A Letter from Badal Sircar.

November 23, 1981

Author(s): Badal Sircar
Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 26, No. 2, Intercultural Performance (Summer, 1982),
pp. 51-58
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1145430
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Drama Review: TDR

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Dear Richard,

You wanted me to write for the "Intercultural Performance" issue of The Drama
Review. You wanted me to write about my experience with my theatre group Satabdi;
about the difficulties I had and the successes I have had; about my state of mind, my
experiences as a playwright and a director.
What can I write? I am no writer of essays. I am a theatre man. I wrote some plays
because I am a man of the theatre, not because I am a writer. I have to write in English,
but English is not my language. My experiences with Satabdi, in theatre, in the cultural
jungle of Calcutta, my city; my experiences with other people, with society, with life itself
in all its absurdity, sordidness and beauty-all these are no better than a chaotic mass
of confusion, and a long history of trying to find a meaningful course, a rational path,
through this chaotic agglomeration. I am looking back to locate and understand the path
already traversed; I am looking ahead to project it to the future so that the next few steps
can be taken.
So where do I begin? At the beginning? At where I am now? At somewhere in the
mid-course? Better somewhere in the mid-course; then I shall not have to bother about
chronology, continuity, or coherence.
Calcutta. The city I was born in and raised in. An artificial city created in the colonial
interests of a foreign nation. A monster city that grew by sucking the blood of a vast rural
hinterland which perhaps is the true India. A city of alien culture based on English education,
repressing, distorting, buying, promoting for sale the real culture of the country. A city I
hate intensely. A city I love intensely.
Calcutta, July 6, 1979. An old building in the congested College Square area occupied
by the Theosophical Society of India for more than ninety years. The lecture hall on the
second story, 58 feet long and 24 feet wide, with its old dusty cupboards full of books
on Theosophy and faded oil paintings of potentates of Theosophy-given to Satabdi on
hire every Friday after much persuasion. First performance of Basi Khabar. Culmination
of a year-long process. The first experience of Satabdi of creating a play collectively.

THE DRAMA REVIEW, Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 1982, (T94)

0012-5962/82/020051-08 $4.00/0
? 1982 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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 Badal Sircar

Year-long-but what is a year? None of the Satabdi members are paid anything.
They work in banks, schools, offices, factories; they assemble in evenings exhausted by
loveless work and sardine-packed public transport; they have to disperse early for long
journeys, many by scandalously irregular suburban trains. On Sundays we can work for
five hours, provided we are not invited to perform somewhere-a village, a "bustee"
(slum), a suburban town, a college lawn, an office canteen. Shows on Friday evenings;
Thursday evenings spent on the rehearsal of the play to be perforned the next day. How
much time can we get for working on a new project? Eight hours in a week is an optimistic
average. Still, a year means that we all grow with the play for one full year, and the play
gets into our bloodstream.
One year back. July, 1978. First performance of Gondi-an adaptation I made of
The Caucasian Chalk Circle. We felt good. We enjoyed preparing it-only fifteen per-
formers taking care of forty roles; hut, stream, door, trees, bridge made of human bodies.
We all felt that the play is Indian and contemporary, and can be understood equally by
the educated of the city and the illiterate of the village, and our later experience proved
this belief to be correct.
It was the third year of our regular weekly performances at the Theosophical Society
hall. Before that we have had two years of such weekly shows in another room
(1972-1974), and a spell of nearly two years of only open air shows. Performances in
public parks were stopped by the police during the "Emergency" (1975) and our search
for an indoor space ultimately brought us to this hall in early 1976. Admission was free;
a donation of one Rupee (eleven cents, a cup of coffee in a shabby cafe costs more in
Calcutta) was expected and was willingly paid by most, but that was not the condition for
entrance. Leaflets containing the program for the next five or six Fridays were distributed
to the spectators, otherwise we depended entirely on word-of-mouth publicity. (I am using
the past tense because we now perform in another hall-the system has remained the
same.) The relation between acting and sitting areas varied according to the demand of
the play. For Gondi we could provide about 125 seats, all seats were booked much in

