Sombhu Mitra 1914-1997

In Memory

±ombhu Mitra 1914²1997

Spoken-word 45 rpm gramophone records were once a prized possession in many Bengali middle- class households of Calcutta that dabbled in high cul- ture. There were a handful of elocutionists who released albums of poetry quite regularly. Among the many albums in our record collection was one that featured baritone artists reciting some of the best specimens of Bengali poetry. But there was one voice among them whose timbre was of a different sort. To my adolescent ears it was not particularly pleasurable to hear, but singular in its tenored nu- ances, in its intensity of expression and clarity of pronunciation. It was ±ombhu Mitra’s rendition of a poem by the Bengali pantheist poet, J }ban nda D s. There was something in Mitra’s vocalization that stirred my adolescent spirit. I had never known me- chanically reproduced spoken words to engender such intense emotions. My elders told me I was un- fortunate to have missed seeing Mitra in action onstage. He had retired just a few years before I was of age to see and make sense of a play. Then, a few years later, there was news that Mitra was coming out of retirement to play the title role in Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo under the direction of the East German director Fritz Benevitz. I stood in line for a whole night to get tickets. The experience of seeing Mitra live was indescrib- able. This was my first Brecht play and was it a grand introduction! Mitra’s depiction of Galileo from late youth to senility was a display of such amazing dexterity in vocal as well as physical acting, such richness of characterization, replete with details and subtleties, that I simply had to see the play again the next night. Much later I saw the English film versions of the play with Charles Laughton and Topol, but memories of Mitra’s performance were indelibly etched in my mind. I couldn’t help pondering on the inequities of cultural hegemony; probably, no Western audience would ever see or even hear of Mitra, while we in the co- lonial backwaters of the erstwhile empire would continue to evaluate our ac- tors by Western standards, to the point of rendering the comparison absurd. But if a culturally relativist mode of comparison were really to exist, ±ombhu Mitra would easily find himself in the ranks of the likes of Richardson, Olivier, and Gielgud. On the Bengali stage, ±ombhu Mitra appeared first as an actor in the commercial public theatre circuit around the Second World War. After a few

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420498760308616 by guest on 01 October 2021 In Memory 9 years of circulating among various theatre companies, he in 1948 joined the Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA), where he emerged also as a director. IPTA was the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India and had on its agenda a theatre movement that existed outside the commercial ambit, working along the lines of social realism. With IPTA, Mitra directed Bijan Bha ÒcÒ rya’s Nab nna (New Harvest) in 1948, Tuls} L hir}’s Pathik (Wayfarer) in 1949, and his own Ulukh gr (A Mere Trifle), and Tuls } L hir} ’s Che/ r T r (Broken Strings) in 1950. In 1951, after his short but fruitful stint with IPTA, Mitra went on to form his own theatre group, Bahur ¢p}, with whom he would stay until his retirement. It was with Bahur ¢p} that Mitra’s genius was fully realized. Among the first things that Mitra did was to try Rab }ndran th Ó h kur (Eng. Tagore) on the Bengali stage. Before Mitra, no one other than Rab }ndran th himself had attempted to stage his plays professionally. In fact, Rab }ndran th Ó h kur’s plays had been dismissed by many in the Bengali public theatre as unper- formable because of their “poetic excesses.” But Mitra not only proved this to be specious, he argued that this was an Indian way of doing theatre. In an ar- ticle written in 1969 for TDR (published in 1971), Mitra expressed himself clearly, disavowing the modes of naturalism as the only form of theatrical expression:

Acting should attune itself to express naturally the poetry of passions— the language of poetry. It cannot be accomplished through a naturalistic style alone. We must find a way to pass easily from the naturalistic plane to the subjective. Exterior and interior life should rub shoulders with each other and remain organically related [...]. ( 1971:204)

After doing a theatrical adaptation of Ó h kur’s novel C r Adhy y (Four Chapters) in 1951, Mitra soon took up the challenge of his plays. In 1956 he directed Bahur ¢ p}’s production of Ó h kur’s Raktakarab (Red Oleanders). With Raktakarab ±ombhu Mitra proved himself a theatre visionary, opening up doors for Bengali theatre that had until then seemed uninfringible. But Mitra was not asking for a simple return to a romanticized past unsullied by Western civilization; Raktakarab , he felt, was “a play about modern industrial civilization, showing the internal contradictions that this civilization gives rise to” (1971:204). In the years to come Mitra successfully produced other plays by Rab}ndran th Ó h kur: Muktadh r (The Released Stream) in 1959, and Bisarjan (The Sacrifice) in 1961. In 1957 ±ombhu Mitra acted in ) kghar (The Post Office), directed by Tdipti Mitra, his wife, who played most of the lead female roles in his productions. In 1964, ±ombhu Mitra made a unique move by producing, on consecutive nights, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (Mitra’s own translation) and Rab }ndran th Ó h kur’s R j (The King of the Dark Chamber), billing them as “two plays of darkness.” Although reminiscent of Laurence Olivier’s ambitious “double bill” of Sophocles and Sheridan, Mitra’s experiment demonstrated more than an actor-director’s vanity in successfully pulling off two very different kinds of productions back-to-back. This experiment made his point clear: Bengali theatre would have to find its voice in hybridity, between forms as various and contradictory as the action-driven Sophoclean tragedy and the contemplative, poetic plays of Rab }ndran th Ó h kur. Mitra’s “Indian” theatre would not smack of xenophobia, but at the same time it would not kowtow to all things European. As if to carry his point further, Mitra produced landmark Bengali adaptations of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1952) and A Doll’s House (1958). Bahur¢ p} kept most of these productions in repertory during various phases

