Journal of Bengali Studies Vol.2 No.1

ISSN: 2277-9426
Journal of Bengali Studies

Vol. 2, No. 1
27 March 2013 Dolpurnima, 13 Choitro, 1419 Spring Issue
Bengali Theatre: Bengalis and Theatre
Issue Editor: Asst. Issue Editor:
Sourav Gupta Rishi Ghosh
Editor: Asst. Editor:
Tamal Dasgupta Mousumi Biswas Dasgupta
The commentaries', articles', review's and theatre-in-practice's copyrightsindividual contributors, while the Journal of Bengali Studies holds the publishing right for re-publishing the contents of the journal in future in any format, as per our terms and conditions and submission guidelines. EditorialSourav Gupta. Cover design by Dr Neeru Prasad. An image from Nobanno (1943) produced by IPTA has been used on the cover. Further, Journal of Bengali Studies is an open access, free for all e-journal and we promise to go by an Open Access Policy for readers, students, researchers and organizations as long as it remains for non-commercial purpose. However, any act of reproduction or redistribution of this journal, or any part thereof, for commercial purpose and/or paid subscription must accompany prior written permission from the Editor, Journal of Bengali Studies. For any queries, please contact: shoptodina@gmail.com, editjbs@gmail.com and journalofbengalistudies@gmail.com
Contents
Editorial Articles Analysing Contemporary Response to Tagore's Philosophy of 'Indian' Theatre: A Selective Study of Productions in West Bengal Sourav Gupta 7 Nineteenth Century Bengali Theatre: Nationalism and Identity Rudrasish Dutta Getting Our Bearings: The 'Unbearable' Tagore and Karnad's Bearable Dramaturgy Dattatreya Datta The Lonely Crusader's Journey: Sambhu Mitra and His Theatre Gautam Sengupta Open Air Theatre in Bengal Dani Karmakar Third Theatre: Thematic and Structural Decolonization Debadrita Bose Review A Performance of Ruddhoshongeet by Bratyojon in New Delhi Tamal Dasgupta Theatre in Practice: Concerns of a Field Worker Theatre: Bread and Butter versus Broad and Better Rishi Ghosh Commentaries Bengali Theatre and Bengali Audience Soumitra Basu Theatre in Patna Ajit Ganguly 82 88 77 71 18 26 50 56 62 5
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The contents, views and opinions occurring in the contributions are solely the responsibilities of the respective contributors and the editorial board of Journal of Bengali Studies does not have any responsibility in this regard. The image/s appearing in the Journal are parts of a critical project, not for any commercial use. Image/s are either provided by the authors/designers from their personal collections and /or are copyright free to the best of knowledge & belief of the editorial board.
Editorial
Bengali stage and film actor Jnanesh Mukherjee had once said in an interview that, Bangali ra natok dekhte bhalobashe (Bengalis love to watch theatre). Arguably, one of the greatest Bengali icons, Rabindranath Tagore, was extremely passionate about theatre. That he wrote plays throughout his life, tried to create a novel idiom of play writing is miniscule a fact when compared to his efforts to give shape to the abstract idea of Indian Theatre. Tagore started his work on theatre on a ground dating back to the days of Bhababhuti and Jayadev. Theatre in Bengal was a part of the country life style and the rural folk culture taking the form of Jatra, Pachali, Kabigaan, Tarjaa, Akhrai etc. With the advent of British rule in India, theatre got confined inside the auditorium in a true European blackbox style. However, it was only after the initiative of Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedev that Bengali theatre got an entry into it. Since then, the main stream force of Bengali theatre has been, working in European proscenium style. There have been occasional exceptions where people have experimented with text and form, but by and large, through ups & downs and several metamorphosis, Bengali theatre has been able to carve a niche for itself, as a medium of education and entertainment, specially among the elite and middle class educated bengalis. It would be worthwhile to remember Sri Sri Rama Krishna Paramahamsas emphatic comment about theatre- Theatre e loko shikkhe hoi (Theatre educates mass). As Bengal and Bengalis underwent socio-economic, political and cultural movements to emerge as a community, the elements of these changes have found resonance in Bengali theatre. Notable instances may include the patriotic wave in 19th century public stage or the communist wave in the 1940s and 1950s hailed as IPTA. Even in recent times, theatre is said to have shown the path signaling the end of a communist hegemony in West Bengal.
6 Journal of Bengali Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1
Journal of Bengali Studies, since its inception in 2012 has thrived on a basic nationalist principle: that queries must be instituted into the history and culture of the Bengali people, creating genial conditions for scholarly studies and methodologies to emerge which, in turn, can illuminate the different aspects of the Indic Bengali experience. This interdisciplinary journal is a platform for exploring the social, political and cultural dimensions of Bengali identity, and the present issue of JBS tries to capture the journey of Bengalis with Theatre as an art form and as a weapon of struggle in its various phases since the beginning of public stage to the present day group theatre. The authors, who represent a mix of youth and experience, have tried to explore the nuances of the art of theatre as well as the message and philosophy in context to changes that have taken place over the last two centuries. The Issue Editor would like to acknowledge the help and support from his wife, Monideepa Gupta in the transcription of some of the hard copies. The editorial board (and the contributors) can be reached at editjbs@gmail.com and shoptodina@gmail.com. Readers of JBS can find updates and call for papers for the forthcoming issues and post comments and responses at
http://bengalistudies.blogspot.in/ . We hope that the readers enjoy the following scholarly approaches to the never ending romance between the Bengali people and the immortal art of theatre.
Analyzing contemporary Response to Tagores Philosophy of Indian Theatre: A selective study of productions in West Bengal.
Sourav Gupta Rabindranath Tagore wrote plays through out his life span. Experts have divided his plays into different categories comedy, farce, symbolic, musical drama, dance drama etc. Tagore, internationally acclaimed for his poetry was committed to the art of theatre to a surprisingly great extent. His efforts were not limited to scripting plays only. He took up the baton of director himself to give shape to his ideas, to form a new kind of a theatre in contrast to the existing European Theatre a theatre, very Indian in spirit, which may be hailed as Indian' Theatre. He himself affected a paradigm shift in his later productions and writings. The year 2010-11 marked the 150th birth anniversary of Tagore and the occasion was widely celebrated throughout the world. In West Bengal, the bards home state, there was a flurry of Tagore productions from the group theatres including plays written by Tagore as well as adapted from his poems, novels and stories. It was quite a phenomenon as theatre groups of West Bengal have never been too keen to produce Tagore like their counterparts in Bangladesh have been. To what this tide of Tagore be attributed to true respect for his work or the luring amounts offered by the Ministry of Culture, Government of Indias Tagore Commemoration Grant Scheme, is another debatable issue. Whatever be the reason, this has given researchers an opportunity to analyse the approaches of contemporary directors towards producing Tagore. The present paper aims to analyse selected productions from the recent times and find out to what extent they conform to Tagores idea of Indian theatre. In this process, the paper will also reiterate Tagores philosophy regarding producing a theatre. An insight may be hinted at its relevance in present times.
Musical drama use of songs in theatre Having brought up into an ambiance of cultural practice in an elitist set up, it was at a very early age that Tagore dwelled into theatre and music under the guidance of elder brother Jyotirindranath
Tagore. He insisted inclusion of a song in Jyotirindranaths play, Sarojini, for creating an apt theatrical mood. Eventually he himself contributed it. This was an early signal that he was thinking theatre in terms of music. His first play, Valmiki Pratibha is a direct outcome of his musical inclinations. His association with Jyotirindranath and Akshay Chowdhury and tour of England led him to experiment with musical fusion. He asserted that, The addition of music to theatre in this fashion has not been illogical or ineffective. This is also the uniqueness of Valmiki Pratibha. The fun of releasing music in this fashion and using it pamperingly captured my heart. 1 Herbert Spencers concept that emotion, when generated between words, contain tunes and these tunes culminate to music on training, influenced Tagore as he thought- It will be fine if I express emotion through songs and carry on the acting. 2Tagore followed it up with another play of this musical style, Kaalmrigaya. He blended songs and drama beautifully in Prakritir Pratishodh by inducting the song, Hede Go Nandarani about which he commented, The song is a picture with the juice of theatre in it.3 While songs of Tagore have been used in most of the contemporary productions, they appear to be alienated from the mainstream drama. In Chetanas, Chirakumar Sabha, Kasba Arghyas Raktakarabi, Theatre Spandans Sesher Kobita, Aghraner Nabannas Nastanir and Ashoknagar Nattyamukhs Muktadhara, Rabindra sangeet appear frequently but they appear to be additional to the script and alienated under their own weight. The script has said it all and the song seems to be there as an independent entity. But the song Megh Boleche Jabo Jabo transports Purba Paschims Chaturanga to altogether different level as Sachis & Sribilas move to the Ashram in search of spirituality. In Purba Paschims production, the singer emerges from the audience and moves about in the auditorium with the song, as the protagonists move on stage. Another exceptional musical
1 Jeevan Smriti-Rabindranath Tagore 2Jeevan Smriti-Rabindranath Tagore 3Introduction of Prakritir Pratishodh-Rabindranath Tagore;1941
treatment has been done in Alternative Living Theatre's Krishnakali where the song Krishnakali Ami Tarei Boli has been converted to a motif of the play dealing with the exploitation of Tagores Kalo Meye(Dark Girl). As Pallab Kirtaniya acts out Bishu Pagol in Kasba Arghyas Raktakarabi, one is filled with musical expectation. At the end of O Chaand it turns out to be an excellent rendition but apart from the play as water from cottage cheese! A garland of theatre linked by songs4 is how Tagore described Valmiki Pratibha .The link between theatre & song is what Tagore mastered.
Over to dance: birth of nrityanatya After his tryst with songs, Tagore concentrated on the element of Kavya in his plays and remained committed to the European Proscenium Theatre and its Elizabethan school of play writing, producing masterpieces like Raja O Rani, Bisarjan & Malini. He also wrote popular farces like Sesh Rokhha & Chirokumar Sabha which became hits in the then dominant public stage of Bengal. Tagore wanted to challenge this dominant paradigm of theatre production. He had hinted at his intentions in Malini but announced it clearly with a new school of play writing starting with Sharadotsav. He started denouncing prose language or gadya bhasha in a play. This play started a series of signal plays & symbolic plays which included Raja and Raktakarabi. He actually wanted to strip a play off happenings and touch the inner soul of poetry through prose. A classic example of this is Daakghar of which he himself comments: It has no story; It is a prose lyric. 5 Although Tagore succeeded in erasing the line of division between prose & poetry by writing plays like Falguni, Chitrangada, Muktadhara, Achalayatan etc. but he could not get dialogues & music married. He discovered a new idiom of play writing but not of play production. He dwelled on the possibilities of integrating the language of dance into theatre a thought, born out of his tryst with
4Jeevan Smriti-Rabindranath Tagore 5Jeevan Smriti-Rabindranath Tagore
songs, experience with Japanese No Theatre, Javanese Dance Theatre and search for an Indian form of theatre which would obviously challenge the European school of Indian Theatre. Besotted by the honesty of expression and tremendous power of this art he came to the conclusion that : Theatre has to be a kind of dance, whose expressions shall be in rhythm with that of poetry; Watching real life expressions and listening to recitations like they do in Europe is weird. 6 Subsequent productions by Tagore, namely, Rituranga, Shaap Mochan, Taser Desh, Chandalika, diminished the role of words and expressions took centre stage just as it did sparingly in Krishnakali and Chaturanga. As the Dark Girls deliberated in the fences tied to cloth pieces each of the words in the song erupted to life. In the cave scene in Chaturanga, the psycho sexual deliberations going on between Sachis & Damini was wonderfully portrayed through a piece of choreography untamed sexual desires oozed from the bodies of the actors. In Vidushak, the mass movements, agitations and state terrorism all grave issues are reflected through well designed group compositions. In Ghare Baire too, in the scene where some people agitate and threat Nikhilesh, a group composition aided by rhythmic movement creates an unique language so representative of Tagores spirit. These were pieces of well composed choreography in Strir Potro and Muktadhara but both seemed out of place and forcefully imposed, just for the sake of it. Hence, instead of creating a rhythm, it disturbed the production.
Paradigm change in Tagores philosophy of theatre Tagore came down heavily on the European school of theatre practiced in Bengal through his 1902 article, 'Rangamancha'. The Bengali prototype of European proscenium stage was the commercial public stage with legacies of Girish Chandra Ghosh and Sisir Kumar Bhaduri. It was characterized by use of highly realistic and voluminous sets and stage props which became the poet's primary bone of contention.
6Interview of Amita Sen cited in Kabir Abhinay-Abantikumar Sanyal;Rabindra Bharati University;2007;pp.58
He began thus: There is a description of theatre space in Bharats Natyashastra and there is no mention of set settings in it which I think is perfect . He felt that drama is independent and its strength lay in its intrinsic poetic values which by itself is strong enough to draw a set in the minds of the audience, which he compared to a canvas. He commented that the expenses in European stage to import realism were enough to compensate famines in India. How he hated realism is evident from his subsequent words: It is high time that we, denounce European obvious methods of showing a garden through an exact painted garden and a lady always portraying a lady's character. In this context, he also praised Jatra, the rural theatre of Bengal for its simplicity and close proximity with the audience. He felt that the enactment of Jatra is based on mutual trust and privilege of performers and audience. He held the sense, wit and mind of the audience in high esteem and opined that saying and showing every detail undermines their intellect. In a wider sense, Tagore believed that an art form like acting, is slave to none except the script of the drama. He felt the same for all great art forms. An interesting fact is that Tagore himself relied heavily on the proscenium for writing as well as producing plays in the early phase of his life. Plays like Raja o Rani, Bisarjan, Chirokumar Sabha, Seshrokkha were written to be staged in proscenium and some of them were in fact lapped up by the then dominant professional Bengali public theatres. In the productions where he was directly involved, the set settings were usually gorgeous, heavy and extremely realistic tendencies could be seen. For example, in the set design of Mayar Khela in Bethun School the stick of mayakumaris were mounted with electric lights to produce fairy wand effect! The paradigm shift in his theatre ideology came after Bisarjan, with the second phase of his theatre life starting with Sharodotsav. In this phase the change may be understood from the set design of the play Falguni staged in 1915 in Jorasanko in aid of the people of Bankura. About the set design, Abanindranath Tagore writes: the backdrop was the blue velvet cloth from Valmiki Pratibha, it had just the appearance of blue, night sky. Branches and leaves from Almond tree were hung on a rope
supported by a shaft.7 From the opinions expressed in 'Rangamancha', it may be safely interpreted that to challenge the dominant paradigm of European styled public stage, Tagore chose ethnic, folk, rural as the countrys age old traditional medium as his response. It is quite evident from his appraisal of Jatra. Even for songs and music Tagore referred back to his roots. His concept of Valmiki Pratibha was heavily influenced by rural Kathakata, which according to him turns to music in between sentence. For subject matter too, he desired his information from the Ramayana, the oldest mythical epic of our country. The obvious question that comes to mind is, what kind of a production design is Tagore referring to? If we denounce proscenium where will the plays be staged and how? The answer to this may be derived from Tagores own writings. In 'Rangamancha', he says: one who is thoughtful carries a stage in his mind, a huge stage with no dearth of space. A magician goes on creating one scene after another on that stage. That, should precisely be the target of a theatrician. An artificial stage and setting is not fit to be the space for a theatre. In terms of acting too, there was a paradigm change in Tagores ideas. He was respectful and influenced by the surela, tuned verbal acting school of the doyen of Bengali public stage, Girish Chandra Ghosh. He was also influenced by over acting of internationally renowned actor Erving, whom he had seen performing at Liseum Theatre in 1890 during his Europe tour. His own acting was capable of creating emotion of the highest level and in doing so he completely lost himself to get assimilated in the character. So much so, that once while enacting the role of Raghupati in Bisarjan, he injured his waistline in an effort to pick up a heavy idol of Goddess Kali. The same Rabindranath, later during a rehearsal of the same Bisarjan, did not allow Arunendu Tagore to get epileptic (as Jaysingha who was just landed with a knife down his chest) and commented, ..these tricks are unnecessary, there is no need for so much of realism in acting8
7Gharoa-Abanindranath Tagore;pp.134 8Rabindra Prasanga-Amita Tagore;1989;pp.14
Thus, we can see that Tagore's writing and philosophy marked a remarkable departure from the real to the abstract. He wanted to say things under a veil, not directly. He wanted the readers of his plays to decipher the inner meanings from his writings. Similarly in theatre he wanted to give a chance to the spectators to form their own imagination and feelings rather than telling them every single detail by crass realistic acting and set-settings. Moreover his exposure to art of Japan, Java and Sri Lanka helped him to improvise expressions, acting and body language in theatre which would create an universal language of theatre. Moreover, he consistently inducted elements of folk and traditional culture into his theatre like mela, kathakata, jatra, kirtan, baul to get it closer to the fragrance of the Indian soil. All his plays produced at Shantiniketan were under the open sky and on the ground with no artificiality of proscenium or burden of settings.
Response by theatre groups of West Bengal It is indeed very sad that the group theatre movement of West Bengal has been more or less oblivious to Tagores philosophy of theatre, and the European school proscenium till date is the choice of producers and directors when it comes to productions. Almost all the notable Tagore productions in post colonial Bengali theatre have been prepared in the proscenium style which Tagore himself denied. The picture remained the same in the bards 100 th as well as 150th birth anniversary. However there have been some exceptional efforts where the reflection of adherence to Tagores theatre philosophy may be found in partial fulfillment. The Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA) movement which started a new school of Indian theatre by taking theatre to the masses in rural areas broke away from the proscenium. The activists staged their plays mostly in very shabbily built temporary bamboo stages open on three sides, known as macha, or on the bare streets, fields and market places. They did not sell tickets or restrict the audience. There was open access and their aim was to publicise communist ideology through their plays. Initially they got
success in productions like Laboratory, Jabanbandi and Nabanna largely because of a group of talented artists like Bijan Bhattacharya, Shambhu Mitra, Tripti Mitra, George Biswas, Utpal Dutta, Shobha Sen, Ritwik Ghatak and Salil Chowdhury. But the Communist Party tried to control it with an iron hand and many artists left as they did not want to compromise with their freedom of art and expression. Interestingly, the IPTA always shied away from Tagore as the communist party felt that he was a reactionary poet and supporter of imperialism! However there is no denying that the principles followed by IPTA in drama production were largely reminiscent of what Tagore himself believed in. Shambhu Mitra, disillusioned with both the Bengali public stage and IPTA engaged in search for a true Indian theatre through his philosophy of honest theatre or Nabanatya. Under his direction the group 'Bohurupi' became pioneers in producing Tagore plays. Mitras search for true Indian theatre did not end, but culminated in Rabindranaths plays. He discovered that essential Indian flavour in Tagores symbolic plays, researched deep about his text and devised an appropriate and scientific way of dialogue delivery. In fact, it was due to Mitras talent and efforts that plays like Raja, Raktakarabi and Muktadhara, till then rejected by theatricians as unfathomable, emerged to audience with a meaning. In Mitras own words: Only Tagore has been able to establish a connection with our Golden Age, even in the midst of social & political conflict. Tagores plays are concerned with modern society, but not in the European manner. For example, Raktakarabi is a play about modern industrial civilization, showing the internal contradictions that this civilization gives rise to. And Muktadhara (The Released Stream) also has a modern context. Western critics find these plays difficult to understand..I often feel that the inherent character of our culture, its simplicity and sophistication, is not easily comprehensible to Europeans or even to the Indian disciples of the Europeans. Tagores plays do not use realistic characters, yet when we do these plays we feel they are real. He does not use common everyday language. In
Raktakarabi, Kishore says: I often dream of dying one day for your sake, Nandini. Most of our actors find it difficult to perform these words. They feel that even if Kishore feels this, he would express it in a different way. The words sound pretentious, they say. Consequently, even today it is difficult to perform Tagores language.9 It is really unfortunate that Mitra, inspite of being philosophically in unison with Tagore, never produced anything outside the proscenium stage. May be he couldnt forget the insult meted out to theatre as an art in his IPTA days by politically blind theatre activists in the organization. In the name of taking theatre to the masses they actually compromised with the art. Mitra for one, was a firm believer that theatre needed an appropriate space and ambiance. Also, he seemed to be less interested in diverting back to the traditional forms of our countries which Tagore took deep interest in. In this context, Mitra explains, After independence, we wanted to discover ourselves as a nation. We are still proud of the great culture and civilization of ancient India, but it is impossible to revive the ancient culture in a modern context . Probably, that is the reason he never stepped out of the proscenium as Tagore did. Even in his understanding of the Indian theatre, Mitra was distinctly different from Tagore. I would like to develop another kind of drama, which has a single central character who discovers life through a conflict with everything around him. In action-oriented drama we are outsiders watching others behavior through an imaginary wall. In the more contemplative Indian drama that I propose, we come closer to the character and move into his subjective world.
10
One fails to clear
the recent production of Raktakarabi by Kasba Arghya from charges of violating Tagore ideology, in spite of being a fabulous production in terms of team work and music. Firstly, the set by a renowned painter is a beautiful piece of art but individual. Collectively, when mounted on the stage
9Building from Tagore-Sombhu Mitra(Tr. Samik Bandyopadhyay);The Drama Review: TDR, Vol.15, No.2, Theatre in Asia(Spring,1971),pp.201-204 10Building from Tagore-Sombhu Mitra(Tr. Samik Bandyopadhyay);The Drama Review: TDR, Vol.15, No.2, Theatre in Asia(Spring,1971),pp.201-204
it becomes a mountain like impediment to free movement as it takes away a lot of stage space. Secondly, at the end, the land movement of Nandigram peasants have been referred to which was unnecessary as it undermines the imaginative capability of the audience, an act Tagore vehemently objected to in 'Rangamancha'. The first aesthetic approach to break away from the proscenium came in 1972 when theatre group 'Shatabdi' under the direction of Badal Sircar performed Sagina Mahato inside a room in 1972. Audience sat on three sides of the acting space and the performance was done with minimal light, costume and settings. Sircar coined this particular genre as Third Theatre. The coinage was essentially in Indian context, the first being Indian folk theatre and second being European proscenium. Along with Sircar, Julian Bake, Georgi Grotsky and Augusto Boal are also credited to propagate similar philosophies. However, exploration of theatre space beyond proscenium, acting without the burden of imitation, multiple roles for an actor, open entry without tickets, subtraction of theatre accessories and minimizing financial implications makes Third Theatre, by far the truest and most honest adherer to Tagores theatre philosophy. In context to the relevance of Third Theatre, Sircar writes: The indigenous folk theatre of India, strong, live, immensely loved by the working people of the country, propagates themes that are at best irrelevant to the life of the toiling masses, and at worst back dated and downright reactionary. The proscenium theatre that the city bred intelligentsia imported from the west constitutes the second theatre of our country, as it runs parallel to the folk theatre the first theatre practically without meeting. This theatre gets money bound and city boundcosts go on rising, unable to reach the real people. Historically there appears to be a need for a third theatre in our country a flexible, portable, free theatre as a theatre of change. 11 In the same context Sircar explained that the ultimate aim of the movement was to encourage the
11A letter from Badal Sircar-The Drama Review:TDR,Vol 26, No.2, Intercultural Performance(Summer 1982);pp.51-58
working class to perform their own plays and he significantly professes, when that happens, the third theatre will no longer have a separate function, but will merge with a transformed first theatre. As evident from Sircars statement, the eventual thrust is on the folk and traditional theatre of India which echoes in support of Tagores belief on the countrys own cultural idioms. In his later years, Sircar edited and guided the theatre group 'Pathasena' to produce Raktakarabi. The production was by far the truest adherer of Tagores theatre philosophy using human body props to substitute stage settings. The dialogues are said with the realization of Tagores words to the truest as Shambhu Mitra wanted them to be pronounced. Much of this realization is attributed to the fact that the Third Theatre is not mere enactment but a state of being brought about by workshops where artists learn to live with a play and express his own feelings in the form of dialogues. Sircars philosophy has been widely accepted nationally and internationally but in West Bengal, Third Theatre has till date remained a marginal art practice with proscenium still ruling the main stream theatre scenario. As Mitra said, it is indeed tough to enact realistic plays, in the real sense of the word, what playwrights like Tagore have written. Bengali theatre sadly continues to defy one of its greatest icon and lives on amidst the so called European Realism.
Sourav Gupta is Assistant Professor at Centre for Journalism & Mass Communication, Central University of Orissa, Koraput. He is actor, director & scriptwriter for stage, radio & television. He is also one of the Executive Editors of Journal of Bengali Studies.
Nineteenth Century Bengali Theatre Nationalism and Identity

