Forty years of theatre

Syed Jamil Ahmed

Photo: Amirul Rajiv

IN the mid-19th century, when the region today known as Bangladesh was the 'frontier' between a settled inland and an un-settlable sea, a vast amount of 'waste' wetlands was being reclaimed for a successful commercialization of agriculture. Having already de-industrialized the region and reorganized its land tenure system and agrarian relations, the British East India Company would soon entangle it further into a colonial relation of power with a vast network of railway and telegraph. In this colonized tract deeply incised with agriculturalist inscriptions, there were only a few, tiny and widely dispersed urban locations. Passing through a major paradigm shift, the inhabitants of these locations were in the process of appropriation and reconstitution of the performance idiom of the Imperial centre and remobilization of it as a self-reflexive tool. Over the next century and a half, this tool served them as the 'drawing board' to sketch out what they believed to be more apt or interesting 'designs for living.' In seeking to answer as to what difference the 'designs for living' produced on the 'drawing board' has made over the past forty years since Bangladesh emerged as a sovereign country, when a vast network of information technology is in the process of transforming the 'frontier' to the 'interior' of a globalizing world motored by the neo-liberal economic order, it is necessary to evaluate the forty years against the perspective of the century and a half.

In the mid-19th century, Dhaka was the largest urban location of the region today known as Bangladesh, inhabited by a population of only around fifty thousand. The Urdu-speaking khosbas, i.e., the erudite of the town, comprised mostly of zamindars, a few high government officials and the descendants of the old Mughal families, had a predilection for the mujra ('nautches') in which the tawa'ifs (courtesans) danced to Hindustani classical music, sang ghazals, and recited poetry. On the other hand, the Bengali-speaking elite classes comprised of Hindu zamindars, merchants, and Western-educated intellectuals were given to Krishna Jatra, Kabigan, Kirtan and Kathakata. In c. 1854, the tawa'ifs of the town performed Ahmad Hasan Dafar's domestic drama Bulbul Bimar for the khosbas; and in 1861, the Bengali-speaking elite classes produced Dinabandhu Mitra's Neel Darpan. Bulbul Bimar, based on an everyday story of social problems such as money-lending, women's rights, and forced marriage, introduced a veneer of social concern and European dramaturgy. Neel Darpan further reinforced European dramaturgy, appropriated its performance vocabulary, and articulated a stringent protest against the exploitation of the European indigo planters in Bengal.

In 1857, set between the above-mentioned performance events sketching two 'designs of living' of two distinct communities of the colonized, the sailors of the colonial Indian navy performed two farces in English - Chaos is Come Again and the Original and thus introduced the 'picture frame' proscenium stage and its performance vocabulary. At a time when the community of British colonizers stationed in Dhaka was receiving terrifying reports of sepoy revolt at Lal Bagh fort in the town and also from distant Chittagong, the performance of the two farces as the 'Original Chaos' articulated an agenda radically different from Bulbul Bimar and Neel Darpan: they reassured the colonizers stationed at ground-zero level that the norm of Imperial authority was there to stay, despite the 'chaos' caused by the sepoys.

About a hundred years after the three performance events mentioned above, a little after 10 in the evening of 21st February 1953, the political prisoners in Dhaka Central Jail secretly performed Munier Chowdhury's Kabar by the light of lanterns, lamps, and matchsticks. Set in a graveyard late at night, the play shows an influential political leader and a police officer supervising the secret burial of Language Movement activists killed by police shooting. Apparently, the influence of alcohol and the eerie environment lead them to hallucinate that the dead refuse to be buried and march out to the street to continue demanding that Bengali be instituted as a state language of Pakistan. Although the apparitions melt with daybreak, the 'design for living' articulated by Kabar continue to exert an uncanny presence, foreshadowing the defining attribute of theatre in Bangladesh: cultural nationalism. The point not to be missed is that the three communities of the Hindus, the Muslims, and the colonizers seen a century ago had also disappeared. Instead, there were two: one defined by religion (Islam), and the other by language (Bengali).

