
We lose our pillars according to the ways of time, but the passing of Zarin Chaudhuri leaves a huge void in Kolkata theatre that no one person can fill alone, for she was sui generis. In her lithe frame she held the mind of an organizer, teacher and scripter, the body of an actor and mime, the eyes and ears of a director, the voice of an elocutionist, the hands of a makeup artist, the poise and grace of a cultured lady, and what theatrical discipline! By virtue of her cosmopolitan career, she gained a familiarity with international as well as Indian theatre that most Indians lack. And so she contributed to English, Hindi, Gujarati, school, deaf theatre and mime alike.
Born Zarin Engineer in Bombay, she took to drama very early and in her teens had Ebrahim Alkazi as her director in Theatre Unit for three years, then a year with Satyadev Dubey while in St Xavier’s College, whose dramatic society she also joined. In 1963 she won a scholarship to study theatre at Brandeis University in the US—significant during a period when our country offered zero opportunities for a full, formal theatre education (a situation that has not changed much, in terms of exposure here to advances in world theatre).
Unlike some Indians now who avail of an undergraduate theatre degree abroad and then leave theatre studies after their Bachelor’s, Zarin earned another fellowship to pursue a Master’s program at the pioneering experimental Dallas Theater Center, which gave her specialized training in Marcel Marceau’s mime as well, and she became a founder-member of DTC’s first touring company. She wrote her Master’s dissertation on direction.
After her return to Bombay in 1967, she taught mime at the Film and Television Institute of India, Poona, acted in Gujarati productions under Adi Marzban and in radio drama on All India Radio, and joined Irshad Panjatan in a mime duo who performed across India. Marriage took her to Delhi, where she taught speech and drama at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, acted in the leading group Yatrik (for example, creating the heroine’s part of Rose in the Indian premiere of Asif Currimbhoy’s Goa, 1970), and directed and performed mime for the new family-planning programme of the Government’s Song and Drama Division, and for Doordarshan under Sai Paranjpye.
When her husband transferred to Calcutta in the 1970s, Zarin gave elocution lessons at Modern High School, and mime at Theatre Centre (the avant-garde venue opened by Tarun Roy) and the Oral School for Deaf Children (ever since 1973, later forming the nucleus of India’s first mime group for the deaf, The Action Players). She acted in English and Hindi theatre directed by Swaran Chaudhry (including Tendulkar’s Silence! and Sakharam) and Rustom Bharucha, as well as directing musicals herself. Her solo enactment in Rustom’s My Story/Your Story (photo alongside), based on Flavia Agnes’s autobiography about domestic violence, received acclaim nationally.
As the Arts and Cultural Activities Officer in British Council, Calcutta, from 1974 to 1995, she looked after their theatre programming too, when BC built a reputation of trendsetters in bringing touring productions (no longer, sad to say). Her brainchild, their Inter-School Drama Competition (now discontinued, sad to say), initiated hundreds of Calcutta schoolgoers into theatre. She also took her mime coaching to Doon School and Dubai Modern High School. Meanwhile, she started teaching speech and drama in Loreto House and Calcutta School of Music.
I knew Zarin after she arrived in Calcutta, first through her inviting my father (who published Currimbhoy, residing here at that time) to lecture in BC, then as a junior in The Red Curtain when she hosted Rustom’s direction of Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in an eye-opening (for me) intimate performance on BC’s old verandah (now Axis Bank), and countless theatre occasions since. Her room, with theatre posters decorating all walls, welcomed me like a second home. Only naturally, when I began directing my students at Jadavpur University, I went straight to her to ask if BC could allow us to stage Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1994, where Sohini Sengupta of Nandikar acted as Mrs Petkoff in her first major role) in their quaint little hall in the same building. Her answer was yes, of course!

Even after leaving BC, Zarin always encouraged us at every step, helped with our makeup and costumes, and I requested her to lead several workshops at JU, from which her skills of voice projection, in particular, have stayed with the students in their future careers demanding public speaking. In Rustom’s memorial tribute to Zarin, he recounted an appropriate anecdote:
“I lost my voice on one of the shows for Joe Egg. I woke up in the morning to realize that I had no voice. Who else could one turn to in this state of emergency but Zarin? I remember her talking to me on the phone, very calmly and with professional assurance, that I needed to keep my mouth shut, gargle endlessly with hot saline water, sip hot water with spoonfuls of honey, and suck on rock candy. By the time she was doing my makeup just before the show, I hadn’t opened my mouth. She then asked me to hum and then, very slowly, to speak. It’s a miracle … I recovered my voice for the show.”

I had the privilege of reviewing many productions that Zarin either directed or acted in, especially her trailblazing work with The Action Players employing mime, sign language and contemporary dance, recording their progress from comedy to realism, best exemplified on Satyajit Ray’s Patol Babu Film Star (1989), C. Y. Gopinath’s The Banyan Tree (1997), Badal Sircar’s Beyond the Land of Hattamala (2004) and Banaphul’s The Pebble and the Tal Tree (2010). TAP even played in the US, Japan and Taiwan, putting Kolkata on the map for their prowess in theatre for the deaf. And who but Zarin could I persuade to write the entry on mime for my Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre?
Just a couple of months before she departed, Zarin asked me to find a home for her 200-plus books on theatre—a collection that could enrich any library. In every book, she had inscribed her name and place and year of its acquisition, so one can track her life’s journey through them, from Bombay to Brandeis to Dallas (with visits to New York and London too) to Delhi and finally Calcutta. The scripts that she acted in have her detailed marginalia of characterization and movement—she used to habitually make notes in true Method-acting technique. I took them to Natya Shodh Sansthan, where the next generation can read them for their own use. It almost seems like she knew she should ferry her material theatre objects to another bank to help whoever might need them.
[Zarin died on November 8. No newspaper has printed anything about her since then, other than two personal memories in online editions.]