An Anthology of Contemporary Bengali Plays by Bratya Basu

Nandita Bannerjee-Dhawan and Sam Kolodezh’s edited An Anthology of Contemporary Bengali Plays by Bratya Basu is a cornerstone volume and part of a recent trend of translating literary texts that critically interrogate cultures of decolonization in the deepening shadow of the neoliberal here-and-now of Indian public life. As a part of the volume, there are six plays by a Sahitya Academi–winning playwright and now provincial Education Minister, which have been ably translated by Mainak Banerjee and Arnab Banerji.Initiating his journey as a playwright in 1992, Bratya Basu’s credibility as a thespian gained significant traction during the nascent stages of neoliberalism and the all-pervasive bureaucratic hegemony of the Left-front government. Basu’s theatrical output encapsulates a culture-defining shift from the earlier group-theater mode of postcolonial Bengali theatrical practice to a new form of company-theater, where sustenance of the group depends on the commercial decision making of the producer-director and is reasonably free from control of cultural-political cliques. Simply put, this shift made Bengali theater significantly more market-friendly, often perhaps at the cost of subtly commodifying it for the urban archipelagic subcultures. Perhaps this was the first moment that worldwide neoliberalism made first contact with public entertainment consumption patterns under one of the longest running pseudo-democratic Communist governments.Also noticeable in the list of plays translated as a part of the anthology is a nuanced tilt toward greater intersectionality in lieu of class-conscious cultural polemics. Basu, elsewhere in an interview, concedes how greater alliance with the grand narratives of class struggle led to the formation of a “dwarfed reality,” where human relations were heavily impacted; in such circumstances it was an imperative for him to produce a neophyte subculture that understood theatrical performances as a greater part of the umwelt. Likewise, adherence to the classical norms of the Rasa became secondary to the postmodern human condition in his plays.The anthology consists of three thematic segments, each of which contains translations of two Basu plays. Likewise, the entire anthology consists of six plays split thematically across three segments.The first segment, titled “Poignant Challenges, Soulful Remorse,” contains the plays Love in the Times of Corona (Coronar Dingulite Prem, 2020) and The Penitence (Anusochona, 2016), both translated by Mainak Banerjee. This segment of plays is largely reflective of the fallacy of human agency as circumscribed within the contemporary post-truth climate. The first play offers us a portal into the domestic life of Bijoy and Sulagna, a middle-aged couple, who are imprisoned inside their posh apartment, much like the inmates of Plato’s cave allegory, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Designed like a satire, Love in the Times of Corona closely interrogates the limitations of human agency by contrasting the discourses of subliminal anthropocentricism and intersectional alienation in the face of the aggressive information barrage of broadcast and social media. Bijoy and Sulagna, who are established to be significantly privileged members of the nouveau riche nomenklatura and with their son Runu settled in California, curiously enough have a television with a news channel running almost throughout the duration of the play. The news channel reports, debates, interviews, and even the telephone phone-ins appear to be painstakingly written in the style of a pastiche of actual 24/7 cycle news channels; this functions almost like a “McGuffin,” to borrow Alfred Hitchcock’s phrase: a catalyst to the dramatic narrative while somehow extraneous to it. Likewise, for a play that is based on the pandemic experience, the satire verges on the hyperreal, when one observes that in fact much of the pandemic experience the play harps on is in fact reflective of a simulation act based on received information/misinformation. As the media that the protagonists use are increasingly the products of complex industrial processes, those protagonists lose touch with the underlying reality of the commoditized media they consume. No identity functions in a world of multinational corporations. In keeping with what Jean Baudrillard had contended, it is capital that continually defines identities and sets off a rhizomatic network of keywords, discourses, and such clichés as nationalism, authoritarianism, #MeToo movements, and so on and so forth.As the play moves, the characters thus continue to lose touch with the material fact of the laborer represented by their own servant Gopal or, for that matter, the news anchor dying during streaming, who is increasingly invisible to the consumer-oriented retail outlets or the even-more-impersonal internet-based social media. To simplify, the COVID-19 pandemic becomes less of a medical concern and more of a hyperreal event that is to be consumed like a commodity; the dramatists’ use of popular commercial music, as well as cliché classics, to reflect the unpredictability of internet virality during the pandemic is worth lauding in this regard.In the climax of the play, we find Corona personified as a youth to be a visitor at Bjoy-Sulagna’s household. Bijoy hosts him with tea and snacks, where the abrogation of rights and degradation of human values in Kashmir are discoursed upon in the fashion of a small-talk/adda, which deracinates the registers of sanitized contact receiving much popular currency during the pandemic. The Bengali household adda, a highly untranslatable affect, is at once invoked in a volatile fashion to establish how easily one could contract COVID-19, and how all other discourses contingent to the human condition came second to it. The play fittingly ends on a climax, where Sulagna, in a bid to kill the personified “Corona,” ultimately murders her son Runu, who, as it turns out, had just reached his parents’ residence after walking like any other migrant laborer, in his case straight from California to Kolkata. While it would not be subtle to identify this play as a satire critical of the Anthropocentric turn to patterns of human condition, the underlying nuances of a “pandemic-by-simulation” reflective