Rabindranath Tagore's Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre

‘Rabindranath Tagore's Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre’ maps Tagore’s place in the Indian dramatic/performance traditions by examining unexplored critical perspectives on his drama such as his texts as performance texts; their exploration in multimedia; reflections of Indian culture in his plays; comparison with playwrights; theatrical links to his world of music and performance genres; his plays in the context of cross-cultural, intercultural theatre; the playwright as a poet-performer-composer and their interconnections and his drama on the Indian stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785273964

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RABINDRANATH TAGORE’S DRAMA IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF INDIAN THEATRE

RABINDRANATH TAGORE’S DRAMA IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF INDIAN THEATRE

Edited by

Mala Renganathan

and

Arnab Bhattacharya

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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and

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© 2020 Mala Renganathan and Arnab Bhattacharya editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936295

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-394-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-394-9 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

In Memory of the Innumerable Victims of Covid-19

Contents

The Understudied Dramatic Aesthetics of Rabindranath Tagore

Mala Renganathan and Arnab Bhattacharya

PART I The Dramatic Tradition

Chapter 1 Rabindranath Tagore: Imagining Nation, Imagining Theatre

Abhijit Sen

Chapter 2 Rabindrik-Nritya , Tagore’s New Aesthetic for Indian Dramatic Art: Discourse and Practice

Deepshikha Ghosh

Chapter 3 Place and Space in Tagore’s Raktakarabi and Muktadhara

Chandrava Chakravarty

Chapter 4 Tagore’s Artistic Rendering of Spiritual Realism in Dak Ghar

Papiya Lahiri

Chapter 5 Tagore and the Indian Tradition of Hasyarasa : A Study in Tagore’s Shorter Humorous Plays

Arnab Bhattacharya

Chapter 6 The Comic Genius of Tagore: Interplay of Humour and Reality in Chirakumar Sabha

Deboshree Bhattacharjee

PART II Theatre/Performance Tradition

Chapter 7 The Unrealized Theatre of Tagore

Dattatreya Dutt

Chapter 8 Encounters and Exchanges: An Intercultural Interrogation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Dramaturgy in Muktadhara

Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam

Chapter 9 Performing Chitrangada : From Tagore to Rituparno Ghosh

Debopriya Banerjee

Chapter 10 Visarjan as Performance: A Road towards Ritual Healing

Seetha Vijayakumar

Chapter 11 Valmiki Pratibha and Its Afterlife

Sharmila Majumdar

Chapter 12 Postmodern Subversion and the Aesthetics of Film Adaptation: The Example of Tasher Desh

Sneha Kar Chaudhuri

Contributors

Index

THE UNDERSTUDIED DRAMATIC AESTHETICS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Mala Renganathan and Arnab Bhattacharya

I

It is indeed an honour for us, as editors of the volume titled Rabindranath Tagore’s Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre, to contribute to Tagore studies and promote/enrich scholarship on the dramatic works of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Asia’s first Nobel laureate. Tagore, lauded primarily for his poetry, has left a voluminous amount of dramatic literature that has gained recognition only from the recent decades. Primarily a poet, Tagore was no less a playwright than a poet or fiction writer, a fact proved by his reasonably vast opus comprising more than 40 plays. Tagore’s drama, a substantial part of which is written in verse, demonstrates his creative transformation of the Indian dramatic tradition, submerged in his unique and highly original philosophy of life and art. Perhaps due to inadequate translations or biased notions on his plays as not stage worthy, Tagore’s plays have not been mapped properly in the history of the Indian stage. It is only in the past two decades that Tagore’s place in the local as well as global environs has been realized in relation to his plays, which are now seen to be decisive to an understanding of his philosophy of life, his social and political consciousness and his spiritual affinities.