Rudrashis Datta Introduction It is perhaps widely agreed that the origin of modern Bengali theatre owes its origin to a Russian musician and cultural worker Gerasim Stephanovich Lebedev who adapted an English play The Disguise by Richard Paul Jodrell and staged it at Calcutta on 27 November 1795. When the play was staged, English theatre in Calcutta was already in vogue albeit for the entertainment of the English elite. The Playhouse (1753), the Calcutta Theatre (1775) under the patronage of Warren Hastings and Sir Eliza Impay, the Private Theatre (1789) of Mrs Ema Bristo and the Whaler Place Theatre (1797) focussed on staging classical English plays generally as a cultural connect for the Englishmen serving the Empire in Calcutta. The plays and skits performed in such theatres were clearly imitative of the English originals and as such had a purely entertainment value.
Bengali in the Calcutta theatre The first Bengali play of significant note was staged some forty years into the nineteenth century when Vidyasundar by the lyric poet Bharatchandra was staged. Around twenty years later came a brilliant adaptation of Kalidasas Abhignana Shakuntalam. Almost around the same time was staged a landmark production that can be credited with being the first Bengali play carrying a definitive social and reformation message Kulin Kul Sarbaswa. The playwright was a great social reformer Ramnarayan Tarkaratna, who brought about a dozen more plays in the next decade, earning for himself the title natuke Ramnarayan. A critical aspect of the Bengali theatre of Calcutta in the mid-nineteenth century was the extensive culture of adaptations, notably from Sanskrit classics like the plays of Kalidasa or even from episodes of Hindu epics. One remarkable production was a truncated adaptation of Kalidasas Vikramorvashie in 1857 in which Woomes Chandra Banerjee, who later went on to become the president of the Congress, played the lead female role. Michael Madhusudan Dutt, perhaps realizing
the inadequacy of the lyric and epic medium to convey his enthusiasm for Indian culture and intellectual tradition, turned to the theatre, producing a lyric masterpiece Sharmistha in the year of the Revolt while at the same time expressing his reservations against the culture of imitations and adaptations. He categorically asserted: The friends who wish that our countrymen should possess a literature of their own, a vigorous and independent literature, and not a feeble echo of everything Sanskrit [sic], will rejoice to hear that a taste for the Drama is beginning to develop itself rapidly among the highest classes of Hindu Society. I am fully convinced that the day is not far distant, when the princely munificence of such patrons as the Rajahs of Paikparah will call onto the field a host of writers who will discard Sanskrit [sic] models and look to far higher sources for inspiration. Another landmark play focussing on social reform was Bidhaba Vivaha by Umes Chandra Mitra. The play takes on the hollowness of the orthodoxy of the society and espouses widow remarriage as a means of undermining several social and moral ills. Similar other plays with serious social messages of the time include Naba Natak based on the deplorable condition of women and the misrule of the zamindars.
The transition from the social to the national The growing interest in the theatre-going public for plays with nationalistic themes had perhaps to do with the elaborate exploration of social ills at the time. While most plays depicted social evils with stark realism and stopped there, the audience began exploring the cause of the social ills, particularly the deplorable condition of women and the tortuous rule of the zamindars. This concern logically took the audience to the British rule, the assumption being that since such ills were absent even a couple of generations back, the Britishers were to be blamed for the adversity of the times. Michael Madhusudan Dutts play, Krishna Kumari (1861) was one such production which develops
an episode from the chivalrous heritage of Rajasthan narrated in James Tods Annals of Rajasthan and brilliantly transfers emotion from a social evil to a nationalistic agenda. Though Dutt steers clear of explicit political goals in the play, a subtle but strong under-current of nationalism can be traced in some of the speeches. One such speech is of Tapaswini who declares rather prophetically to the king Bhim Singh before her self-sacrifice: Oh King, this sorry state of India will surely not last. Will the great Lord who rescued the earth submerged in the ocean by taking the form of the boar remain forever oblivious of this holy land? The sun and the moon are still rising, one quarter of Dharma still lasts. The tenor of the play is unmistakably Hindu and this must be seen in the context of the fact that a revival of Hindu texts and a general interest in their interpretation and reinterpretation was already in currency by the mid-nineteenth century. The re-interpretation generally focussed on bringing the Hindu religious texts and precepts closer to the situations of the common man, and it went to the advantage of the catholicity and liberal nature of the prevailing Hindu discourse which began addressing contemporary social and political concerns with parallels from Hindu legends, as Tapaswinis speech clearly shows. The Hindu concern for the jati race was interpreted in the same vein as the concern for swa-jati (own race) and swadesh (own country) and this became a common theme in most nationalist plays wherein the Britishers were unmistakably equated with the quintessential other. The most powerful manifestation of this ideology was Dinabandhu Mitras play Nil Darpan (translated by Michael Madhusudan Dutt as The Indigo Planting Mirror) staged in 1867. The play was taken by the people all over the world with a mixed bit of reaction. Mitra himself wrote in the preface of the English translation: I present The Indigo Planting Mirror to the Indigo Planters' hands; now, let every one of them, having observed his face, erase the freckle of the stain of selfishness from his forehead, and, in its stead, place on it the sandal powder of beneficence, then shall I think my labour success, good fortune for the helpless class of ryots, and preservation of Englands honour.
It is evident from Mitras preface that the play was intended to integrate the concerns of the indigo planters and the socio-cultural concerns of the intellectual elite and theatre goers in Calcutta. The Bengali theatre showed an interesting step in its evolutionary history in 1873 when a new kind of play appeared in Bengali public theatre: the short patriotic "masque" accompanying the featured full-length play of the evening. Short skits - between, before or after the main attraction of the evening were not new to the stages of Bengali theatre; early in the Bengali public theatre, satirical pantomimes (pancharanga) and the one-person playlet (mastered by Ardhendu Shekhar Mustaphi) had been introduced as welcome changes much in line with the Interludes of the English Medieval stage to the feature productions of the evening in response to the same tradition in the English theatres of Kolkata. But the satirical intent of the pancharanga had been replaced with a more serious scheme; this new version had something novel for its subject matter: devotion to the nation. On 28 March 1874, the Great National Theatre presented along with the full-length comedy Jamai Barik (The Son-in-Law`s Lay) by Dinabandhu Mitra, a 15-minute masque by Kiranchandra Bandyopadhyay titled Bharat Mata (Mother India). The brief masque equated the nation with the mother and as such any insult to the nation was to be construed as an insult to ones mother. Besides being overtly emotional and spiritual in its tenor, the equation was a significant symbolic step in the ideation of the concept of nationalism as a religious duty of every righteous Hindu. We get an interesting account of the masque and its impact on the audience in Bipin Chandra Pals book Memories of My Life and Times. Pal writes: In the early years of the seventies of the last century before Surendranath and Anandamohan had organized their new platform, it was the Bengali stage which had given expression to the new spirit of patriotism among our rising generation of educated intellectuals. It was this stage that first proclaimed the gospel of the religion of the motherland in an opera, now completely forgotten, called Bharat Mata or Mother India. I forgot the details of the play, but the name indicates the nature of the theme and the religious idealization which must
have inspired it. Those were the days when a new passion for freedom, personal, social and political, had possessed the educated Bengali mind. Mention in this context should be also made of Jyotindranath Tagore, an elder brother of Rabindranath. Regarded as a major dramatist of his times, his play Puru Vikram (The Prowess of Puru) was performed at the National Theatre on 8 October, 1874. By portraying the heroic fight of Puru against the invader Alexander, he gave expression to the growing nationalist sentiments and relied on the legends and past glory of the country. His Sarojini, performed in 1876, contained songs which stirred national feelings in the audience. The famous chal re chal sabe Bharat santan, from the play Sarojini excites patriotic fervour even today. The song, rich in exhortation and motivation runs like this: Move on, move on, all sons of India The motherland has given the call With the daring of a hero, with pride of prowess, Let everybody dedicate themselves for the countrys good. Who else but the son can erase the miseries of the mother? The aim of Jyotindranath was clearly to fuse the sense of nationalism with the concept of individual identity a powerful medium of motivating the masses against anything that was perceived as unnational, let alone anti-national.
Censorship The fact that British government did not take long enough to control the contents of the Bengali theatre was evidence enough that the nationalistic content of the plays were actually going beyond mere entertainment and ideation and was effectively infusing the public with a powerful fusion of religious, more specifically Hindu, sentiments, individual dignity and identity and a sense of nationalism. Clause III of the draconian Act No. XIX of 1876, passed on 16 December, 1876,
deserves a detailed quote: AN ACT FOR THE BETTER CONTROL OF PUBLIC DRAMATIC PERFORMANCES CLAUSE NO. - 3 Whenever the local Government is of the opinion that any play, pantomime or other drama performed or about to be performed in a public place is:a. Of a scandalous or defamatory nature; or, b. Likely to excite feelings of disaffection to the Government established by law in British India; or, c. Likely to deprave and corrupt persons present at the performances,
The local Government or such Magistrate may by order prohibit the performance. Though the immediate provocation of the Act was a play that lampooned the Prince to the British throne, it was realized by the government of the day that Bengali theatre has reached sufficient sophistication both in terms of plot and language to couch serious nationalistic discourses in apparently innocent skits and farces. The play in question was a Great National Theatre production titled Gajadananda o Jubaraj (Gajadananda and the Prince), allegedly by Upendranath Das. This play was a satirical account of one Jagadananda, a barrister, who had entertained the visiting Prince of Wales in his house, allowing the womenfolk of his family to meet him. This was regarded a total violation of native custom that forbade the British from trespassing into the inner sanctums of Indian households, the world of women. In the play Jagadananda became, by a simple twist of syllables, Gajadananda, the native-supplicant, too eager to please the British rulers for professional benefits. After the second night, the play was stopped by the government for it was realized that the rogue planters of the play were none other than the British royalty. The play can be easily interpreted as a trendsetter in that it signalled the consolidation of an intellectual battle between the Indians aware of the importance of sovereignty and the British rulers who sought perpetuation of
the right to rule as something laid down by law.
Conclusion Nenad Miscevic, in his article on Nationalism in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, categorizes the concept under two broad parameters, namely, the nationalism that focuses upon the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity, and the actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) some form of political sovereignty. It goes to the credit of the nineteenth century Bengali stage that both the parameters were made integral to the oeuvre of most producers of the theatre thereby establishing the stage as a credible, nationalistic platform for the first time in Indias modern history.
References 1. Banerjee, Brajendranath. Bengali Stage, 1795-1873. Calcutta : Ranjan Publishing House, 1943. 2. Banerjee, Utpal K. Bengali Theatre 200 Years. New Delhi : Publications Division, Government of India, 1999. 3. Chatterjee, Sudipto. Theatre in Colonial Calcutta. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2007. 4. Datta, Michael Madhusudan. Madhusudan Rachanabali. Ed. Kshetra Gupta. Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1982. 5. Guha Thakurata, P. The Bengali Drama: Its Origin and Development. London : Routledge, 2001. 6. Mitra, Dinabandhu: Nil Durpan or the Indigo Planting Mirror, translated by Michael Madhusudan Dutt, edited by Sudhi Pradhan and Sailesh Sen Gupta .Calcutta: Paschimbanga
Natya Academy, 1997. 7. Mukherjee, Sushil Kumar. The Story of the Calcutta Theatres, 1753-1980 . Calcutta : K P Bagchi,1982. 8. Oddie. Geoffrey A., The Aftermath: Nil Durpan, Trial and Imprisonment, Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-Nationalism: James Long of Bengal 181487. London: Routledge, 1999. 9. Pal, Bipin Chandra. Memories of My Life and Times. Calcutta: Modern Book Agency, 1932. 10. Raha, Kironmoy. Bengali Theatre. New Delhi:National Book Trust, 1978.
Web Resources 11. Hindu Nationalism of the Bengali Theatre. on
<http://www.indianetzone.com/60/hindu_nationalism_bengali_theatre.htm> Accessed 04.02.2013.
12. Performing (Domi-)Nation: Aspects of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Theatre.Sudipto Chatterjee. <http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/southasia/TESTold/Sudipto.html> Accessed on 30.01.2013. 13. Miscevic, Nenad, "Nationalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/nationalism/> Accessed on 12.01.2
Rudrashis Datta is Assistant Professor of English at Raiganj B. Ed. College (Government Sponsored), Uttar Dinajpur, West Bengal. His areas of interest include Sri Aurobindo studies, mystical poetry and 19th century Bengali theatre.
Getting Our Bearings: The Unbearable Tagore and Karnads Bearable Dramaturgy
Dattatreya Datta
But man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, ... like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep.
(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, II.2)
Bengal has been sitting pretty on the top rung of modern Indian theatre ladder for a good while now. And our greatest littrateur Tagore has of course been standing head over shoulder above all the Bengali playwrights since his post mortem rehabilitation, not merely as the greatest theatre person of his time, but as the creator of modern Indian theatre idiom itself. Unfortunately, we Bengalis have remained a little too pleased with the situation to notice the growing Indian resentment over this state of affairs. The power players of Indian politics have already done much in promoting Hindi that paradigmatic language of cultural poverty internationally via the UNO to advertise the literary bankruptcy of India (incorporating a culturally disowned Bengal), and the denigration of Bengali culture continues as a part of the same program, unofficially and subversively, through literary agents who for a few titbits of awards and rewards undertake to bark at Bengali culture itself. And who can be a better target here than Tagore, who still pervades Bengali culture as the soul pervades the body? The formula seems to be: bring down Tagore, and the edifice of modern Bengali culture crumbles. Thus it is that we find Girish Karnad dutifully complaining over several past years over Tagores dramaturgy obviously trying to suggest that he can do or has already
done better, and found the true mode of Indian theatre. Now Girish Karnad, putatively the most frequently honoured theatre/film personality of modern India, and a playwright of international recognition, is reputed for his poetic vision of the theatre. In our part of the country he is largely known by his Tughlaq and Hayavadana, to a lesser extent by Nagamandalal, and above all by his dismissal of Tagore as a playwright. To those who have actually seen him in either print or production, the formidable array of his awards and honours justify his reputation in the world of theatre a reputation which, in its turn, justifies his claims to awards.1 Seemingly, it also justifies his claim to critical accolades. Among the leading contemporary theatre persons, Mahesh Dattani has proposed that Karnad has a historic vision, but a timeless voice which makes his plays very universal. Among the literati, the novelist Ananthamurthi has very cogently remarked that Karnad is the poet of drama. The use of history and mythology to tackle contemporary themes gives him the psychological distance to comment on our times.2 The cautious vagueness of timeless voice and psychological distance puts these claims safely beyond the realms of either proof or reproof; and exactly what kind of relevant comment Karnad has been able to make (if at all) on our times through his plays can only be touched upon in a short paper like the present one. However, Karnads one continuous as well as latest public comment on our times is his denigration of Tagores dramaturgy: His plays are unbearable (Times Nation, 9.11.2012, p. 7). Of course this not a critical evaluation of Tagore; for a literate critic knows that he has to substantiate his opinion with evidence: that is, analyses of faults in plays that he denigrates. In the absence of a literate approach on his part, we are obliged to assume that it is his self-evaluation as a superior playwright that endows Karnad with the authority to dismiss a universally respected playwrights dramaturgy and vision of the theatre. Therefore, with proper humility, we may take a look at Karnads best-known play Hayavadana to learn something from his
superior artistry, dramaturgy and theatrical vision (not forgetting his tackling of contemporary themes) but do so objectively, for we are not self-appointed arbiters of what is bearable and what unbearable in drama. For many of his plays, like the one we are about to learn from, Karnad has depended upon Indian classical or folk fables, augmenting them with thematic undercurrents that relate the traditional story to modern sensibilities. Hayavadana is fairly representative of Girish Karnads dramatic style. Together with Nagamandala, it represents Karnads preoccupation with moulding legendary tales for the contemporary audience in an effort to forge a modern Indian theatre idiom. It is also a play of proven theatrical viability. Indeed, its spectators have seldom, if ever, considered either their money or their time ill spent in this respect: it is marvellous entertainment. A comparison of Hayavadana with plays like Tendulkars highly stageworthy Shantata! Court Chalu Ahe or Sakharam Binder also suggests that Karnads theatre is also a healthier one if one may use the expression without prudery inasmuch as he avoids the salacious or the scandalous in favour of the serious in his treatment of sexuality. In his methods Karnad has largely followed the traditional Indian narration-oriented episodic style of the theatre rather than the western characterconflict- causality-based plotting of the action, livening this up, most notably in Hayavadana, with folk entertainment elements such as the Muppet-horse and talking marionettes, a pseudo-Grecian chorus representing the female ethos, and physical actions (mime, mimetic dance, sword-fight) in tandem with issues of modern psychological interest like identity crisis and the populist lovetriangle theme. Yet, after seeing the play, we feel that all this good theatre has inexorably led us to an overwhelming question: What is all this about, and why was the play written at all? We feel an almost palpable central vacuum around which all this theatricality has been built up exactly following Augiers formula of constructing a play like a canon: you take a hole and pour your
bronze around it. We are perturbed by a nagging suspicion that the playwright, too excited over his theatrical and poetic vision (and perhaps a little too eager to make hay while the sun shone the years 1970-72 having bagged him no less than seven awards/recognitions), had not paused to consider whether he possessed a dramatic vision sufficient to make his play meaningful to himself. These would be offensive words if taken as a mere attempt to debunk a representative playwright of our times. We, at least, are not Girish Karnad. If one should have to raise these observations above the level of mere personal reactions to a play for only licensed fools may publicize their unsupported personal comments with impunity one must sweep aside the tinsel of awards and honours that glamorise the persona of the playwright, and look at the play itself, objectively, like an anonymously authored text approached for the first time by a dissatisfied spectator of the play; and try to determine whether the dissatisfaction itself was an illusion or not. This is done best by beginning at the beginning. Hayavadana starts with the Bhagabata doing the Nandi or the auspicious ceremony for a play which purports to depict the story of Devadatta, Kapila, and Padmini a staging of the familiar quiz-story from the Vetalapanchavimshati. But a horse-headed man interrupts it with his tale of woe. He cannot get rid of his equine head. He tells us the story of his misfortune: how his mother had lusted after a horse as her husband; how, given the option to choose between the beastly and the human, and later between the Divine and the beastly, she persistently chose the beast, and was consequently cursed (happily for her!) to spend the rest of her life as a mare revelling in undiluted sexual gratification. The result of that unmixed pleasure is this mixed-up progeny Hayavadana, a freak doomed to lead life as a horse-headed human. He is sent off by the Bhagabata for a katharsis of his inherited sin to the temple of the bounteous Kali (a sanctum scrupulously avoided by people because the goddess there instantly grants everyone everything wished for with calamitous results).
And now, with the eponymous hero safely out of the way, the initially proposed play can begin. We find the contemplative Devadatta and the dynamic Kapila talking about Devadattas newfound love (his sixteenth eternal love in the last two years), and Kapila taking on the task of matchmaking. The project comes off smoothly, barring a few moments of embarrassed puzzlement for Kapila. The mercurial spirit of Padmini is cleverly established here to make her future wiliness a quite probable almost an expected development of her character. In spite of Kapilas admonition that Padmini is too high-spirited for him to tackle, Devadatta marries Padmini and settles down to domesticity. But Padmini is powerfully attracted towards Kapila, whose physical prowess rivals his intellectual torpor. He is comparable, in Padminis eyes, simultaneously to the ape and a celestial Being; and she is potently moved by his physical anima or animal quality (which she would later refer to as his male-ness). Devadatta is aware of this attraction, is jealous, and the complications of the love-triangle begin here. In spite of Devadattas objections, the trio undertake a journey to Ujjain at Padminis insistence. On their way they halt at a spot near the temples of Rudra and Kali. Kapila and Padmini go to visit the Rudra temple, while Devadatta, realizing that his conjugal life is in ruins, decapitates himself at the temple of Kali. Kapila returns with Padmini, finds Devadatta missing, discovers his corpse, and commits an identical suicide. Padmini likewise searches out both the men, and is about to follow suit when the Mother Goddess intervenes. She is pleased with Padmini for her honest admission of her illicit desires, and instructs her in the magical procedure which would resurrect both the friends. But Padmini in apparent mistake puts the severed heads on the wrong bodies (the Mother Goddesss caustic comment on her action is: There should be a limit even to honesty!), and the friends are resuscitated with mismatched heads and trunks. Now they start quarrelling about who is the actual husband of Padmini. Here the first Act ends. The second Act finds Padmini and the now composite Devadatta-Kapila in their new-found
love, expecting the birth of their first child. In their jubilation they buy a pair of dolls for the soonto-arrive baby; but the dolls prove to be extremely snobbish, cynical, inquisitive, and quarrelsome. They hate the rough strength of Devadatta-kapilas hands (also hating it when the same touch becomes soft: sickly soft); consider it disgusting that a mere ball of flesh (the baby) should be lavished with greater care than they; and pry into Padminis dreams about Kapila-devadattas now toughened up virile body. In contrast to this dream figure, Devadatta-kapila visibly reverts to his former weak physique, and his retiring, scholarly way of life. Both the men become self-consistent wholes again under the governing influence of their respective heads. Finally, the dolls fight and tear up each other, and are thrown out of the house as Padmini looks for new toys for her child. Sending Devadatta away to the Ujjain fair once more, she runs away to Kapila now a recluse nursing a grudge against both society and his fate. She satisfies her lust with Kapila for a few days till Devadatta arrives there searching for her. The two old friends meet and fight as rivals now not for victory, but seeking death at each others hands. In a dance-like ritualistic duel, they kill each other. Padmini instructs the Bhagabata to rear her son among the local hunters for five years as the son of Kapila, and then place him with Devadattas father as the son of Devadatta. With that done, she performs the sati rites on the joint funeral pyre of the two friends, unsure of whose sati she is. What happens to the son during the following five years is left to our guesswork. We next meet him when he is about to be taken to Devadattas father. He appears as a boy who never laughs, but clings ferociously to the two dolls that we have seen earlier in the play. He is recognized by these tokens and by an inherited mole on his back. At this point Hayavadana re-enters the stage as a Houyhnhnm a talking horse sans the human body. We hear that the mother-goddess had only partly listened to his prayer to make him homogenous, and in her haste had granted him an equine body instead of a human head. However, he is happy now (like his mother was); but his human
voice still bothers him. So he practises the National Anthem in the hope of removing this last trace of humanity from him. However, seeing a horse talk like a man amuses the boy so vastly that he starts laughing; and at that moment, Hayavadana too loses his human voice and finds his neigh. So there is happiness all around, the tragedy of the trio (the originally proposed play) is dismissed from our minds, and the fun show ends with a prayer to Lord Ganesha. Clearly the play is built at four levels: the play-presentation by Bhagabata (taken from the Yakshagana form), the history and the therapy of Hayavadana (Karnads personal contribution to his source material: the Mann-Zimmer- Betala story), the story of Devadatta-Kapila-Padmini love triangle (lifted from Manns The Transposed Heads); and the story of the dolls (another of Karnads originalities). The arrangement and the proportional weightage of the four sets of actions in the play, or its basic structure, may be charted here at the very outset.3
HAYAVADANA Pages Duration A ct I 10-116 117136 137A ct II 155164 165177 178186 10 13 9 Dolls story (parts I to VI): Discontent; malice; probing Padminis dream. Dolls thrown out. Crisis II: Padmini goes to Kapila. Duel and double death. Padmini becomes a sati. Hayavadana story part II with Bhagabatas formal conclusion of the play. 149 150154 7 20 13 5 Hayavadana story part I. Devadatta-Kapila-Padmini story part I: Love triangle leading to crisis. Crisis I: Double suicide. Padmini saves all. Problem: who is Padminis husband? Devadatta-Padmini story part II: New love. Devadattas physical change leading to crisis. 105109 (in pages) 5
Action content (episodes) Bhagabatas preliminaries for the Devadatta play.
The play begins with an invocation of a God with a transposed head: the elephant-headed Lord Ganesha. This thread runs through the whole of the play barring the episodes of the dolls. After this invocation and introduction to the main plot there comes three pages of sheer comedy, followed by the horse-headed Hayavadanas entry and his gradual exposure before our eyes. Our attention is thus diverted from the main plot (as a foretaste of what is to come). After Hayavadanas departure, the main action commences. It flows smoothly and formally from exposition through complication to climax and a remedied catastrophe to reach a problematic peak. Then we have another diversion: the story of the cynical dolls, presented in a series of episodes interwoven with brief snapshots from the conjugal life of Devadatta and Padmini. The main thread of action is then picked up: Padmini forces a resolution by causing the deaths of the husband-lover-wife trio. Hayavadana re-enters as a transformed creature, Padminis son is made happy, and the play ends with salutations to Lord Ganesha. The structure of the play could thus be profitably looked at in the following manner:
MAIN PLOT Introduced (Bhagabata) Action halted
MAIN ACTION (The Trio) Main Action Interrupted: (The intrude) dolls
MAIN ACTION (The Trio) Action halted
MAIN PLOT Concluded (Bhagabata)
(Hayavadana intrudes)
(Hayavadana intrudes)
Even as early as this in our analysis, it is apparent that Hayavadana is an intruder in the play. He is not actually related to the central action: he forces his way into it, as a kind of premature comic relief, and surfaces again at the conclusion to dispel the tragic gloom proscribed by Indian dramaturgical prescribers. The only excuse for his presence is that he too has a history of an not transposed, but only inherited anomalous head; although his identity crisis in no way matches
those of Devadatta or Kapila. Seemingly, it is only as an afterthought that he is tied up with Padminis son in the finale of the play. His is a story different from that of the central trio; and this story again is not enacted on the stage. It is a mere report: we never witness it, and are not convinced of its reality. This eponymous anomaly in the play therefore is no hero, not even a centrally placed character, but an interloper. (Imagine Twelfth Night being titled as Fabian!) Consequently, we are reduced to the conjecture that Hayavadana is a symbolic presence in the play. But a symbol for what? Whatever he may stand for, clearly, is not what the main story is about. Admittedly his initial situation approximates that of Padminis son towards the end of the play. Yet, with the son himself present on the stage, and the story of his origination already acted out in vivid detail before our eyes, what is the use of bringing in Hayavadana as a symbol at all? Are we to suppose that as his problem is solved by becoming a complete beast, so are Padminis sons problems going to be, by merely returning to his grandfather? Or is it that going back to ones intellectual heritage is equivalent to becoming a complete beast? After reading the play carefully, an erstwhile spectator becomes confirmed in his initial reaction that the play without the horse-headed monster would have gained much in its impact.4 It is to camouflage Hayavadanas innate inconsequentiality that the playwright has desperately tried to render him somehow interesting by adorning his scenes with forced humour: for example, the joke about public urination and the one about the national anthem. But without any relevance to the main action, they appear tasteless in both the senses of the term and fail to fulfil any dramatic purpose. The last one especially singing the national anthem in order to erase the last trace of humanity from ones existence looks like a gratuitous insult offered to the Indian nation at large. Within a narrower perspective, it might even be interpreted as a snide comment on the Sanskrit-based language in which the song is written, or a South Indian comment on North Indian music and culture: including the achievements of Tagore, the author of the song. As an
expression of narrow-minded provincialism, the joke is noxious at best. However, since it won the play the prestigious Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay award for the Best Indian Play, and won its author the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (both in 1972), it is wiser for us to ignore the point. The issue revolves more around the techniques of award-winning than around the art of playwriting. A playwright whose sense of humour exists at the level of scatology, and attempts at satire at the level of insulting his own nation, is certainly expected to find Tagores plays unbearable. It would indeed have been an insult to Tagore if such an author as Karnad spoke appreciatively of Tagores plays; and were he living, Tagore would certainly have been amused by the remark He is a great poet from an author of Karnads calibre. (One remembers Abanindranaths amusement when a monkey stole one of his art works.) The segment of the play which had really caught Karnads imagination, naturally, was the part embodying the staple theme of 19th century melodrama: the theme of the love-triangle. Here the playwright finds himself on home ground. The psychological aspect of the story Karnad presents simplistically enough; but in contrast to the cursory treatment of the Hayavadanas story, the main story gains an almost realistic charge as if the whole mental turmoil of Padmini and the acute suffering of the two heroes due to their identity crises were presented in every detail before our eyes (whereas in reality Karnad spends very little time in depicting these). If one looks for traces of elementary technical training in dramaturgy, one must seek it here in the clever juxtaposition of the fabulous (narrated history of Hayavadana) and the actual (performed story of the trio). There is the further contrast between folk candour and urban suavity in the treatment of the two stories; and the change in the texture of the language is so apparent that it comes through even in a translation. We forget for a moment that the story of the trio is as much a fable (remember the Bhagabata!) as that of Hayavadana, and involve ourselves in the reality of the main plot. Quite expectedly, it is the main story that offers the proper tie-up with modern situations and
sensibilities. Whereas no classical dramatist could have thought of Padmini as anything more than a mere bundle of sexual attributes (sufficiently illustrated by Devadattas initial description of Padmini), Karnad presents Padmini as a woman with a psyche (by simply following Mann, who in turn was inspired by Zimmer but a theatre spectator is not supposed to know all this). At her very first appearance she wins our admiration with her sharp wit and playful temperament. We expect a lot dramatically of such a woman. In the following sequence we come across two more of her characteristic traits: her womanly wily unpredictability, and her craving for a companion to play with. Her playfulness, established earlier in her first encounter with Kapila, justifies this development: she is unwilling to remain bound to a book-worm who lacks the courage even to do his own wooing for himself. The adventurousness, the dare, the risk-taking capabilities in short the alpha male qualities of Kapila attract her, with the natural consequence of a strong sexual magnetism growing between the two. There is perhaps nothing new or too intricate here in this character study, but the excellent economy of its delineation elicits our admiration. Yet, the playwright quickly loses confidence in his power to sustain our theatrical interest in this well-handled melodrama, and suddenly breaks off to introduce further theatrical novelties with the help of talking marionettes and aware that this may be a great taxation on the technical resources of any theatre group, allows that the dolls may be substituted by live children. This instantly raises the question: children of what size and age that they would look like a babys playthings, and yet deliver the dialogues allotted to them? Even if they are marionettes and sizeable enough to possess mobile limbs, jaws, and eyes, how convincing would they look as a neonates toy? The second Act begins with the trios problem apparently solved, but giving rise to another complication and leading to another crisis. Devadattas story is actually interrupted in terms of theatre by the ten-page-long chain of dolls episodes. Somehow pasted on to the main action,
these episodes nonetheless remind us that in the previous Act, the naive but stylistically harmonious technique of aside/monologue was used for the exposition of Padminis mental state, whereas in the second Act, the rather theatrical trick of the talking dolls is being exploited for the same purpose. Moreover, the dolls hardly seem to contribute anything significant to the action or the situation itself. They talk about the doll-makers assessment of their worth; and also of their possible lack of appreciation in their new abode. They look like idle allegories of vanity. We might interpret them as signifying dissent entering into the Devadatta-Padmini household; but they do not even talk about that. What makes us consider theirs a separate story in the play is that they have concerns distinct from that of the main characters: concerns about their position in the household, their future prospect, and so on. All through they remain outsiders; and their references to the dollmaker and other might-have-been customers (outsiders all to the main action of the play) also confuse us as to the cause of their presence, distracting our attention from the main story. They repeat information already provided by the main characters (like Devadattas body degenerating from toughness to flabbiness), and make unpleasant comments about both the process of childbearing and the newborn. In short, having introduced the dolls, the playwright is now in a quandary about what to do with them. In a similar situation, a self-respecting playwright would have quietly struck the doll episodes off his play; but Karnad, convinced of his imagined brilliancies, is unable to discard even a particle of his erratic brain-waves. Yet, discard the dolls is exactly what he is obliged to do in the end. Here is a summary view of the doll fiasco of the play: 1. The dolls arrive at the house. (Purposelessly critical of the household). 2. Six months later: the child is born. (Disgust. Needlessly adverse reaction to the baby). 3. Devadatta is turning soft. (Tiring reiteration of already known facts; the dramatist is running short of inventions). 4. Spying on Padminis dream (a): an unknown visitor. (The changed Kapila, already shown on
stage). 5. Spying on Padminis dream (b): the visitor identified (as Kapila, ditto). 6. Spying on Padminis dream (c): suggested dream-adultery (with Kapila) ... The dolls fight, mangle each other, and are thrown out. (The playwright admits defeat: his power of invention is exhausted and he discards the dolls.) Even C. E. Montagues remarks (apropos of Labiche): it takes a master-joiner to make such a mess of a play, without making more seems too generous for Karnad. Playmaking couldnt have been any messier than this. One might argue that the dolls are needed to indicate the passage of time: which indeed they do in a way. But the short scenes from the main story interpolated between the doll-episodes represent the same passage in more concrete and more relevant theatrical terms. A playwright with enough self-confidence would have considered these short scenes sufficient to serve the above purpose. Further, other established and handy theatrical techniques for indicating passage of time (e.g. use of light and music) would have served the purpose better, because they would not have distracted our attention from the main action by indulging in useless verbiage about the dolls snobbery and pettishness etc. One feels that the dolls have come into the play not to serve any dramatic purpose, but rather to showcase the fact that Karnad was a Homi Bhaba Fellow in creative work in Folk Theatre. (Else, their pettifogging, their irrelevance, and their ultimate fate would seem to be the authors clairvoyant self-portrayal as a playwright.) As a result, there is no way left to the playwright but to tear the dolls to rags and banish them from the play and conscious of having indulged in irrelevancies, make them reappear mysteriously in the hands of Padminis son at the end of the play.5 Of course as an afterthought: for, where did the jungledwelling boy find the mangled dolls discarded years ago at home? However, there still remains the defence of depth psychology: the argument that through the
dolls Karnad delves into the innermost thoughts of his heroine by revealing her dreams to us: obliquely, and thereby, convincingly. Thanks to the dolls, dull sublunary spectators come to know of the subconscious desire still active within Padmini, and understand why it is imperative for her to visit Kapila again. (This is to admit that the foregoing part of the plays action was mismanaged enough to fail to arouse in the spectator an expectation of this possibility.) Unfortunately, neither the female chorus with their exquisite poetry, nor the Bhagabata the traditional theatrical omniscient present on the stage are considered qualified enough to reveal the dreams of Padmini to us. They just sit idle: useless human sacks oozing fat on the stage. Another proof of their total incompetence is the fact that although the Bhagabata had been quite forward in suggesting a remedy for the intruder Hayavadanas problem, he is at a complete loss over the problems of Padmini and her son although purportedly he was presenting the history of this particular group. He also becomes an irrelevant figure in his functional aspect: just an ornament to decorate the stage with. The psychological issue relates directly to our contention that Karnads significant achievement in this play is to have endowed Padmini with a very complex psyche a contention further strengthened by the female chorus who metaphorically sing the praise of multiple love: a very cautiously worded philosophy of polyandry. Indeed, in Karnads hands the dry intellectual problem of the Betalapanchavimshati becomes the lived and suffered problem of a woman in whom we may discover the modern feminine ethos and its attendant desires and dilemmas. Hers is a question of choice and she cannot make the choice because apparently she wants the best of both the worlds: that of Devadatta, and that of Kapila. Or does she really? Looking objectively at the play, one finds Padmini lamentably attached only to the physical aspect of love. The intellectual status of Devadatta has no attraction at all for her: indeed, in this she closely follows her prototype from the Panchavimshati. In the four major phases that we see her, we find her
1. Prolonging her first interview with Kapila by teasing him mercilessly (a foretaste of her future flirtations); 2. Married to Devadatta, but evincing an increasing attachment to the alpha male Kapila 3. Greatly in love with the transposed Devadatta as the possessor of Kapilas physique 4. Bearing Devadattas son, but dreaming of Kapilas virility 5. Rejecting Devadattas soft embraces and going into the wilderness to spend a few days with Kapila, now possessed of a toughened physique. Her earlier intellectual alacrity leaves her completely, and she becomes a plaything of only her physical passions. This is certainly not a flattering not even a responsible picture of the feminine psyche; and it reflects the rather tatterdemalion male chauvinistic view of women: found, for example, in The Arabian Nights and such other titillating tales of antiquity, as well as in modern pornographic fantasies (and of course, in Karnads historic vision of womankind). If the play is about the glorification of feminine desire (the female chorus certainly tempts one to imagine so), Karnad has set that desire a rather degrading limit. It has been said that Mann had deliberately named her heroine Sita to ironically highlight her lack of sexual restraint that is symbolized in the Mother Goddess Kali. Following him, it seems, Karnad has named her heroine Padmini to ironically suggest her implied hastini nature. (So much for Ananthamurthis appreciation of Karnads comments on our times from a psychological distance.) Our doubts in this regard are allayed by Karnads deliberate preface to the main plot: the history of Hayavadanas mother the woman who persistently refused both the human and the Divine in favour of bestial sexual congress. But whereas Hayavadanas mother was in effect rewarded for her single-minded pursuit of carnality, Padmini, ever lusting after adultery, has to
perform the sati to establish her fidelity. This rite is the real symbol of her attempt to make the best of both the worlds satisfy her adulterous cravings by subterfuge, and yet remain the epitome of chastity in the eyes of society. Taking up a highly-sexed witty woman as his central character, Karnad ends up by making a cheat and a hypocrite out of her. Apropos of the healthier theatre mentioned apologetically at the opening of this article, we should here add that one would rather have on stage a daring Tendulkar who knows how to handle his theme than a faint-hearted Karnad who bungles his play through timidity. Karnad should have followed Kapilas advice and not meddled with Padmini at all. With his degree of understanding of Character, he should have chosen a melodramatic heroine who is only and solely faultless, with no other qualities at all. Yet, one cannot help feeling that Karnad, had he really wanted to celebrate female sexuality in its utter abandon, would have eschewed the model of his western masters, and reverted instead to the original Indian version of the Betala story where Kapila is not a friend of Devadatta, but the sibling brother of Padmini. There the wise King Vikrama grants Padmini the right to enjoy her brother sexually with her husbands head superimposed on his body. It was a much bolder acknowledgement of the right of the woman to choose her most closely known and dependable male as her consort much bolder than what a European author playing for a bit of safe sex in fiction might dare. The practice of sibling-marriage existed in the pre-Aryan cultures of India, as indicated in the Yama-Yami story of the Vedas: with Yami desiring congress with her brother Yama according to the pre-Aryan matriarchal custom, and Yama rejecting her advances, imposing Aryan patriarchal strictures on her desire.6 The prevalence of this ancient custom is also proven by the oldest traceable version of the Ramayana story: the Buddhist Dasaratha Jataka, where Rama, Laxmana, and Sita are siblings, with Rama married to Sita. Such a triad was also glorified to the status of divinity not only in the case of the transformed classical Rama-Sita-Laxmana triad, but also in the Jagannatha-Balarama-Subhadra trinity: a brothers-and-sister triad still worshipped by the
multitude in modern India. In short, to write an Indian play, it is better to explore Indian culture rather than peep into German books. One would not be far off the mark to say that Karnads distaste of Tagores plays stems from his philosophy of enriching Indian folk theatre by aping sundry westerns gurus. So finally we are obliged to play the last card in our hands: the classical story has no hint of a progeny or of the problem regarding its identity (fortunately the German stories have else, where would Karnad get his ideas from?), while the play Hayavadana grapples bravely with the problem, bringing into focus the social implications of Padminis actions over and above the individual psychological crises and philosophical dilemmas. Unfortunately, however, the play is so constructed that the distressing condition of the son gets short shrift, apart from an apologetic note from the playwright that the boy has never laughed (he is unable to provide a cogent reason for this). The boys problem is not dwelt upon in any detail that might make us feel its gravity; and his alter-embodiment Hayavadana, whose mock-seriousness hardly conceals his obvious enjoyment of life, robs the boy of whatever seriousness the spectators of their own accord might endow his situation with. Theatrically speaking, Hayavadanas initial distress had looked funny to us because of the way it was presented on stage; and when he finally comes in with the tale of the miscarriage of the boon, he is funnier still. We are yet to know a spectator who has not laughed heartily at his predicament. Of course, there is nothing wrong with his enjoyment of life, or ours; but the fun that emanates from Hayavadana impacts the child also, making his situation humorously enjoyable to us and can we be blamed if we conclude that the restoration of this boy to the house of his official progenitor rids us of the bother (including the play itself), and that everybody would be living happily ever after? Without Hayavadana, the tragic dilemma of feminine desire in a male-dominated world might have concluded the play with a bang. With the last entry of its eponymous interloper, it is reduced to a whimper.
A bearable play is supposed at least to hold the answer to a basic question about itself: what is it about? But whatever angle Karnads masterpiece is approached from, this question engenders a series of structural as well as thematic questions which expose the messy nature of Karnads dramatic imagination. For example: 1. Is Hayavadana a play about Hayavadana? Then how does the Padmini story clarify or comment on Hayavadanas plight, problem, and solution? Why is the Padmini story several times longer than that of Hayavadana? Why is Padminis story enacted, and Hayavadanas story merely narrated? If the play is not about Hayavadana, why is it titled after him? 2. Is the play about Padmini and her problem? Then how does Hayavadanas presence help us understand Padminis plight, problem, and end? Is it Hayavadanas mothers bestiality that is relevant to the interpretation of Padminis story? Is Padminis relationship with Kapila to be interpreted as a sign of her sexual bestiality? If so, why should we be interested in the story of a single woman with such a sexual perversion? Is it very universal, as Dattani suggests? Or does the author tell us that for women, extra-marital sexual relation is a universal sign of sexual bestiality? 3. Is the play about Hayavadanas mothers problem illustrated through the Padmini story? Then why is Hayavadana, and not his mother, focussed on in the play? 4. Is the play about Padminis dilemma and the outcome of her choice seen in the light of Hayavadanas mothers history? But Hayavadanas mother never was in a dilemma; and we know nothing about how she ended her career. Then how does her history shed light on Padminis? How do their stories support or clarify each other? 5. Is the play more about the solution than about the problem? In other words, is it focussed on the two products of unbridled female sexuality? Then why dont the solutions to the problems of Hayavadana and Padminis son throw light on each other? Why is Padminis son
brought in as a mere appended character in the play? How do we know that he is aware of his problem of identity? Why are Hayavadana and the child placed as peripherals to the main story, and why is the history of Padminis son not simply narrated, like Hayavadanas is? 6. Finally, is the play about anything at all? If yes, why does it raise so many awkward questions? Why cant it tell us anything about itself? Thus in the final analysis Hayavadana impresses us like a pulp fiction from a Railways book shop. The story is a melodrama (of Padmini, with a few inserts of the authors recently won fellowship), backed and fronted by the hard covers of a skit (of Hayavadana), and the package handed over the counter glamourized by a gift wrapper (of Indian classical theatre). In its artistic methods, drama is much like sculpture: it achieves its form by meticulously chipping away the inessentials. It fails dismally when one tries to pack into it all the theatrical resources at hand; and it fails equally if all the uncoordinated poetico-socio-psycho-anthropophilosophical perplexities of a learned author struggle for room within a single presentation, 7 that has to impress the spectator with only a brief and fleeting experience. 8 One cannot simply pour in tragic dilemmas of feminine desire, digs at National sentiments, quarrelsome dolls, quaint monsters, serious poetry, mime, sexual perversion, folk theatre forms, urban scepticism, choric songs, bungling goddesses, problems of identity, and sundry other items into a pseudo-literary bottle, shake it well before use, and pour out good drama. Drama is not poetry that it would grow as it meanders wherever the poet lets his fancy roam, trusting to the relaxed readers intermittent attention encapsulated from the intrusion of other stimuli. Drama thrives on economy: deriving its power and thrust from the strict rejection of the superfluous. It exists on the razor-sharp clarity of the authors mind regarding what precisely he intends to convey to his audience. If the author himself has no inkling of it, hed better not write plays. From our experience of Hayavadana, we are obliged to accede to Ananthamurthys
unconscious sarcasm in his remark that Karnad is at best merely a poet in the theatre: prone to stuff a single play with everything that catches his eager fancy of the moment, and not take time either to discard some or assimilate them into a streamlined vision of the action and the purpose of the play. A poetaster of theatre would have described him even better. He has intruded into the world of theatre like his creation Hayavadana, and like him, has at last found his true voice that we hear in his denigration of Tagore. Moreover, the Mother Goddess, in restoring Hayavadana to his birthright, had automatically granted him the boon to urinate in public without fear of censure and we have a shrewd guess that he is happily continuing to do so. As we hear, Karnads youthful aspiration had been to become a great poet; and perhaps his failure in that field has driven him to seek success in a medium for which he is eminently unsuited. Tagores superhuman mastery over both the media is a matter of envy to mankind, and Karnad has remained, alas, human, all too human at heart. He doesnt even know the Bengali language, and his dramatic acumen, as revealed in the above analysis, does not qualify him even to read Tagores plays, let alone understand them. Aristotle had said that a dramatist should speak little in propria persona, that is to say, the playwright should not intrude into his play in his own persona. Indeed, no great playwright has ever done so. The poet, arguably, may present himself in his poem, but never the dramatist in his play. When he does so, it becomes a poetic interference. Karnads poetic vision is best exemplified by his two original contributions to the Mann-Betala story, neither of which can be explained except as projections of the authors personality in the play. The first is the pair of sneaking dolls, with their snobbish, selfish, quarrelsome nature, and their irrelevant talk. The second is the piss-happy Hayavadana himself, with his delight in neighing, and his equine insults to the symbols of national pride and national culture. And both, by their total irrelevance to the play, symbolize their creators irrelevance to the world of theatre. Poetically speaking, if there is any meaning in the play, it must be sought in the casting-out of the dolls from the play, and in Hayavadanas transformation into a
horse. Drama is essentially a structure of interrelated happenings; and Karnad, valiantly rushing in where angels fear to tread, has tried his hand at the most difficult of all the dramaturgical techniques in Hayavadana: the combination of several disparate happenings into a significant and unified structure. His failure in this attempt is demonstrated most clearly in the insertion of the dolls story which sticks out like a sore thumb at the very centre of his play; and to a lesser extent by the useless Hayavadana peripheral. But difficult endeavours need not necessarily court failure. One needs only compare the play with Badal Sircars Baki Itihaas or Pagla Ghora where three even four separate stories are fused together to form a seamless whole and make complete statements that demand of the spectators no initiation into obscure western philosophical doctrines, and convey clear-cut, albeit problem-oriented, central ideas. For Karnads other fumbling attempt the fusion of folk theatre elements and the urban theatrical idiom, one may profitably compare his play with Manoj Mitras stupendous Kinu Kaharer Thaytar where an actual theatrical practice of the folk repeatedly dissolves into folk realities to create a humorous, yet nerve-shattering picture of the life of the downtrodden and of international politics. But then, Manoj Mitra knew this folk theatre form and folk life not through Fellowships, but through first-hand experience. That is where he had the advantage over Karnad. And if one wishes to look within urban theatre for an example where the problem of identity of reality itself is both poetically and funnily explored in a theatre-within-theatre-withintheatre structure, where theatre becomes a reality and reality intrudes as theatre one only has to witness Nabhendu Sens Nayan Kabirer Pala. Even for basic instructions in the art of transforming ancient fables into plays of modern realities, Karnad might profitably look into Manoj Mitras Rajdarshan and Mesh O Rakshash. These authors succeeded grandly because they knew their job: they were dramatists not poets of the theatre. The fact that Karnad has learnt nothing from
his contemporary playwrights suggests that his thoughts were focussed more on the awards to be captured than on learning the art of playwriting. It occurs to us as an afterthought therefore that Karnads desperate denigration of Tagore springs from the panic of an aged author who finally feels his grip loosening on the bountiful strings, fears a cessation of awards, and is now courting notoriety as a last desperate measure to remain in the public eye. Still, in an age in which fumbling dramaturgy is considered the hallmark of poetic drama (one despondently thinks of Shakespeare!) the name of Girish Karnad must stand out among the Indian playwrights because of his confused vision of the theatre. The traditional story he messes up in the Hayavadana surely would not have irritated us without his piecemeal imagination, his unsound sense of construction, his lop-sided scholarship, and his whole-hearted misogyny. But one must not forget his famous dual award of 1972; and whatever the degree of the bearability of Hayavadana, we theatre people shall be obliged to take our hats off to this bungling author for his exercises in ineptitude but respectfully, from a distance because official fame seldom survives close scrutiny. Endnotes
1. Karnads prodigious aptitude for winning awards may be gauged from the following no doubt incomplete list:
1. Mysore State Award for Yayati (1962) 2. Government of Mysore Rajyotsava Award (1970) 3. Presidents Gold Medal for Samskara (Best Indian film) (1970) 4. Homi Bhabha Fellowship for creative work in folk theatre (1970-72) 5. Sangeet Natak Academy Award for playwriting (1972) 6. Kamaladevi Award for the Best Indian play of the year for Hayavadana (1972), 7. Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (Excellence in Direction, shared with B.V. Karanth) (1972) 8. Mysore State Award for the Vamsha Vriksha (Best Kannada film and the Best Direction) (1972) 9. Presidents Silver Medal for Kaadu (Second Best Indian film) (1974) 10. Padma Shri Award (1974) 11. National Award for Ondanondu Kaaladalli (Best Kannada film) (1978) 12. National Award for Bhumika (Best Script, shared with Shyam Benegal and Satyadev Dubey) (1978) 13. Film Fare Award for Godhuli (Best Script, shared with B.V. Karanth) (1978) 14. Bengal Film Journalists Association Award for the Best Actor in Swami (1978) 15. Karnataka Nataka Academy Award (1984)
16. Nandikar, Calcutta, Award for Playwriting (1989) 17. Golden Lotus for Purandara ( Best Non-Feature Film) (1989) 18. National Award for The Lamp in the Niche (Best Non-Feature Film on Social Issues) (1990) 19. "Writer of the Year" Award from Granthaloka Journal of the Book Trade for Taledanda (1990) 20. Karnataka State Award for Shishunala Shareef (Best Supporting Actor) (1991) 21. Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award for Nagamandala ( Most Creative Work) (1992) 22. B.H. Sridhar Award for Taledanda (1992) 23. Padma Bhushan Award (1992) 24. Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award for Taledanda (Best Play) (1992) 25. Booksellers and Publishers Association of South India Award (1992) 26. National Award for Cheluvi ( Best Film on Environmental Conservation) (1993) 27. Special Honour Award from the Karnataka Sahitya Academy (1994) 28. Gubbi Veeranna Award (1996-97) 29. Jnanpith Award (1999)
30. ... And other lesser awards. 2. Both quotes are from Kalidas, S. And Merchant, R., Renaissance Man [source: http://india-
today/12041999/arts.html] 3. The text followed here is Karnad, Girish, Collected Plays Vol. I: Tughlaq; Hayavadana; Bali (OUP 2006). The temporal duration of stage actions never tallies with the space a text occupies in print. The printed spatial durations given here only tenuously represent the time taken on the stage. They may be profitably taken as indications of their relative durations on the stage. 4. Hayavadana is a monster in the original technical sense of the term: monstra vocantur quia monstrant called a monster because he demonstrates the result of the sin committed by his mother. 5. Padmini and her son did not bring the dolls with them when they came to Kapila ( Hayavadana, p. 166). A playwright worth his salt almost instinctively keeps track of these matters because while he writes he sees the whole play happening before his eyes both sequentially and simultaneously. Note also that Kapila lifts her [Padmini] up and takes her in to the same hut where the child was resting (p. 171) a situation Mann was careful to avoid. What does Karnad imply by locating Kapilas action there? 6. Also in the Aryan tradition: see the Rig-Veda: VI.55.4 [Pushan and his sister]; VI.55.4 [Agni, (born of sibling marriage, I.91.7) and his sister]; the Bible in the Hebrew tradition: Adam and Eve, Lot and his daughter, and Gen 20:12 [Abraham speaks of Sarah: Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not of my mother; and she became my wife."] Compare the myth of Freyr and Freya in the Norse, and the marital practice of the Pharaos in the Egyptian traditions.
7. Ganesha is hailed as an embodiment of imperfection: with a beasts head on a human body. Does his beastly head dominate his divine body? Then why does Hayavadana search for perfection? He too has a beastly head! Does Ganeshas divine body dominate his head? Then why do the heads of Devadatta and Kapila transform their bodies and not vice versa? What happens, finally, to the social identity of Padminis son? 8. This is best brought out by a contemporary reading of the play by a literary critic of acknowledged merit: ...The simple story of Betal becomes a rich complex story of modern sensibility in which the Lacanian notions of desire and lack [1], Freudian id [2], Sartrian existentialism and atheism [3 & 4], Brechtian expressionism [5] and Strindbergian symbolism [6], Bakhtinian carnivalization and feminism [7 & 8] and above all search for identity and completeness [9] are all fused in a harmonious whole. (Mohit. K. Roy, Hayavadana: A Study of Karnad's Use of Source-Texts and Folk Form, in (ed) Kundu, Rama, Indian Writing in English, p. 209); I have inserted numbers in square brackets to keep track of Karnads bottomless profundities). [source: http://books.google.co.in]. Even without questioning the claim that all this has been fused into a harmonious whole, one feels pity at the plight of the poor spectator who is ex-spected to realize all this within a couple of hours at most, with the better part of his attention engaged in empathizing with the characters, absorbing the multiple audio-visual stimuli of the stage, and pursuing the progress of the action.
Dr. Dattatreya Datta is Professor, Department of Drama at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata.
The Lonely Crusaders Journey: Sambhu Mitra and His Theatre