of a set of highly changeable and volatile rituals invoking discourses of sanitization, charity, healthcare, domestic violence are to be observed keenly by anyone hoping to study the Coronavirus pandemic as an anthropological event of interest.The second play in the first segment, titled The Penitence, explores the theme of human agency while describing Gautama Buddha during his Mahaparinirvana at Kusinagar. We find him surrounded by his beggar (bhikshu) followers at his sangha, where he is visited by Devdatta. Devdatta happens to be of Buddha’s own bloodline and has always harbored feelings of jealousy toward his cousin, desiring greater authority for himself within the Buddhist religious order and a greater interaction of the sangha toward the political administration. However, Devdatta, as described in the play, is hardly the conspiratorial and the conniving manipulator of his youth. He is in fact the “penitent” of the play, who appears to have come with a desire to seek Buddha’s forgiveness and to be allowed to be part of the audience who had the privilege of witnessing his Nirvana. Unsurprisingly, Devdatta is held in check at the gates of the sangha by Sariputra and Moudgalyayana. What ensues is a long discourse on Devdatta’s continued attempts, over Buddha’s and his own lifetime, to control the Sangha initially by discrediting Buddha and later by attempts at his assassination. The dramatist’s use of flashback to establish the dichotomy between Buddha and Devdatta clarifies his own contentious take on how far religion should be allowed to stay in contact with public modes of administration. In this regard, Devdatta’s manipulative treatment of prince and later king Ajatashatru encapsulates a cornerstone event, especially Ajatshatru’s assassination of his own father, Bimbisara. Throughout the play, the audience members are witness to Devdatta’s own attempts at embodying the Buddhist religious establishment as a nexus between the worldly and the religious, wondering all the while if this is indeed a simpler abstraction of the neoliberal Indian body politic, where Hindutva seeks to cannibalize the liberal-democratic set-up, all in the name of the decolonial praxis. The “penitence” in the climax offers us a clearly allegorical lesson for modern neoliberal times, wherein Devdatta’s endless bargain and claims of self-legitimacy are harshly set aside by the sangha, and he is left to his own devices.Devdatta’s predicament of being denied acceptance into the fold of the Buddhist school is no less a parable of the so-called anti-establishment figure who must exist forever as a binary to the surviving establishment in the play. This is a theme that remains primary to earlier biographical plays directed and produced by Basu, especially Bratyajon er Ruddhasangeet (“The exiled, as he sings”). Devdatta’s limitations as an anti-establishment figure to Buddhism are reminiscent of Debabrata Biswas’s continual harassment and later a short ban by the Rabindra Sangeet establishment. Performing on the stage as the veteran newspaper editor Santoshkumar Ghosh, Bratya, in the latter play, is seen to present a monologue on the limits to being a “pro-anti” establishment figure, which could only attain legitimacy if one seeks to embody the establishment itself, even after realizing that it has its own shelf life before ultimately being rendered shop-soiled.The second segment of the anthology is titled “(In)visible Boundaries, (Un)Democratic Choices” and consists of the plays The Final Night (Antim Raat, 2020) and Creusa—The Queen (Raani Creusa, 2019), again translated by Mainak Banerjee. This segment impinges on the present discourses of nation/nationalism and interrogates the metaphysics of democracy, which are contingent to the geographic/political inscription of the boundary. To simplify: Can democracies exist sustainably if their citizenry is not held firmly by a collective imaginary of what is right and what is not?The Final Night is basically a magic realist treatment of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s final night in India of 1947 before the Partition of India and creation of India and Pakistan. Utilizing creative microhistory, the play includes a sizeable chunk of responses from Jinnah’s sister, Fatima, and his own daughter, Dina, who neither understands nor recognizes Pakistan in a fashion approved by the patriarch of the family and the soon to be Quaid-e-Azam. Likewise, the nation as a political entity, circumscribed by legible geopolitical boundaries, continually comes into friction from the less legible and softer entities of family and bloodline. The result is the creation of a smoky ambience of loss. The play achieves a polyphonic note in the protestations of Dina, who as a representative of the postcolonial liberal elite presents the audience with the impossibility of imagining a feminist ethico-political “standardization,” which could be replicated at the level of a nation. Largely reminiscent of Kate Millet’s war cry of “the personal is political,” Dina is in fact ahead of her time, and at times even ahead of her father, who ultimately expels her from his residence when she brings up the impending plights of the partition that would affect Hindus and Muslims, men and women alike. Purity, exclusionary, and nativist movements often face such unforeseen vituperative ends: it would be no surprise that the largely communal afterthoughts behind the “Two-Nation Solution” would have such a secularized traumatic outcome that would continue to plague both nations for decades to follow. Contrarily, Fatima, Jinnah’s sibling, is Jinnah’s docile caregiver, who follows him everywhere without much agency of her own. She is represented as an alternative to the liberal progressive elite Dina, who gives up her dentistry practice to take care of her brother. Jinnah, as a widower-lawyer-father, is held at a distance, from the first governor-general of independent Pakistan and ex-congressman Jinnah, which results in an aporia that subsumes the entire history of struggle and propaganda for the creation of the state of Pakistan at the cost of his family. Unlike other biographical plays of Basu’s, like Bratyajaner Ruddhasangeet, Adyoi Shesh Rajani—Bishader Ekti Blowhot Natok, The Final Night does not spill from the proscenium into