Staging the rebellion

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Playwright Badal Sircar knew that while ideologues argue, the world moves on. Ramu Ramanathan remembers

Badal Sircar 15 July 1925–13 May 2011
Badal Sircar 15 July 1925–13 May 2011

IRONIC THAT Badal Sircar passed away a day after the Left relinquished power in Bengal and Kerala. Badal Babu had withdrawn from theatre, and with this final denouement, it seems he was turning his back on the real world.

I met him in Pune in 2004 when he was being honoured by Amol Palekar. It was a mini-fest with speeches, play readings and nostalgia. One of those rare occasions when the upper-caste, upper-class Indian theatre fraternity felicitated the neglected of the Gang of Four (the other three being: Vijay Tendulkar, Mohan Rakesh and Girish Karnad). During that fest, a scribe asked Badal Babu, what about the revolution? He replied, “You don’t keep up with current affairs, do you? Of course, for you journalists there’s no need.”

There was uncomfortable laughter.

One of the key aspects of Badal Babu’s genius is that he was one of the first theatrepersons since Ebrahim Alkazi who grasped the vital importance of presentation. That’s how he was able to defeat his ideological opponents. He felt the Leftists and Socialists were sitting around discussing real issues, matters of substance and policy, and then, of course, disagreeing, splitting into factions (and city chapters) and insulting each other and telling us not to vote for the ideological heretics who failed to grasp historical materialism. With his plays, he circumvented all of that. He realised, while we argue, the world moves on.

Badal Babu’s later plays are good material to perform. That’s one of the reasons plays like Spartacus, Juloos and Bhoma became huge favourites on Mumbai’s fiercely competitive inter-collegiate theatre circuit, which is where I cut my teeth. Most of us had never heard of Third Theatre (later Free Theatre) nor did we care about anti-capitalist rants. We wanted easy-to-stage, award-winning plays.

Some of the one-acts I saw on stage in the 1970s, ’80s and even ’90s lent themselves to a vivid sense of spontaneous composition with huge all-male casts and minimal sets (ideal for college students) with ensemble passages appearing and disappearing in an informal manner. The plays had rhythm and there were appropriately phrased lines for the chorus to belt out. Most of the young people had fascinating interpretations of the original Badal Sircar theme of their own. Sometimes there were three versions of Spartacus in the same competition. And so, in a way, the plays had to keep reinventing themselves. When I mentioned his popularity among college students to him, he said, “It’s good to know people care about the stuff.”

The stagings of Badal Babu’s plays became a reference point for my generation. Even today, he pops up unexpectedly. There’s a moment in Mohit Takalkar’s staging of my play Comrade Kumbhakarna that took place last week at the National School of Drama when there are chants and black flags. It is a classic Badal Sircar dramaturgical moment in a modern staging — brittle choreography and joltingly urban.

Unlike other playwrights, Badal Babu didn’t have the ability to market himself. But that shouldn’t undermine his role. While the others conjured a world of the boring and vulture-like Indian bourgeois on stage, Badal Babu stirred things up by questioning the status quo. Especially, fake progressiveness.

His death is the end of the end. Perhaps it is a good time to read his early plays like Ebang Indrajit, Pagla Ghoda, Baaki Itihaash and even the gentle satire Ballabhpurer Roopkatha. And hope that time will accomplish for the poor what money does for the rich.

Ramanathan is a Mumbai-based playwright and director
letters@tehelka.com

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