In 1970, after a hundred and thirteen years of the 'Original Chaos' in 1857, a group of English-speaking expatriates and local elites, who had formed an amateur group named the Dacca Stage in Dhaka city, produced Rabindranath's Red Oleanders. This performance event marks a full circle from the mutinous days of 1857 because it promised the possibility of setting out on a bold exploration of an uncharted postcolonial terrain, where the epistemic violence of colonialism could possibly be re-negotiated by dialogic encounters of the ex-colonizers (now expatriates) and their 'other' (now citizens of an independent country). This, in turn, could re-imagine performance as a 'clearing space' that generates multiple and/or heterogeneous identities and the concomitant realization that we are always more and less than a Bengali, a Bihari, a Pakistani, a British, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Taliban, a Chakma, a proletarian, a capitalist, ad infinitum, because, as Geraldine Finn argues, we inhabit “the space between experience and expression,” always submerged in a process of becoming. Hence we are forever too late or too early in arriving at the normative identity. Although and perhaps because dominant discourses forever “organize[] and obscure[]; organize[] to obscure”, we are inevitably 'fated' to fail in actuating the normative identity.

The Liberation War of 1971, however, erased the possibility of the 'clearing space' by trapping the theatre of Bangladesh into a singular discourse of cultural nationalism by marginalizing all languages except Bengali. It is this difference between expectation and desolation between 'what could have been' and 'what is' that furtively unhinges the deferential tale of forty years of theatre in Bangladesh. If there is a singular inscription by which Bangladesh theatre is marked, an inscription that overshadows all others, it is perhaps here, in the recurrent insistence of its practitioners that the nation must be 'imagined' imaged by the creative imagination of language as a cultural tool. This passionate insistence, whereby numerous 'designs of living' were imaged by creative imagination, began to be articulated after liberation in 1972 by non-profit ensembles of theatre practitioners who were drawn mostly from middle-class students and professionals. These ensembles identified themselves as the 'Group Theatre' (borrowing from similar practice in Kolkata), emphasized collectivity, inculcated professionalism in voluntary artistic labour, and emerged as the 'main stream' theatre in Bangladesh. Eschewing state support in most cases, they sought to sustain their endeavour by box office return, contributions of its members, revenue accrued from adverts published in souvenirs, and occasional sponsorships. Clearly, what they produced was nowhere equivalent to a Dionysia as in ancient Athens in which all the citizens participated. They could not lay claim to a Shakespeare, who is performed more often than any other playwright of the world, or flaunt the glitz of Broadway in New York City, where forty large professional theatres sell approximately US$ 938 million worth of tickets in a season. Nevertheless, they rightly prided themselves of amour the passion of creation unsanctioned by the 'sane,' which refused to be commoditized by exchange value. The difference lay here in their amour, and hence they were proud amateurs who sought professional finesse that no commercial enterprise could fetch.

Photo: Amirul Rajiv

If, however, the difference is sought in the perspective of the past century and a half, then perhaps such bold claims need to be deferred because similar amateur groups existed in Dhaka in the second half of the 19th century. Although most of the groups were sporadic, occasional and/or short-lived, some, such as Purba-banga Natya Samaj (1862- 1873) and Elysium Theatre (1880s), emerged to pursue sustained artistic output with social commitment and even sold tickets to sustain their efforts. These groups even had a permanent playhouse to stage their plays: the East Bengal Dramatic Hall, built in 1862. Some amateur groups had at their disposal their own playhouses (such as the playhouse of Sanatan Natya Samaj, and the Olympian Theatre of the Subarna-baniks), which very few Group Theatre ensembles in Bangladesh can claim today. The difference from then and now, perhaps, is the frequency of performance, the number of performing groups and technical facilities available.

Furthermore, if the difference is sought in the current state of globalization and neo-liberalism that Bangladesh is increasingly interiorising, then the appraisal needs to be deferred again because one is forced to concede the uncanny: today the Group Theatre is increasingly bordering on to the anachronistic. Increasingly, the ensembles are finding it hard to conduct extensive rehearsals, which are necessary to maintain the artistic merit that they seek, because the private television channels prove more lucrative in terms of economics as well as célébrité stature they promise. Increasingly, matured and experienced performers are finding it difficult to invest their surplus time for exchange-valueless amour. Already, in Kolkata, it is difficult for the Group Theatre ensembles to sustain their work even after making nominal payment to the performers. Perhaps it is time that Bangladesh theatre should seek a different organizational mechanism. One such option is the professional theatre company.