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420498760308616 by guest on 01 October 2021 10 In Memory of Mitra’s career. Mitra also directed other productions, including B dal Sark r’s B ki Itih s (1967) and P gl Ghor (1971), and a Bengali version of Vijay Tendulkar’s Marathi play, Silence! The Court is in Session (1971). He was at the peak as an actor in the role of C gakya, the Machiavellian politician, which he played in an independent production of the ancient Sa fskd t play Mudr r k asa, in Bengali. Early in his career, Mitra worked in the Hindi film industry in Bombay, acting in Dharti Ke Ll (1945) and later directing J gte Raho (1957). He also acted in a handful of Bengali movies. He was awarded the Padmabh¢sag, one of the highest awards given by the state, in 1970. In 1976 he was awarded the Magsasay Prize, instituted in memory of the late Presi- dent of the Philippines. In 1983 he was honored by the Government of India with the K lid s Award for his lifetime achievement in the theatre, and the prestigious De °ikottam in 1992. ±ombhu Mitra has seven published books and numerous articles to his credit and appeared in several plays for the All India Radio. In the late 1970s, ±ombhu Mitra went into a self-imposed exile, giving up theatre altogether, except for rare and sporadic appearances in short-term revivals of old productions or readings to raise funds for charities. I waited overnight in lines that meandered around the theatre for these revivals, in or- der to catch a glimpse of the master yet again. The last show was a revival of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in which, very like the good Doctor he played, Mitra left the stage indefatigable and alone, remaining as ever a pillar of un- compromising courage. In 1996 ±ombhu Mitra made his final contribution, an extended audio recording of his three-hour “unstaged” C / d Ba+iker P l , a play based on a well-known Bengali mythological tale of C j d, the trader, who dared to disregard the gods and embrace loneliness as a virtue. Like Ibsen’s Doctor and C j d, ±ombhu Mitra remained a lone crusader till the very end, somewhat bitter but wise, ascetically enriched by fervid iso- lation, amidst letters and learning. His last album of poetry readings, Din nter Pra+ m (Homage from the End of the Day), a selection of his favorites from Rab}ndran th and J}ban nda D s, came as a fitting epilogue to a rich and contemplative life. Honoring his last wishes, ±ombhu Mitra was cremated pri- vately within hours of his death, without fanfare. He was 83. He is survived by his daughter, ±j oli, also an actor-director. His wife Tdipti Mitra had died in 1989. ±ombhu Mitra has left several paradigms for Indian theatre to build upon. He had taken note of the impasse in which Indian theatre had found itself— in its uncomfortable alliance with the Western style of realistic theatrical rep- resentation—long before anyone else. He tried to rescue it with radical interventions he had discovered in staging the visionary plays of Rab }n- dran th Ó h kur. And in this, ±ombhu Mitra was a visionary himself. He broke new ground, revealing what theatre should mean to a modern Bengali/ Indian audience—in the plays he chose, the ways in which he produced them, the way he ran his theatre company as a disciplined unit, his interac- tions with the contemporary political and cultural intelligentsia, and the acting style he helped evolve. Several directors coming long after him have echoed, in some form or another, Mitra’s sagacious proposal for the redemp- tion of Indian theatre:

The only way out [...] is for an actor to learn to rely on himself on an empty stage and to act with his entire body. His movements will be- come beautiful, and the poetry will be accessible. The expressiveness of his body must find a style close to reality, touching the very edges of reality, the way good [...] poetry runs close to common speech, almost touching it. ( 1971:203)

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The poetic truth of this same expressiveness, which I had sensed (but not understood) in Mitra’s poetry readings as an adolescent, was the same truth of performance that had animated his performance in Galileo. The same truth re- turned with the revivals of the 1980s. The truth, whether I knew it then or not, had always resided in the performed poetry of sight, sound, and motion that ±ombhu Mitra’s theatre stood for—carefully considered, diligently exer- cised, exquisitely rendered, eternally remembered.

—Sudipto Chatterjee

Reference Mitra, ±ombhu 1971 [1969]“Building from Tagore.” Translated by ±am}k Bandyop dhy y. TDR 15, 3 (T50):201²04.

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