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Bhoma by Satabdi, Calcutta

advance, and we felt good. That was the beginning of the year-long process of creating
Basi Khabar.
After Gondi we had no play at hand. We were having workshops, relating sometimes
to the cruel absurdities we live in. Enormous wealth and immeasurable poverty. A dev-
astating flood ruining hundreds of thousands in the villages and a huge crowd of fans
gathering to see the film stars raising donations in Calcutta for flood-relief. Construction
of the underground railway in Calcutta and 90 percent of the underground water remaining
untapped, rendering most of the arable land mono-crop. Satellites in space and 70 percent
of the population under the poverty line. Democracy and police brutality. The stupidity of
man, the cruelty of man, the achievements of man, the callousness of man-not just in
this country, but in the whole world.
But what about the courage of man? somebody asked. What about Spartacus, on
whose struggles we made a play in 1972? What about all those who dream of and die
for the emergence of a new and better society?
We decided that we would try to make a play collectively on these issues built around
the theme of a revolt. Revolt-the ultimate burst of collective courage. We chose the
Santhal revolt of 1855-56 that shook the British imperial hold on Eastern India for nine
long months.
The aboriginals. Always subjected to the worst kind of exploitation and injustice.
Pushed beyond limits, they have often burst out in spontaneous revolts. But the accounts
of such revolts do not find any place in the history textbooks. We had to depend on the
work of some rare researchers and some obscure accounts.
The Santhal tribe is one of the oldest and largest communities of India, settled in the
Bihar-Bengal border. I shall not try to describe here the inhuman extortion, oppression,
and torture they were subjected to by the British colonists and their Indian stooges-
usurers, traders, native princes and landlords (the "maharajah" so lovably portrayed in
Air India advertisements). One can imagine all that when one finds that fifty thousand
hungry, half-naked Santhals took up their primitive arms-spear, axe, bow and arrow-

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54 THE DRAMA REVIEW/T94

and fought against the trained, well-fed troops with guns, cannons, horses and elephants,
liberating district after district in Bihar and Bengal, not giving up until twenty-five thousand
were killed, not counting the women, children and old folks in the villages razed to the
ground after nine months of heroic struggle.
In the process of workshops, research and discussions, several decisions emerged.
We decided not to make just a theatrical presentation of the Santhal revolt. Through our
research we became more and more confirmed in the belief we already had-that con-
ditions have not changed fundamentally even today. To us the subject was contemporary.
We collected material from newspapers, magazines, survey reports-accounts of poverty,
exploitation, injustice and atrocities perpetrated against the poorer communities and the
repressive measures taken against those who protested or wanted to bring about a change.
These accounts were juxtaposed against the accounts of the conditions that pushed the
Santhals to revolt. We also decided that we would not make a play with characters and
dialogue, for that would be false, unconvincing and inadequate. We decided to show it
from the point of view of a contemporary young man just like any of us. The man is born,
is educated, is constantly bombarded by lots of information from textbooks, newspapers,
radio, literature-false, half-true, irrelevant-and sometimes he comes across a report
of mass killing or gang rape in an aboriginal village by paid hoodlums of the local (high
caste) landlord. Or maybe a survey report giving figures and facts regarding "bonded
labor"-a man or his whole family becoming virtual slaves for indebtedness (100 to 500
percent compound interest-fabricated figures to boot-to cheat the ignorant debtor) for

Satabdi's Michhil, Calcutta

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 BADAL SIRCAR 55

a whole lifetime, sometimes for generations. If that young man also happens to rea
account of the Santhal revolt, what happens? Will his defense mechanism succeed i
making him forget all that, thereby allowing him to concentrate on his career, his perso
life, his family affairs? Or will he change a little, will he make a decision, make a ch
however minor, to do something about it?
All that happened to us, is happening to us. Each of us was that young man, tryin
our best to deny the existence of the "killed man" in our midst, and yet not wholl
succeeding. The "killed man" in our play wandered silently from time to time amongs
chorus of performers, sometimes breaking through, holding his bandaged right palm
front of the eyes of a performer to make him read something about the Santhals of
last century, another time using his left palm for something happening today. That
Basi Khabar (stale news)-a theatre created by the whole group in pain and love.
It is not a theatre one can perform by "enacting." It can only be performed by "st
of being." The performer acts out his own feelings, his own concerns and questions
contradictions and guilt. Through the play, our protagonist changed a little, we chan
a little, and we hoped that our spectators, some of them, would change a little. The s
total of all these little, almost imperceptible changes, all these little positive choice
take, can one day bring about the change we are all waiting for.
Yes, our theatre has become a theatre of change. A long voyage- Spartacus, Michh
Bhoma, Bhanga Manush, many other plays. We came out of the proscenium stage in
1972, five years after the inception of Satabdi, twenty years after the beginning of

