Contemporary Group Theatre in Kolkata, India

Arnab Banerji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367496128
• eBook ISBN: 9781000068993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book is the first of its kind offering a materialistic semiotic analysis of a non-Western theatre culture: Bengali group theatre. Arnab Banerji fills two lacunas in contemporary theatre scholarship. First, the materialist semiotic approach to studying a non-Western theatre event allows Banerji to critically examine the material conditions in which theatre is created and seen outside the Euro-American context. And second, by shifting the critical lens onto a contemporary urban theatre phenomenon from India, the book attempts to even out the scholastic imbalance in Indian theatre scholarship which has largely focused on folk and classical traditions.

The book shows a refreshing new perspective toward a theatre culture that frequently escapes the critical lens in spite of being one of the largest urban theatre cultures in the world. Theatre events are a sum total of the conditions in which they are built and the conditions in which they are viewed. Studying the event separate from its materialistic beginnings and semiotic effects allow only a partial insight into the performance phenomenon.

The materialist semiotic critical framework of this book locates the Bengali group theatre within its performative context and offers a heretofore unexplored insight into this vibrant theatre culture.

Part I

The city and its theatre

1The city of Kolkata

How does one begin to introduce a city that is some three hundred years old and where one has spent the greater part of one’s life? Where does one begin? The arrival of the British; the East India Company’s acquiring of the three villages – Gobindapur, Sutanuti, and Kalikata – from the Sabarna Roychowdhury family; the fortification of the city under the British; the development of the modern city or the emergence of the city as the cultural capital of independent India; or the changing political scenario – the repressive Congress regime, to thirty-four years of leftist governance to the current Trinamool Congress administration. I toyed with all these choices before arriving at the decision to present it in the current form. In doing so, I engage with the material realities of negotiating with the city. In this introduction to Kolkata, I assume the position of a virtual tour guide helping a new visitor to the city find their way to the Academy of Fine Arts and beyond.

Imagine, if you will, that you have decided to go watch group theatre performances in Kolkata, India. You arrive at the newly built massive Kolkata airport. The first thing you notice as you step outside the terminal building is the sheer number of people and the massive chaos. There are tens of people near the arrival doors holding name cards while others simply call out the names of their near and dear ones as they see them coming outside the terminal. You clear the maddening maze of people, avoid the touts who promise to take you to your destination or ask for “foreign money,” and head to the prepaid taxi counter and book a cab for, let us say, Behala. You get into the cab and he pulls out of the airport area.

Driving past the huge “Welcome to Kolkata” sign with a smiling portrait of the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, you enter the VIP Road. As the heat pinches into your skin and the pollution hurts your eyes a little, you notice the incredible amount of constructions all around you. Bridges, buildings, and roads – everything is under construction. The taxi slows down to a crawl behind a long line of buses, taxis, and private vehicles. It allows you the time to soak in some more of the sights and sounds of the city that you have just alighted in. One of the distinct features you will notice is, in spite of the best attempts to present a homogenized look, Kolkata changes every two kilometers or so. You are in a sprawling tree-lined highway one second, and the next moment you are turning onto the busy Shri Aurobindo Sarani toward Sovabazar in north Kolkata and then again onto the magnificent Central Avenue, lined with huge colonial-era structures on both sides. The drive takes you past the Ram Mandir, Mahajati Sadan, School of Tropical Medicine, the Calcutta Medical College, and the century-old newspaper office The Statesman House before converging into the central business district of Esplanade.¹

Figure 1.1Central Kolkata’s bustling New Market area. Photo: Author.

Esplanade, at the heart of the city, is bustling with thousands of people as they go about their daily business. Central Avenue now joins the Jawaharlal Nehru Road and you drive past the bustling New Market area, the Grand Hotel, the chic Park Street before turning onto Cathedral Road past the magnificent St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Nandan Cultural Complex, and onto Harish Mukherjee road. The highway gives way to narrower roads as you leave the imagined boundaries of central Kolkata and enter into the south. The buildings lining this road are almost as old as the ones you drove past in the north, but they are smaller. You realize that this area must have been more of a residential area. You make a left on Judges Court Road at the Kalighat Fire Station and drive over a bridge.

The famous Hindu Kali Temple of Kalighat is to your left. The Kali Temple is one of the fifty-one most sacred pilgrimage sites for Hindu devotees. The temple is dedicated to Kali, one of the many forms of the mother goddess in the Hindu pantheon. To your right on the same bridge you see the high walls of the Alipur Central Jail, a pre-independence prison where several freedom fighters were incarcerated and executed by the British. You drive past the resplendent Hastings House, erstwhile home of Warren Hastings and past the Judges Civil and Sessions court before turning left on to Alipore Road. The sights are completely distinct from anything that you have seen so far. Posh bungalows and huge apartment buildings, home of the rich, and the largely non-Bengali Kolkata population lines the road. Emerging out of the Alipore Road and past the Kolkata Port Trust officers’ quarters you merge onto Diamond Harbor Road. You are about to leave the city proper and enter suburban Kolkata. The roads here are narrower, more chaotic, and cops try to manage the unmanageable traffic that is characteristic of this part of the city. You go past the Taratala crossing and enter Behala, a bustling market area with shops lining both sides of the street and incredibly slow-moving traffic.

