I
As I muse over the years when I lived at Parivaar Ashram, tucked away in a non-descript village called Barkalikapur in 24 Parganas (South), I recall that among many other things that spelt magic to me was my love for and engagement with the Bengali theatre. My years in Bengal undoubtedly quickened my sensibilities in the sphere of arts. As someone keenly interested in the cultural history of Modern India, I was well-read about the great Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) movement, its sociology and politics, and its tremendous impact on the cultural discourse of the forties and fifties, as reflected in theatre, cinema, and literature. I knew about ‘Nabanna’, the play set against the backdrop of the 1943 Bengal Famine, which had heralded the arrival of the IPTA. I knew about its author Bijon Bhattacharya and others like Shombhu Mitra and Tripti Mitra (then Tripti Bhaduri), who helped bring it to the stage. Nabanna, set against the backdrop of the Bengal famine of 1943 when millions of people died of starvation, was written by Bijon-babu when he was a young Communist-journalist. The play was really a landmark in the cultural history of the modern India. I have been fascinated with the Ganasangeet stream of the IPTA, with its chief protagonists like Salil Choudhury and Hemanga Biswas. Listening to Salil-babu, who was not a just a great composer but also a first-rate songwriter, has been a tonic for me during times of my sagging moods. The deep humanism and identification with the poor, which was the hallmark if the art that emerged from the IPTA, moved me deeply and has stayed with me. I remember how I was so shaken up when I first listened to Hemanga Biswas’s ‘John Henry’ – the only other time I felt my heart completely break was during one particular moment of Kaushik Ganguly’s ‘Chhotoder Chhabi’. Hemanga-babu’s ‘John Henry’ has been so sacred to me, that I never listen to it more than once a year for the fear of diminishing the impact, and usually never play before others suspecting that they might not feel the same sentiment.
From Parivaar, we used to visit various theatre houses in the city in groups varying in size from five or six to thirty or forty. The most frequent visits were to some of the iconic venues like the Academy of Fine Arts (popularly referred to only as the ‘Academy’), the Girish Mancha in North Calcutta, the Madhusudan Manch in Dhakuria, the venues witness to long history like Minerva, and other relatively newer venues like the Jnana Manch and the Sangeet Kala Mandir. I followed the work of most ‘Groups’ – Group Theatre still being significant in Kolkata, perhaps the only place where it is still vibrant. The group I most identified myself with – in the same sense in which someone would identify as Mohan Bagan or East Bengal – was Nandikar.
II
Even before seeing a single Nandikar play, I had known about the group’s history starting under the leadership of Ajitesh Bandyopadhay and their wonderful productions from some of the greatest playwrights like ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ by Luigi Pirandello, Brecht’s ‘Three-Penny Opera’ and ‘Caucasian Chalk Circle’, and Chekhov’s ‘Cherry Orchard’. I never saw Ajitesh on stage (though I got to see him on screen in films like Mrinal Sen’s ‘Kolkata 71’ or Tapan Sinha’s ‘Hatey Bazaare’) but I did see many of the later productions by Nandikar under the stewardship of that venerable sage-like figure – Rudraprasad Sengupta – featuring the glorious products of Nandikar like Swatilekha Sengupta, Sohni Sengupta, and Debshankar Haldar in plays like Brecht’s ‘Good Person of Szechwan’ and Bhisham Sahani’s ‘Madhavi’. Nandikar has churned out many actors and directors of formidable capabilities. One of the best performances I have ever seen on the Calcutta stage was from Debshankar Haldar, a product of the Nandikar school, in Bratya Basu’s ‘Ruddhasangeet’, based on the life and struggles of the legendary Rabindra Sangeet exponent Debabrata Biswas.
Nandikar with more the sixty years of history behind it is still going strong. It has a distinct, culture, tradition, and well-shaped and carefully guarded institutional values, which will ensure that it keeps going successfully in the coming decades too. Over the decades it has become an institution than just a theatre group. It has been playing a significant role in promoting and broadcasting the best in class theatre, courses in training, workshops, working with schools, underprivileged sections, and other such wider modes of engagement with the society in general. A key event on the theatre calendar in Kolkata is Nandkar’s National Theatre Festival where groups from all over the country (and sometimes from abroad) are invited to perform, with rich discussions, lectures, and workshops enriching the theatre enthusiasts.
