Badal Sircar Scripting a Movement Shayoni Mitra The ultimate answer [...] is not for a city group to prepare plays for and about the working people. The working people—the factory workers, the peasants, the landless laborers—will have to make and perform their own plays. [...] This process of course, can become widespread only when the socio-economic movement for emancipation of the working class has also spread widely. When that happens the Third Theatre (in the context I have used it) will no longer have a separate function, but will merge with a transformed First Theatre. —Badal Sircar, 23 November 1981 (1982:58) It is impossible to discuss the history of modern Indian theatre and not en- counter the name of Badal Sircar. Yet one seldom hears his current work talked of in the present. How is it that one of the greatest names, associated with an exemplary body of dramatic work, gets so easily lost in a haze of present-day ignorance? While much of his previous work is reverentially can- onized, his present contributions are less well known and seldom acknowl- edged. It was this slippage I set out to examine. I expected to find an ailing man reminiscing of past glories. I was warned that I might find a cynical per- son, an incorrigible skeptic weary of the world. Instead, I encountered an in- domitable spirit walking along his life path looking resolutely ahead. A kind old man who drew me a map to his house and saved tea for me in a thermos. A theatre person extraordinaire recounting his latest workshop in Laos, devis- ing how to return as soon as possible. Sircar’s criticisms of city life have not lost their edge with time, nor has his vision of social change dulled. It’s true that he now operates on what he calls “a principle of conservation of energy” (2003a), but that does not prevent him from being mentally and physically in- volved with the work of his group, Satabdi, at every juncture. Considering his prolific past and pertinent present, looking just at the “then” or “now” of his career, as many earlier critics and interpolators of his work have done, is rather limiting. To understand the immense contributions this man has made to In- dian theatre we need to take a holistic view of his work. In the year before his The Drama Review 48, 3 (T183), Fall 2004. ᭧ 2004 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 59 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204041667730 by guest on 24 September 2021 60 Shayoni Mitra 80th birthday therefore, it becomes worthwhile to retrace the long road Sircar has traveled. Yet he him- self is characteristically reticent: “Why should I look back? I only think about my life’s work when people like you come asking questions” (2003a). In compiling a comprehensive account of Sircar’s life in the theatre, I have distinguished between the written, the theorized, and the performed, with the awareness that the first two are grounded in the third and indeed inseparable from it. It is important to note that Sircar himself eschews the divisions. According to him there is no difference between his roles as playwright, director, and actor. With his clear precise logic he says, “I wrote plays to perform them. I am a theatre person, that’s all” (Sircar 2003a). True enough on the level of personal motivation perhaps, but more complex when considering the body of his work historically. His actor’s body must fade, but what of his performed and published plays, the com- mitments that have guided them, and his directorial influence? I believe that even as there can be no sure way to measure the influence of Sircar’s distinct roles, each has had a profound impact. They however con- 1. Badal Sircar, Kolkata, tribute unequally to Sircar’s fame. His better-known scripts and radical new 2001. (Photo by Avik theory of theatre get the most critical play while his contemporary work con- Chatterjee) tinues to pass relatively unknown. It is not sufficient to look at any one frag- ment of Sircar’s work and make assumptions about the rest, for no individual segment is a metonym for the whole. I attempt therefore to bring his present activities into focus by looking at them through the lens of his theatrical his- tory. Such a trajectory will necessarily obviate Sircar’s omniscient commit- ment to the theatre of social change. Transforming the Word The 1960s was a definitive decade for the arts in many parts of the world, including India. Moving into a postcolonial era, Indian theatre was starting to be demarcated in national terms. What comprised national theatre itself varied from one region to the other, but for perhaps the first time we Indians could begin a discussion of what or who constituted our modern Indian theatre. In