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The Unforgettable Mitra of Bengali Theatre
Highlights
It’s the 100th birth anniversary of Sombhu Mitra (1915-1997), who is often described as a quintessential man of Bengali theatre. Also known as a director, producer and playwright, he is considered by many to be the greatest actor on Bengali stage. He appeared first as an actor in the commercial theatre circuit around the Second World War.
It’s the 100th birth anniversary of Sombhu Mitra (1915-1997), who is often described as a quintessential man of Bengali theatre. Also known as a director, producer and playwright, he is considered by many to be the greatest actor on Bengali stage. He appeared first as an actor in the commercial theatre circuit around the Second World War.
Thereafter, in 1944, he joined Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), an off-shoot of a progressive association of writers and artists. His directorial debut came with Jabanbandi (Confession) of Bijon Bhattacharya, a founder member of IPTA, and Muktadhara (Released Stream) of Tagore. “Aar kato chanchabo Babu ek mutho bhater jonney?”(How long will we cry for a handful of rice?) – a dialogue from his much acclaimed Nabanna (New Harvest), a character-centred play written in the background of the worst ever famine of Bengal in 1943-44 – revealed political events through the characters.
He left IPTA in 1948 and staged two other performances of Nabanna, and Tulsi Lahiri’s Pathik (Wayfarer) under the banner of a theatre group, which in 1950 came to be known as Bohurupee (Masquerade). Under the sensational direction of Mitra, Bohurupee theatre group staged Ulukhagra (A Mere Trifle), written by Mitra, and Chenda Tar (Broken Strings) of Tulsi Lahiri. In 1951, the legendary surprised theatre lovers by presenting Bibhab (Incitement), partly based on Artaud’s surrealist theatre which emphasises the avoidance of sets and props.
It was with Bohurupee that Mitra’s genius was fully realized. Under the able guidance of Mitra, Bohurupee’s foray into Tagore became a reality. Before Mitra, no one other than Tagore himself had attempted to stage his plays professionally. In fact, his plays had been dismissed by many in the Bengali public theatre as most undoable because of their “poetic excesses”.
But Mitra not only proved this to be erroneous, he argued that this was an Indian way of doing theatre. He went on to say that, “….acting should attune itself to express naturally the poetry of passions— the language of poetry” (TDR, 1971) and not dilute the power of Tagore texts. By disapproving the modes of naturalism as the only form of theatrical expression, Mitra went on to construct a true theatrical form for Tagore’s textual complexities. As a result, theatrical adaptation of Char Adhyay (Four Chapters) in 1951 was followed by Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders) in 1956. With Raktakarabi, Sombhu Mitra’s interpretations provide striking new perspectives on Tagore. He re-created and re-defined Raktakarabi as he felt that it was “a play about modern industrial civilization, showing the internal contradictions that this civilization gives rise to” (1971:204). In the years to come, Mitra successfully produced other plays by Tagore like Muktadhara in 1959 and Bisarjan (Sacrifice) in 1961. In 1957, he acted in Dakghar (Post Office) directed by Tripti Mitra, his wife.
In 1964, Sombhu Mitra made a distinctive move by producing, on consecutive nights, Sophocles’ Raja Oedipus (Oedipus), an action-driven tragedy, and Tagore’s Raja (The King of the Dark Chamber), a poetic play, billing them as “plays of darkness”. Through such a venture of staging two very different kinds of production back-to-back, he demonstrated that Bengali theatre would have to find its voice in hybridity and greater experiments in style and form. To carry his point further, Mitra produced landmark Bengali adaptations of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (Dashachakra, 1952) and A Doll’s House (Putulkhela, 1958) wherein he integrated elements of East and West, advanced Ibsen not as an import from a superior culture to be blindly venerated but as something to be appropriated and explored. In 1964, Mitra, as if to prove his versatility, directed Kanchanranga (Farce of Gold), a successful light comedy. Through all these productions, he and his genesis are seen as an exemplar of the shifting topology of Bengali theatre.
Sombhu Mitra also directed major productions like Badal Sarkar’s Baki Itihas (The Other History, 1967), Pagla Ghora (Mad Horse, 1971), and a Bengali version of Vijay Tendulkar’s Marathi play, Silence! The Court is in Session (Chop, Adalat Cholchhe, 1971). He was at the peak as an actor in the role of Chanakya, the Machiavellian politician, which he played in an independent production of the ancient Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa (Signet of the Minister) in Bengali. Even after his retirement, he marvelled the audience by his portrayal of Galileo under the direction of the German director Fritz Bennivitz in the 1980s.
He gave a fair number of striking performances in Hindi movies like Dharti Ke Lal (1946) of K.A. Abbas and Hindustan Hamara (1950). As to Jagte Raho (1956), a Raj Kapoor film written by Abbas, Amit Maitra and Mitra was successfully directed by Maitra and Mitra. Its Bengali version, Ek Din Raatre, also directed by the same duo won a President’s Medal as the best Bengali film of 1956. In this connection, it may be mentioned that Sombhu Mitra acted with aplomb in 14 Bengali films, a few which were also directed by him. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1970 and the Magsaysay Award in 1976. In 1983 he was honoured by the Government of India with the Kalidas Samman for his lifetime achievement in theatre, and the prestigious Desikottama in 1992.
Sombhu Mitra has several published books and numerous articles to his credit and appeared in several plays for the All India Radio. As a reciter, he had no parallel. He was universally admired for his commitment to the spoken word in his public recitations with his high baritone voice and bardic rhythms. His lucid and unfussy diction in Tagore’s verses like “Ohe Antarotomo/ Mitechhe ki tabo sakol tiash ashi ontore momo?” (My Lord, have you drunk enough of me? ) was the result of close study of the text. As a playwright, apart from his masterly Bengali adaptation of foreign language plays, his originally written Chand Baniker Pala (Opera of Chand, the Merchant), theatre reading of which attained high excellence.
As an outstanding thespian of Bengali stage, his influence on Bengali theatre is unparalleled. Mitra’s effort to make Western plays more immediate to Bengali audience by fusing them with familiar images and cultural references was part of a reversal in India’s inferiority complex toward Western culture. And in this, Sombhu Mitra was a visionary himself. He has provided a vision of how theatre can be spectacular and serious, traditional and trendy, foreign and familiar at the same time. He was one who learned the lessons of modernity without compromising his own distinctive theatrical identity. He broke new ground, revealing what theatre should mean to a modern Indian audience—in the plays he chose, the ways in which he produced them, the way he ran his theatre group as a disciplined unit, his interactions with the contemporary political and cultural intelligentsia, and the acting style he helped evolve. His productions enjoyed wide appreciation and were seen as providing a refreshing impetus to a theatre tradition that many believed were growing stale in Bengal. True to his last name, he was a real Mitra (‘friend’ in Bengali) of the theatre circuit.
The author, at times, ponders on the inequities of cultural hegemony. No western audience would ever hear of Mitra, while, we, in our attempt to drum up our interest in colonial hangover, would continue to evaluate our actors by Western standards to the point of rendering the comparison absurd. Had there been a culturally relativist mode of comparison, Sombhu Mitra would have easily found himself in the ranks of the likes of Gielgud, Olivier and Jacobi.
-Sohini Basu
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