Lounge Loves: ‘Badal Sircar’ by Anjum Katyal
An engrossing new biography of Kolkata's theatre legend
The cover photograph of this book is a close-up of a man with unruly white beard and eyes that hold the reader in a discomfiting direct gaze. While this photograph ends at his dominating forehead, we know he has a clean pate. That is how we recognize Badal Sircar, the man who brought political theatre on to the streets. On reading Anjum Katyal’s Badal Sircar: Towards A Theatre Of Conscience, one realizes why the Badal Sircar the world knows has never been a young man.
Katyal moves in chronological fashion to tell her readers about Sircar’s interest in reading and writing plays right from his childhood—once a week, he would even be excused from homework so he could listen, headphones restricting his movement for 3 hours at a stretch, to radio plays—and of him as a young man abandoning his ambition of being a playwright for 12 years after a particularly harsh round of criticism from his mentor.
Hard to imagine now, but the early plays that were eventually performed were comedies. By the time he wrote Ebong Indrajit—the play that catapulted him to fame and displayed his “first tentative step towards the politicization of the subject" that would define his Third Theatre, or “free theatre" as he preferred to call it—it was 1965, and he was already 40 years old. Over the next 40 years, he would create, live by and show commitment to the theatre path that he forged.
Katyal, who has been chief editor of Seagull Books and editor of the Seagull Theatre Quarterly, focuses precisely on Sircar’s theatrical journey, limiting mention of his personal life to those aspects that directly led him on to the stage. This can’t have been an easy task since so much of the drudgery of his middle-class life seemed to have motivated his theatre practice, a point that Katyal regularly makes. As a householder, married with two children, working a routine job made worse by the long commute, he didn’t however succumb to the ennui. Sircar alleviated the seeming misery by forming amateur theatre groups with friends.
Later, when theatre became a more prominent part of his life, he showed equal determination to not remain with the “rotting" proscenium form, evolving a unique language that put the actors and spectators on an equal platform. Katyal is particularly evocative when describing the plays that Sircar created at this stage, its emphasis on humanity and equality having a marked effect on the people in Calcutta in the throes of the Naxalite movement in the 1970s.
Katyal adds a lucidly written study on a man who displayed the kind of mettle, passion and morality rarely available in individuals.
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