusion. “With a feeling,” she says. “Something should change in the way they think about life.”

Rs 500 onwards. On June 28. At 6 pm and 7 pm. At Medai, Alwarpet.

Email: shivani@newindianexpress.com
X: @ShivaniIllakiya

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