Two professional companies already exist in Bangladesh: the Bangla Theatre (established in 1992) and the Centre for Asian Theatre (established in 1994). Both of these perform intermittently. The first enjoys no financial support from corporate sectors or the State, and the second is heavily funded by NORAD and other international agencies. In this regard, too, the difference that theatre in Bangladesh has achieved over its own past is hardly enviable because, with a fragment of its current population, Dhaka was good enough a market for two professional companies from 1897 to 1925. One of these was the Crown Theatre, which was established sometime between 1890 and 1892 and survived till 1925. The other, the Diamond Jubilee Theatre (later renamed the Lion Theatre), was established in and ran its business till 1931. There are telling signs: both the companies were forced out of business by the 'talkies.'

Faced with this foreboding future, perhaps the theatre in Bangladesh can rightly seek reassurance in the difference it has achieved by having institutionalized graduate and post-graduate levels of education on theatre at five public universities Dhaka, Jahangirnagar, Rajshahi, Chittagong and Trishal. Pakistan, a country from which we parted ways forty years ago, is yet to achieve this distinction. The cultural capital produced by these institutions, hopefully, will provide a sustained interest in theatre and inaugurate bold horizons by feeding theory into practice. Already, the University of Dhaka has proved its worth by mounting memorable productions such as Bhasa's Urubhangam (2008), a Sanskrit classic, Chekhov's Three Sisters (2005), a 'Western' masterpiece, and Bangladesh's own, Behular Bhasan (2004). After all, Shakespeare and Rabindranath may not have been university products, but such infinite grandeur could emerge only because the universities in Elizabethan England and colonial Bengal generated a backdrop of rich tapestry woven by informed interest of infinite variety.

It is this variety daring to reach out to infinity that may be fast receding from the landscape of theatre in Bangladesh. After its inception in 1972, an important cluster of 'design for living' etched by the Group Theatre ensembles was underpinned by class-consciousness and a facile Marxist ideology, which voiced protest against exploitation in contemporary society (as in Mamunur Rashid's Ora Kadam Ali, produced by Aranyak in 1976) and crises in state-level politics (as in S. M. Solaiman's Ei Deshe Ei Beshe, produced by Dhaka Padatik in 1989). To these may be added Bertolt Brecht's works (such as The Good Person of Szechwan, produced by Nagarik in 1975). In articulating this line, theatre in Bangladesh had not achieved any significant difference because a politically and artistically committed group named Dacca Theatres had already inaugurated the theatre of class-struggle in 1943 with the production of Machine-O-Manush by Brajagopal Das. Performed at a time when Dhaka city was passing through the darkest of times marked by famine and Hindu-Muslim riots, the symbolist 'design for living' in Machine-O-Manush argued that humanity can be freed only if Science is employed for human welfare. Today, the Marxist dream has virtually disappeared from the landscape of Bangladesh theatre, to be replaced by human rights.

Other important clusters of 'design for living' etched by the Group Theatre ensembles were underpinned by (i) the crisis of values of the petit-bourgeoisie in post-liberation Bangladesh, as in Abdullah Al Mamun's Subachan Nirbasane (Theatre, 1974) and Mamtazuddin Ahmed's Shat Ghater Kana-kadi (Theatre Arambagh, 1989), (ii) the Liberation War as in Syed Shamsul Huq's Payer Awaj Pawa Jay (Theatre, 1976), (iii) interest in the history of Bengal prior to Muslim conquest, as in Alok Basu's Atish Dipamkar Shaparja (Natya Dhara, 2003), and (iv) urge to engage with Islamism and Islamic cultures as in Masum Reza's Araj Charitamrita (Natyakendra 2001) and an adaptation of Meer Musharraf Hussain's Bishad Sindhu Parts I and II (Dhaka Padatik, 1991 and 1992). A common vector that empowers all these clusters of 'designs for living' is the discourse of a totalitarian nationalism that defines the nation by Bengali language. Inhered from Kabar in 1953, the discourse of cultural nationalism had gathered force in 1961 when a major debate had raged on the occasion of Rabindranath's birth centenary. It would be hardly an overestimation if one asserts that the silent yet pervasive touchstone and the ideological underpin of Bangladesh theatre thus represented is Rabindranath Tagore, as exemplified in Nagarik's production of Raktakarabi (2001) and Prachyanat's 'Raja' … ebong anyanna (2008).