III
I could never see Shombhu or Tripti Mitra and their wonderful Tagorean productions (Shombu-babu and his Bohurupee were pioneers in successfully staging much of Tagore drama like Raktakarabi, Raja, Bisorjan, and Char Adhyay, which many till then considered to be not easily stage-able). But I did get to watch Tagore plays like Raktakarabi and Chandalika by other groups. They of course had a lyrical feel to them. I did watch a play on Shombhu Mitra’s life and work.
Of Chetana’s productions, I remember having seen ‘Putul Naacher Itikatha’ (dramatic adaptation of Manik Bandypadhyay’s famous novel) but missed the golden period of the group under Arun Mukhopadhyay. I have seen the work of his talented sons – Suman and Sujan – both in theatre and cinema. My biggest regret, however, remains, missing Suman Mukhopadhyay’s Shakespearean adaptation ‘Raja Lear’ which featured the great Soumitra Chatterjee in the lead role, and considered by many as Chatterjee’s greatest stage performance. The play ran to full houses at Minerva, and despite several tries, we never managed to get the tickets. And then the play, due to reasons not very clear, abruptly stopped its run. It was a huge loss to the theatre-loving people of the city. However, I did watch some other plays at Minerva, the venue unforgettably associated with the great Utpal Dutt and his Little Theatre Group. Throughout the sixties, Dutt did some magnificent plays at Minerva like Angar (with music by Ravi Shankar), Kallol, ‘Manusher Adhikarey ’, and ‘Titash Ekti Nadir Naam’. He was imprisoned for Kallol, which was based on the Royal Naval Mutiny of February 1946, which many believe decisively brought the end to the colonial rule.
I did make up for the loss of ‘Raja Lear’ by watching on Soumitra-babu’s 78th birthday his autobiographical play ‘Tritiya Anko Ataeb’ at the Academy. There was a moment in the performance when the great man had a miss, and had to be prompted by his co-actors Dwijen and Poulami (his daughter). The audience, so much in awe of the master’s presence, was absolutely respectful – it was enough that they were witnessing the legend performing at his age before their eyes. I later told the group accompanying me that even if Soumitra-babu had paused to have a glass of water it would still have been perfectly fine with the audience; such was the reverence everyone felt for him. The short address delivered at the conclusion of the play by Bengal’s greatest living thespian, marked by his characteristic humility and humanism, remains ever-etched in my mind. I often think of Soumitra-babu as Bengal’s last link with its Golden period of cultural history spanning two centuries. Just within a month of this performance, he was honoured with the ‘Dada Saheb Phalke Award’, the highest recognition in cinema in the country.
Soumitra Chatterjee’s birthday falls on 19th January, which is also the birthday of someone for whom I have great personal affection – Anjan Dutt. Anjanda’s films and songs are a key part of my ‘Bengali Self’ – there has been a period in my life when I have only listened to Anjan’s songs. His long leave from theatre had deprived me of the opportunity to see him on stage. I did know that Anjan had started his life as an artist with theatre performing plays of Satre, Badal Sarkar, and also had a theatre internship in Germany, before being discovered by Mrinal Sen for the latter’s Chalchitra (since then he has had many avatars as a supremely versatile artist but that is a separate story). It was in 2012 that Anjan returned to theatre with the staging of Brecht’s ‘Galileo’. He followed that up with another Brecht production of ‘Three Penny Opera’ – it was directed by Chanda, his wife and his theatre colleague from the bygone days of the 70s. I remember we had purchased a very large number of tickets – a hundred or so – of these plays on different days of the performance. The Dutts, who know about my special affection for them, had sent me a guest card for these shows – the only time when I have sat on one of the front rows. Anjan’s shows were vastly different from the recognizable schools or styles of the Bengali theatre. With a live band on the sides, providing a commentary through songs and music, the ambience was a combination of a play and ‘rock show’. I can never forget the thrill I experienced when Neel Dutt, with masterly Amyt Dutt on the guitar, began to sing the prelude song ‘Mac the Knife’ in Bangla in the same tune composed by Kurt Weill for the original production in Berlin in 1928. ‘Mac the Knife’, transcreated from Brecht’s original German into several languages, has since then been, sung by numerous famous artists like Louis Armstrong, Boby Darin, and Frank Sinatra.