Gautam Sengupta
At the outset The truly rich history of Bengali theatre having never been fully written, it has never been possible either to offer a genuine history of what Sambhu Mitra aimed at throughout his life. Even in self exiled seclusion he did not desert the dream of making it successful till blindness and death made him absolutely incapable. This unique figure had definitely had his limitations, including the pride of a genius and outbursts of anger that is temperamental of an esoteric individual. This is a task which should begin somewhere by somebody not in the interest of Mitra and his personal legacy, but in the interest of the rich legacy of theatre in Bengal as a whole.
The hours of creation It was a difficult task for Mitra, given that he was out to build up a richer but different legacy of Bengali Theatre in the post-Bhaduri era. Right from the age of melodrama, farce, historical play and social tragedy, theatre in Bengal had been dominated by individuals, and sometimes by actormanagers like Girish Ghosh (who was a writer too) or Sisir Bhadhuri. But such an individual had to function against a dated background; sometimes such an artist's histrionic talent did not receive the play, the playwright and the play house that it needed badly. At this juncture came up IPTAs Nabanna, wherein Bijan Bhattacharya underscored the human values under the thrust of the famine of the forties. IPTA signaled the beginnings of a new avenue for Mitra, though he could not stick to it for long. As Jyotirindra Moitra wrote (and Mitra recited), The delirious fever has set into the bones of this age of decadence(translation mine), the Young Sambhu Mitra was to search through the proscenium a route to a better humanity. The urge was so genuine that it burst through the tentacles
of IPTA which had to obey the dictates of the undivided Communist Party of India. Around the end of the forties, when P.C. Joshi was removed from the secretaryship and B.T. Randive stepped in, the octopus' pressure kept growing on great artists like Mitra, George Biswas, Ritwik Ghatak, Uday Shankar, to name only a few. It was in 1948 when the final break-up took place; it so happened that a week after Gandhis assassination (1948) Mitra came out of IPTA. The individuals journey began under the pressure from a deluge of darkness. To illustrate this critical point in Mitra's trajectory, it will not be irrelevant to quote an important statement from Ibsens, A Dolls House which Mitra was to stage later in 1962 (his own adaptation) as the keynote to his long journey: 'Nothing can hinder the lonely individuals fearless stance. Nothing really.' Having come out of IPTA, it was Maharshi Monoranjan Bhattcharyas advice that showed Mitra the way: Why are we eating our hearts out ? Lets do something. Weve nothing to quarrel about. Lets begin it in our own way. Ive seen many things getting broken... create something new. Create it in a manner which will persist. Their individual initiatives and collective-national urges merged at a significant moment to give birth to Bohurupee. The stage that existed prior to independence, the social disasters Bengal suffered in the 1940s, the post-partition malady of Bengal came together to replace an overmelodramatized and purposeless stage of the later Bhaduri period in Bengali theatre. The new currents merged together to create a basic desire: We will perform good theatre in a good manner . Here the term theatre stood for basically good social values, a spectrum of light that will not only illuminate peoples mind, but breed a sense of betterment in them. Later, it was married to a movement for the creation of National Theatre that was originally conceived by Sisir Bhaduri. Sambhu Mitra, Tripti Mitra and others laboured hard to create plays which, without getting disconnected from world drama, would bear the stamp of Indias National Theatre. The projects materialized and then were shattered a number of times, but Mitra never gave up. Commitment to
and command over his art bred a continuity in him, though disillusionment set in, but he remained hopeful like his own Chand Banik in Chand Baniker Pala. The darkness was light enough for him, throughout his lifetime. From Nabanna to Chhenra Taar, Bohurupee developed its own tune during the period of 1948 1952, reflecting on the social milieu of the time. It is remarkable to note that Mitra and his troupe did not have any so-called political bias or any established form of drama to adhere to. The search went on and on, until Mitra embarked on the plays of Rabindranath. Not that Tagore was a ready road to success. Muktadhara was later staged and proved a failure. But in Char Adhyay (1951) the freedom struggle waged by the revolutionaries (called terrorists by the British) with all its intensity and in-fighting, love and bickering, seemed to be the drama of the day which reflected the nationalist and the communist politics of the day as well as became the mirror in which, via Tagore, an individual could see his own crisis mirrored. But it was disturbing, too. Even to the politically oriented people, it seemed delirious. Only decades later it seemed a correct vision in retrospect. Sambhus contemporary (slightly senior) Chinmoy Sehanobish deplored the dissection. It seemed to him a betrayal of the communist struggle. It was only later that he confessed his fault and the righteousness of Mitras vision. Amal Roy, a pro-naxalite dramatist and essayist, deplored its depiction of darkness behind the struggle but finally admitted the truth in Mitras play. It was impossible for Mitra to be otherwise. A genius always has to create his own ground. He may seem individualized and egoistic, even disturbing, but his conscience will not allow him to become anything else but a true artist. There may be different versions of this struggle from different points of view and many would not admit the greatness of Mitras unique vision. Still it was and continues to be true for all generations.
Dasachakra, Raja, Raja Oedipaus: light through darkness Personal identity is difficult to be chalked out. Against the backdrop of social and emotional crises,
it is not merely important to explore one's identity, but to stick to it is also necessary. Hatred, envy and calumny did their bits to disturb Mitra. In 1970 he wrote: To enrich theatre , one needs classic plays which can be interpreted newly every age or from age to age ... plays can not be factory made. Thus Dasachakra (Adaptation Of Ibsens An Enemy Of The People) And Putul Khela (Ibsens A Dolls House) were born of western drama of ideas as well as interpretations of individual entities in a complexity-ridden world. In 1972 he wrote: We want to create a new kind of dramatic art, wherein all grades of actors would create a complex mode. It is imperative to point out how the theme and structure of Dasachakra & Putulkhela embodied the individuals struggle against the pressures of social norms. In these classic liberal plays, social norms create a sort of mentally tough pressure against which the individual requires a great capacity to stick to his/her originality. Though both the productions were great models of composite art, they can be seen as the exploration of the individuals destiny (in this case, Mitras destiny) too. At this juncture, the Bohurupee drama festival in 1964 staged Raja (The King of the Dark Chamber by Tagore) & Raja Oedipaus (Edipus Tyrannus by Sophocles), both of which seek truth as liberator. The process is painful, the impact disturbing but the discovery is precious. In Raja, it is Sudarsana who discovers the truth in relation to her own self while in Oedipaus it is King Oedipaus who has to discover the truth at the cost of his cursed life. In both the journey from darkness to light is the central theme, focused on the crisis in every individuals life. Raja begins with the cry for light (Where is the light?) and Oedipaus ends with a cry, Apollon! Let me see you once more, the protagonist having blinded himself and going out in search of truth.
Break-up in Bohurupee: Chand Baniker Pala: blindness It was deeply disheartening for Mitra to observe how some of his compatriots deviated from his
own, carefully nurtured norms. He wanted to create an ambiance of learning and an aura of intellectuality which would not only make the production an example of consummate artistry but also create better human beings in a crumbling world. But chaos was there, too. There were shifts and divides within Bohurupee itself ensuing in a hiatus that led Mitra to a state of exile. But his indomitable vision led him to write the ever unproduced Chand Baniker Pala. He read it several times on public forum in his indomitably tuned voice. Perhaps it was his testament to his age and his stage. A reworking of the age old Chand Saudagar myth collected from Manasamangal, this play in a sense echoed lines from Tagores Balaka: paths have to be sewn/ boats have to create new shores/ the boatman calls/ the moment at the port has come to an end . In the play Chands compatriots mistrust him, desert him and the false persons (like Subarna in Raja) triumph; still the man at the helm has to steer on and on: pari dao, pari dao (move onward, move onward) says he, much like Ulysses of Tennysons poem of the same name.
Coda: his last testament Almost echoing Tagores immortal lines, 'O my indifferent world/ Before you forget me wholly/I would place my salutation at your cruel feet' (translation mine), Mitra said in his last testament: 'Many common persons have loved me and honoured my tasks. They were humbly done on the basis of their support on the face of many adversities. I tender my most sincere regards at their feet'. The Bengali stage has seen other artists of ability. But destiny-makers are few and far between. Sambhu Mitra was such an individual whose inner light made him forever uneasy. He was never at rest, busy in etching out a better avenue for mankind through drama. He wanted better plays, better stage and better men so that better human beings could be created. Even in death he shunned publicity, trying to live through his art and art alone. As a devoted worker of the Bengali theatre, he fought his own crusade silently till death. Like all crusaders he was abused and lies were
showered on him. Having tolerated all slanders, he was insistent on giving whatever little he could. Little, but gigantic indeed in the context of Bengali theatre, steps yet to be blotted out even after his death.
References 1.Mitra, Shaonli. Sambhu Mitra (1915-1997). NBT, 2008. 2.Mitra, Shaonli (Ed.). Sambhu Mitra: Dhyane O Antardhane. 3.Mitra, Sambhu. Sanmarga. M C Sarkar & Sons Pvt Ltd, 2002. 4.Mitra, Sambhu. Abhinay, Natok, Mancha. Saptarshi Prakashan, 2009.
Dr Gautam Sengupta is Associate Professor of English at Gurudas College, Kolkata and Guest Faculty at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. He is a member of International Shaw Society. He has attended and presented papers at several national and international conferences including the International Shaw Conference, USA in 2004.
Open Air Theatre in Bengal