Bhoma

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56 THE DRAMA REVIEW/T94

Michhil

involvement in theatre. The immediate reason was that of communication-we wanted

to break down the barriers and come closer to the spectators, to take full advantage of
direct communication that theatre as a live-show offers. We wanted to share with our
audience the experience of joint human action. But in taking that course we also found
our theatre outside the clutches of money. We could establish a free theatre, performing
in public parks, slums, factories, villages, wherever the people are, depending on voluntary
donations from the people for the little expenses we needed. We stopped using sets,
spotlights, costly costumes, make-up-not as a matter of principle, but because we realized
that they are not essentials, even if sometimes necessary. We concentrated on the es-
sentials-the human body and the human mind. Our theatre became a flexible, portable
and inexpensive-almost free-theatre.
The indigenous folk theatre of India, strong, live, immensely loved by the working
people of the country, propagates themes that are at best irrelevant to the life of the toiling
masses, and at worst back-dated and downright reactionary. The proscenium theatre that
the city-bred intelligencia imported from the West constitutes the second theatre of our
country, as it runs parallel to the folk theatre-the first theatre-practically without meeting.
This theatre can be and has been used by a section of educated and socially conscious
people for propagating socially relevant subjects and progressive values, but it gets money-
bound and city-bound, more and more so as costs go on rising, unable to reach the real
people. Historically there appears to be a need for a third theatre in our country-a flexible,
portable, free theatre as a theatre of change, and that is what we are trying to build. This
theatre is not an experimentation in form; we have no concern for taking theatre as an

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 BADAL SIRCAR 57

art from point A to point B. We nevertheless have to explore to find the best form t
communicate our theme as directly, effectively and intensely as possible to our audience
through such exploration new forms often emerge.
Obviously, such a theatre takes the character of a movement, and cannot be taken
as a profession. Those interested only in theatre cannot do this kind of theatre, nor can
those depending on theatre to make a living. Only those who feel the urge to change,
and want to use theatre to contribute to the forces of change, can be in this theatre. Ther
are not many who come, and those who come can devote only their leisure hours. Our
work therefore is frustratingly slow, but there is no other way. The only way is to hav
many such groups to join the movement at different places. This is beginning to happen
not so much in Calcutta proper, but in suburbs and provincial towns. Formation of new
groups, change in old groups, establishment of free open air theatre spaces, organization
of free open air drama festivals in different areas-all this is happening not only in this
State, but in other parts of India as well, sometimes independently, sometimes as a follow
up of workshops I (and now others too) conduct from time to time at different places. Tw
joint productions have already been mounted successfully-three or four groups have

Hattamalar Oparey by Satabdi at a park in Calcutta

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58 THE DRAMA REVIEW/T94

joined together to prepare a play requiring a relatively large cast. The movement, though
still young, is growing steadily.
The ultimate answer however is not for a city group to prepare plays for and about
the working people. The working people-the factory workers, the peasants, the landles
laborers-will have to make and perform their own plays. We have deprived them not
only of food, clothing, shelter, and education, but also of self-confidence. Here we can
also help by demystification, by assuring them that theatre is not the monopoly of th
educated. One of my greatest experiences of self-fulfillment occurred when a group of
illiterate and semi-literate peasants and landless agricultural workers of a remote villag
bordering the jungles of Sundarbans (south of Bengal) began making and performing plays
about their own life and problems, following Satabdi performances in that village and th
workshops I did with them. I have recently experienced promising results in workshop
with landless laborers in a Gujrat village in western India.
This process, of course, can become widespread only when the socio-economic
movement for the emancipation of the working class has also spread widely. When tha
happens, the third theatre (in the context I have used) will no longer have a separate
function, but will merge with a transformed first theatre.
Richard, this is all I can write now. It is inadequate, incomplete, and confused, and
may communicate very little to the Western reader who knows so little of the real India
You have seen a lot-in city and in village, you have known our group in action, you wil
probably understand what I am trying to say. So this is a letter to you.

Love,
Badal Sircar

Badal Sircar is one of India's leading playwrights and founder-director of the Bengali Group,
Satabdi.

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