this decisive discussion, Badal Sircar was included without exception. After writing a few pure comedies of middling local Bengali renown in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Sircar shot into the national limelight in 1965 with the publication of Ebong Indrajit (And Indrajit). Written in 1963, the play re- volves around a Writer’s search for the subject of his play. Stuck for inspiration and torn between his Mother and Manasi,1 he summons Amal, Vimal, Kamal, and Indrajit out of the audience to be the subjects of his play. The first three pass from school to college to careers and family life without event, following the predictable vector of middle-class tedium. They are therefore unsuitable fodder for a dramatic work. Indrajit however is markedly different. Forever restless, he looks for ways out of his dreary life. He cannot marry the person he loves, his Manasi, because she is his first cousin. He marries another. Drained by a life of meaningless substitutions, Indrajit realizes that each break he makes from his preordained middle-class life brings him back to the same Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204041667730 by guest on 24 September 2021 Badal Sircar 61 predictable pattern he was trying to escape. He finally confesses to the Writer that he is indeed “Nirmal,” the last in a chorus of rhyming names summoned from his anonymous audience (Amal, Vimal, Kamal, and Nirmal). The Writer refuses to accept this. While the others mirror each other in their banal exis- tence, he contends Indrajit and him are different—special. In response, Indra- jit blandly charges: INDRAJIT: It’s your job to write. So write anyway. What have I to do with it? I am Nirmal. WRITER: But you are not looking for a promotion—or building a house— or developing a business scheme. How can you be Nirmal? INDRAJIT: But...but I’m just an ordinary man. WRITER: That doesn’t make you Nirmal. I am ordinary too—common! Yet I am not Nirmal. You and I can’t be Nirmals. INDRAJIT: Then how shall we live? WRITER: Walk! Be on the road! For us there is only the road. We shall walk. I now have nothing to write about—still I have to write. Youhave nothing to say—still you have to talk. [...] For us there is only the road—so walk on. We are the cursed spirits of Sisyphus. We have to push the rock to the top—even if it just rolls down. (Sircar 1974:56) Ebong Indrajit is by any reckoning a hallmark in Indian dramatic history. On its first appearance it was hailed as unquestionably “modern.”2 Showing the angst of the educated middle-class man, the script was branded existentialist, in the tradition of Camus and Beckett.3 It consequentially broke away from the naturalist conventions that had tied down Indian theatre until then. Scenes were fragmentary, a characteristic that was to become an abiding feature of Sircar’s plays. Unity of time was shattered to create instead a montage of past and present life. The language used was itself a novelty. Leading Marathi play- wright G.P. Deshpande aptly captures the spirit of this innovation when he says, “Badal Sarkar’s [sic] Bangla is radically different from the pre-Sarkar the- atre speech in Bangla. That it came close to actual speech is not its only achievement. The economy of words was unknown to several theatre tradi- tions in India” (2002:11). Another linguistic attribute of Badal Sircar’s scripts is his extensive use of poetry and his characteristic wry humor. Ebong Indrajit was an instant success onstage. It was translated from Bengali into Hindi, English, Marathi, Gujarati, and Kannada and produced through- out India. Among the renowned directors and groups who staged the play are B.V. Karanth with Darpan, Girish Karnad with the Madras Players, Sambhu Mitra with Bohurupee, and Shyamanand Jalan with Anamika. Sircar, working in Nigeria from 1964 to 1967, was prolific, writing six plays in the three years, firmly establishing his reputation as a leading contemporary playwright. Baki Itihaas (The Other History, 1964) and Pagla Ghora (Mad Horse, 1969) are the two other landmark scripts of this “existential” phase. The first deals with a couple imaginatively reconstructing the circumstances of a casual acquaintance’s suicide, only to realize that neither of their (melo)dramatic re-creations is true. The man killed himself because of the burden of that “other history” (for instance, Auschwitz or Vietnam), the his- tory that kills millions of people everyday but one for which people rarely take direct responsibility. Sircar squarely places the collective responsibility for these Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204041667730 by guest on 24 September 2021 62 Shayoni Mitra heinous crimes on all of humanity.