Another pillar of Bangla theatre has departed. Usually named in dramatic history alongside Mohit Chattopadhyaya, Manoj Mitra actually had little in common with his senior by four years, besides their prolific writing careers. Mohit-da belonged to the line of esteemed playwrights who did not pursue stage activities themselves. Manoj-da, on the other hand, practised the difficult triple tradition of dramatist-director-actors who ran their own groups, like the celebrated Badal Sircar and Utpal Dutt. But his big difference with them was that they sometimes adapted others’ texts, whereas Manoj-da composed original scripts exclusively—entirely his own, even completely independent of foreign influence, therefore a conspicuous exception in post-1947 Bangla theatre.
We can understand this last point to some extent when we learn that Manoj-da read philosophy in college, unlike many leaders of the stage movement, graduates in literature. He studied at Scottish Church, which in the 1940s and 1950s bred the likes of Badal Sircar, Rudra Prasad Sengupta and other theatre enthusiasts. It was there in 1957 that he launched his group Sundaram with fellow student Partha Pratim Chowdhury, significantly announcing in their agenda “no political party affiliations” (we must remember that most groups in those days proudly declared their socialist, if not Communist, ideologies).
The first play that Manoj-da penned, Mrityur Chokhe Jal (1959), rose from his memories of his grandfather’s sorrow at having to leave East Bengal after Independence. We notice from that humble one-act beginning his recurrent dramatic concerns: old, lost men; rural and urban realism based on his acute sense of observation; a veracity of dialogue clearly rooted in the soil, with dollops of rustic humour; and deep human insight that frequently juxtaposed the cruelty of the powerful against the helplessness but inner strength of the victims.
He was a wonderful performer and director of precisely these qualities, but in interviews he always said that he loved writing most of all. In the scope of an essay for the lay reader I cannot possibly analyse his prodigious 100-plus output that also encompasses hugely popular one-act and children’s plays (someone needs to author the definitive book on his entire work), so I have selected my personal choice of a dozen major plays that establish his permanent place in Bengali drama.
The Seventies saw him break through with a quartet of contemporary classics that did not connect explicitly to the incendiary politics of West Bengal at that time. In Chāk Bhāngā Madhu (1972, translated as Honey from a Broken Hive), produced by his peers at Theatre Workshop, he depicted marginalized snake-handlers, among whom the medicine man has to decide whether to cure an evil moneylender of snakebite or let him perish. In 1975, after Sundaram had fallen into doldrums for several years, Manoj-da took charge with Parabās, a bittersweet comedy that exemplified his typical character and theme—a lonely old tenant facing eviction (individualized as both namby-pamby and mischievous) and ruminations on the idea of what constitutes home.
The next year, again for Theatre Workshop, a new Manojian aspect manifested itself on Narak Guljār: a showy and boisterous satire of deities and a mafia in hell. From that point on, gods and ghosts, heroes and animals, began to populate his plays more regularly, along with commoners. He followed up in 1977 with his masterpiece Sājāno Bāgān (filmed by Tapan Sinha as Bānchhārāmer Bāgān and translated as Banchharam’s Orchard) for Sundaram, in which his lead acting and directing peaked as the poor nonagenarian fighting land sharks who want him to die fast. He had seen the story unfold in his native village. The headline photo captures him (at the age of 39) in the part of Banchharam, on the left.
The Eighties proved a relatively quieter decade during which Bohurupee produced two of his excellent plays. Rājdarshan (1982, translated as An Encounter with Royalty) was an allegorical parody of kingship, where a greedy Brahmin transmigrates into the Raja’s corpse. And in the first of Manoj-da’s metatheatrical excursions, Kinu Kāhārer Thetār (1988) drew a witty and entertaining picture of a man he knew, a rural swineherd doing his own brand of open-air, makeshift but genuine histrionics. Along similar lines, Darpane Sharatshashi (1992, directed by Soumitra Chatterjee) recreated authentically a Calcutta-trained 19th-century actor staging Nil-darpan in his home village with an invited cast from the city; Manoj-da always had a soft spot for melodrama, which occasionally went over the top, but perfectly suited the subject here.
His drama took more complex and serious directions in the Nineties, pushing Sundaram to the front rank of Bangla theatre. Shobhājātrā (1991), a greater tragedy than the highly-rated Alakānandār Putra-kanyā, reflected the changing sociopolitical scenario, presenting a depleted zamindari family (photo alongside of Manoj-da as the patriarch) continuing its annual ratha-jātrā ritual somehow or the other, symbolizing the decay in Bengali culture and a gloomy prognosis for lumpenized Bengal’s seething violence under the surface calm of daily life. Through a dedicated herbalist village hakim caught in the middle of power politics, Galpa Hekim Sāheb (1994, translated as The Tale of Hekim-shaheb) touched on rivalry between neighbouring lands, oppression of visionaries, and intellectual freedom to research and investigate. Manoj-da then turned to history on Chhāyār Prāsād (1998, translated as The Shadow Palace), pitting Bindusara against Chanakya (who advocates the rights of women and Sudras) as the backdrop to a destitute androgynous Brahmin raising a foundling as his daughter and a calf as his son.
In between, he had written Debi Sarpamastā (1995), also historically placed in a small Bengal principality during the British Raj, when the ruler decides to appease the local Resident with a necklace adorning their patron deity, whose priest regards this as sacrilege and escapes with it to a tribe on the periphery who recognizes it as stolen, belonging to their snake goddess. Manoj-da sides with the tribal people as the exploited original inhabitants, who should rightfully inherit the earth. Eventually, the Minerva Repertory Theatre staged it in 2011, directed by the next-gen’s Debesh Chattopadhyay in an electrifyingly spectacular display (photo). The last of Manoj-da’s best plays in my opinion was Nākchhābitā (2000, produced by Anya Theatre), describing the pastoral past through a sexagenarian’s flashback; her nose ring worn as a teenager becomes a touching symbol of love as well as lost innocence.
I should address a popular misconception: because Manoj Mitra does not figure in commonly-read accounts of late-20th-century Indian theatre, his works can’t possibly be as important as those of his exact contemporaries like Karnad or Elkunchwar. Nothing could be further from the truth. The lack of enough translations (for which Bengalis can only blame themselves) caused his invisibility outside Bengal. To rectify this injustice, our best translators should take up the as-yet untranslated plays above, to show the world what a vault of riches Manoj-da has left behind.
English translations:
“Banchharam’s Orchard” and “An Encounter with Royalty”, translated by Sangeeta and Ranjan Ghosal. Kolkata: Seagull, 1999.
The Theatre of Conscience, three plays translated and introduced by Mousumi Roy Chowdhury. Kolkata: Seagull, 2007.
Sunny, Shady and Dotty, four children’s plays translated by Sebanti Sarkar. Kolkata: Lalmati, 2017.
[Reprinting the text or reproducing the images only possible after acquiring permission.]