Rabindranath Tagore’s fascination for and engagement with theatre began in early childhood. Growing up in the ancestral family home in Jorasanko in Kolkata, he would often watch traditional Bengali folk theatre (jatra) and amateur theatricals performed by his family members, in the house.
Tagore was 19 when he started writing plays. Initially, these were staged at home, with all roles being played by relatives. The roles were therefore written to fit the talents of family members. Once he established a school at Santiniketan, he wrote scripts with parts to be played by boys, as there were only boys in the school at first. But as more girls joined the school, and it became generally more accepted for ‘respectable’ women to appear on the stage, his plays increasingly involved roles for women.But beyond the family performances at Jorasanko and the improvised open-air staging of several of his plays at Santiniketan, 1916 onwards, Tagore began to mount his productions in auditoriums of Kolkata, and involved professional artists to design his sets and lighting.
Interpreting many of his scripts, in particular Rakta Karabi, Bisarjan and Mukta Dhara, contemporary directors bring their own vision to his writings. In Delhi, Sudhanva Deshpande directed Char Adhyaya setting it in a metro train, while a Mumbai theatre group, Qissa Kothi, brought an experimental production of Her Letters by Rabindranath to Delhi in January.Written a hundred years ago, the story is fascinating because it reminds us that little has changed in the way we treat our women.
Growing up in Jorasanko’s Thakur Bari, with a multitude of mother substitutes, young Rabindranath learnt how to cope with the emotional life of at-home Bengali women, early on in life. Fathers were often away, out in the wide world and women waited months for correspondence. When it came, they waited more for someone to read it to them and then help them write a reply, because many women were uneducated. Letters were therefore important markers in lives, and Tagore often used them as tools to explore a character’s thoughts and views in an uninterrupted flow. If responded to, they gave the other point of view, and Stree Patra (Her Letters) is one such letter.
The play tells us of Mrinal, who writes a letter to her husband while on a pilgrimage, on which her husband does not accompany her. She recalls her relationship with Bindu, an unmarried young girl, a distant relative, an orphan who was an unwanted guest in her house. Were the two women lovers? Tagore leaves the answer ambiguous.
Adding to the original story, the Qissa Kothi cast has drawn narratives from their own lives, as well as borrowed from the powerful feminist writings of Virginia Woolf and Amrita Pritam. A tulsi plant, a bowl of water, a grinding stone, a mirror and jewellery suggest the ‘boundaries’ of a woman’s life in this retelling. Two actresses dressed in red sarees use speech and dance, static postures and mimetic gestures to create a unique performance. This group was formed in 2016 when some artists based in Mumbai were grappling with a name for their collective explorations.
The writer is a Delhi-based theatre director.
feisal.alkazi@rediffmail.com