MONOJ MITRA’S FUNTASTIC ASHCHOURJYO
FUNTOOSI
The Bengal theatre world is elated!
Once again Monoj Mitra has come on stage
with his latest play AASHCHOURJYO FUNTOOSI produced by his team Sundaram. After
Jaa Nei Bharate it has been quite a few years that the Bengali theatre viewers have
been deprived of his FUNTASTIC stage presence. It is Monoj Mitra the
playwright-actor-director all the way as usual in this latest production. So it
is nonetheless an occasion to rejoice for the theatre lovers of Bengal.
This time playwright Monoj has based his
plot taking a leaf out of Ramayana. The epic of Valmiki has been modified in
its sub-content, so to say, in order to elucidate a very important
point-of-view that Mitra finds pertinent as well as relevant in the body of the
basic text. Instead of focusing on the plight of Sita in the hands of her captor
Ravana, Mitra delves into the predicament of all women in the patriarchal
society that exists today as was in the
supposedly Rama’s times. So the playwright decides to introduce a female
character to emancipate the women folk tied in fetters. In the original text it
is the Hanuman who leaps out to Lanka in search of Sita but Monoj has preferred
to replace the mighty ape with his female edition with the name Hanumati
keeping to the logic of the nomenclature followed in cases like Sreeman-Sreemati
and such others in the Bengali language, and also keeping to the conviction
that women’s problems can best be solved by women themselves.
The original text of Valmiki fell in the
hands of a thief who brought about the different changes and adapted it for his
theatrical group which in turn has been performing this so-called ‘Sita-haran
Pala’ for generations. The play tells this adapted story of the abduction of
Sita and the subsequent freedom of all women. Hanumati goes to Lanka in a
Mayurpakshi boat and finds a whole lot of women members of Ravana’s household
confined to different situations not to their individual likings. She finds a
gouty Mandodori deserted by Ravana, a forlorn hash-addicted Bajrajwala frustrated
in her conjugal life with the perpetually sleeping Kumbhkarn and the ambitious
Sarama who never finds her match in Bivisana. For Hanumati it is a revelation
to find that these ladies are no better than Sita confined in the Ashoka
forest. So she decides to rescue all of them together with Sita and sail out of
Lanka. Kalnemi gives them his newborn girl child so that she will grow up a
free individual. Sita tells them that she will not go back to Rama as she had
been a prisoner of sorts in the Ram-rajya much before Ravana abducted her. So
they steer the Mayurpakshi away from the fiefdom into a new world.
The different un-Ramayan situations like
Hanumati creeping into the bed under the mosquito net and the blanket of the
sleeping Kumbhkarn or the Chief of Ravana’s army courting Sarama at the top of
his voice as he is used to shouting out orders to his men, bear the typical
signature of Manoj Mitra; and that gives the play its characteristic flavour.
Excellent performances by Mayuri Ghosh as
Mandodori, Dipak Das as Ravana, Aditi Ghosh’s Hanumati, Subrata Choudhury’s
Achari Baba, Dipak Thakurta’s army chief as well as the performances of
Priyojit Bandopadhyay as Bivisana, Krishna Dutta as Bajrajwala, Arpita Sen as
Sarama, Samar Das as Adhikari and Biswanath Dutta as the Thief gave the production a great support. Manoj
Mitra himself in the role of Kalnemi was in his usual self. Dress and music
played important roles. The songs written by Manoj Mitra and put to tune by
Soumitra Roy were well executed.
It was an enjoying evening with some
thoughts to bring back home.
