Nandipat and director Prokash Bhattacharya lavish laborious care in every department of their latest production, which guarantees its success at the box office. The play, too, by Ujjwal Chattopadhyay, attempts a complex synthesis of three narratives: the 16th-century life of Chandrabati, Bengal’s first woman poet; the tragedy of Maluyā ascribed to her; and her incomplete version of the Rāmāyana from Sita’s perspective. Chattopadhyay weaves back and forth to dramatize their similarities, which many commentators have noted previously, linking Sita, Maluya and Chandrabati herself, even parallels with Behula. To interested readers, I recommend Mandakranta Bose’s A Woman’s Rāmāyana for a full discussion and comparison with Valmiki and Krittibas, plus translations of all three texts.
Purportedly biographical drama comes with great responsibility, which Chattopadhyay does not heed. Nowhere does he say that he has fictionalized a great deal, straying from the primary source we have on Chandrabati—Nayanchand Ghosh’s ballad about her. Thus, unaware viewers may regard Chandrābati Kathā as wholly authentic when it is not. First, Nayanchand repeatedly used “shaishab” (childhood) to portray the deep friendship of Chandrabati and Jayananda, which eventually became romantic, but Chattopadhyay depicts them falling in love at first sight. When Chandrabati in a hurry didn’t read Jayananda’s epistolary proposal, he left and soon got attracted to a Muslim girl instead, whereas Chattopadhyay transfers the evil Kazi from Maluyā here, to send a maiden to seduce “innocent” Jayananda! Ultimately, after Jayananda returns but can’t get through to Chandrabati, he drowns himself, and in the play she follows him (why on earth?)—which she didn’t do in the ballad.
Although Chattopadhyay keeps the Maluya romance relatively intact, problems arise again with his rendering of the Chandrabati Rāmāyan, for he provides no mandatory disclaimer that Chandrabati did not invent most of the plot, which may mislead Bengalis to think of it as her creativity. Dinesh Chandra Sen in The Bengali Rāmāyanas showed that the earlier Jain Rāmāyana contained many of Chandrabati’s interpolations. For example, Mandodari is Sita’s mother in the Jain and Adbhuta Rāmāyana. The Jain epic relates that Rama’s three other Ranis tricked Sita into sketching Ravana’s feet (rather than his shadow), while in Krittibas, Rama’s brothers’ wives requested her for a drawing. Chandrabati attributes this guile to Kaikeyi’s daughter Kukuya, which may have been her only original contribution other than her proto-feminist stance.
Chandrābati Kathā clearly offers a vehicle for Anwesa Bandyopadhyay’s acting prowess in the titular role (photo), which she carries off with aplomb, except for the intolerably coy love-at-first-sight filmic stereotype. Monami Roy takes full advantage of the rare opportunity to double as diametrically opposite characters, of Maluya and Kukuya (normally doubling occurs to mirror parts). Sandip Suman Bhattacharya’s varied costumes, Sushruta Goswami’s tasteful, live acoustic music (unusually incorporating a sārindā and dotārā) and Debkumar Pal’s group choreography add value to the performance. Since the duration is tight, Prokash Bhattacharya could expand the poets’ elaboration in such loving detail of Bengal’s flora, in conjunction with introducing Chandrabati and Jayananda as older children to restore the important theme of the young in tune with nature.
1 July 2025