Tapati Gupta, an alumna of Presidency College, has been a professor of English at Calcutta University. She is known for her extensive work on theatre, especially the Bengali stage. Her recent book, Analysing Bengali Drama: Time, Text & Performance (Dasgupta and Company), looks into some landmark aspects of Bengali theatre with regard to text and performances.

In a freewheeling interview on art and theatre, she discusses the various influences and outside impacts on the Bengali stage while tracing its lineage and its major turning points.

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Theatre has always fired Bengalis, in particular Group Theatre, which has been progressive, though Bengalis’ love for jatra runs parallel. In fact, it is often argued that the robust energy that the Bengali stage enjoys is sadly lacking in its general celluloid language. For this, let us return to 1859.

Theatre in Bengal started as a weapon of protest, if we take the neel vidroha or the indigo revolt, which was sparked by Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Neeldarpan. Otherwise, Sanskrit plays were staged, from which Michael Madhusudan Dutt derived his own inspiration. As theatre gradually evolved, Girish Ghosh and Sisir Bhaduri started introducing realism in theatre. But it was not until the Indian People’s Theatre Association, or IPTA, that theatre took on a more socio-political critical tone in the post-independence era. It became a structured movement. This, in turn, fuelled thespians like Utpal Dutt, who till then did English theatre, especially Shakespeare’s plays, and later, Badal Sircar, who brought theatre out into the streets.

Based on a number of research articles on the different facets of theatre on various podiums in India and abroad, Ms Gupta focuses on the emergence of the performance of the text through translations and adaptations of western plays. “Sometimes, the performance in the local context changes the text,” she says. An example of this is Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem), which was first performed in 1879 in Copenhagen. Later translated into English by William Archer, it gained worldwide popularity for its strong rebellious message from the wife.

In Calcutta, it was first produced as Putuler Sansar and directed by Utpal Dutt in 1951. It was translated by Debiprosad Chattopadhyay, and he stuck to the original, but in the very next year, Dutt Indianised it under his Little Theatre Group. Nora became Niroja. In Bohuropee’s Putul Khela, Shobhu Mitra introduced various Bengali sensibilities, though the breaking of the conch shell bangles and wiping of the vermillion by Bulu/Nora created quite a stir.

Ibsen remains a major area of Ms Gupta’s research. She extends this argument of representation in our indigenous context, anlaysing other plays like An Enemy of the People, When We Dead Awaken and The Wild Duck, among others.

Reading the book, it is clear that the point she repeatedly makes is that theatre as a medium is not static. If we contextualise it in India and take the various ethnicities, such as the Parsi theatre, for example, the subject becomes vast. To narrow it down, the author has focused on various chapters, such as Shakespeare re-configured, stifling the voice in which she writes about Mukunda Das’s jatra, and Bijon Bhattacharya’s naturalism to abstraction, starting from the play Nabanna onward.

Although she would have liked to have included more material, she rues the fact that contemporary Bengali theatre is not experimenting anymore. “Theatre in the West,” she opines, “is far more experimental. The body movements are very important.”

One reason for this could be that when the left was not in power, theatre had more vigour in its protests, but once in power, there was not much scope to criticise. Badal Sircar, on the other hand, shunned the proscenium and adopted the Third Theatre mode, where spectators became spect-ators and performances were in the street. He, too, like Dutt, had the propaganda motive. Michhil, or ‘procession’ was his famous play, at the performance of which the police opened fire and one person was killed, according to Ms Gupta.

But again, the theatre movement in India has not been linear. It’s a total entertainment package with songs, dance and comic relief to break the monotony; for instance, the chorus in Greek theatre becomes the Fool in Shakespeare’s plays and the various aspects of stagecraft.

Since theatre is very here and now, she feels that documenting the performances is essential because there is no proof of the presentation once it is done. It is transient. This is especially true at a time when there were no videos to record performances. This is where she devotes a whole chapter to making an interesting comparison. She points to the theatre’s performances on stage, equivalent to the installation art of the annual Durga Puja celebrations of the state. Referring to Durga Puja in contemporary Kolkata as “a festival of scenic performance,” she draws similarities between the two arts.

Performances of plays by Bertolt Brecht, another playwright very popular on the Bengali stage at one time, are not included in her analyses. She says in its defence that Utpal Dutt did not adapt any Brecht, for he thought his drama spoke for his society, not ours, though the Brecht technique of Epic Theatre, mode of presentation, and propagandist commentary was a great influence on Indian theatre. Usha Ganguly’s Himmat Bai was a great presentation and was adapted for our society.

She concludes by discussing a recent play called Brahman by the well-known theatre group Aneek. It deals with social injustice related to class and religion and the authority’s indifference to the issue due to today’s system of placating all communities for the purpose of winning the elections. This is a form of post-colonialism prevalent today.

She hopes that her book, passionately researched by texts and visual performances in several parts of the world in drawing certain comparisons, will facilitate our need to preserve our rich theatre culture materially. “The material records of theatre are always less,” she signs off.