Similarly, while Tagore’s plays have been critiqued, they have been rarely seen in the context of his contributions to the Indian dramatic genre, particularly focusing on his cosmopolitan spirit, his classic style of blending arts, his spirit of fusion and his effort to modernize theatre. Therefore, our aim here is to map the poet-dramatist’s place in Indian drama and performance, since his plays cover a wide variety of dramatic forms from folk plays, dance dramas to operatic forms as well as from prose plays, humorous plays and children’s plays to political and social plays. Despite being a world traveller with an awareness of the Western classical dramatic styles, Tagore never compromised Indian cultures to Western dramatic forms or Western styles of staging. His plays take the dramatic sweep typical of Kalidasa and at the same time, they do situate the plays within the contemporary context of experimentation and renaissance fervour, giving his plays a new technique, a new identity, a new dramatic method. Tagore’s plays and their experimental zeal can also be seen in his dramatic characterizations of strong characters like Chandalika (Chandalika) or Nandini (Red Oleanders), in his mythical retelling of stories, in his strong theatre landscape that envisages a painterly imagination and breathes a poetic delight in things that come in his way.

What has he not done to enrich Indian drama and performance? If Habib Tanvir’s experimentations with folk forms are revolutionary, has not Tagore done so much earlier with his Baul singing infused in Manipuri dance forms? If Girish Karnad, Satish Alekar, Chandrasekhar Kambar and Ratan Thiyam are well known for their individual styles of either retelling of epic stories or recreating folk narratives or historical figures, did not Tagore attempt all these much earlier in his Valmiki Pratibha (1881) or Biday Abhishaap (1894) or Chitrangada (1891)? Valmiki Pratibha, which goes back to the life of Valmiki, could be considered as a postmodern narrative that looks at the fringes and not at the centre of narrations. By choosing to narrate the roots of Valmiki and his transformation from a thief to a poet, Tagore has retold the epic in a different sense, not by narrating the narrative but by narrating the narrator. Similarly, without aping the West, he has introduced all women characters in a play like Mayar Khela (1881). Today we consider Indian dramatic experimentations as excelling in their awareness of their sociopolitical environments and eco-sensitivity. But Tagore’s plays like Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders, 1926) and Muktadhara (1922) deal with the slow mechanization and dehumanization that technology has reduced us to, while Chandalika (1933) brings awareness into the social oppression and casteism prevalent in the Indian society.

Tagore’s dramatic/theatrical arts established the first milestone of many a dramatic/performance traditions that got forgotten due to the growing influence of Western performance style in the colonial India. Instead of the colonial style of mechanical imitation of Western styles prevalent then in Indian plays, Tagore’s art revealed the zeal of a synthetic reconciliation, a kind of unification of diverse art forms of the world into a universally integrated whole, guided by certain integrally unifying principles. Such an art form was the most suitable for expressing Tagore’s views on society, politics and the world events. Tagore brings out the unconventionality of the conventional Indian dance and dramatic traditions, in his act of fusion of the Eastern and Western performance styles into a new, flexible patterned performance.

Tagore’s dramatic tradition tells tales of an experimentation of verse plays rendered into dance dramas when we read plays such as Chitrangada (1891) and Shapmochan (1931). Even when Tagore made use of European style of staging, like the use of Card Kingdom in Tasher Desh (1933), he never displayed artificiality, but rather replayed surrealistic characters in an Indian puppet-style dramatization, thereby modernizing indigenous arts.

Tagorean dance form integrates a variety of dance styles derived from one umbrella of the mood it evokes, thereby putting an end to the long debate of abhinaya and rasa as root of nritya. Dance, as an integral part of Tagorean dramatic tradition, is akin to dance as a primordial unit in any theatrical tradition. Therefore, his use of dance as an effective component of theatrical performances is an important Tagorean theatre tradition.

Further, Tagore’s style of fusion of dances such as Kathakali, Manipuri, Odissi, Kandyan (Sri Lanka) and so on, with which he reworked his plays into musicals, dance dramas and operas, is a theatrical tradition unique to Indian performances. In such a theatre, women occupy centre stage, since women are effective vehicles of Tagore’s dance and theatre performance tradition, where they are partakers in his social revolutionary zeal rather than symbols of social victimization, the realization of which point makes us opine that his plays stage female emancipation in a nuanced aesthetic.