the authentic life of the statesman, whether intentional or not; this is hard to gauge, however, given the protagonists’ own highly controversial perception of communalized democratic politics.Creusa—The Queen, the other play in the second segment, is an adaptation of Euripides’s Ion that extrapolates the contradictions of democracy from the postcolonial milieu to that of the Greek city states when democracy was nascent. The narrative establishes King Xuthus and Queen Creusa as the royal couple of the city state of Athens, who visit the temple of the oracle of Apollo to seek an heir to the throne of Athens. Crisis ensues when it is stated that until the time when Creusa bears a biological child, they must adopt an orphan of Apollo’s temple, Ion, as the crown prince of Athens. The prophecy creates a schism within the royal boudoir, where Queen Creusa, driven by jealousy and suspicion, interprets the divine order as something concocted by the royal priest of Apollo’s temple to wrest the rights of administration and order away from the hands of the court. Creusa’s suspicion ends in a conspiracy involving his personal servant Danius to poison Ion within the premises of the temple, which leads to the poisoning of a pigeon and then massive unrest and turmoil within the Athenian citizenry. When Creusa’s public punishment seems just a matter of time, the climax of the play presents Pythia, the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo, who clarifies Ion’s identity for her: he is in fact her own illegitimate child born from her union with Apollo.While the translator’s introduction to the play identifies Creusa’s predicament within the play as reflective of the fallacies pertaining to women leaderships within statecraft and bureaucracy, I believe the play could have better interpreted the public and the private life of the authority figure before and after the figure achieves recognition within the power structures of state hegemony. This theme finds a credible exploration in the “final night” as well, where Jinnah is shown to use his initially failing legal practice as an excuse for his threadbare and failed marriage, which ultimately led to his wife’s suicide, an event for which his own daughter unconsciously blames him. This theme, however nuanced, is particularly explosive and requires gender-neutral treatment vis-à-vis the existing discourse of “consent,” especially in a world after the #MeToo movement. Queen Creusa, who identifies in Ion her own sensual devotion to Apollo, is forgiven by Xuthus, and Ion accompanies the royal couple back to a future Athens where a person born of the divine seed shall precede the biological royal heir. I am sure that the legislator sitting within the dramatist today must have felt a wry sense of discomfort at this; for the neoliberal politically aware Bengali of contemporary times would have scarcely been as forgiving as the Athenian public.The final segment of the anthology, titled “Intimately Political and Politically Intimate,” consists of two plays, titled The Black Hole (2007) and Ke? (Who?, 2013). The plays have been translated ably by Arnab Banerji, who has done justice to the uncertain intersectional polyphony that is evident in both texts. The protagonists represented within the plays of this section cannot be easily categorized within the registers of class; rather, they have their own trajectories of vulnerability, which are not subsumed by all pervasive postliberal and the world of the private across both the Black Hole (2007) an from the life of who that he is and initially to this inside the The play, which have been the first of a theater group with even before received much vis-à-vis media in the attempts a form of of urban discourses of and to a in appears to be to her with her and both appear to have only an in their Crisis ensues when has a of with his wife’s which ultimately into a has a long history of movements and public with the first in being in the city as as identity and its in however, remains only one of the registers the dramatist to the of who is a part of a theater we find characters like and who are characters from the of the left after the who the theater group as a is shown to be under a form of of the where his with the other is to class as the in the of is as a figure he was from While at one he is described as a with an in of theater like at other times the fact that his was in of him in the of the violence appears to to his in of the urban of the While violence is within the play, the of and with and for better appear from time to time, which the progressive Bengali that in and cultural the play in India in an gives any a significant sense of how neoliberal have over time and are intersectional of social The climax of the play the audience into as we find to the from a to him a and Kolkata. of the play is and their brings up for for for hoping for better in life for a and it is clearly stated he does so his to the violence are always This remains all pervasive throughout the play and the urban with the as something with for a other play of the final segment and the final of the anthology, the of intersectional identities to the domestic world of an to is toward is in circumstances that is and by for with his had been and had been with his What ensues is a of where appears time and again to and his who is in the the and his in contact with private of come in with his of In the climax, where is to to a who has been written off as a the in time to state that identity had in fact been by himself to a for his of who had been on the of her and as the has been the of an by While the dramatist does at a history of on where is his more and all is not what it seems in this dramatist does a of up a pastiche figure like who is ultimately a from the collective of Bengali literary that have been as popular as and The perception identifies the Bengali with to be of a desire to a that is within of and Ke? (Who?, its neoliberal audience to its to and other grand it or, for that matter, of the characters a the protagonists are in fact a of I would like to that the present anthology, translations of and plays by playwright Bratya Basu, is a of The translations of modern Bengali plays greater into contemporary Indian theater and it enough to in the provincial commercial entertainment