If Brecht finds a home in Kolkata, Shakespeare of course is well domesticated. It is here that some of the best Shakespeare productions, both in English as well as Bengali, have been staged. Utpal Dutt started his theatrical journey as a very fine Shakespeare actor with his Little Theatre Group doing only English theatre for many years (he always called the great Geoffrey Kendal his Guru). I have watched a few Shakespeare plays in Bengali. The greatest Shakespeare performance I saw was that of Koushik Sen in Swapnasandhani’s ‘Macbeth’, a play which ran to packed houses at the Academy, and where too we had to return without tickets on more than one occasion. I also watched Hamlet directed by Bibhash Chakrabarty at the Academy.
IV
It was sheer sociological interest that led me to watch a Hindi play in Kolkata – Rangakarmee’s Chandalika, a Tagore play, directed by Usha Ganguly. I was curious about who are the audiences of a Hindi play in Kolkata. To my surprise I found that majority of the actors were Bengalis; not just that – almost ninety percent of the audience too were Bengalis. I tried to figure out an explanation of this seemingly strange revelation. The thesis I could come up with was that proscenium theatre is mainly sustained by the middle-classes, and the presence of the Hindi speakers in Kolkata’s middle classes is woefully low. The Hindi speakers in the city are chiefly divided between the upper wealthy echelons or the humbler working classes. The wealthier classes have money but hardly any leisure (or some would even say, aesthetic tastes), while the work-a-day earner has neither money nor leisure. The middle class professions like government employees, school and college teachers form a predominant part of Kolkata’s theatre-going audiences (along with youth and students), and they are almost wholly Bengali. Of course, another compelling explanation is the primacy of arts in the Bengali life and imagination, and it was heartwarming to see that they were the ones still supporting the Hindi Theatre in the city. But surely it had much to do with the missionary zeal of Rangakarmee’s leader, Usha Ganguly. Ushadi, who hailed from UP and was married to a Bengali, sadly passed away during the lockdown period of the present crisis. With her passing away one does not feel certain of the future of Hindi theatre in Kolkata.
Not many now would know that throughout the 60s and 70s, Kolkata was also a great centre of Hindi theatre in the whole country. It was here that the formidable Shyamanand Jalan worked, and where the earliest productions of Mohan Rakesh’s finest plays ‘Aashadh ka Ek Din’, ‘Laharon ke Rajhans’ and ’Aadhe Adhure’ were staged, which ushered the real modern Hindi theatre. It was through Jalan’s productions that the country discovered the powerful playwright in Mohan Rakesh (though his early death caused a big loss to Hindi drama), and the same plays were then successfully latched on to by, the other stalwarts like Ebrahim Alkazi in Delhi and Satyadev Dubey in Bombay.
Shyamanand Jalan, born in a Marwari family, was a successful solicitor. He has been a giant in Hindi theatre. Definitely energised by the high standards of the Bengali theatre he saw around him, he too could successfully raise his own theatrical practice to a very high level. Under him Calcutta was setting new trends for the Hindi theatre for rest of the country to follow. His productions in Hindi of Badal Sircar’s Bengali plays ‘Evam Indrajit’ and ‘Pagla Ghoda’ presented Sircar to the whole country. He directed a special staging of Girish Karnad’s Tughlak in Bengali, directing legends like Shombhu Mitra and Rudraprasad Sengupta. It was Jalan who brought an unknown Kulbhushan Kharbanda from Delhi to Calcutta and work under him in his group Padatik, where the latter was first noticed in the staging of Vijay Tendulkar’s ‘Sakharam Binder’ and subsequently picked up Shyam Benegal for his ‘Nishant’. Jalan’s groups Anamika and later Padatik also promoted dance and choreography.
V
My knowledge of theatre in general and Bengali theatre in particular, was largely accelerated by some fine scholarly works which I was lucky to read over the years. Much of the credit to this goes to that wonderful niche publication house Seagull. Starting out in Kolkata, but soon having offshore centres in the West, Seagull has an illustrious array of works translated into English from several European languages from some of the finest authors and practioners. Seagull specializes in the space of visual and performing arts and I have fond memories of spending many an hour in its bookstore in Bhowanipur. This where I first read Satre and Ibsen, got introduced to Samuel Beckett (who incidentally is one of the very few Noble Laureates to have written high quality in two languages – French and English). Through Seagull I also read intellectually engaging essays on theatre and cinema authored by Utpal Dutt – compiled with great care by the stalwart theatre critic and scholar Samik Bandyopadhyay, fine studies of Mahasweta Devi, theatrical practice of Badal Sircar, collected writings of Ritwick Ghatak, and studies of works of Mohit Mitra and Habib Tanvir. Dutt’s wonderful study ‘Towards Revolutionary Theatre’ is a particular favourite of mine. A treasure from Seagull, that I laid my hands on, was the collection of all the back issues (some thirty or forty) of the now defunct Seagull Theatre Quarterly. It was the best scholarly journal on performing arts in the whole country, and one of the best in the whole world.
