Ujjwal Chattopadhyay’s twin pack on progenitors of early 19th-century Bengali music and theatre definitely illuminates a past largely unknown to the general public. On the downside, however, he persists in writing simplistic plots that will not stand the test of time. The last memorable drama by him that I have seen, Passing Show, dates way back to 2016 and that, too, not an original but based on Amar Mitra.
Purba Paschim’s Sri o Nidhu-bābu Kathā centres on Ramnidhi Gupta (1741-1839), the inventor of Bangla tappā who started teaching the style from his home in Kolkata around 1804. His patron, Raja Mahananda Ray, entrusted him with the training of his musically-talented kept woman Srimati. A deep guru-shishyā relationship developed when Nidhu-babu realized how easily she picked up his semiclassical melodies, but Mahananda grew suspicious because Nidhu-babu insisted on the appropriate times to sing specific ragas, for example, asking her to come to his house late at night to learn Behag or Bahar. He refused to instruct her inside Mahananda’s mansion. Srimati, in turn, sneaked away from there at night to him on the pretext of going to bathe in the Ganga.
At least two productions about Nidhu-babu have appeared on the Bengali stage: Bohurupee’s Piriti Param Nidhi from Chittaranjan Ghosh’s biodrama (originally titled Gitaratna), and Ekush Shatak’s Rāmnidhi, where Partha Chatterjee appropriated Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Chattopadhyay relates an uncomplicated triangle, his characterizations two-dimensional, not changing much throughout. He could have retold imaginatively Srimati’s tragic invisibility after Mahananda threw her out, but he does not.
He relies on the songs to carry the play, which director Soumitra Mitra also recognizes as the strong point. Rajat Ganguly reprises his Nidhi-babu from Bohurupee, his robust vocals surprisingly as powerful as ever. An equal partner, Anandarupa Chakraborty (Srimati) comes into her own as a theatre singer here, delivering such difficult tunes. Shantilal Mukherjee (Mahananda) does not have much to do except behave drunk and jealous; and my expert on costume, Ruby Palchoudhury, tells me that colourful dhotis did not exist as zamindari daily wear in those days. More inauthentically, music arranger Alok Roychowdhury employs the harmonium, which entered usage much after Nidhu-babu’s death, confirmed by my fact-checking resource for Bengali music, Devajit Bandyopadhyay.
Chattopadhyay’s earlier play, Gopāl Ure and Co., offered him a chance to script the first production on Gopal Ure (1819-1859) after Rudra Prasad Chakrabarti’s unstaged work. But instead of historicizing Gopal’s life and contribution to popularizing “new” Jatra, he totally fictionalized Gopal’s nephew running his uncle’s enterprise after he died, which missed the opportunity to dramatize Gopal’s fascinating rise from a humble Odia hawker in north Calcutta to the pioneer of demotic Bidyā Sundar troupes that thrilled the city, topped by his own female impersonation of Malini, dancing and singing with bawdy abandon into the commoners’ hearts.
Chattopadhyay created a situation where the company’s zamindar owner withholds their pay and demands his rights on their women performers, until finally they revolt—not a particularly novel resolution, not to speak of wishful thinking. Chetana’s Sujan Mukhopadhyay, the director (or “motion master”, cleverly reviving the 19th-century appellation), revelled in the musical and entertaining aspects it provided, but inaccurately billed it as a “Gitabhinay”, the term that defines the short-lived genre refined by babus such as Manomohan Basu and the Tagores, who obviously wanted no truck with “vulgar” Bidyā Sundar.
The production won the META awards for both male and female supporting actors. Nibedita Mukhopadhyay deserved it for her uninhibited Malini, eyeing Sundar (photo) and enjoying the so-called “lewd” khemtā hip-swinging that earned Gopal notoriety. The other winner, Tarun Bhattacharyya, was funny as the zamindar, but not exceptionally so. The tall Anandarupa Chakraborty (Bidya) made Raju Bera (Sundar) look decidedly challenged in height, jointly cast against the stereotypical grain for romantic leads, presenting a contemporary (though anachronistic) feminist pushback.
25 October 2024