Staging the Urban Naxal

The rehearsal for the play would take place at a small room in a slum, near Chetla in south Kolkata. The room was close to railway tracks, and very often our practice be interrupted by a passing train's whistle. The play we were rehearsing was a new one, Jatiyo Sampatti (National Treasure), written by the father of a friend from Jadavpur University. The group was called Natyarghya. Many of its members, including the director, did small parts in TV serials and gathered in the evening to rehearse. Unfortunately, though, the plot, the design, and the performance were mediocre. The script was the cheapest form of melodrama, trying desperately to milk the ideals of the Naxalbari movement that had a nostalgic rebirth in West Bengal in the years immediately following the Nandigram massacre.

After the arrests of five activists last week, the term Urban Naxal has gained wide currency. It was made popular by filmmaker and writer Vivek Agnihotri, through his film Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2016) and his recent book, Urban Naxals. Now, it is a catch-all term, describing almost everyone from sympathisers of Naxalites to social activists who have nothing to do with the far-Left group. Since last Tuesday, #MeTooUrbanNaxal has been trending on Twitter, with many criticising the government and the security forces for what they describe as a crackdown on dissidents. While many across the country are only becoming familiar with this term, those of us who lived in Kolkata after the Nandigram incident would be more aware of it.

The Naxalbari movement, which spread from north Bengal to Kolkata in the late 1960s and 1970s, was essentially an urban guerrilla warfare. The Naxalites, usually high school and college students, were inspired by Carlos Marighella's Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla. Many films, from Mrinal Sen's Padatik (1973), Satyajit Ray's Calcutta Trilogy, Ritwik Ghatak's Jukti Tokko Goppo (1977) to Govind Nihalani's Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa (1998) and Suman Mukhopadhyay's Herbert (2005), have represented the movement, usually in a sympathetic light. Following Nandigram, the group theatre scene in Kolkata, which grew out of the Communist movement and the crucible of the India People's Theatre Association, was split right down the middle, with some supporting the Left Front government and others criticising it. The result was a spate of plays, indulging in nostalgia about the Urban Naxals of the '70s.

After a few months of rehearsals, innumerable delays, technical glitches, etc., Jatiyo Sampatti was finally staged to a full house at the Academy of Fine Arts. The size of the audience, however, was no measure of success: Most were friends and family of the players. There was loud cheering, but again, that was no indication of the audience's political affiliation. (During another show, of Utpal Dutt's Iron Man, where I was in the audience, people sitting around me started chanting "Lal Salaam! Lal Salaam!" Those unfamiliar with the play would be amused to learn that its ideology was distinctly Stalinist.) The protagonist of Jatiyo Sampatti was a retired post office employee who discovers a wooden box with a revolver while labourers are digging a plot of land he owns. The revolver, as he finds out, was stolen by a Naxalite in the 1970s from a police officer he murdered. The activist himself was killed in an encounter. This sparks in the protagonist a moral dilemma, making him rebel, with disastrous consequences, against the Leftist state government.

Plays such as this one were not uncommon in those years. The most popular of these was probably Winkle Twinkle, written and directed by Bratya Basu, the current minister of education in West Bengal. The protagonist of this play, Sabyasachi Sen, a role usually played by Debshankar Halder, is a Naxalite activist who disappears from police custody. His family presumes him to be dead. But, he returns 20 years later, to a Left-ruled Bengal, only to find that all the revolutionary dreams of his youth have been betrayed by the party. After a show of the play at Madhusudan Manch in 2008, the audience stood cheering for full 10 minutes. Had some members of the communist parties been there, they would have had an idea of how disillusioned the people were with them.

In fact, faced with criticism of overreaching its mandate in Nandigram, the party itself had begun a vicious us-and-them debate, which was reflected in group theatres. The last two plays I did were with Rangakarmee and Nandimukh — both groups that were pro-Communist Party of India (Marxist). My role in Rangakarmee's play Bhor was a minor one, but for Nandimukh, I played the protagonist of the Bengali adaptation of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party. The director, a protégé of Ajitesh Bandhopadhyay, had himself been to jail in the 1970s, and claimed to have been tortured by the police. His production was meant as a critique of alienating political forces, but ended up with being so melodramatic that Pinter would have thrown up if he saw a show. But, in a sense, it reflected the problem with nostalgia for a bloody political movement. It tended to ignore the extent of violence. For instance, the murder of Gopal Sen, the vice-chancellor of Jadavpur University, in the 1970s, or the widespread encounter killings by the police. The stage representation of Urban Naxals was often a far cry from this bloody truth.

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