The continuous tradition of Bengali public (not private) and commercial (not amateur) theatre began on 7 December 1872 with the staging of Nil-darpan by the National Theatre. To celebrate its 150th birthday, the umbrella society of theatre groups, Banga Natya Samhati, commenced a year-long programme on 7 December 2022, inviting the Bangladeshi group Bangla Theatre from Dhaka to revive and premiere Nil-darpan at Tapan Theatre.
The Dhaka connection is historic because Dinabandhu Mitra published his play from Dacca in 1860, and most Bengali theatre scholars affirm that it was performed there in 1861, though nobody has identified exactly when and where. The circumstantial evidence for 1861 dates to a British correspondent’s report in the Bengal Hurkaru of 12 June 1861 containing one sentence that refers to its enactment. On 19 July that year, the editor of that newspaper, Alexander Forbes, testified at the trial of Rev. James Long for publishing the English translation: “I received the information by a letter from Dacca, that the drama was represented there.” But let us not forget that Forbes had an interest in the proceedings, as head of one of the two dailies supposedly libelled by Long.
No doubt the incendiary and nationalistic subject of the classic, about the Indigo Mutiny, motivated the National Theatre to choose it for their opening night. Not many revivals have occurred after the British left, because obviously its primary target had gone. Yet Nil-darpan remains a sociohistorical document, and for many years school students had to read it on the Bengali syllabus. It retains that value, as well as exemplifies the nascent modernist Indian drama that emulated the model of Victorian melodrama.
Directors today must contend with that melodramatic style—which Mamunur Rashid manages rather well, quite unexpectedly downplaying it, given that Bangladeshi theatre has a proclivity for melodrama. He lets the harrowing narrative simply speak for itself, bringing doom through multiple deaths to the Basu and Ghosh ryot families. However, he has less success in reducing the lengthy duration typical of the 19th century, which he must do to cater to current audience demands. While he keeps the horrific attempted rape of the pregnant Kshetramani, he deletes the younger son Bindu Madhab, thereby sacrificing most of Act 4, containing the remarkable trial scene and the terrible sight of his father’s body hanging in the jail, and the concluding scene in Act 5, where Bindu’s lamentations as one of just two survivors never leaves a dry eye in the house.
Bangla Theatre’s cast performs a sterling job in not overdoing emotions yet expressing the characters’ sorrows. What struck me most through this production was Mitra’s prescience in creating as many as seven female roles on his dramatic debut, at a time when actresses had not even set foot on the Bengali stage (leaving aside the one-off experiments of Lebedeff and Nabin Chandra Basu).
There is one mistake in the souvenir brought out on the occasion, which states that Nil-darpan was the first Bengali play translated into a foreign language. No, that honour goes to Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Sharmishthā, which Dutt himself rendered into English in 1859.
29 December 2022