A favourite bedtime reading for me for many months had been the 800 page tome (not an ideal size for a bedtime read), titled ‘Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre’. It has been diligently put together by Ananda Lal, Professor of English literature at St Xavier’s College Calcutta, who like Samik Bandyopadhyay, is one of the leading theatre scholars in the country. The massive book has condensed profiles of hundreds of theatre practioners from all regions of India and in different aspects of theatrical practice. If I know what were the highlights in the stage lighting career of the illustrious Tapas Sen, or in the set designs of Khaled Chowdhury, I owe that, quite substantially, to this encyclopedic book on Indian theatre.
Another favourite of mine is a photo-collection titled ‘Dramatic Moments from Calcutta Stage’ from the master photographer Nimai Ghosh (with text contributed by Samik Bandypadhyay). The work details out most of the important plays from 1950s onwards in Calcutta theatre. Incidentally, one of the most expensive (and treasured books) in our Parivaar library is Nimai Ghosh’s greatest work – ‘The Cinema of Satyajit Ray’, with text from Andrew Robinson. I remember after purchasing that from ‘Chuckervurtty and Chatterjee’, I, accompanied by Parivaar kids, walked a few steps in the same building to enter the iconic Coffee House, and sat for a couple of hours absorbed in the book – all the while others kept staring at this strange person who had brought young kids, not exactly a familiar sight at this iconic venue where scores of ‘addas’ go on in parallel.
I also used to purchase a lot of minor works in drama from the Pavilion of Little magazines in the Kolkata Book Fair, where some small niche groups showcased their wares on their tables. For those who have never visited the world’s greatest book fair – the Kolkata book fair – it is hard to convey what a Little Magazine Pavilion means. In a big hall there are scores of tables, and each table being an independent publisher (I was reminded of this when a friend took me to a Silicon Valley Incubation Centre where there were hundreds of tables and each person with a laptop represented one different company). I was always deeply moved by this unique spirit manifest only in Kolkata and during every visit to the Book Fair tried to be their patron in my humble way. They too would recognize me as one of their valued customers and enthusiastically showed their publications. Quite often we had run out of our budget for the day (we used to visit the Fair on multiple days and stocked our Library for the whole year mostly with the purchases from the Book Fair) but had to give in to their affectionate persuasions. They often mistook me for a college professor; I did not attempt to correct (or confuse) them that I was merely running a Children’s Home
VI
From the world of Kolkata theatre, it is Utpal Dutt, who has fascinated me the most. One reason for this, I believe, was that he was common to the two very different phases of my life – my early life before Bengal and my years in Bengal; in other words common to my ‘pre-Bengali self’ (I have deliberately not written ‘non-Bengali self’) and my ‘Bengali self’. One of my earliest memories, when I was 3 or 4, was a screening with a projector and screen in a proper cinema fashion, at our home courtyard in Bhopal, of the freshly released Golmaal. The occasion, perhaps, was the birthday of one of my elder sisters, and all the children of the neighbourhood were treated with what is a now a cult comedy in Hindi cinema. I do not know what made my father, never a film enthusiast, to have made that choice – that was the only time we had such a show at our house. That is my first memory of Utpal Dutt. Of course, I discovered the more fundamental and substantial aspects of Dutt’s life as an artist-activist-intellectual only during my Bengal years. Dutt was a polyglot, and read seriously heavy Marxist texts in original German (I have read anecdotes that in between the shots during his films in Bombay he would open a German tome from his ‘jhola’ and got completely absorbed in it; one can only try to imagine how overawed his co-actors in Bombay would be. His only motivation or even compulsion to acting in cinema (Bombay cinema in particular) was his need for resources to run his theatre ventures in Calcutta. If I know a little about Brechtian concepts of ‘alienation’ or ‘epic theatre’ it is only due to my reading of Dutt. I have read books on and by Dutt both in Bengali and English (by Seagull), his biography in Bengali by Arup Mukherjee, and a study of his play titled ‘Utpal Dutta-er Natya Chinta’ by his longtime colleague Satya Bandyopadhyay (who too I fondly remember, like Dutt, for some wonderful roles in some great films by Ray and Mrinal Sen). I must have read Dutt’s essays and memoirs many times over – his energy is palpably passed on to the reader.