Dani Karmakar
Open Air Theatre is an effective idiom of theatre both in terms of text and form. It undoubtedly plays a vital role in development of society, family values and spread of science, political ideology. Like any other art form it is creative and unique. Campaign has been implicit in this form of theatre and it has been exhaustively used as a tool of political campaigns by the left movement in Bengal. The origin of open air theatre in West Bengal and its distinct characteristics may be traced in details from the pages of history. Veteran nationalist and communist author, Bireswar Bandyopadhyay, in his book, Patha natoker Katha, writes: Open air theatre has been existing in our country since ancient times. It was particularly visible on the eve of deity worship and processions. Throughout the country, it was a part of royal huntings, mrigayaa. The Shawng, which came out on the roads in various occasions in 19th century Bengal, is also open air theatre. The open air theatre form found application in the worship of deities like Manasa & Sheetala, also in traditional and folk forms like the Khal of West Dinajpur, Leto of Birbhum, Chor Churni of North Bengal, Palatia of Jalpaiguri and Shawng of Kolkata, as already quoted. In the 4th decade of the last century, a crisis was developing around the world and India as Fascism found strong a foothold in Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan. As situations leading up to the World War II intensified, the national movement gained strength in home front, in the midst of worldwide economic depression, unemployment, famine and poverty. With all other political forces working towards independence completely banned, communists fully utilized the fact of being in the good books of the British. An organization of students called Youth Cultural Institute started visiting the rural Bengal with cultural presentations comprising theatre, music etc. The Student Federation squads also ventured into villages of Bengal for their campaigns and this laid down the foundation of the IPTA or Bharatiya Gananatya Sangha. This was during the early 1940s when the communists of India collaborated with the British in fighting against a common enemy, i.e. fascism. The Pragati Lekhak Sangha may be mentioned here in this connection, as it was another cultural
front of the communists. Coming back to YCI, it produced some plays like In the heart of China, written by a University student named Debabrata Basu. The show of this play was attended by the Chinese Consul General in Kolkata. The settings were done by putting up Chinese posters. The period witnessed flow of information as well as scripts from the Chinese Mass Theatre movement, no doubt facilitated by the British as a tactful strategy. One such Chinese play, Strange Meeting was performed by the Bombay branch of IPTA in English. It was written by Chinese mass theatre organizer Ting Ling. There was a demand for these kind of scripts which is evident from the following advertisement published in Janajuddha magazine, the communist mouthpiece: Bengals encounter Japan is imminent. The villages of Bengal have to be aroused to resist the Japanese fascists. The mass theatre is a great means to that end. We hereby call upon patriotic authors and mass movement activists to write short plays effective for the masses. The play should have the following characteristics-(i) it should be fit to be staged in open air; should not be demanding in terms of set & costume; should be more like a Jatra, and (ii)language should be easy enough for the common uneducated masses to understand easily; (iii) the subject should be strongly anti Japanese and should be able to drive people emotionally against them; (iv)it should be concise preferably within an hour or an hour & half.(Janajuddha; Pathanatok: Ajker Bhavna- a collection by Shantimoy Guha). It is interesting to note how the communist party completely sidelined the question of national independence by harping on the Japanese question, as they were under instructions from the British. On July 7th, 1942 the Students Federation organized a public meeting to commemorate the China Diwas and a play named Japan Ke Rukhte Hobe (Japan Has to Be Resisted). Here Japan was of course a short-hand for Subhash Bose and INA whom the communists vilified with full rigour. This play was presented on stage as well in open air across villages, inside markets and fields. Encouraged by a generous hospitality from the imperial government, the Student Federation used to
send Jatha from Kolkata who visited various districts of Bengal with music, art exhibition, speeches and plays like, Rajbandider Mukti Chai and Pratirodh. The cultural movement expanded not only with theatre but also with renewed interest in dance drama, shadow drama and music. Popular plays produced during this period were Laboratory, Jabanbandi, Homeopathy, Nabanna, Sanket, Janantik, Nayanpur, Dheu, Daak etc. Among these, the short ones were presented on stage as well as in open air sometimes under the sky or under a tree or in the terrace of a farmers hut or even in front of a factory, armed with a vigorous theory of proletarian revolution. As Shantimoy Guha writes, These plays were presented under the lights of Kerosene and on stages made of soil Muktir Abhijaan, Alor Pathe, Japan Ke Rukhte Hobe, Rajbandider Mukti Chai, Deshrakkhar Daak, Ek How, Patanger Protishodh, Kerani, Laboratory, Homeopathy, Jabanbandi, Aagun, Anjangarh, Pratirodh etc. According to Sajal RoyChowdhury, one may say that the short plays of Gananatya (IPTA) are written like open air play scripts. They are compatible for presentation in any kind of space. Janantik or Sanket written by Salil which fall under the same category, could be produced anywhere (Sajal RoyChowdhrys interview; Group Theatre Patrika;Year 9; 3rd Issue). Both in reaction to incidents at home (collaboration with the British) and the world (the people's war being fought by the socialist fatherland called Soviet Russia), the leftist theatre activists of Bengal used the open air media. Right from the 4 th decade of the last century, this form of theatre has been used to treat almost all the issues concerning what the communists dubbed as the peoples struggle. The open air plays are historical documents of the communists' cultural activities, their political struggle over policy and ideological perspectives. As they slowly gained hegemony on the cultural scenario, their use of open air plays has been prolific as a powerful tool of public communication. This role of the art has established its place in the history of communist movement in our state. In elections, this art form has been used by leftists to publicise their political agenda. On the eve of the campaign of the first general election of our country in 1952, Panu Pal wrote his
first open air play, Voter Bhet. The play very craftily exposes the deprivation of peasants in the hands of the Congress government in conversational style, the characters being a congress leader, his friend, an aged peasant and his son. Umanath Bhattachrya acted in this play, who wrote Chargesheet the previous year. Utpal Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak and Panu Pal were noted communist propagandists who fully exploited the fact that in a political campaign an issue can be taken to the masses more easily through theatre and music than by giving lectures. Besides the leftist open air theatre, a different kind of theatre was started at Kurzon Park of Kolkata from December 11, 1971 with the staging of the play Mukti Ashram by a theatre group called Silhouette. It was a regular exercise on every Saturday. They were soon joined by Shatabdi, Batanagar Theatre Workshop, Bright Future of Tamluk, Nirikkhon, Shilpifauj, CPAT and many other theatre groups. The action continued at a specific place on the ground, under the open sky with audience on all sides. There was no entry fee for the audience. In order to spread the phenomenon, Batanagar Theatre Workshop started acting on every Saturday in Kolkatas Subodh Mallik Square. The movement found new venues with the group Sri Vidushak starting in Shahid Minar premises from October 1973, as it also followed up acts at BBD Bag, Hazra Park, Sealdah Station etc. from November 12, 1972, Shatabdi started their Angan-Mancha format of presentation in a room on the 2nd floor of the Academy of Fine Arts. It was a big hall where the sitting arrangement of the audience differed from play to play. A rupee was collected for entry pass but it was not binding on one who could not pay. The presentation was characterized by use of limited and plain light, judicious costume, intellectual acting and silence. The actors and audience were at the same level and shared a close proximity. On July 20, 1975 the show in Surendranath Park was interrupted by a sudden lathi charge by the peace keeping committee. Some theatre workers were arrested on the spot and Prabir Dutta, 23 years of age, a spectator, died. Members of Batanagar Theatre Workshop were arrested from their rehearsal room. The theatre fraternity protested against this incident and jointly organized a staging
of Badal Sircars Michhil at Surendranath Park on August 24, 1975. The incident signaled the end of theatre staging in the park as most groups started to stay away from it. However, Shatabdi continued in the park and regular enactment started once again, only to be stopped at gun point. The period was that of emergency and on its pretext, laws were enforced to stop theatre in June 1976. Next year, in 1977, came the much awaited political change in India and after a gap of 21 months 11days, the regular Saturday enactment was revived on April 2 with the staging of the play Nirmok by the theatre group Ritam. A comprehensive history of Open air theatre of West Bengal has not been written till date. Its heydays are perhaps gone; the legends of open air theatre of our country are dead and their interviews are rare to find; the surviving accounts from contemporary sources are mostly based on memory. Scripts of many famous open air plays are not available any longer, let alone any accounts of the on-the-spot improvisations which were added to the written script during acting. Utpal Dutt in an interview said, the play Din Badaler Pala was originally of 2 hours duration, but it went on to become a 3 hour play. The reason for this extension, as he pointed out, was this: the ruling class is so stupid that it invariably initiated such measures which were difficult not to be mentioned inside the play. These added on and the length of the play increased(Group Theatre Patrika; Year 9; 2 nd Issue). We come to know from Dayal Kumars memoirs that on a visit to a village, upon listening to the exploitation of the peasants by the colonial landlords there, an open air play was devised instantly. There was no written script and the play was born out of verbal discussion and was staged likewise. Many such plays can no longer be traced. Dayal Kumar writes: 'The play written on Somen Chandas martyrdom by poet Prantosh Chattopadhyay and Chithi, written by me about the demands of labourers served a purpose, but their texts couldnt be recovered. They got lost without a trace' (Dayal Kumar; Ganantya: 50 Years collection). We have lost so many open air plays and valuable information but still the responsibility to
write a comprehensive history of this art form cannot be avoided as it throws valuable lights on the emergence of communist hegemony in our state. And from the theatrical point of view, it is needed more today as the practice of open air theatre still continues to thrive, giving rise to debates, difference of opinions and a whole lot of confusion. So, we have to trace its history at this point where it is a proven fact that open air theatre is a potent idiom of mass communication.
References 1. Bandyopadhyay, Bireswar. Pathanatoker Katha. 2. Advertisement in Janajuddha Magazine cited in Guha, Shantimoy Pathanatok: Aajker Bhavna. 3. Interview of Sajal RoyChowdhury: Group Theatre Patrika (Year 9, No. 3). 4. Interview of Utpal Dutt: Group Theatre Patrika (Year 9, No. 2). 5. Kumar, Dayal. Gananatya (50 Years Collection).
Dani Karmakar is pursuing his PhD in Drama from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. He writes regularly on theatre and is associated with Rabindra Nagar Natyaudh as actor, director & playwright.
Third Theatre: Thematic and Structural Decolonization

