Papri Sri Raman
Some of my childhood memories are of annual visits to grandparents in Kolkata. A young uncle would take his volatile and growing charges to a show of Sagina Mahato or Michhil. Of course, I was too young to know that it was theatre for the poor, or that our young guardian was just another unemployed youth with meagre resources for entertaining a bunch of kids, or that it was high intellectual fare or that one day it would be considered so. The name Badal Sircar stuck through the years of varied jukebox influences. Knowledge of middleclass Bengali cultural practices never wither away, no matter for how long one has lived away from Kolkata. One has to be perhaps, typically middle-class Bengali, to actually relate to what Sircar was trying to portray in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.
His letters and pages from his diary included in this edition give the reader a glimpse into the process of ‘evolution’ of Sircar’s kind of theatre. ‘I have even thought of writing something other than a play but to no avail. I don’t even feel like thinking about it. The medium of a play is now so deeply seated in my mind.’
‘The thought of doing theatre and theatre projects often becomes almost obsessive. On such days, I am unable to think of anything else. Against all reason, logic and intellect, entire evenings are spent imagining somewhat impossible ideas related to theatre. I calculate. I make drawings of the set. I give shape to the production in my mind. I think of lighting. I think of the stage.’
Not being able to write, Sircar wrote 62 plays. Sadanand Menon, in an article in EPW, as a tribute to Badal Sircar after his demise in 2011, soon after the Left Front lost the assembly elections and power after thirty-four years writes, ‘In their typically bureaucratic manner, the Left party shut its eyes and ears to the signposts of concerns this sensitive playwright was laying out for them….What they refused to acknowledge was that Sircar and his Satabdi group represented the cleanest example within modern Indian theatre of a group relentlessly questioning its own politics and, in the process, persuading its audiences also into intense selfreflexivity. What the flag-wavers of the organised Left failed to see was that while they themselves picked up issues that concerned a narrow bandwidth in India called the “proletariat”, Sircar was speaking about speaking about a much more capacious bandwidth called the ‘poor’.
Though he was a perfectionist, he was multifaceted. Professionally, he was an engineer, a scholar, town-planner, a frugal Protestant family man, a working person with responsibilities. A smoker. And he was an Esperanto buff, a constructed international auxiliary language, a contributor to the growing community of Esperantas. He, of course, was many other things, among them a selfproclaimed Marxist, Badal-da and a Bengali Brecht in thought, at least. He had a Third Theatre manifesto, as Sadanand writes, quoting Sircar: ‘The ultimate answer…is not for a city group to prepare plays for and about the working people. The working people—factory workers, peasants, the landless labourers—will have to make and perform their own plays… This process, of course, can become widespread only when the socio-economic emancipation of the working class has also spread widely. When that happens, the Third Theatre will no longer have a specific function and will merge with a reformed First Theatre.’ That was the language of theatre Badal Sircar spoke, something this book encompassing the academic and the artistic perspectives is able to present with clarity and élan.
He was a performer par excellence, unique in his own way, a star of sorts in the global community of theatre activists. He was an inspirer of awe, an innovator, eventually an icon. A book that goes through his work with different perspectives and understandings, of course, adds to the ‘history’ and ‘evolution’ of modern Indian (subcontinental) theatre. The styles have been adopted in Pakistan and Bangladesh, naturally. The world is a stage and on that stage Badal Sircar is more than a name.