I have also watched many minor productions, and have caught short bits of one or two Jatras (Bengali folk-play in open air ambience) in the Bengal countryside. I still need to see some proper Jatras. But I understand that the golden age of the Jatras with great artists like Phanibhushan Bidyabinod and Ponchu Sen, is almost over. Even though I have read Badal Sircar’s plays like ‘Evam Indrajit’, one of the greatest twentieth century plays, I never saw him perform. He had given up proscenium theatre long back. I missed the chance to see firsthand, his alternate theatre, the Third Theatre, as he called it, with his group Shatabdi.
Of all arts, it is theatre which engages in the widest active exchange between different linguistic cultures. Serious theatre practitioners keep themselves fully abreast of the latest plays and productions from different regions of the country. So, it is not uncommon to see Sircar’s ‘Evam Indrajit’ or ‘Pagla Ghoda’ being performed in Hindi or Marathi, or Karnad’s Kannada masterpieces ‘Tughlak’ or ‘Yayati’ performed in Marathi or Bangla. These plays are so well domesticated throughout the country that they are not perceived to be different from the native plays written that language. Thus, we have a Soumitra Chatterjee adapt and perform Mahesh Elkuchnwar’s ‘Atmakatha’, and a Bratya Basu staging Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadan (which I saw at the Academy). Plays travel far and wide, with the likes of Karnad and Sircar being performed world over. Hindi theatre, to some extent, has acted as a ‘moderating’ or ‘clearing house’ for adaptations from one region in India to another, as some of the first adaptations from a non-Hindi language are in Hindi, from where it is picked up by others languages too.
While there have been films with theatre as a central concept, the film of this type which impacted me most was Ritwick Ghatak’s ‘Komal Gandhar’, which furthered my love for exploring the times of the great IPTA movement. Incidentally, a key person behind the IPTA movement, was Puran Chandra Joshi, who at the age of 28 has been the youngest ever General Secretary of the Communist Party, and hailed from same hill town of Almora from where my father and earlier ancestors come from. He was a neighbour to some of my close relatives. Joshi, who had married Kalpana Dutta – the protégé of Masterda Surya Sen – after she had served a seven year term of ‘Kala Pani’ at the Cellular Jail, was one Kumaoni, who played not an insignificant part in Calcutta’s (and India’s cultural history), before he was relegated to oblivion for the last three decades of his life. When I, another Kumaoni, think of Bengal’s connect with Almora, not unoften has Joshi’s name crossed my mind.
VII
This memoir would remain incomplete if I do not mention my own amateurish forays into theatre. With a ready (and some would say a captive) audience of Bengali speakers at my institution with whom I lived, there were years when I, with great enthusiasm, tried my hand at writing and staging Bengali plays. The actors came from amongst our workers and volunteers, and resident boys and girls. I also felt inspired to create something in language which I had made my own. I started first by reworking (not merely translating) Habib Tanvir’s Charandas Chor into Bengali. I then wrote a play set in Russian ambience taking elements and some situations from two Tolstoy stories. My most ambitious venture was to transcreate Karnad’s ‘Hayavadana’ running into 150 minutes, and with a troupe of 73 actors. I also dramatized a Satyajit Ray story into a very short play. I derived great satisfaction by dramatising Premchand’s ‘Panch Parameswar’, where I had to thoughtfully create many parallel events, some quite complex, to establish the narrative which the author could do in the story with a few sentences. Dramatising a story into a play can be addictive, as I too was beginning to discover. About eight years back, I wrote for the last time, a play based on my own original plot in the thriller-suspense genre. I was quite proud of that achievement. My papers of all these plays lay scattered. I did think of publishing them after a little bit of tweaking but I just kept postponing the idea. At some point of time I should definitely be publishing them, not with any illusions of being seen as a literary talent or anything of that sort, but as my expression of the love of a language I learnt at a later stage in my life, and my total identification with a culture and its people at a very deep level. That should be a reward enough for all the blood, sweat, and tears of those years.