They Insist Your Show Must Be Cancelled!

The phone call came on April 10. One of the organisers of the Champadanga Theatre Festival was on the line. On the receiving end was thespian Kaushik Sen, who has been active in the civil society movement of Nandigram.

“We will not be able to host your play. There’s pressure from the party. Look, I am also an activist of the party. But there are others here and some of them are very rough. And they insist that we should not allow you to perform here.”

This invited performance of Bonkubahabur Bondhu—a Swapno-Sondhani production—was supposed to be held in Champadanga on April 17. Incredibly, even a Satyajit Ray short story smacks of politics and treason these days. Advance payment for the show had been made by the festival committee on April 7. This is not an exception; the number of invited performances of Swapno-Sondhani in and around Kolkata has declined drastically in recent months.

Let’s go back to December 10, 2006. The theatre group, Pancham Baidik, organised a protest meeting against the Singur atrocities, outside the Academy of Fine Arts. An Open Letter was sent to the Chief Minister demanding concrete information on the issue. It was signed by many citizens. On December 24, Pancham Baidik was supposed to perform at a theatre festival in Bansberia, near Kolkata. But one of the organisers asked director Arpita Ghosh to replace their production Poshu Khamar (a Bengali adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm) with ‘something else’.
The cause of the request was some ‘external pressure’.

Since the director declined to acquiesce, Poshu Khamar was cancelled on December 20. One of the organising committee members complained that a theatre group has no business in getting into all this ‘protest stuff’. Arpita had demanded for a written reason of cancellation of the show. The organisers never got back to her.

On December 21, 2006 there was an invited performance of Poshu Khamar. After the first half was done, one of the organisers rushed to the green room and blurted out that it was a ‘very dangerous drama’ and ‘there can be law and order problems anytime’. After the Nandigram incidents, one officer in charge of a government theatre house asked Arpita Ghosh if their production had any references to Singur-Nandigram.

November 2007. Just after the successful ‘Nandigram Recapture’, theatre person Debshankar Halder received a call from a Bakreshwar based theatre festival committee. They wanted to know if their production Furut had any political message or reference. Debshankar retorted that it was an Upendrakishore Roychoudhury story, the question of contemporary politics here was ridiculous. After a few days, another call. “Please tell us if there’s Singur-Nandigram in the play. Rumours are flying here and there may be trouble… “. Debshankar tells us that the queries were made with complete decency and humility.

Belghoria Ethic, in association with a century-old library hall, had been producing plays for the last six years. Last year, after the March 14, 2007 massacre at Nandigram, Ethic was instrumental in consolidating the indignant voices into a ‘Anti-Genocide Citizens Forum’.

They arranged a convention in Belghoria on this issue. They even produced a play in protest called Pokay Kaata E Duhsamay (This Moth-Eaten Time). Within a few days, the Library authority informed Ethic in writing that all the associated theatre groups needed to discuss their productions first with them. They also wanted a written word from Ethic that they would indulge in no further ‘political activity’. Ethic was not prepared to budge. That ended the long-standing relationship of five-and-a-half years. Presently Ethic is renting the same library hall to stage their plays. With a difference: the rent is almost as astronomical as a premier Kolkata hall like the Shishir Mancha.

Ethic used to arrange its rehearsal sessions in a local school in Belghoria. They were soon informed that the group was henceforth unwelcome. They were advised not to oppose the party. After their recent play, Sthanakan, about the contemporary issues, was staged, ‘well-wishers’ of the members of the group visited their respective homes and advised them to parties with the group. Debashish Sengupta of Ethic says that even their regular audience is being ‘advised’ to stay away from their shows.

LET us now look at what theatre personality Bratya Basu has to say. One organiser of a theatre group, in which Bratya also acts, requested him not to speak outside about Singur-Nandigram for sometime. All that the poor fellow wanted was not to lose call-shows! But this was nothing new. In fact in 2003, Bratya’s Winkle-Twinkle, a satire on the present state of affairs of the West Bengal CPI-M, was barred from being staged at the last moment at Ashoknagar. Even now, Bratya’s Krishnagahvar (Black Hole) is not getting show requests.

Anirban Bhattacharya of the group Drishyapat has a different tale to tell. An actor playing the central protagonist of their play was a Naxalite at one time. Anirban was summoned by a governmental department a number of times to explain the screenplay of this production. And finally he was asked to change quite a few places of the script. Anirban, who was once an SFI activist, declined to budge. In the last one year Drishyapat never got an invitation to perform.

Last year, around April, Kasba Arghya was requested to stage their production, Pandabanee, from the Drama Department of a Kolakata-based University. The play was stopped in the middle under the pretext of time-crunch. Just a month before, the group was actively involved in protesting against the Nandigram massacres and the creation of a cultural-intellectual solidarity group. Arghya’s Manish Mitra informed us that from last November till January they hardly got three call shows. The show requests have gone down drastically.

Debesh Chattapadhyay of Sanskriti informed us that they are hardly getting any government run theatre halls for staging their productions. In the last three years they never managed a booking of Rabindra Sadan, the premier theatre hall in Kolkata. They had captured the Aamlashol deaths in their production, Cadavarous. The last show of Fyatadu at Rabindra Sadan was way back in 2004. Now they are staging Fandigram. Till now, there has been only two shows of this drama being staged. An old activist of the DYFI, Debesh is pretty sure that they cannot continue to perform Fandigram for long. They are seeing a real dip in the number of invited shows in recent months.

Vocal protests against Singur-Nandigram incidents, resignation from the Natya Academy has put Bibhas Chakraborty in a precarious situation. The number of call-shows are dwindling. To quote Bibhas ,“..We are pretty certain now that we will not be getting any more show requests outside Kolkata. So, all our performances will be limited to Kolkata. If anyone dares to call us, they themselves will land in trouble…’’

The theatre-festival committees, which for long have been patronising these theatre groups, are backing out. Whatever financial difficulties that the groups incur when they stage a new production are somewhat compensated by the invitational performances. But this is no longer a viable mode of operation for some ‘marked’ groups. A few theatre persons are being targeted. Theatre personality Suman Mukhopadhyay terms all this as ‘old tactics’. Screening of his film Herbert was stopped at Nandan in a similar fashion.

Yes, the tactics are really old. A renewed version of the British ‘Drama Regulator Act’ was once invoked by the first Chief Minister of West Bengal, Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy. Copies of 59 plays, produced by the Indian People’s Theatre Association, were scrutinised by the government. Bidhan Roy detailed this list on November 10, 1953 in response to a question asked by Jyoti Basu, Monikuntala Sen, Monoranjan Hazra.

The goons who used to terrorise people by bombing theatre halls where Utpal Dutta enacted Duswapner Nagari (City of Nightmares) would probably have been put to shame by the present form of cutural terrorism.

(Courtesy: Anand Bazar Patrika)

[Translated from the original Bengali by Suvarup Saha]

[(The article “CPI-M’s Sleight of Hand delays Justice for Victms of Massacre at Shuchpur” by Manas Ghosh [published in Dainik Statesman and reproduced in Mainstream (May 24, 2008)] was translated from the original Bengali by Soumya Guhathakurta. —Editor)]