Badal Sircar and Chidananda Dasgupta represented modernism in the Indian context
With all the hullabaloo and euphoria over the Fall of the Left in West Bengal, a couple of deaths in Kolkata went almost unnoticed. Theatre director, playwright and actor Badal Sircar was 86 when he passed away, felled by cancer, on 13 May 2011. Film critic, filmmaker, and translator Chidananda Dasgupta was 89 when he died on 22 May 2011. In a sense they represented a history that could be identified as modernism in the Indian context. They entered the history at two different points — Dasgupta in 1947, the year of India’s Independence, in his role as one of the founders (along with Satyajit Ray) of the Calcutta Film Society, and Sircar in the second half of the 1960s (around the time, soon after Nehru’s death when the euphoria over Independence and a New India had dissipated, giving place to a strong surge of dissidence), when he launched what he called initially The Third Theatre and, subsequently, Free Theatre.
The entry points were significant, and there was something common in their motivation. I am not sure if they ever met. As far as I can recall, Sircar was abroad when Dasgupta made his documentary on the theatre movement in Calcutta, though much later Sircar would act in his daughter Aparna’s telefilm on an NRI seeking her roots in Calcutta. But the urge that they shared was to conscientise the educated urban middle class to the changing realities of a postcolonial situation. Dasgupta and his friends in the Calcutta Film Society, one of the first of its kind in India, were inspired by what Dasgupta would later describe as “more than a trace of messianic fervour for a new cinema”, as simultaneously “an art and a social force”, dedicated to “social engineering of some scale”, and the conviction that “the thoughts of the leaders of the country were not radically different from ours”.
The Calcutta Film Society was the first mobilisation in India for a new cinema beyond the pale of Bombay’s film industry; throwing up within less than a decade an “art cinema” that “by and large derived its inspiration from the West—American storytelling, Russian revolutionary innovations, Italian neo-realism, French New Wave, and so on”.
Over the years, Dasgupta developed a more sympathetic understanding of popular cinema nurtured in Bombay, ruing the fact “that the so-called art cinema should wear social problems on its sleeve, while pure entertainment should conceal its social concerns in a secret chamber of its heart”. In his occasional forays into filmmaking in the fictional mode, and particularly in his first feature-length work Biletpherot [“England Returned”], he displayed a sensitive insight into history and an exemplary sense of humour. He could hone his sense of history in his documentaries dealing with India’s artistic heritage, and then take recourse to it to layer his fictional narrative in the feature films.
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Sircar made a late entry into theatre. In his early youth, he was no more than an entertainer for his cronies, writing and “producing” smart comedies; his training and practice as an engineer contributing to some innovative and ingenious scenography at low cost with basic material resources! As he acknowledged later, it is only with the national “recognition” of his play Evam Indrajit in 1964 that he woke up to his own potential as a playwright and to the importance of theatre. He was not much of a theatregoer. In the early 1950s — years of change, experiment and excitement in British theatre — Sircar was in London, taking a course in urban planning. He saw barely three plays then, two of them only because he had seen their stars, Redgrave and Laughton, on the big screen.
His despondency in London, with all the struggle for survival and the self-pity that grew out of it, led to the semi-autobiographical Evam Indrajt which for him was initially little more than a private testimony. When I heard it for the first time in 1963, when he gave a private reading to a small group of friends, and asked for a copy to show around, he was most reluctant, pleading that he did not consider it good theatre and found it too inchoate anyway. For me it was an overwhelming discovery, and when I had coaxed him to make a copy for me, I handed it over to Sombhu Mitra who was excited about it; but before he could take it up, an overenthusiastic member of his group, Bohurupee, got it published in the group’s periodical, only to be grabbed by a rival group who staged it without a clearance from the playwright, who was abroad at the time.
The production, barely able to suggest the striking originality of the text, struck Girish Karnad who translated it into English from Hindi and produced it in Madras. B V Karanth, Satyadev Dubey, Praveen Joshi, some of the major Indian directors of the time, found in Sircar’s dramaturgy an idiom, fragmented, subjective and performative enough to bear the burden of a nation falling apart and torn with doubts and uncertainties.
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In his plays in the late sixties, Sircar challenged the complacency of the dumb majority of the middle class, implicating them in the rampant violence all around, stemming from state violence and popular dissension alike, blaming it on their criminal silence! Both Baki Itihas and Tringsha Shatabdi (produced by Dishantar in Hindi, directed by Ebrahim Alkazi, and by Bohurupee in Bengali, directed by Himanshu Chatterjee) were for all practical purposes India’s first modern problem pays, in a political-existential mode.
Even as Sircar cracked open in his dramaturgy the comfort zone of the linear, narrative plot, and placed discursive and dialectical thought and the clash of ideas at the centre of the play, he found the usual distances between performers and audiences an irritant in the exchange. After some exploratory work between 1969, when he reorganised his old group Satabdi, and 1971, he broke into his new theatre, in which, as he himself said, he “dispensed with the mechanical division of the play into scenes and acts, the sequence of time and the barriers and limitation of space”, could “show different times and locales simultaneously”, emphasising “group acting, pantomime, rhythmic movements, song and dances”; and reduced scenography and sets to a minimum, allowing expressive choreography to take over.
While Sircar’s proscenium masterpieces remained popular in mainstream theatre, he led an underground theatre with a repertoire that addressed live political and social issues and revived classics in more contemporary terms, performing in small private halls or in any open space available, free of charge, never advertising, never getting “sponsored” — a difficult and marginal existence. One does not know for sure if his small group of followers would be able to continue the adventure for long. But the Sircar mystique endures in Indian theatre — with its utopia of a free theatre.
The writer is an editor, publisher and critic of the arts
