Santanu Das, director of Kalyani Kalamandalam’s Radha-Ramakrishna, has surpassed all his previous work with the group on their 30th anniversary. Simultaneously, the author, Rakesh Ghosh, has outdone the plethora of currently running plays on Binodini Dasi by setting aside the standard (and now too well-known) biographical narrative and focusing on the pinnacle of her career, when Ramakrishna came to watch her gender-bender performance as the hero in Girish Chandra Ghosh’s Chaitanya Lilā (1884) and blessed her afterwards. Going one better, Santanu took up Rakesh’s casual jest to cast a man as Binodini and a woman as Ramakrishna, transforming the production into a coup de théâtre where faith, history and gender fuse.
Consequently, even an atheistic or agnostic viewer can appreciate the aesthetic. Ranjan Bose opens as Binodini, already a star yet struggling with her guru Girish Chandra’s exhortative insistence on an actor’s sadhana, which peaks in his apparently astonishing decision telling her to enact Chaitanya, forgetting herself as woman. Then we see Monalisa Chattopadhyay portraying Ramakrishna, who in his penchant for experimentation cultivates the Radha bhāva to fully realize the intensity of female bhakti-love for Krishna. The epiphanic moment at the end (photo) occurs in the historic meeting of him with Binodini backstage. Meanwhile we have witnessed caste and gender equality as well, when Ramakrishna accepted a sweeper as his aide and Rani Rashmoni overruled the British law against transvestism by allowing hijras at her Durga Puja.
Santanu has frequently embraced non-binary theatre, but Radha-Ramakrishna marks a milestone. Although not yet reaching the level of Shakespeare’s quadruple gender-switching (a boy acting the heroine who disguises as a man who role-plays the wooed woman), Ranjan and Monalisa attain triple layers respectively: an actor performing a leading lady who enacts a godly man, and an actress performing another masculine saint who seeks the feminine in himself. This achievement in metatheatrical parallelism deserves ovations for both, even if Ranjan receives slightly less of the action compared to Monalisa, the senior artist. Perhaps Santanu can redress this imbalance somewhat. On the devotional side, Ramakrishna’s unconflicted worship of Krishna and Kali carries an inspiring message, but the keyboards accompaniment strikes a false note given the historical musical context.
16 July 2025