The strongest Bengali-language American dramatist, Sudipta Bhawmik, had two plays on the Kolkata stage this season, both biographical. Natya-Anan’s Meghnad (at Nandikar’s National Festival) presents the first literary expression of nuclear and astro-physicist Meghnad Saha’s life and work, continuing a welcome trend in Bengali drama of spotlighting our forgotten scientific heroes: Malay Mitra’s Acharya Praphullachandra on P. C. Ray, Sounava Bose’s Abyakta on Mahendra Lal Sircar, and Swatilekha Sengupta’s Rani Kadambini on Kadambini Ganguly.
Recognizing the importance of Bhawmik’s Meghnad, professor of physics Gautam Gangopadhyay puts it succinctly in the programme note (I translate): “Poverty, caste discrimination, British rule, disrespect of an East Bengali village boy in Calcutta, condescension by foreign scientists, neglect from independent India’s central government—a struggle against all these.” In their midst, I found two aspects of Saha’s life pushed to the side: as the conceptualizer of the Damodar Valley Project, and his wife’s role and circumstances of their marriage. More on them could replace the contemporary interventions that underline relevance, which become unnecessary after a while.
We perceive some excellent acting from the three males playing Saha (Rayan Sen as the boy, Rwitobroto Mukherjee as the young man, Chandan Sen cultivating an uncanny resemblance to the older man) and Panchanan Banerjee as P. C. Ray. But other performances remain uneven, compounded by Sen’s direction of many of them in frontal and linear positions. The set demands improvement for a group of Natya-Anan’s repute, marred by unaesthetic furniture.
Bhawmik wrote and directed Paul o Vincent for his own group ECTA (New Jersey, presented here by Aneek) a couple of years ago, by which time a surfeit of plays on Van Gogh had reached Kolkata’s theatres, including Satyabrata Rout’s Tumhārā Vincent in Hindi, Koushik Sen’s Tārāy Tārāy, and in 2024, on this very same relationship with Gauguin, Debasish’s Do Paul kā Jinā in Hindi. Bhawmik sticks to the artists’ friendship, conflating various events in their lives within a span of 24 hours to create a compact one-act drama. Both leads are outstanding, Subhodev Das (an astonishing lookalike of Gauguin) portraying him as rational and practical as opposed to Surath Sinha’s crazed Van Gogh.
The author’s interest and research in history impels me to raise the recent scholarship implicating Gauguin as behind the “ear incident”; Bhawmik follows the traditional narrative of Van Gogh inflicting self-harm. Occasional mispronunciations of French jar our ears. An anachronism also appears in Meghnad: Murphy’s Law, mentioned in a dialogue, did not become a familiar term before the mid-1950s outside the US and outside the aerospace community.
(21 January 2026)