Set off by a remarkable difference, the Bengali theatre in the second half of the 19th century was articulated within a loosely-defined parameter of the Brahma Samaj-inspired Hindu revivalism. Its 'designs for living' were derived from mythological and devotional fables such as Sitar Banabas (c. 1862) and Bibva-mangal (1888), or were social satires such as Ekei ki bale Sabhyata (1872) and Bud?o Shaliker Ghad?e Ro (1973), along with an occasional Sanskrit piece such as Abhignan Shakuntalam (c. 1871), or a historical drama with a Hindu protagonist, such as Maharastra-kalanka (c. 1876). The difference is also evident when compared to the Parsi Theatre, which, in early 20th century, catered mostly to the non-literate urban plebeians instead of the khosbas. Besides touring companies from Kolkata, local professional companies and even amateur groups performed numerous plays in Urdu such as Zalma-e Parastan, Indrasabha, Laily-Majnu and Shiri-Farhad, which sketched their 'designs for living' by blending realism and fantasy, music and dance, and integrating the concoction with melodrama, sensationalism and dazzling stagecraft.

Today, the secular ideals of cultural nationalism in the theatre of Bangladesh have found their most ardent exponents in the protest-oriented Street Theatre performances. This brand emerged for the first time in 1969, when Udichi Shilpi Gosthi, gave a series of street theatre performances, which were based on contemporary political issues, and which sought the urban proletariat classes as target-spectators. Street Theatre re-emerged in Bangladesh during the pro-democracy movement from 1983 to 1991. Today, the ideals of the Liberation War of 1971 and stringent opposition to Islamism are its core drivers. It preaches a simplified wisdom to a homogenous mass of supposedly 'unconscious' people by pointing out the real enemy the Islamist 'other.' The issue here is not the validity of the claim, but the intransigent insistence with which the 'other' is held responsible that sets the Street Theatre in Bangladesh a world apart from the work of Augusto Boal and Badal Sircar.

From the obsessive fixity with cultural nationalism that theatre in Bangladesh is engrossed in, four differential 'lines of flight' have been traced by its practitioners that promised new horizons. In the first of these launched in 1981, Dhaka Theatre initiated the Gram Theatre Movement, which, coupled with Selim Al Deen's memorable plays (such as Kittonkhola and Keramatmangal produced by Dhaka Theatre in 1981 and 1985, respectively), broke away from the performance idiom of the Imperial centre by abandoning dramatic conflict, dialogue, and even a linear cause-to-effect relationship in the development of the action in the plot, which had taken hold of the theatre of this region since the days of Bulbul Bimar, Neel Darpan, and Chaos is Come Again. This differentiating move of cultural decolonisation embraces the techniques of narrative performance whole-heartedly as in the indigenous theatre of Bangladesh, and challenges the implicit representational biases of Euro-American theatre. Nevertheless, the differentiation promised by the Gram Theatre movement has been deferred because its 'designs for living' were entrapped in narrating the Bengali people as an all-encompassing and monolithic equivalent of Bangladesh.

The second differential 'line of flight' was generated by dissatisfaction with the Group Theatre's petite bourgeois spectators inextricably entangled with the bourgeoisie, who could enjoy an evening with Brecht only because the latter was thoroughly domesticated. From this terrain that absorbed and muted revolutionary intent, members of Aranyak ensemble rejected their role as traditional intellectuals, and joined the subaltern classes in distant rural areas as 'ideologues in action,' to engender a theatre by, for, and of the people. For about eight years since its launch in 1984, Mukta Natak did appear to live up to its promise as it developed into a rousing popular movement at the grassroots level. However, soon after the fall of the Wall, the movement proved to be an impossible dream for the Mukta Natak practitioners. Consequently, the promised differentiation was deferred as the practitioners returned to their roles as traditional intellectuals in Dhaka city. What remains today is theatre employed for the rights of the disadvantaged groups, made possible by the generous funding of a few INGOs, and executed by their native partners.

