The Bengali theatre, emerging in the nineteenth century largely as a by-product of the Bengal Renaissance, remained first, a colonial importation, and second, an urban phenomenon. The theatres of the British, constructed in Calcutta from the mid-eighteenth century primarily for the entertainment of the local British residents, provided the model for the Indian/Bengali theatres. In the words of Sudipto Chatterjee: âThe Bengal Renaissance was the outgrowth of the grafting of a foreign culture onto a more-than-willing native culture ⊠It is in the wake of this endeavour to assume/regain a respectful self-identity, that in the 1840s, several theatres were spawned in the native quarters of Calcutta.â1
The English theatres in Calcutta, built by the British theatre enthusiasts, were emulating the contemporary European realistic theatre, with its proscenium stage heavily adorned with Victorian âpictorial realismâ. The Russian Herasim Lebedeff is credited with having staged the first Bengali plays (Bengali translations of The Disguise and Love is the Best Doctor); his Bengally Theatre, built at No. 25 âDom-Tollahâ (Ezra Street), would have been very much a replica of the available European model. He writes in his memoir:
I set about building a commodious Theatre on a plan of my own, in Dom-Tollah, (Dome-Lane) in the centre of Calcutta; and in the mean while I employed my Linguist to procure native actors of both sexes, âŠ2
The staging took place on 27 November 1795, and was repeated on 21 March 1796. Interestingly, Lebedeff claims to have used male as well as female players also for his production. However, it is difficult to say how far he could cater to the average Bengali playgoers, as the rather exorbitant admission rates may have been near-prohibitive for them.3 Also, the stilted Bengali translation may not have found favour with the Bengali populace, used to more colloquial language used in indigenous forms of entertainment like jatra, akhrai, half-akhrai, tarja. 4 Moreover, despite its historical importance, Lebedeffâs attempt, ultimately, was one initiated by a foreigner (he was a Russian) and remained an abortive one, as he had to put an end to his ventures when his theatre was closed after a fire and he ran into financial insolvency.
When the Bengali nouveaux riches, in turn, decided to have their own theatres, they, too, followed the European model. Prasannakumar Tagore, the first Bengali bhadralok to erect a theatre in imitation of the Western model, flamboyantly called it the âHindoo Theatreâ, yet went on to stage plays in English â the first night saw productions of scenes from Shakespeareâs Julius Caesar and an English version of Bhavabhutiâs Uttar-Ramcharit (translated by an Englishman, Wilson).5 Scholars mention that among the actors who later appeared in this theatre â usually playing Shakespearean roles in English-language productions â were Ramtanu Lahiri (in 1833) and Madhusudan Dutt (in 1834, then aged ten), playing the Duke of Gloucester in Henry IV. 6
Against this Anglicist or Reformist trend, with its overt dependence on the Western cultural models, emerged an Orientalist/Revivalist backlash. Sanskrit plays (in Bengali translations) were revived and quasi-Sanskrit plays were also composed and staged. So, while there were productions of Sanskrit masters (in translation) like Kalidas and Vasa, there were also quasi-Sanskrit plays like Kaliprasanna Singhaâs Sabitri-Satyaban Natak (published 1858) or Monomohan Basuâs Ramabhishek Natak (performed 1868), for which there were no Sanskrit antecedents but which followed the classical sources using the Bengali language.7 When Kalidasâs Sakuntala was given at Ashutosh Devâs (Satu babu) theatre on 30 January 1857, Hindoo Patriot, on 15 February 1857, noted that â(t)he announcement [on the invitation card] had the further attraction that the play announced was a genuine Bengallee one âŠâ8. Not only was Kalidas appropriated for the Bengali theatre, but he was also stridently promoted as the champion of the Indian/Bengali legacy against Shakespeare, the supreme cultural icon of the Western colonizer. So, when the Bengali poet Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, in his eulogy of Shakespeare, had gushed: âBharater Kalidas, jagater tumiâ [âKalidas is of India, you are of the worldâ], no less than Vidyasagar retorted with: âHembabur e katha bolibar adhikar nai. Se to Sanskrito jane naâ [âHembabu has no right to say this. He has no Sanskrit learningâ].9
When, in the post-Lebedeff era, Bengali theatre stirred back to life on 6 October 1835 with the staging of Vidyasundar, at Nabinchandra Basuâs house at Shyambazar, it took recourse to the Indian love story of Vidya and Sundar, but also borrowed from Western theatrical codes. The Hindoo Pioneer reviewer noted, with approval, the intermixing of the âEnglish styleâ and the ânative languageâ in the performance. Interestingly, this performance also deployed women in the female roles, and the actress Radhamoni was particularly applauded for her impersonation of the character of Vidya, the heroine.10 For that matter, when Taracharan Sikdar wrote his Bhadrarjun (1852), he used a tale from Indian mythology but worked into it a Western dramaturgical style; in his introduction, having declared how he eschewed the details given in Sanskrit dramaturgical prescriptions, he wrote: âDone according to the principles of European drama, I offer this play.â11 The very next year, Harachandra Ghosh published his translation of Shakespeareâs The Merchant of Venice as Bhanumati Chittabilas (1853) and announced in the English preface12 of the play how he