As you leave Diamond Harbor Road and turn in to one of the many even narrower streets negotiating pedestrians, cycle rickshaws, two-wheelers, and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws, your taxi driver mutters obscenities under his breath and honks more than he has ever done during the last one and a half hours that you have been journeying with him. During the final stretch of the journey, he asks for directions from locals congregated at neighborhood tea stalls and cigarette shops before finally pulling in front of the small guesthouse in a quiet Behala neighborhood away from the hustle and bustle of the megalopolis that you have just driven through. Your ears still hurt from the cacophonic rhythm of car horns and blaring microphones. Close your eyes and before drifting off to sleep, recall the wide variety of posters that you saw during your two-hour drive advertising everything from Bollywood films to McDonald’s burgers. Try to remember if you saw one advertising a play; you’re probably tempted to say that you may have seen a couple of those, but you are not sure. Don’t worry, you probably did not see any simply because they are a rarity. Tired after a long flight and the first bout of synesthetic mayhem this initial encounter with Kolkata has been, you retire for the day, looking forward to the theatrical adventure of tomorrow.

You wake up early. A calm hangs over the neighborhood. Looking out of your window, you can see the city gradually waking up like a lazy cat stretching itself out of the stupor of the previous night. You can see the smoke billowing from a clay oven in the distance and hear the soft tune of a devotional number playing in the radio somewhere and the gentle scrapes of the bristles of a broom on the sidewalk. The guesthouse staff has already served a hot cup of steaming tea with a couple of cookies, known popularly as biscuits in India. You turn on your computer and start looking for performances. A simple Google search for “theatre performances in Kolkata” throws up links to a couple of dailies, Times of India and The Telegraph prominent among them. You browse through the listings, noting down items under theatre and drama. After lunch and a brief siesta, you head out around four in the afternoon for the Academy of Fine Arts, which you have been told is the holiest of holy shrines for Bengali group theatre.

Having already experienced a cab ride the previous day, you cannot wait to try some other form of transport today. You are directed to the nearest cycle rickshaw stand, where you climb on to a cushioned back seat of a tricycle. A middle-aged man who lights a leaf cigarette pedals the rickshaw. He takes you to the Diamond Harbor Road and directs you to the nearest auto-rickshaw stand. You climb into one of several waiting auto-rickshaws, a small three-wheeled motorized cabin cycle painted in uniform light green and bright yellow livery. In Kolkata auto-rickshaws are used as shared ride vehicles that ply on shorter routes. The driver tells you that you can pay for four people or you could wait for three other people to show up, you choose to wait. You look around the little vehicle. You’re sitting at the far end of the back seat. You can sort of imagine that in this overcrowded city two more people can be cramped into the back seat but cannot fathom where the fourth passenger that the driver spoke of is going to sit. Putting your curiosity to rest, the auto fills up fifteen minutes later. The fourth passenger balances herself/himself precariously in the front seat next to the driver. You imagine that it cannot be a comfortable ride and probably make a mental note to avoid it. The auto-rickshaw meanders its way through major roads and narrow side streets and takes you to Rasbehari crossing. Rasbehari is a bustling four-point crossing in the heart of south Kolkata with a vertical road linking Behala in the west to the JBS Haldane Avenue to the east crossing the horizontal road linking Tollygunge, home of the Bengali-language cinema and the gateway to the southern suburbs in the south, to Esplanade in central Kolkata.

You brace yourself for your first subway ride in Kolkata. You climb down the steps to the ticket counter and buy yourself a ₹5 (~7¢) ticket. You have to put your bags through a baggage scanner before you punch your ticket and enter through narrow metal gates for another flight of stairs down to the platform. Mounted television sets blare the latest Bollywood hits intermixed with advertisements and movie trailers. Security personnel with semiautomatic weapons walk up and down the station. The train thunders into the platform and the automatic doors fly open. Neither group of passengers wait for the other, and after ample pushing and shoving, you find yourself in a train compartment dimly lit by fluorescent lights and headed toward Rabindra Sadan, two stations and five minutes away. As you make your way up to street level at the Rabindra Sadan station, the smell of tobacco, an assortment of spices, betel nuts, and ammonia waft into your nostrils. Outside the entrance, the sidewalk is cramped with several cigarette shops and food counters selling dumplings competing for space. Walking past all this, you cross the AJC Bose Road and enter the Nandan Cultural Complex. The magnificent facade of Nandan, home of the West Bengal Film Academy and a multiscreen movie theatre, greets you first. To your right is the actor’s entrance for Rabindra Sadan, one of the city’s premiere theatre venues. Moving ahead you pass scores of people milling around, chatting, or standing in queue for movie tickets. You leave the Nandan complex and enter a paved open area. To your right lies a large eatery. You can hear the constant clangs of metal, as plate after plate of noodles are sautéed and dough deep-fried for chicken and egg wraps. To your left is small area with more food counters selling dumplings, wraps, spiced puffed rice, and the Kolkata specialty phuchka.² Immediately in front of you is a raised concrete platform. People sit chatting, sipping tea, and smoking cigarettes on the steps on all four sides of it. You walk past the platform and reach the box office of the Academy of Fine Arts an hour after setting out from Behala. You buy your ticket ranging between₹100 ($1.40) and ₹1000 ($14) and buy a cup of tea in a clay tumbler known as the bhnar, as you watch the sun setting over the beautifully restored Mohor Kunja gardens across the street.

A little later you start heading down the shrubbery-lined path toward the auditorium entrance at the back of the Academy of Fine Arts, which is also Kolkata’s premiere art gallery. Near the entrance of the theatre there is another small food counter selling batter-covered, deep-fried delicacies such as egg chop, vegetable chop, fish chop, fish fry, and fish roll besides tea and coffee (premixed with milk and sugar). There are some more people waiting in this area in small groups. At a quarter pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Setting the stage: An introduction
• Part I The city and its theatre
• Part II The material conditions of Bengali group theatre
• Part III Case studies
• Bibliography
• Index