Debadrita Bose
Calcutta had been the commercial capital of India under the colonial rule. Since its birth it had learnt to acquire a colonial character. Undoubtedly the British along with their colonialist strategies brought with them their own form of art which also incorporated theatrical forms. The then contemporary urban intelligentsia learnt to imitate the British like a diligent student and started attending the popular city theatre. The city theatre which came with the British was modeled after the stages of Drury lane and Covent Garden. However, in spite of the dominance of colonial theatre, the indigenous, homegrown rural theatre of India ran alongside, variously known as jatra, bhavai, nautanki, kathakali, tamasha, Ramlila etc. This kind of theatre had flourished as a living tradition beyond the court and was nurtured and sustained by the rural India. In this folk theatre, the setting is insignificant as it is usually staged in open spaces and the actors communicate directly with movements and gestures with the audience. The elite class looked down upon what was homegrown and preferred the colonial import instead. The National theatre, opened in 1872 was the first public proscenium stage of Bengal. The educated natives tried to imitate the customs of the west while they visited the theatre halls. There seemed to grow a kind of dichotomy in the cultural fields between the rural and the urban lives. Proscenium remained out of reach for innumerable people. It tended to become a theatre not for everybody but only for the elite. Thus the power and the passion remained in the hands of the so called educated class. They sneered at the traditional homegrown theatre of their motherland. The British encouraged the proscenium because it was visited only by the decision makers of the society; hence this kind of stage became an instrument of colonial hegemony. From its beginning the proscenium stages shunned down a section of the society. What Badal Sircar deeply realized was that theatre required money. The idea of the third theatre sparked in his mind when he was challenged by financial and aesthetic crisis with the rising popularity of the cinema. He had already been accustomed to experimental theatre from his
associations with Joan Littlewood, Antony Serchio and Jerzy Growtowski, he now thought of beginning his own experimental theatre. He knew that both his group and his countrymen were poor and all that he meditated on, was how to utilize poverty and turn it into an advantage instead of a restriction. What bothered him most was the ever decreasing scope of communication between the spectators and the performers. The rising cost of theatrical productions and the threat of cinema compelled Sircar to move away from a kind of theatre that had its roots in a feudal system to the anganmancha i.e. the theatre of the courtyard. He realized how the theatre workers of the west were learning a lot from the Indian folk theatre and realizing the value of the use of direct communication. He began to question the social limitations of a theatre that depended on ticket sale and the role of the spectators, who are completely cut off from the actors. The proscenium stage draws a line of demarcation between the actors and the spectators as the actors move about in an illuminated and raised platform whereas the spectators sit in a darkened area. Moreover according to the price of the tickets the seats in a theatre hall is divided which further demarcates between the statuses of the spectators themselves. This is separation in level and location, says Sircar. In no way can the spectators directly communicate with the people on the stage nor can they communicate with each other. What it creates in not a reality, but an illusion of reality, a make believe life. Badal Sircar strove to create a form of theatre that did not depend on capital and provided a scope for the spectators to directly communicate with the actors so that what he created became a live experience and not just an illusion of reality. This kind of theatre he named the Third Theatre. It is so called because it is a synthesis of the thematic sophistication of the urban theatre and the simplicity and scope of direct communication of the rural performance form of jatra. It is a theatre which does not need a raised platform; rather it could be acted in any room or any open space with raised wooded benches for the spectators instead of chairs, so that the spectators are not separated either from the performers or
from each other. It places the audience within the performance space. The space here plays a vital role, as in a colonized or postcolonial country the space for human identity is always in a state of depletion. Sircar gives the ordinary people this space by erasing all kinds of class distinction depending on the price of the tickets. His theatre also places the actors and the audience in the same platform. Moreover, the performance spaces do not separate the rural from the urban. His plays could be enacted indoors, outdoors, in cities and villages. Sircar also relied on movements and gestures of the actors, not merely on verbal speeches and this enabled his actors to directly communicate with the performers. He himself went on several tours at villages which he called gram parikrama and mixed with people coming from all classes. What he created could only be called a people's theatre. His theatre emerged out of crisis and moved and appealed directly to the people from all social classes. Veena Noble Dass, claims, If there is any playwright in the contemporary Bengali theatre who is capable of creating a genuine people's theatre, a theatre supported and created by the people and not merely performed by the people, it is Badal Sircar. His plays are an outcome of his own passionate response to the social injustices and oppression on the socially marginalized and are charged with anti-hegemonic overtones. The themes of his plays are located in struggle and he is always vocal in unmasking establishment hypocrisy. The plays like Micchil, Bhoma, Spartacus are essentially suitable not for the box and arch but for the anganmancha. His characters are marginalized and they find their voices in the intricate mazes of the plays. Michhil (Procession, 1974) directly evokes the chaotic and cacophonous atmosphere of the streets of Kolkata. A procession signifies a revolt against something and in this play the characters revolt against the multiple hypocrisies that confront us. The play begins in complete darkness, deeply reflecting the darkness of the times of war. A scream is perceived in the dark and someone suggests murder and another suggests that someone have fallen into a hole because the roads are all
dug up. The digging up of the roads is akin to map making. Those who have the power of map making, of creating sections and fragments on the earth's surface are bestowed with a kind of superior knowledge, and knowledge brings power. Foucault argues, Power and Knowledge directly imply one another ... there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge; nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. As the power of the map-makers increase, the ordinary people are numbed with personal loss of direction, and thus their yearning to find the true home increases. The old man had been searching for a path that leads home. All the roads vanished round the bend then a new road which vanished at the bend and a new road till it vanished again at the next bend and a new one again and a bend and the vanishing road the new the road the bend vanished new the ro-o-o-o-ad. (19) says he in desperation and dilemma. His speech comes out disjointed like the roads he travels. Khoka too has lost himself, he dies everyday; he is the victim of the scheming and the cunning and the powerful because he lacks wisdom and suffers under the spell of hegemonic teachings. People try to lure him with promises of a normal life of education, of love, of family bonding if he returns. He is searched with the help of the media, even the SOS and the spaceships; this gives a universal colour to his existence. Khoka is everyman; he is everywhere, wherever people are subjugated to colonial exploitation, the unseen but omnipresent authorial forces. The old man knows from his own experience that Khoka shall never return to his old home, he says, ...If he comes back it'll be to a new home, true home, truly true ho-o-ome(21). The crisis of a murder is completely overlooked by the police officer, he tries to solve the upsurge among the common people, either by brain wash or by generating fear. The people talk about different kinds of crisis and they are promised by the ministers of a better life, of a kind of utopia that shall never happen in reality. The ministers are just some falsified hollow men who try to lure the masses by false pretence. The Master is a religious guru who creates
a spell over the people and they willingly or reluctantly fall under the spell. They cheer in the name of the British government and again in the next moment they try to come out of the spell. The people are constantly oscillating between submission and rejection, never able to stand up for themselves against a system that makes them marginalized. They understand that all the noble words are false, and yet they utter words taught by the establishment. They know that all men were equal at the time of the creation of the earth; then again they learn that it was an uncivilized world. Class distinction has to be a normal condition in a world that has undergone the processes of getting civilized. The Master has been denied a particular name, as his identity lies in his power to control and exploit men who are inferior to him the way a white man thinks it is his right to control those who are non-white. Edward Said argues: A white middle-class westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the non-white world but also to own it, just because by definition 'it' is not quite as human as we are. Similarly, it is the master's duty to show the right path to his subjects and those who complain of misery are assured of heavenly bliss in their afterlife if not then. He offers nectar to the masses as it can wipe all agony; it is the best medicine for getting lost, for losing one's identity. The people talk of different problems and rush to grab the nearest solution. Under the power of hegemonic propaganda they have lost their powers of decision making, of differentiating the right from the wrong. All their speeches express desperation and determination, their weakness and greed, their domestic desires and frustration. As Khoka can look into this system of hypocrisy, he dies whenever he is keen to protest. Indeed there is a rather curious point of similarity between the old man and Khoka. The old man is deceived by the roads he travels on, at every bend he is confronted with a new enigma and at every walk of Khoka's life he is confronted by death. The image of procession is employed to show the positive forces of people unifying under one banner. However all the effort is futile. The old man is experienced, so he has lost all attraction,
all colours and sounds of a procession. He and Khoka meet at the end of the play. They are presented as fragments of one soul, one lost, the other dead. They however do not succumb under fatal resignation, rather a new procession comes in and they are filled with hope, with dream of finding a space, a voice, and an identity. Bhoma (1976) shows the vast difference between the lives of impoverished villagers and the city dwellers and appeals for equality. The play opens with six actors who are dressed identically. One of them says, Days have gone without knowing. Now I know (59), he understands that there were days when he was not aware of the spell of hegemony, but now the truth has dawned. However there are many who do not know and he wants to speak to them, he wants to break the spell of the evil. Man has learnt to adapt himself according to the conditions imposed on him. The people in the play express their agonies and frustrations with life but at the same time they utter words not felt but learnt. One of them says aloud, Drink boiled water only. Or drink only Coca Cola(62). They accept the systems and norms of the society as they are afraid of being marginalized. Foucault is vocal in summarizing this kind of social behavior. He observed, Individuals working within particular discursive practices cannot think or speak without obeying the unspoken 'archive' or rules and constraints; otherwise they risk being condemned to madness or silence. The playwright brings in a number of juxtapositions of binary oppositions in the play. The beggar woman has been juxtaposed against Maniklal Muktaram johuree, the village against the city, rice against other crops, love against materialistic gain and the metro rails and other forms of urban development against arid, cultivable lands. These binaries play significant role in exposing the power structures and illuminating the fate of the silenced. Each man has his own personal dilemma yet there is a difference in the degree of their demands. When the people of the city complain of not having a composite stadium, the village folk want their stomachs to be filled by a simple meal of
rice. Yet simple notions bind the city dwellers and the forest villagers irrespective of so many difference in need and its fulfillment the notions of love and the erosion of human values. The people are easily consoled by the advent of the metro rail, the maruti car, the television. These paint their visions and momentarily they forget that they are underpaid, that they are being used as scapegoats for the benefit of some one in whom resides the power of economy. They consider the atom bomb as the pride of India, overlooking the chance of devastation it might cause. The Samson and Blackbird, a Company with an English name gets the bank loan without the question of security, whereas Mahamaya engineering, a local factory which actually makes the machines is denied the loan. The factory at a point is sold out, on the other hand Samson and blackbird is declared the friend of the farmer, though majority of the farmer lack the money required for buying the diesel pump sold by them. The diseased view of education shows how the people dream of abroad, of emigration. America is utopia for them, a promise of better life. : TWO: I'll sell my pots and pans, but he'll get his education THREE: Yes, yes, sell your pots and pans. FOUR: Your country will also sell its pots and pans to educate him. FIVE: Thousands of pots and pans will be spent to educate him. SIX: Educated, he will depart in glory for America. TWO: I'll get his picture printed in the newspapers. THREE: Your son will earn thousands of dollars in America. FOUR: You'll advertise in the papers for a bride for your son in America. FIVE: Meanwhile your son will have married a blue-eyed America blonde, (84)
Bhoma finally appears with his hunger, his loss and his story. He is the epitome of the forests, the cornfields, the villages. What he wants is some rice and some rest. Bhoma is the representative of those on whom the city dwellers are parasites. Finally Bhoma is juxtaposed against the speaker. Bhoma grew up clearing the forests, getting hungrier and losing his family members. What are beautiful tourist spots for others, for all the Bhomas it had been a place of struggle. The embankments break, the rivers overflow, the land gets narrower every day and the people have learnt to live with it. Like Maurya in Synge's play Riders to the Sea, they resign to fate. Their lands are lost, their water is scarce, and they cannot hold their claim on the earth, the earth that belongs to everybody. The loss of lands signifies the loss of identity and of right. In the end of the play, Bhoma, hungry and exploited, gets up in agitation and attempt to strike at the poisonous forests. The chorus reciting the song of protest against their struggle by clearing the poisonous growth and freeing the air from the smell of Bhoma's blood is a direct opposition against oppression. Badal Sircar, popularly known as the barefoot playwright has achieved his goal of uniting the people in this new form of theatre. His focus had been the subject and the form of theatre. With the rejection of the use of sets, lights etc his theatre has become portable and diminishes the distance with the audience. His theatre has completely achieved the status of a social action. In his conversation with eminent scholar Chinmoy Guha in January 2002, recorded in Guha's book, Ayna Bhangte Bhangte, on being asked if he was an anti-stage person he says, I have proposed an alternative of the stage. And have established it through a period of twenty seven years, Does alternative mean a rebellion? If one wants to stage something, he is free to do so; he is free to reach his goal. But I have discarded it. That's the main thing. (70)
References 1. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, ed, Selden, Widdowson, Brooker, fifth edition, Pearson edition. 2. Aayna Bhangte Bhangte, Conversations with Chinmoy Guha, Gangchil, Kolkata. 3. Contemporary Indian Drama, ed. Sudhakar pandey, Preya Taraporewala, Prestige Books, New Delhi. 4. Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 5. Said, Edward. Culture and imperialism. 6. Sircar, Badal. On Theatre, Seagull Books, Calcutta. 7. ----------. Three Plays, Seagull Books, Calcutta.
Debadrita Bose is an Assistant Teacher of English at Gobindapur Ratneswar High School. She has participated in various translation work-shops and seminars, and has translated poems of Shakti Chattopadhyay. Her poems and articles in Bangla feature in several little magazines.
A Performance of Ruddhoshongeet by Bratyojon in New Delhi

