Sudhanva Deshpande

Courtesy: Indian Express

Badal Sircar remained, in many ways, the outsider in Indian theatre. He was a prolific playwright, author or more than 50 plays. Ebong Indrajeet (Evam Indrajeet, ‘And Indrajeet’, 1963) and Pagla Ghoda (‘Mad Horse’, 1967) are undisputed classics of the modern Indian stage, translated into several languages and performed across the country. They blazed a trail, and opened new vistas. Badal Sircar was a playwright of great power and technical sophistication. Playwrights and directors we consider masters today — Shombhu Mitra, Girish Karnad, Satyadev Dubey, B.V. Karanth, among others — acknowledged their artistic debt to Badal Sircar. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 1968, and the Padmashri in 1969.

And yet, when he was at the peak of his creativity, hailed as a modern master, he quit and went away.

He didn’t quit writing, and he didn’t go away from theatre. He quit being a “playwright”, and abandoned the urban proscenium stage of psychological realism and the box set, a theatre that showcased the actor and his virtuosity. But he couldn’t simply have embraced the rural theatre. He was city-bred, and he did not want to be an imposter in the rural theatre. So he created what he called the “Third Theatre” (later he abandoned this term for “free theatre”).

Badal Sircar’s theatre was a theatre that lived and breathed among the common people, that spoke of their lives, cried their tears and dreamed their dreams. This was theatre for social change. In the early ’70s , the world, especially Bengal, was in turmoil, and this is the turmoil Badal Sircar captured with such precision in his third classic, Michhil (Juloos, ‘Procession’, 1972). He had already formed his theatre group Satabdi, in 1967. Badal Sircar and Satabdi performed their plays anywhere — in large rooms or halls, in the open, in fields, in parks and gardens. This was “free” theatre. It required no ticket to see it, and it required very little money to do.

What it did require, though, was imagination. Too much of what goes in the name of street theatre (particularly today, when the NGOs have appropriated the form to a great extent) is patronising, artistically weak, imaginatively barren and plain boring. Badal Sircar’s theatre was never barren, intellectually or aesthetically. You might or might not agree with him, but you could not dismiss his theatre. He was influenced by the methods of the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, and in plays such as Bashi Khobor (Basi Khabar, ‘Stale News’, 1978) and Bhoma (1979), Satabdi created some of the finest instances of “physical theatre” in India.

In other words, in Badal Sircar’s work, writing, directing, and acting in plays became seamless parts of the larger process of creating theatre. And while he continued writing plays, the act of creating theatre involved, more and more, the reconfiguration of the performance space, and manipulation of actors’ bodies and voices to create meaning.

What Badal Sircar also did was to seed practice and train practitioners. This is a part of his legacy that has not been appreciated enough. But through the 1970s, he travelled all over the country, holding workshops in the techniques he was exploring. The Kannada theatre group Samudaya (the theatre director Prasanna was associated with it, as was, though not so centrally, B.V. Karanth) first did street theatre in 1978 following a workshop with him. Samudaya went on to become one of the finest exponents of street theatre in the coming years.

Or take the case of the Manipuri director, Heisnam Kanhailal. Having to leave the National School of Drama because he couldn’t manage the “high” Hindi expected of him, Kanhailal found his own unique idiom after a workshop with Sircar. Kanhailal’s extraordinary work, including early classics such as Pebet, Memoirs of Africa and, later, Draupadi and Dakghar, could not have been possible without Badal Sircar’s defining influence. It is an irony that while Badal Sircar’s plays for the proscenium stage remain justly well-known, his post-proscenium career is hazy in the minds of theatre lovers. But perhaps that is how he wished it. He was a man who had walked away from the spotlight.

His last years were spent, by all accounts, in some financial difficulty. While some festivals and groups did confer awards upon him, he got no institutional support. We, as a nation, must hang our heads in shame at this. Too many artists who have played defining roles in the creation of modern India have died in need.

Badal Sircar went the day the Left Front lost. Trust him to time his exit perfectly. The “end of an era” is a cliché. I never met him, but he was a moral compass. He embodied everything that drew me to left-wing theatre — the inventiveness of the form, its rough texture, the ability to say a lot with very little, an unwavering commitment to the people, smell of the earth, and of the rain. Habib Tanvir died in 2009, and now Badal Sircar. The touchstones are gone.