In the late 1980s, the third 'line of flight', inspired by feminism, turned to enquire into the notions of hegemonic masculinity, gender, and sexuality. This differential event took place in 1989, when Theatre produced Kokilara, a monodrama written and directed by a male (Abdullah al Mamun) but performed by one of the most popular and versatile actresses in Bangladesh Ferdousi Majumdar. It shows how a univocal and domineering ideology of gender, articulated through the institutions of marriage and divorce in the social field of Bangladesh, attempts to control and silence all women irrespective of classes. Although feminism-inspired Kokilara is trapped in biological essentialism, it generated a new cluster of 'designs for living' as Binodini (Dhaka Theatre, 2005) and Khana (Subachan, 2008). By this time, the difference that the theatre in Bangladesh had achieved over its past is quite significant. Gone were the days of 1879, when Brahmo Samaj had led a vociferous protest against the National Theatre from Kolkata which performed their plays in Dhaka with female caste members branded as 'prostitutes.' Gone also was the patriarchal amazement of 1949, when Shirin Chowdhury, a married Muslim woman from a respectable middle-class background, performed the role of a female character in Uday Nala by Golam Rahman, disregarding the norm that female roles can only be performed by female 'prostitutes' or male impersonators. Nevertheless, the differentiation that the feminism-inspired plays promised was inevitably deferred because all the performances it produced in its wake have inevitably been entangled in the monolithic discourse of Bengali nationalism.

The fourth differentiating 'line of flight' was launched in 1983 when the Joom Esthetic Council in Rangamati performed Anat Bhajee Udhe Muk, a play in Chakma language written by Chirajyoti Chakma. Since then, Bangladesh has witnessed numerous ethno-theatrical performances in Manipuri, Sadri, Santali, Oraon, Garo, Munda, and other languages. In 1990, the Bengali community joined this line of differentiating articulation when Desh Natak produced Masum Reza's Birsa Kabya. This 'design for living' revived the memory of the struggle of the Austro-Asiatic ethnic community of the Mundas who waged the Ulugan (lit “Great Tumult”) against the British colonizers and the Bengali feudal lords in 1899-1900, to exert their right to community ownership of the forestland. By this act of remembrance, the Bengali community acknowledged that the symbolic boundary of the nation cannot exclude the existence of forty-five distinct ethnic communities living in Bangladesh, even if the Bengalis constitute an overwhelming numeral majority of 98% of the population. The differentiation sought by Birsa Kabya generated huge interest in ethnicity among the Group Theatre practitioners, as they produced memorable plays such as Banapanshul (Dhaka Theatre, 1998) and Rarang (Aranyak, 2004). In consequence of the line of flight generating out of ethnotheatre, theatre in Bangladesh today has redirected the narration of nation from the nationalist 'roots' of identity derived from the majoratarian norm to postnational 'routes' of a pluralist process of becoming.

This, then, is a brief stocktaking made in deference, of the differences that theatre in Bangladesh has achieved or have been deferred, hopefully not definitely. At a time when neo-liberalism threatens to subsume the country into a homogenized monoculture enmeshed in the 'interior' of globalization, let us hope, that the difference sought by means of ethnotheatre to destabilize cultural nationalism will not be deferred, if only because the theatrical idiom borrowed from the Imperial centre has already been subverted. It is here, in the multiplicity of a postnationalist identity promised in the differential move of the ethnotheatre that the theatre in Bangladesh can best sketch 'designs of living' as a celebration of life erasing totalizing boundaries and deconstructing the hierarchy of inflexible monolithic systems be they religious or cultural. Let this stocktaking urge the practitioners of theatre in Bangladesh to devise ways and means by which any identity national, ethnic, racial, gendered, class-based, or otherwise becomes more of “a concern with 'routes' rather than 'roots'.”

The writer is theatre director and Professor, Department of Threatre, Dhaka University.