A Letter from Badal Sircar
To: Richard Schechner November 23, 1981 Dear Richard, You wanted me to write for the “Intercultural Performance” issue of The Drama Review. You wanted me to write about my experience with my theatre group Satabdi; about the difficulties I had and the successes I have had; about my state of mind, my experiences as a playwright and a director. What can I write? I am no writer of essays. I am a theatre man. I wrote some plays because I am a man of the theatre, not because I am a writer. I have to write in English, but English is not my language. My experiences with Satabdi, in theatre, in the cultural jungle of Calcutta, my city; my experiences with other people, with society, with life itself in all its absurdity, sordidness and beauty-all these are no better than a chaotic mass of confusion, and a long history of trying to find a meaningful course, a rational path, through this chaotic agglomeration. I am looking back to locate and understand the path already traversed; I am looking ahead to project it to the future so that the next few steps can be taken. So where do I begin? At the beginning? At where I am now? At somewhere in the mid-course? Better somewhere in the mid-course; then I shall not have to bother about chronology, continuity, or coherence. Calcutta. The city I was born in and raised in. An artificial city created in the colonial interests of a foreign nation. A monster city that grew by sucking the blood of a vast rural hinterland which perhaps is the true India. A city of alien culture based on English education, repressing, distorting, buying, promoting for sale the real culture of the country. A city I hate intensely. A city I love intensely. Calcutta, July 6, 1979. An old building in the congested College Square area occupied by the Theosophical Society of India for more than ninety years. The lecture hall on the second story, 58 feet long and 24 feet wide, with its old dusty cupboards full of books on Theosophy and faded oil paintings of potentates of Theosophy—given to Satabdi on hire every Friday after much persuasion. First performance of Basi Khabar. Culmination of a year-long process. The first experience of Satabdi of creating a play collectively. Year-long-but what is a year? None of the Satabdi members are paid anything. They work in banks, schools, offices, factories; they assemble in evenings exhausted by loveless work and sardine-packed public transport; they have to disperse early for long journeys, many by scandalously irregulars suburban trains. On Sundays we can work for five hours, provided we are not invited to perform somewhere-a village, a “bustee” (slum), a suburban town, a college lawn, an office canteen. Shows on Friday evenings; Thursday evenings spent on the rehearsal of the play to be performed the next day. How much time can we get for working on a new project? Eight hours in a week is an optimistic average. Still, a year means that we all grow with the play for one full year, and the play gets into our bloodstream. One year back. July, 1978. First performance of Gondi—an adaptation I made of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. We felt good. We enjoyed preparing it—only fifteen performers taking care of forty roles; hut, stream, door, trees, bridge made of human bodies. We all felt that the play is Indian and contemporary and can be understood equally by the educated of the city and the illiterate of the village, and our later experience proved this belief to be correct. It was the third year of our regular weekly performances at the Theosophical Society hall. Before that we have had two years of such weekly shows in another room (1972-1974), and a spell of nearly two years of only open air shows. Performances in public parks were stopped by the police during the “Emergency”(1975) and our search for an indoor space ultimately brought us to this hall in early 1976. Admission was free; a donation of one Rupee (eleven cents, a cup of coffee in a shabby cafe costs more in Calcutta) was expected and was willingly paid by most, but that was not the condition for entrance. Leaflets containing the program for the next five or six Fridays were distributed to the spectators, otherwise we depended entirely on word-of-mouth publicity. (I am using the past tense because we now perform in another hall-the system has remained the same.) The relation between acting and sitting areas varied according to the demand of the play. For Gondi we could provide about 125 seats, all seats were booked much in advance, and we felt good. That was the beginning of the year-long process of creating Basi Khabar. After Gondi we had no play at hand. We were having workshops, relating sometimes to the cruel absurdities we live in. Enormous wealth and immeasurable poverty. A devastating flood ruining hundreds of thousands in the villages and a huge crowd of fans gathering to see the film stars raising donations in Calcutta for flood-relief. Construction of the underground railway in Calcutta and 90 percent of the underground water remaining untapped, rendering most of the arable land mono-crop. Satellites in space and 70 percent of the population under the poverty line. Democracy and police brutality The stupidity of man, the cruelty of man, the achievements of man, the callousness of man-not just in this country, but in the whole world. But what about the courage of man? Somebody asked. What about Spartacus, on whose struggles we made a play in 1972? What about all those who dream of and die for the emergence of a new and better society? We decided that we would try to make a play collectively on these issues built around the theme of a revolt. Revolt—the ultimate burst of collective courage. We chose the Santhal revolt of 1855-56 that shook the British imperial hold on Eastern India for