undertook to write it [the play] in the shape of a Bengali Natuck or Drama, taking only the plots and underplots of the Merchant of Venice, with considerable additions and alterations to suit the native taste, but at the same time losing no opportunity to convey to my countrymen, who have no means of getting themselves acquainted with Shakespeare, save through the medium of their own language, the beauty of the authorâs sentiments⊠the work being of a novel character, professing, as it does, to be a Bengali Natuck though written much after the manner of an English play. 13
Though Bhadrarjun or Bhanumati Chittabilas were early indications, it was finally through the efforts of Michael Madhusudan Dutt that a happy conciliation was achieved between the Reformist and Revivalist positions in the Bengali theatre. Aware of Western traditions, he was able to use these for his dramaturgical structure, while for the dramatic narrative resorting to Indian epics/myths/legends. In fact, Madhusudanâs role as a playwright of the period encapsulates the dilemmas involved vis-Ă -vis the realization that the British presence in India had a two-fold Janus-like influence, âone destructive, the other regenerating.â14 On the one hand, Madhusudan had an undisguised disgust for the mindless borrowings from Sanskrit drama, which impelled his conscious efforts to import Western models for Bengali dramaturgy, and which he justified thus:
I am aware, my dear fellow, that there will, in all likelihood, be something of a foreign air about my drama: but if the language be not ungrammatical, if the thoughts be just and glowing, the plot interesting, the characters well maintained, what care you if there be a foreign air about the thing?15
On the other hand, he was acutely aware of his sociocultural position as an Indian and hence the need to relocate his Western borrowings within that context. This may have been the reason why he did not dabble in Shakespearean translation/adaptation â though that was one of the foremost preoccupations in the contemporary theatre. In a letter to his friend Rajnarain Basu he wrote:
Some of my friends â and I fancy, you are among them â as soon as you see a drama of mine begin to apply the canons of criticism that have been given forth by the masterpieces of William Shakespeare. They perhaps forget that I write under different circumstances. Our social and moral developments are of a different character.16
In his earliest play, Sarmishtha (1859), while importing the model of tragic drama from European sources, Madhusudan used it to retell a well-known story that had its roots in the Indian tradition17; in doing so, he not only provided the model for his other plays but also for the kind of âtransculturationâ later adopted in the Bengali theatre. We need to contextualize Madhusudanâs efforts within that dialectical relationship, which informed the cross-cultural exchanges between the European/English culture (of the colonizing master) and the new urban educated Bengali elite (the colonized subject) in nineteenth-century Bengal: âEnglish literature was not merely a literature of the masters but it was literature, a source of non-denominational spirituality, a harbinger of a secular outlet.â18 But the fact remains that though Madhusudanâs Sarmishtha or Ramnarayan Tarkaratnaâs Ratnabali or the many Indianized Shakespearean adaptations (Hamlet as Hariraj, Macbeth as Rudrapal, Othello as Bhimsingha) all emerged as Bengali playtexts, their performances were conditioned by the Western staging principles. The theatre semiology on the Bengali stage, therefore, remained â and has remained â a Western importation.
The other important characteristic of this Bengali theatre was its urban nature: it evolved primarily in the city, for the entertainment of the Calcutta residents, under the patronage of the rich bhadralok (elite) classes. In its early phases, it was kept confined to the premises of these social elites, though usually at their âgarden-housesâ and not quite their official residential quarters. The invited guests who went to the theatres also came from the upper echelons of the society; these performances were meant primarily for select audiences and not for the common people.19 In fact, even for these invited bhadralok classes, a hierarchical system of seating arrangements was, perhaps, practised. There is at least one reference to the ushers showing seats to the spectators in keeping with their social ranking (the dress they wore being the marker); the incident left quite a few feathers ruffled and, in turn, elicited hasty explanations that the organizers were not aware of this development.20 The performances of the theatrical troupes of that period were chiefly bolstered by the generosity of the city-based wealthy patrons. Even when later amateur theatrical companies tried to carve out identities f...