FROM ODISSI DANCER
TO DOCTOR'S WIFE

After Indira Verma and Sarita Chowdhury, Mira Nair has played god-mother to yet another Indian stunner, Ellora Patnaik who plays the lead role in Mira’s new film, My Own Country.

Patnaik was born and brought up in Orissa where she learnt Odissi dance first from her mother, Chitralekha Patnaik, and then from leading gurus like Gangadhar Pradhan, Sanjukta Panigrahi and Kelucharan Mohapatra. Mid-’90s, she went abroad and trained in acting at New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The course covered, among other things fencing, and horse riding. After receiving her associate degree in drama, she acted in several plays in the Big Apple which included The Country Wife, The Heidi Chronicles, The Sea Gull and “my most acclaimed role”, that of Catherine in Standing On My Knees. From New York, Patnaik moved to Toronto where she gives regular dance recitals, teaches Odissi at the Chitralekha Dance Academy and pursues her acting career.

Mira Nair happened to be busy with pre-production plans for her new film in Toronto when Patnaik was playing the lead at Tarragon Theatre in Girish Karnad’s Naga Mandala. The play had a successful run with eleven shows over a two week period. Nair’s initial choice of Nandita Das as her lead actress did not work out and hearing rave reviews of Patnaik’s stage performance, Nair rushed across, saw the play, held a hurried audition and quickly signed Patnaik for her next film. “Patnaik is a mature and committed actress,” says Nair. “She gives the role its right ethnic balance. Her talent as a dancer is also an asset.”

My Own Country was shot over autumn 1997 in Toronto. Post-production was rushed through in Nair’s home-base in Cape Town, with the sound track being fine-tuned in Los Angeles. The film will hopefully have a Cannes premiere. Its producers, Show Time Television, have slated a National release in September.

During the Toronto Film Festival, I spent a September afternoon watching Nair shoot a sequence in a quiet suburb. Adjoining streets were lined with cars and vans but at the location there were no gawking crowds, confusion and chaos. The neighbourhood was quite indifferent to the shoot in progress. The ebullient Nair was in control, ready with her observant asides and quick repartee.

Ellora Patnaik was not around that day. I watched the lovely Marisa Tomei (Oscar winner and star of Nair’s The Perez Family) and London-based actor Naveen Andrews (The English Patient and Kama Sutra) enact a key scene when over an impromptu meal they unwind and talk of their personal lives. In the film Andrews is playing a doctor and Marisa is a nurse working in the same hospital.

I watched video runs of the shoot with Nair later and that was when I saw Patnaik in action. I met her the next day and she informed me that it was Sally Jones, the American theatre academic and director who also researches Eastern dance forms and in India studies Kathak under Munna Shukla, who got her her Toronto break in Naga Mandala. “I was deeply moved when I read the play. I play the role of Rani whose journey from a gentle flower to a Durga-like goddess was a major challenge, particularly because I had to blend my experience as a known dancer with that of an actress, a career I’m just launching into,” Patnaik maintained.

Soon after, she was spotted by Mira Nair and rushed headlong into playing the lead role of Rajani in Nair’s film. “I had acted on screen just once in 1989 in Hara Pattanayak’s Oriya film Dauda Daudi. Nair’s film was my first North American venture,” Patnaik confessed. She found Nair very interactive as a dirctor, always open to the actor’s interpretation. “At times, she shoots a scene in several different ways and selects the one she likes later.” Patnaik’s initial apprehension at playing a big role was allayed by the unit’s patience and support. “Naveen Andrews in particular was very helpful,” she asserted. “He lends a giving, generous nature to his incredible professionalism.”

My Own Country is based on Dr Abraham Verghese’s semi-autobiographical book. Verghese, of Indian origin, was born in Ethiopia, studied in India, worked in many places before arriving at Johnson City in Tennessee, which is where the film is set. “The film sees the doctor as someone lacking a sense of identity or country. That’s why he marries Rajani, a girl he meets on a visit to Mumbai, whom he symbolises as authentic, educated India,” Patnaik explained. Johnson City becomes his first real home, his own country, as it were. He opts for the AIDS department as the hospital’s Head of Infectious Diseases. His terminally-ill patients find solace in his concern for them. His work becomes self-redeeming.

With his job turning into an obsessive preoccupation, the doctor’s home life falls apart. His wife, who has a son and is expecting again, is appalled by the sordidness of his work, the company he keeps and the dreaded disease that he lives with. In real life, Verghese’s marriage breaks up. In the film, the exhausted doctor’s reserves crumble when his superiors blame him for the hospital’s rising graph of AIDS patients. He leaves, reunites with his wife, and looks for a better life elsewhere.

My Own Country sees Nair returning true to form in a film that conveys her insights into the migrant worlds of today.

Ellora Patnaik was in India recently. Training in Odissi with her dance gurus was first on her agenda. This will be followed by a dance concert in Delhi in April with another hopefully in Mumbai, before returning to Toronto.