Disturbed by the politico-cultural winds blowing across the country, director Asit Basu goes back to Nazi times for parallels, just like his mentor Utpal Dutt did. For Jharer Kheyā, translated by Sounak Chakraborty, he chooses Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, one of the early anti-fascist plays written in the first year of World War II when the US was still neutral. A German underground activist flees to America, his wife’s family home, where her mother’s house guest suspects his political ties and blackmails him. The play’s domestic confrontations have not aged well dramaturgically, but the subject of dissent and resistance certainly endures.
Chakraborty adds a scene in the German embassy to vary the stagecraft and display the Nazi foreign service at work. Other than that, he sticks to the text. But the erratic acting weakens the performance, ranging in extremes from the experienced naturalistic poise of Mishka Halim (the wife) to Saurabh Chaudhuri’s atrociously head-turned-at-right-angle-facing-the-audience pose of TV villains, with Biswajit Sarkar (the hero) in the middle. The women’s costumes go against 1940 style. Basu should look at the photos online of the original production in the issue of Life magazine, 14 April 1941.
To celebrate Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s bicentennial last year, Akhor had revived Padmābati Nātak, his 1860 romantic comedy, in a kind of period piece that turned out more of an antiquarian museum relic. Dutt Indianized the Greek myth about the golden apples with intelligent Hindu equivalents, but it draws our interest now only historically for introducing his innovation of amitrākshar or blank verse in some scenes. The plotting owes far too much to Sanskrit precedents like Ratnāvali.
Bhadra Basu’s directorial note argues that the Brahmin vidushak exposes the greed of the priestly caste and applies it to Hindutva, but Dutt did not invent it. We need only look to Kalidasa for predecessors of materialistic Brahmin confidants of Rajas—for instance, notably in Shakuntalā—the character was a satirical stereotype in classical drama. The note also states that Padmābati premiered on 11 December 1865; the correct date is 9 December, as reported by Sambād Purnachandroday on 11 December.
14 June 2025