Tamal Dasgupta
This review of Ruddhoshongeet was composed by the present writer following a performance of the play on January 20, 2010 at Kamani Auditorium, New Delhi, at the Bharat Rang Mahotsav organized by National School of Drama.
The Bengalis living outside Bengal had been hearing about Ruddhoshongeet for the last one year, and some of them happened to read the play in one of the sharodiya potrikas. But for the first time the Bengalis of Delhi were fortunate enough to witness a performance of this play that became a phenomenon in the contemporary Bengali stage on 20 January 2010, at Kamani Auditorium, New Delhi, as a part of Bharat Rang Mahotsav organized by National School of Drama. There was a kiosk outside the entrance to the auditorium selling the publications of Bratyojon and books by Bratya Basu. The tired theatre-worker said that Bratyojon directly came to the playhouse after arriving at Delhi by train from Bhopal where they put up a performance of Ruddhoshongeet also as a part of Bharat Rang Mahotsav, though the superlative performance later on betrayed no sign of that sheer fatigue which they must have endured.
The audience constituted of the usual lot of kaalcharal Bongs, who are mostly menopausal bhadraloks and senile govt officers and their relatives, so obviously some of the play's antiestablishment dialogues were not cheered the way some of the directly anti-CPI/CPM statements were applauded. But nevertheless, they loved the play, and were enthralled by the performance and did not want to leave the playhouse even after the play was over with the hope of hearing a word or two from Bratya himself when the entire cast came on stage. The playhouse was packed with spectators, though most of them, unlike the regular Kolkata theatre aficionado, earned their place in the audience by virtue of possessing a 'pass' without ever bothering to buy tickets. Now, coming straight to a discussion of the performance of Ruddhoshongeet: this play is
about the the life and times of the singer Debabrata Biswas (his autobiography was titled Bratyojoner Ruddhoshongeet, i.e., 'the stifled song of the outcast') who was victimized by the 'Tagorean' establishment called Visva Bharati for allegedly taking liberties in his renderings of Robindroshongeet. The first thing that strikes us is the fluent performance of Debshankar Haldar in the role of Debabrata Biswas who acts as a pivot in the entire structure of the play. Bratya Basu playing the double roles of two despots, Promod Dasgupta and Santosh Kumar Ghosh, representing the two most powerful and hegemonic establishments of Bengal left politics and Anandabazar Patrika, was the piece de resistance of the play. A rebellious and conscientious artist tyrannized by these establishments was portrayed brilliantly by Satrajit Sarkar who played Ritwik Ghatak. It appeared that Rajorshi Dey's (who used to play Salil Choudhury) departure from the group (as he recently went to Hyderabad to join a popular television network) affected the play. The actor playing Salil Chowdhury, in spite of his honest and flawless acting and his physical resemblance with the late maestro, was not convincing enough for the role. Sabyasachi Chattopadhyay played a minor role, that of Jyoti Basu (who happens to be one of the major characters in the history of twentieth century Bengal), but naturally such a character grabs attention if not for any other reason, then for the sheer weight of this persona oppressively felt by generations of Bengalis born and grown up during his regime. The actor might have done well in not overdoing the parting remark of Jyotibabu (aami abar culture-fulture bujhi na, to be translated as: Well, I do not understand these culture thingies), which in any case surely would have brought applause. The striking physical resemblance (barring the height, the actor was taller than Jyotibabu) was interesting; however, the mannerism of Jyoti Basu was missing to some extent, as the leader's casual, broken syntax was lacking, and the Jyoti Basu type composure and indifference (even say callousness) were not seen. Jyoti Basu and Promod Dasgupta represent the two most important figures of the hegemonic left movement in Bengal, and the playwright-director-actor Bratya must
be credited for taking the rhino by its two horns.
Bratya Basu and the entire cast of the play being felicitated by the Director, NSD after the performance
This play is Debshankar Haldar's spectacular show of acting prowess. The spotlight is on him, and naturally he is most loved by the audience. Doelpakhi Dasgupta's Manjushree and Sushmita Goswami's Suchitra are impressive, and it was certainly not easy to share the stage-space with Debshankar without getting overshadowed by his character, so the performances of Sushmita and Doelpakhi were even more creditworthy. The songs of this play were on the stage performances (real instant singing, not recorded) which gave them a raw vitality: they were indicative of the times when Bengal underwent a great intellectual and political ferment and related to the contemporary period when an equally passionate anti-CPM struggle has been launched in different aspects of Bengali life. Unto the background, throughout the performance, there was a gigantic empty rectangular photo-frame (not upright, but slightly tilted, about 10 degrees from the ground), hung from the ceiling by what looked like a long ragged sheet of clothes. That could very well be symbolic of the
construction of the play out of diverse threads (evidently the playwright has undertaken great pains in researching for this play, particularly where he raids the headquarters itself, i.e., when he reproduces Communist Party's trial of Ritwik Ghatak on stage), while the empty frame stood for an abstract perspective/aperture, its tiltedness being quite suggestive. Among other things, it suggests the tiltedness of the entire IPTA movement, and its emptying out. This play's politics is Foucauldian. It is a critique of power, authority and establishment. The twentieth century Marxist experiments in the exercise of state power have been disastrous to say the least, and a liberal-anarchist trend believes that this has been due to the fact that the very nature of power is oppressive, and leftists in power everywhere ended up becoming a new privileged class. The Communist party structure has been fascistic since Lenin, and a communist party is as egalitarian an apparatus as Anandabazar or Visva-Bharati. Hence, the promise of revolution soon ends in disillusionment, slogans end in jargons, proclamations in hypocrisy and commitments in opportunism. The dissenter either has to surrender or has to bear the brunt, like Meyerhold had to, under Stalin's regime. The play's statement has no ambiguity. The honest, conscientious and committed artist makes a series of daring decisions, not only refusing to align with establishment (thus bordering on the playwright's own trajectory), but challenging and taking on the establishments again and again. This individual crusade has some strong revolutionary implications for the society, and its precisely where the play presents the spirited aesthetics of a rebel artist and itself attains the uncompromising dissent of an artwork (a work of art being essentially non-conformist, defamiliarization being one of the supreme conditions of art). As Hemingway wrote in Old Man and the Sea, the rebel protagonist of the play seems to hold that a man can be destroyed but not defeated. Here the play ends. but where does the answer to oppression lie? How is a change possible?
Or, in other words, the point is to change the world, not merely to interpret it. A change of society, as we have learnt it the hard way, is not what a Stalin, a Promod Dasgupta, or a Charu Majumdar can offer us. Instead, they all perpetrate the old power structures which they superficially fight against. We have to look for the answer elsewhere. And it is interesting to note that Bengal in recent times started to search for answers beyond the various hues of left doctrines, which is nothing short of an epistemic break, and for which Bratya Basu's theatre has been responsible in a considerable way. The rebel Robindroshongeet artist Debabrata Biswas is an example of what Gramsci called organic intellectuals, who have the intuition to throw their weight behind emerging popular aspirations and new kinds of struggles (as opposed to traditional intellectuals who stick to received wisdom), and if we may be allowed to extend this category, we may note that the rebel playwright-director Bratya Basu himself is an example of an organic intellectual who was ostracized by his then theatre group for going to the annual public meeting of Trinomool Congress on 21 July in 2007, at a time when it was almost suicidal for any Bengali intellectual to share a public stage with the woman who challenged the authority of Left Front. The artist/thinker/revolutionary who challenges status quo may suffer immediately, but the people and posterity might have other plans for such a figure. Debabrata Biswas was an organic intellectual; he continues to be one of the most loved icons Bengalis ever had, irrespective of the numerous attempts of the establishments to gag him. Perhaps the only way to destroy the oppressive hegemony of establishments and authorities is to effectively empower the masses. The failure of Bengal renaissance might be at the core of Bengal's ailments. The upper caste upper class consensus has resulted in that breathless, nauseating (to quote Salil Chowdhury from the play) atmosphere of the social-cultural-political scenario, which is a fertile ground for establishments to grow into omnipotence. But a question arises precisely here: is not this play also a part of that elitist sublime of Bengali identity, that is
centred around a giant like Tagore himself, and his songs? Intellectual giants, creative geniuses, upper class dissenters fighting against equally upper class oppressors and establishments; do we actually get out of that? In group theatre, an actor often has to play more than one role in such plays as these, which come with a huge cast. Interestingly, Tanmay Sur plays the minor roles of a bare-bodied dancer at IPTA function and the servant of Debabrata (George) Biswas, while he also plays poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay. Compared to Bratya's portrayal of two establishment figures, I find this combining act (might be purely contingent) rather unnerving. Come to think of this: a subaltern and a brahmin, a servant and a poet; is not the gap too glaring to ridicule our liberal and/or communistic convictions? No simple answer. Let's ask uncomfortable questions.
Tamal Dasgupta is an Assistant Professor of English at Bhim Rao Ambedkar College, University of Delhi. He got a first class masters in English from Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 2005, was awarded UGC-NET-JRF in 2006, and is currently pursuing his PhD on Terry Eagleton from University of Calcutta. He is the founder-editor of Journal of Bengali Studies.
Theatre : Bread and Butter vs Broad and Better

