ANANDI of Abhaash vs BOSTOMI of Tagore

ANANDI of Abhaash vs BOSTOMI of Tagore

It would take the world yet another 45 years to start a movement for the emancipation of women. And there was Rabindranath, way back in 1914, penning seven short stories and a novel to present some of his famous woman characters who would bring a sea change in our outlook on the society and the related gender discrimination. Bengali literature till then had not expressed such bold and intrepid narrations of the experiences of women who strived to break the shackles of male-dominance-oriented social taboos. Damini from Chaturanga, the novel, Haimanti from the short story of the same name, Anandi from the short story, Bostomi, Mrinal of Streer Patra, and Kalyani from Aparichito are a few of his immortal creations. Pundits say that each of these characters is shaped on women whom he had seen from very near.

But such has always been true for any creator though it would be interesting to note that the creator himself reveals in the case of the character of Anandi in his short story, Bostomi, the familiarity of the character with someone he had met long time back. In one of his letters many years later, in 1931, he writes that this character of the Bostomi is in many ways true. He says that this woman used to visit him often and used to narrate stories to him. This particular Vaisnavite lady who had renounced her family and comfort, and lived by seeking charity singing praises to Chaitanya Mahapravu was named Sarbakhepi. According to the descriptions by Sachindranath Adhikary, a consort of the poet during his Silaidaha days this elderly woman would visit the poet in his Kuthibari everyday of his stay and would partake of the leftovers of his meal as prasaad. She also would bring garlands of white Gandharaaj flowers for the poet and would refer to him as ‘Gour’. These particulars are found to have been incorporated by the poet in his story.

Abhaash presented this story of Rabindranath as a part of its ‘Robir Chhayaye Natak Mela 2012’ organised to commemorate the conclusion to the 150^th birth anniversary of the poet. The play has been written by Sekhar Samaddar and has been named as Anandi. Sekhar has proved his proficiency as an original playwright in many of his plays as well as a very sensible and apt adaptor of Tagore pieces as evidenced in the Purba Paschim production of Chaturanga. But in this particular production he chose to drift away from the original and stuffed in loads of substances of his own imagination as well as from Tagore pieces remotely connected to the storyline or for that matter the theme. This has resulted in a play that tells the story of a writer who never ever fits into the image of the story-teller of the original story and who is undoubtedly the poet himself; and of a woman who also is alien to the Anandi that Tagore had conceived in his story. And so what the viewer finds is the writer purported to be the poet involved in a scandalous relationship with a woman having a not too strong morality. So for the uninitiated viewer it is a far cry from the basic philosophy that Tagore had depicted in his story and the character of Anandi gets a naughty impish touch instead of the bold emancipated woman of Tagore.

But as a production it is praiseworthy and Sekhar has once again has proved his acumen as a director. It is interesting to note that I have been following his works since 1988 when I used to do review articles for The Telegraph and have found him maturing into one of the important dramatist-director of the present time. Every single member of the group had acted out their designated roles commendably. The stage planning was creditably done by the director himself but the faulty handling of the lights could not deliver the desired effects. Music by Swapan Bandopadhyay played an important role admirably.

Nonetheless the production is certainly an important event in the theatre scene of Kolkata.          

IN MEMORY OF THE POET-PLAYWRIGHT, MOHIT CHATTOPADHYAY

IN MEMORY OF THE POET-PLAYWRIGHT, MOHIT CHATTOPADHYAY

Kironmoy Raha while talking about the contemporary playwrights in the chapter on the ‘other theatre’ of his book, ‘Bengali Theatre’ writes, “To a greater extent than any other contemporary playwright, Mohit Chattopadhyaya uses poetic and symbolic devices. His characters have an extra-real dimension and he lets them – and the play – develop tensions by a deft use of imagist language and surreal situations.”  Very seldom one finds such thrifty use of words to explicitly and exactly describe a person’s body of works. This was way back in 1978 when Mohit was in his first phase of his creative writing for the Bengali theatre world. Mohit Chattopadhyay passed away at the age of 78, after a protracted suffering on 12 April just a day before the first death anniversary of another theatre giant of our time, Badal Sircar. Both were poets to their core and both wrote plays steeped in poetry of their individual genre. The Bengali stage has been impoverished and the likes of them would never be seen once again. 

Mohit was born in Barishal and migrated with his family to Calcutta just a few months ahead of the partition. An avid lover of literature and a compulsive writer of poems, his college days in Scottish Church saw him amidst a group of budding poets like Sunil Gangopadhyay, Phanibusan Acharya, Shibsambhu Pal, Sakti Chattopadhyay, Sandipan Chattopadhyay and Soumitra Chattopadhyay amongst others. One of the founders of the Krittibas group, Mohit published his first book of verses, Aashare Shrabone in 1956. His contemporaries found in his poetries a class that had a very individualist style and were certain that this young companion would be their co-traveller in their journey to discover a poetic idiom in the post-Tagore (and post-Jibanananda?) era. But a chance reading of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author opened up for Mohit a hither to overlooked world of theatre and he found a very different language to communicate his thoughts which he thought was much stronger and more passionate a vehicle than poetry. According to him, he felt bogged down in his poetic pursuits and was not finding the ecstasy and the delight in writing the verses that he used to enjoy in the initial days of writing poems. He said that he was looking for a space where he could express his feelings more openly, and he found theatre the ideal spot.  He wrote his first play, Kanthonalite Surjyo in 1963 and then the flood gates opened that gave Bengali theatre a lease of fresh life in the post-Giris era. 

Gradually he stopped writing poems and concentrated on this new idiom. Often he was asked that why did he stop writing poems? He would say that he has not stopped writing poetries but what has actually happened is that the form has changed from verses to dialogues, scenes and acts. Here, Mohit differed greatly from Badal Sircar. Sircar denied the fact that he was a poet to the core of his existence and believed that he was basically a dramatist while Mohit acknowledged his own poetic talents. More than a hundred plays, full-length as well as one-acts have been penned by this great poet-playwright and have been staged by almost all groups of Calcutta. The readers and the viewers of his plays found that he created wonders in each and every drama he finished. His translations and adaptations of foreign works which ranged from Boudhayan and Shudrak to Arbuzov, Brecht and Kafka amongst others, have been so high in intellectual exercise that these plays have acquired the innate flavour as found in his originals. In the initial years his dramas were mainly centred on the individual human existence and its inner world. They and did not comment on the surrounding system – its polemic and politic. He very consciously changed over to his later phase where he vociferously though never losing his unique refinement, became a great critic of all inequalities, disparities, unfairness and the ills that have denigrated the society around us. In this phase as he concentrated more on the content the structural elements of the plays were less complicated. His play of words in constructing dialogues for his characters was one of his fortes and that attracted Mrinal Sen to collaborate with him in scripting many of his films in Bengali, Hindi and in Oriya.  

Mohit received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 1991 but that is never a yard-stick to gauge the colossal talent that he was. He remained a poet-playwright all through and never ever tried his hands in the production of any play, neither as a director nor as an actor. This proved his intense commitment to his work as a dramatist.

[I wrote this piece after returning from a beautiful programme arranged by Paschimbanga Natya Akademi at Madhusudan Mancha on 3 May, 2012 to remember this giant poet-playwright who would be regarded as one the foremost dramatist of this century.]