Rishi Ghosh
Scene 1 : A handful of young theatre enthusiasts gathers together for foundation of a theatre group with a director who is young yet experienced to the best of his capacity. This sincere gentleman is nevertheless the boss of a group but to hide his bossism he initiated an Executive Body on paper which obviously did not exist at all. In the name of that ghostly body, this gentleman kept on dictating terms to that group as the others were new and ought to feel free to put their trust and confidence on that particular director. Gradually it was discovered that arranging for a fixed amount in the fund was their sole job! Chaos occured only when that experienced gentleman raised the issue of his directorial fee even before the first production. The young yet experienced director kept harping on one simple truth, that he was a theatre whole-timer, while the inexperienced members were not!
Scene 2 : It is from the film Bedroom directed by Mainak Bhowmick. Ushashi, playing a journalist asks a page-three celebrity Rudranil, whether he prefers theatre or film when it comes to deciding a medium. Pat comes the reply from Rudranil. He chooses film over theatre, simply because it yields more money! Adding some colour he says, that the so called veteran theatre personalities, clad in khadi kurtas (panjabi) and with an intellectual beard keeps saying that they make theatre for the people, for spreading consciousness etc, while all along, they actually make a lot of money!
Scene 3 : A young director constantly keeps demanding money from people close to him, or threatens to call off the show citing insufficient funds. However, reports circulate as to how the needy director has
skilfully managed some production grant and even some salary grant from the government. Now, to expose him, people begin to apply their wits. Some confront him with the unpleasant issue of grant, only to get a taste of the rage of the director. This government grant, he says, is so meagre an amount that it is practically a farcical grant. There is one thing in common in these three fragments, which is the issue of financial investment in an entertainment medium, or in politesse, the art form that is theatre. Government and individuals may vary on this point, but this conflict between the director and the rest of the group lead to anything but theatre. This has become an everyday problem but to resolve it seems difficult. In a recently published article in a popular daily, reputed playwright Bratya Basu advocated strongly in favour of the socio-economic demands for developing theatre as a special medium for livelihood (22nd September, 2013). In this context, he expressed his keen observations about the aesthetic and effective difference between theatre and serial. For example, he writes that serial is made keeping the commercial interest as the pre-condition, while theatre on the other hand keeps the condition of enrollment as its top priority. Both can accept the other's interest, but the priority should remain same. Immediately after that he wrote of an alternative. He said that the time has come to formalize a plan on how to divert a part of the investment towards the needy theatre youth and thereby check the indiscriminate journey towards Tollygunge with the lucrative and firm grip of theatre once again. There will ofcourse be no act of obstruction towards the more commercial medium, but the money invested in serial making has to be passed on to the theatre activists so that a profession can be created. It means theatre has to be independent in order to combat the competition posed by other mediums of entertainment. There should not be exclusive dependence on central grants as exploring other enterprises is also necessary. Theatre must be ready on its toes to succeed in the open market economy. But, the nature of capital is an issue for thought, as 'capital' and 'money' are not identical. Many theatre people can be heard saying, that money is after all money, and that they shall embrace
it openly if offered. True enough; agreed that money gained from selling gold does not smell different from the money unscrupulously gained from selling any fake gold that simply glitters. The capital passed on from government grant is largely speculative. The funds made available by government grant is basically capital; the extent of abuse done out on that makes us afraid of what can happen with speculative capital which contains all the critical aspects of market economy. In a jiffy, funds misused can give birth to terrible corruptions and unethical practices, just like any open market has the potential to wreak a havoc on a society's well-being. A similar example can be drawn from Bengali little magazines. A senior little magazine activist who was not a blind champion of its non-commercial purity, was once heard remarking that little magazine is clean because it cannot attain the shape of a big commercial house. Had it been so, he said, it could have been even more dirty. The law of market is ultimately very crudely simple where everyone cannot survive. Only the 'fittest' can survive and in order to be so, it leaves so stone unturned. How can we then expect the market governing theatre to not conform to the law and be markedly different? Theodore Adorno, the famous post-Marxian theorist laid down an equation of 'culture' and 'market' keeping in mind, that a segment of the people interested in theatre would want to venture into it as a profession. But for that the slogan, 'of the theatre, by the theatre, for the theatre', is not enough. One has to keep in mind that market does not bother about good intention. What is important in market economy is 'professional interest', which should come charged with competence. Mere interest is not enough, it has to be supported with ability. Ironically, the issue of competence in the context of market will simply not be aesthetic. Competence will be required in managing offices, preparing projects, market research, mass communication and finally in projecting the production of theatre as a successful market product. A director might turn out to be deficient in all these aspects and this may turn fatal for his team. If it cannot be a success, how can it bring bread and butter for his team? Unfortunately, our directors are
very often feudal in character, interested only in projecting his own self and ego above all. How then, can he succeed in a capitalist setup? He has to understand his limitations and give proper recognition to his colleagues who have the competence of contributing to the professional management of the theatre group. Let us take the present setup for discussion which will make things easier to understand. The individuals who are gathering and compiling documents for procuring any kind of national grant, taking care of the theatre publicity including publishing a magazine, maintaining all relevant vouchers for annual audit are actually playing a very very vital role for their team. But, do they get sufficient importance, or do they just remain humble servants of the director? When the frame will pass on to the open market, management job will become no less important than set preparation, lighting, acting, or even directing for that matter. So, if the director continues to be the dictator of all things, it will just be a contradiction of terms. Apart from that, his professional competence will also be much more put to test in the new setup. Needless to say, he has to be a professional man if he is to take theatre as a profession. Theatre unfortunately, is fading out in a peculiar juxtaposition of mutual conflict and mutual hyperbolism, of simultaneous use of kicks and kisses, only to serve the purpose. At the same time, a kind of highbrow attitude towards other visual mediums and yet a contradictory greed for participating in it, is spoiling the culture of theatre. However no one bothers about it. There is an interesting incident of a group's director lambasting the unethical act of a director from another group, namely, the latter purchasing a Tata Sumo car for himself from the money of theatrical grant. The graven nature of this fund misuse notwithstanding, if the said moralist had used even one tenth of this enthusiasm for his own team, it would have benefited his theatre as a whole. The same 'purist' does not hesitate to dictate the fate of the dedicated activist who spends days and nights for producing leaflets, posters and theatre magazine. He rather lectures them to earn their money from selling the magazines, because he has decided not to pay them otherwise. Bratya Basu is right in his comment that theatre is not the launching pad for producing
seasoned actors for the small screen. But it has to be remembered that theatre is not the counterpart of cinema or serial. The feudal director who allows only his name to appear in bold letters in the poster, surprisingly allows the name of a mediocre film singer only because s/he is gracious enough to lend her/his voice. A portion of the caption would read something like this; first time in Bengali theatre. It is a strange example of inferiority complex. Singing e k baar bol nei, tor kew nei and gathering all the advantages that the song provides, is only a juxtaposition of opportunism and the luxury of sorrow. Those who want to think of theatre as an industry should realize that it is such an organized 'unorganized sector', that some people who hold duty and responsibility in it, do so without any sense of what those terms actually mean and should constitute. Let theatre bloom as a means of bread and butter, but let that not spoil the broad and better aspects of this ancient yet contemporary art medium. References 1. Basu Bratya. ABP Ebela, Kolkata, 22Sept 2012. 2. Sen Anjan. Rabindranatya Projojona: Ei Shomoy,Moddhoborti Kolkata, March 2012. 3. Adorno Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (Ed. with an intro by J. M. Bernstein) Routledge, London,1991. 4. Hesmondhalgh D. The Cultural Industry, Sage, 2002.
Rishi Ghosh is Assistant Professor of Bengali at Gour Mahavidyalaya, Malda, West Bengal. He holds a masters in Bengali from Jadavpur University. He is pursuing his PhD on the strategies of marketing in contemporary Bengali poetry from Rabindra Bharati University. His creative and critical writings in Bengali have been published in several magazines under the pen name Tapomon Ghosh. He has been associated with group theatre movement and is a theatre enthusiast.
Bengali Theatre and Bengali Audience

Soumitra Basu The moment one starts reading this write-up of mine, a communication process starts between the reader and me. The reading invariably ends after a time but the process goes on. The longevity of the process depends on the strength and substance of the write-up which is nothing but a collection of signs which the reader knows how to decipher. These signs are letters, alphabets, which get together to form words which culminate to sentences and constitute the article. One who can read English knows the words those signs are representing. Obviously the signs wont create any impact on those who cannot read this language. Any conscious communication under the sun is done through these signs. Sometimes these signs are non-verbal, like a mere look, a lighting of cigarette, a waving of hand, the colour of a dress etc, and they can instantly communicate. The communication in theatre is dependent on these signs. Let me cite Polish semiologist, Tadeus works where he has divided the process of theatre's communication into 5 kinds and 13 systems which are as follows:1. Auditive signs, which being part of the spoken text, are emitted by the actor and exist only in time. Such signs are word (system 1) and tone (system 2). 2. Visual signs which are classified as the expression of the body & are located in the actor; exist in both time and space. Such signs are mime (system 3), gesture (system 4) and movement (system 5). 3. Visual signs which are codified as the actors external appearance & are also situated in the actor but exist only in space. 4. Visual signs, which are called the appearance of the stage, are placed outside the actor and exist both in time and space. Such signs are props (system 9), stage scenery system (system 10) and lighting (system 11). 5. Auditive signs which are classified under inarticulate sounds, and can be found only outside the actor and exist only in time. Such signs are music (system 12) and sound effects
(system13). The signs of theatre are most appealing to our senses. An artist selects them based on his experience of his culture and presents them to the audience who in turn relate to that culture on the same basis. The reception of the play by the audience happens at an intellectual level as well as an emotional level. In fact, it is the latter level that art primarily aims to reach. John Macmurray in his book Selected Philosophical Writings has opined: now the obvious difference between science on the one hand and art on the other is that science is intellectual while art and religion are peculiarly bound up with the emotional side of human life. They are not primarily intellectual. This is specially true for theatre audience who want to experience the artwork of a play through emotion. The reasons thereof constitute a point for a separate discussion. We would remember the fact that in a theatre, people watch together and therefore, a collective mentality is developed. The collective psychology prevails over individual sensesThe most striking peculiarity of a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act as if they were in a state of isolation. ( Portrayal of the Mass Mind by Gustav Le Bon). There are examples aplenty, that the immediacy of reaction of the theatre audience is quite a few degrees up from that of the consumers of paintings or books. The history of the relationship of Bengali theatre with its audience is precisely the selection of signs and its impact on the specific classes of people. The signs are not merely signs but are pregnant with elements of sociological, moral, traditional and ideological values. They also constitute creative acts and their responses, motifs and archetypes, which remain and communicate at our unconscious level.
The question is, what do we understand by audience of Bengali theatre? In Charjapod, we find the mention of Bengali theatre, Buddha Natak and Natapetika. Bengali literature, before the introduction of printing press was mostly oral, dependent on performance and exhibition and therefore may be classified as theatrical. These narratives/plays in the pre-modern era usually were staged on the terraces of Rajas & Zamindars or at religious buildings. They were open spaces unlike the European proscenium and everybody had free access to it. In those days people were confined by geographical boundaries and did not get news of what was happening around them. Even if they did, that did not have much of an impact. The subjects of these plays were mostly religious but not burdened with heavy concepts. Rather, the viewers were drawn very close to life through stories, imagination and emotion. There were also instances like Purbabanga Gitika which had no direct religious intonation but were based on popular legends with which people could readily assimilate. There was a specific idiom in literature which was termed by Dusean Bavitel, in context to Maimansingh Gitika, as Common Fund. The medium of expression is singing, of which Kenneth Burke says that it creates emotional curves in the listeners mind and is free from the load of information. The folk stories contain ample elements of motif and archetype which connect to the audience at an unconscious level. The literature of the medieval era can be thus understood in its subject and form. In the 19th century with the advent of European culture, the language of English remained confined to certain privileged classes only. During the medieval era, the Hindu Bengali maintained his originality despite the onset of Islamic culture but such an equation could not be sustained with English which penetrated the educated classes and influenced them on a massive scale. So there was a demarcation between those who knew English, those who produced theatre, and those who did not know English, the audience of theatre. How does one go about producing theatre in such a fractured scenario? Bengali theatre prior to the advent of public stage in 1872 did not face this problem as they
were mostly performed before an invited audience. Due to this very problem and lack of proper commercial outlook of the initial public stage, Girish Chandra Ghosh refused to be a part of National Theatre. Later, when he was hired by Pratap Chand Johuri, his prime target was to keep the theatre surviving and therefore he resorted to a populist style of play writing that could address our masses, as the common people were not colonized yet by an English culture. Lebedev once remarked in context of the theatre in the end of 18 th century, that ...the Indians preferred mimicry & drollery to plain grave solid sense., a comment similar in spirit to the popular saying, Jatra dekhe fatra loke (fatra, i.e., the uneducated commoners are the audience of Jatra). On Johuris advice, Girish Chandra wrote plays like Sitar Banabaas, based on mythology and fed the audience with child-mother archetypes, popular folk elements like pishaach, rishi, ganatkar, ranga ras, magic, dance & music (as the review of Abhimanyubadh in Aryadarshan Patrika corroborates). The Bengali society at that time was witnessing a resurgence of Hinduism through Ramakrishna Paramhamsa and Swami Vivekananda. Girish Chandra carried on the medieval legacy for the sake of his theatres popularity despite hostile criticism. Usually, experts and elites have timelessly complained about the taste of the commoners. Coming back to Gustav Le Bon, who says in his book Psycholgiedes Foules, the masses are more emotional than intellectual, they believe more than they reason and are community oriented and primitive in mindset. The audience want to see a fight and get excited by taking a particular side. Victor Hugo classified the audience into three groups a thoughtful group who want to see characterization; women, who want emotion and a third group who want action. This has been best represented by the famous British playwright & intellectual John Macgrath in his equally popular book, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre. In context to audience, he has denied the following prevailing concepts: 1. That art is universal, capable of meaning the same to all people. 2. That the more 'universal' it is, the better it is.
3. That the audience for theatre is an idealized white, urban, middle class person and that all theatre should be dominated by the tastes and values of such a person. 4. That, therefore, an audience without such an idealized persons values is an inferior audience. It is not that Girish Chandra did not try to experiment or sometimes move away from commercial compromise. His articles & writings reflect his desire to break out of the shackles of formula theatre. One of his greatest efforts, Macbeth was released on 18th January 1893 at Minerva Theatre. From the writings of Aparesh Chandra Mukhopadhyay, we come to know that Girish Chandra was acquainted with Mrs. Louis and was a regular visitor at her Theatre. He also saw reputed productions by visiting British theatre companies. Visual experiences combined with his god gifted talent created an explosion in his theatre. On directing Macbeth and acting in the lead cast he proved that Bengalis are capable of creating Rasa even with European narratives. But sadly, his efforts were not accepted by the audience and Macbeth failed at the ticket counter. Evidently, the common Bengalis desired a Bengali nationalistic art, and a Europeanized theatre suffered from a certain alienation from its audience. The prime reason for this gap with the audience may be attributed to the fact that the educated Bengalis accepted theatre from Europeans and neglected our own theatre which was characterized by Jatra, Kobigaan, Shong etc. This alienated theatre from the masses. Whenever Girish Chandra followed the traditional Indian idiom he got success, if not critical, then at least popular. It must be kept in mind that in his days, Kolkata was still a traditional place, not this 'modern' city of today. However, Professor Shibabrata Chattopadhyay has proved in his research that the so-called popular plays, fabled to have been enacted for many many nights, werent actually so popular. Parallel to the theatre activities, the rural folk theatre of Bengal, Jatra, was also undergoing transformation from the 18th century. Religious devotion was being replaced by secular ideologies.
In the later part of 19th century, Manmohan Chattopadhyay inducted some changes in Jatra by cutting down the length of dialogues and reducing the number of songs. This urban look of Jatra received support from the transforming lifestyle. Charankobi Mukunda Das drew inspiration from patriotic plays of Girish Chandra and moved around in the villages of Bengal with his Jatras like Samaj, Palliseva, Karma Khetra, Brahmacharini. His work claims honour in terms of the audiencetheatre relationship beyond the urban theatre scenario -in rural Bengal, the Calcutta ban had little impact on staging drama based on Neel Darpan or on Mukunda Das,.the short but powerfully built Mukunda continued to stage his own patriotic drama at night ( Death of a Brahmin: Bhrigus Child by Arun Bhattacharjee). Directors who effected substantial changes in the language of theatre include Amarendranath Dutta who introduced a point of attraction in the plays by making theatre as realistic as possible like using real props like tables and chairs, depicting Rohini diving into Baruni pond, a drenched heroine being rescued by Gobindalal etc. The audience found a talking point as they were awestruck by this magical portrayal of reality. But these stunts perhaps prevailed over the real substance of the drama. Sisir Kumar Bhaduri and Rabindranath Tagore tried to explore a language which was not a mere imitation of reality but brought into life the hidden signals between the lines of dialogues. But the audience of their time were not used to this kind of theatre with a fine touch and they could not appreciate the significance. Tagore was not an exponent of the professional stage and did not face a problem in connecting to a select audience. But Sisir Kumar, an icon of Bengali public stage could not accept this rejection by the people and his lament has been often reflected in many of his writings.
Dr Soumitra Basu is Sisir Bhaduri Chair Professor at Department of Drama, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. He is also a prolific actor, director and playwright of Bengali stage and television. He heads the Kolkata based theatre group, Sandarbha.
Theatre in Patna
Ajit Ganguly
Before we write anything about Patna Theatre we should keep in mind that Theatre started in Patna with Bengali Theatre. As we are aware that this state of Bihar was created in the year 1912 in the month of March. From 1910 Bengalis started coming to Patna for government jobs as it was the Capital. Bengalis were coming to Patna for working at High Court, Secretariat and other govt. organizations. There is a saying that wherever Bengali go first they build a school, then a Kalibari and must open a dramatic club. Even in Patna one can see all the old schools, colleges and other educational institutions, all of which were built by Bengalis. Then a Kalibari can be seen and also a drama club. We can find that in 1910 there was a drama club named Residence Club. In those days people were more interested in Religious and Historical plays. As in those days there were no permanent stage so they made make shift stages and performed on special occasions such as Durga Pujo, Kali Pujo, Saraswaati Pujo, Nabobarsho (New Year Day of Bengali Calendar) and 25 th Boisakh (Rabindra Jayanti). As the teams were all amateur they were doing theatre for pleasure, so they never felt it necessary to keep any record. After returning from Office in the evening they assembled at a place and started practicing. In those days organizing theatre was like observing a festival. We get the first documentation in 1927, of a drama titled Raghubir which was produced and directed by Dr. S. M. Ghoshal. Dr Ghoshal (Dr. Sharodendu Mohan Ghoshal A physician) was a very popular man in town. He was a great doctor, a social activist and also a cultural activist. He was a very serious theatre person. In those days Patna had no auditorium, so he enacted his plays in Medical college (the then Prince of Wales Medical College Hospital and now PMCH) Auditorium. Among his famous productions in those days were Peer Ali, Bisharjan in English titled Sacrifice, Kabuliwala. He also introduced the first female actress in Patna Theatre Shrimati Meenakshi Dey in
1944-45. Before that all the female characters were done by male actors in female make-up. Mrs Dey was wife of another cultural activist Anil Dey. He was son of the elder sister of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Mr Anil Dey founded 'Arts and Artists' during 1945 and did many memorable Bangla and Hindi plays. After Mr. Dey passed away the 'Arts and Artist' was closed. Another great man in Patna theatre was Sotu Roy. Father of great Bangla film actor Jahor Roy. He also did many memorable jobs. One was creating a ballet with only girls. In 1938 he did a ballet which was staged at Sinha Library Hall with only girls in the character. In the group of girls, Bijoya Roy wife of great film director Satyajit Roy was a participant. People may be surprised to know that Patna has two Jatra groups. Jatra is a very strong Bangla folk form of theatre and it is also very popular. After doing a lot of theatre Sotu Roy formed a Jatra group. Then another Jatra group was formed by Shri B K Banerjee and both the teams were very popular in those days. For many years these two Jatra teams were existing in Patna. 1944 45 is a very memorable year for Indian theatre and Bihar theatre also. During this time Nabanatya Andolone came into the cultural arena. During this time Shambhu Mitra produced Nobanno a play written by Bijon Bhattacharjee and produced by IPTA. For the first time people could know that an unknown man could be the protagonist of a play. Before that the plays would either be religious or historical where the protagonist would be familiar and renowned. Even if it was a social play it would spin around a single character. A big change came to theatre, when a team named Magadh Kalakaar was founded by Chaturbhuj at a small place near Patna named Bakhtiarpur to enact plays in Parsi. He became very popular in and around Bihar. Once it so happened that Prithvi Raj Kapoor came for a performance at Muzaffarpur for a Parsi play. Chaturbhuj was also preparing for his own play at the same time at Bakhtiarpur. Prithvi Raj Kapoor came to know of it. He came all the way to Patna and then to the remote place, to see his performance. In those days Chaturbhuj was in the Railways. He was playwright, director, actor and producer. Later on when he came to Patna to join All India Radio, he shifted Magadh Artists to
Patna. There is another interesting incident to recall. Prithvi Raj Kapoor had a touring theatre team and so did Jeffrey Kendal who was interested in Shakespearean plays. For many years Shashi
Kapoor was also in his team to learn theatre. The name of his team was 'Shakespeare Arena'. Since Indian people could not easily spell the name so he was popularly known as Shakespearewala. Both these persons were very great in the field of theatre. In 1972 Jeffrey Kendal and Laura Liddell (father and mother of Jennifer Kapoor) father-in-law and mother-in-law of Shashi Kapoor came to Patna to watch the play featuring Anil Kumar Mukherjee. For the two days that they were in Patna, they enacted numerous scenes from many Shakespearean plays. Like Marathi and Bangla theatre, Hindi theatre is not so old. Even during the fifties there was almost no Hindi theater instead there was Parsi theatre. In 1961 Anil Kumar Mukherjee started 'Bihar Art Theatre' and only after that could people know what systematic theatre was. During the same time, Rabindra Parishad was also organizing plays of Rabindranath Thakur. Rabindra
Bhawan was founded in the year 1961. After that Rabindra Parishad produced many good plays. Eminent Bengalis like professors, doctors, IAS officers, lawyers and many other well established people took part in those plays. They played out Raktkarabi, Raja, Bisarjan etc with great pleasure. The atmosphere became festive. During this period there were many Bengali teams like 'Prabasi', 'Choturongo', 'Shonar Bangla', 'Bidrohi', 'Naborango', PTU and above all Bihar Art Theatre. From the very foundation day Bihar Art Theatre produced plays both in Bangla and Hindi. In 1968 it also started a training Institute by the name Bihar Institute of Drama, for imparting training about theatre acting. It is still survives and currently offers a two years diploma course. The students who have obtained a diploma from this institution are successfully placed at Mumbai and Delhi. Today, Bihar Art Theatre and Bihar Institute of Dramatics is a name to recon in the whole Hindi belt. The period from 1950 to 1980 saw the flourishing of Indian art, be it theatre, film, song and music and to some extent, even painting. Many great people came in the field to make the subject as rich as possible.
One cannot deny the fact that art needs patronization. The government, industrial houses or the general mass has to sustain it. But by not getting any support from any of these quarters, the working of art groups reduced in numbers. This started occurring from 1990. During this period the Bengalis had stopped working, which therefore meant the decline of the first form of theatre in Bihar. Apart from that, Patna Theatre still strongly exists at Katihar, Purnea, Munger and Bhagalpur. It is in the records that in 1895 at Bhagalpur, Sharat Chandra Chattopadhaya was living with his maternal uncles. He was a very good singer and also took part in the Theatre. Specially to listen to his songs, people from far away places like Munger, Jasidih, came to see plays. This is mentioned in the book Awara Mahsiah by Vishnu Prabhakar. Patna has contributed big names to the Kolkata and Mumbai theatre and cinema. It is the birth place of the great Bengali actress Suchitra Dasgupta (later Suchitra Sen). Radha Mohan Bhattachargi the great film and theatre actor in Bengal was practicing Law at Patna High Court. Jahar Roy the great Bengali comedian was also from Patna. Film director Pinaki Mukherjee was from Patna as well. For many years Bijoya Roy lived in Patna; and the list would go on. Once Rabindranath Thakur came to Patna for performing his dance drama Chitrangada. That was in the year 1936. In those days Patna had no auditorium. Elephinstone Cinema was made available to him by removing the Cinema Curtain. Gurudev had come to Patna for collecting funds for Shantiniketan and was staying in the house of P. R. Das, a great lawyer then practicing Law at Patna High Court and Supreme Court and was younger brother of Desh Bondhu Chittaranjan Das. During this period on 16th February 1936 Gurudev was honored by Patna University at Senate Hall. Theatre in Patna saw its bright and colorful days. It is a difficult task to narrate that history in a short space, and all I have given is a bird's eye view with an apology for the vast materials which are left out. This Kalidas Rangalaya that today stands at the centre of the city of Patna particularly pays homage to that person named Anil Kumar Mukherjee who was here and bestowed upon our theatre the honour and respect it continues to enjoy even in the midst of difficult times.
Ajit Ganguly is a veteran actor, director and playwright based in Patna, Bihar. He works in Bengali as well as Hindi theatre. He is currently the secretary of Bihar Art Theatre, Kalidas Rangalaya, Patna.
Read us, reach us, post your comments and find the Call for Papers at http://bengalistudies.blogspot.in/
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ISSN: 2277-9426

Journal of Bengali Studies

27 March 2013 Dolpurnima, 13 Choitro, 1419 Spring Issue

Bengali Theatre: Bengalis and Theatre

Issue Editor: Asst. Issue Editor:

Sourav Gupta Rishi Ghosh

Editor: Asst. Editor:

Tamal Dasgupta Mousumi Biswas Dasgupta

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One fails to clear

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Nineteenth Century Bengali Theatre Nationalism and Identity

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the right to rule as something laid down by law.

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Web Resources 11. Hindu Nationalism of the Bengali Theatre. on

<http://www.indianetzone.com/60/hindu_nationalism_bengali_theatre.htm> Accessed 04.02.2013.

<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/nationalism/> Accessed on 12.01.2

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Action content (episodes) Bhagabatas preliminaries for the Devadatta play.

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MAIN PLOT Introduced (Bhagabata) Action halted

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The Lonely Crusaders Journey: Sambhu Mitra and His Theatre

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