II

The book Rabindranath Tagore’s Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre examines Rabindranath Tagore’s plays in the perspective of the Indian dramatic/performance tradition, locating Tagore as a playwright, performer and director in the panoramic continuum of Indian dramatic performance tradition. It aims to map Rabindranath Tagore’s place in the Indian dramatic/performance tradition, for which purpose it examines unexplored critical perspectives on the following: Tagore’s texts as performance texts, their exploration in multimedia such as film, television, and so on; reflections of Indian culture in his plays; certain inherent traits in his plays such as mise en scène, humour, dance elements and the like; Tagore and Indian playwrights in comparison, Tagorean theatre links to his world of music and performance genres; his plays in the context of cross-cultural, intercultural theatre; Tagore as a poet-performer-composer and their interconnections; and Tagore’s drama on the Indian stage.

The spirit of all that has been discussed above is what the book aspires to document in two broad parts, based on our aim to explore both dramatic as well as theatrical traditions in Tagore’s plays. The first part, in six chapters, discusses vital issues on Tagore’s drama including gender politics, his poetic dramatic tradition of dramatic action, time and space, his use of myth, humour and satire in the Indian dramatic milieu, Tagore and his contemporaries, Tagore and modern Indian drama, and nation and Tagore’s Drama. The second part comprising six chapters includes the following subthemes: Tagore’s drama as performance; politics and perceptions behind the filmic adaptations of Tagore’s plays, Indian cultures and traditions as reflected in Tagore’s theatre; Tagore as a poet-dramatist, poet-translator, dramatist-producer, actor-singer – choreographer and dramatist – scenographer; Tagore and intercultural performance/s; Tagore’s use of environ, mise en scène and the theatrical milieu; and last but not the least, the modern productions of Tagore plays.

III

With Tagore’s dramatic practice, Indian drama underwent a paradigmatic shift, when Tagore shunned Western practices of theatre and explored alternative models for Indian theatre, particularly indigenous traditions of our Indian cultures. The new model of theatre served as a new vision for a new Indian nation, says Abhijit Sen, who in his chapter ‘Rabindranath Tagore: Imagining Nation, Imagining Theatre’ highlights the spirit of the new energized theatre for an equally vibrant new nation. Sen contends that Rabindranath’s vision of a new theatre has deeply integrated with his vision of a new Indian nation. His move in the direction of this alternative model for the Indian theatre was not merely dramaturgical or theatrical, but also remarkably ideological. Such an endeavour is distinctly seen in his experimentation with dance forms that explored fusion of varied dance forms.

In ‘Rabindrik-Nritya, Tagore’s New Aesthetic for Indian Dramatic Art: Discourse and Practice’, Deepshikha Ghosh discusses the audiences’ neglect of Tagore’s close association with the art of dance and the utter ignorance of the educated middle class towards his distinctive dance form emanating from a unique philosophical outlook. Through snippets of information and discussion on the discourse and practice of Rabindrik-Nritya or Tagorean dance, Ghosh attempts to assess the dance-drama texts as well his essays on art and aesthetics such as ‘What is Art?’, ‘Art and Tradition’ and ‘The Religion of an Artist’ to establish Rabindrik-Nritya as an art form comparable to Tagore’s music and paintings, in that it transcends mere norms, rules and gestures towards a vision of an all-encompassing Oneness.

Tagore’s take on dance was also revolutionary, since at a time when the rest of India was delving deep into the rich traditions of Indian classical dance, Tagore, says Ghosh, believed in the spontaneity of physical movement to express the feelings and emotions of man, as a result of which he was experimenting and searching for a new form, a new design and a new technique for Indian dramatic art. He not only refashioned tradition but also allowed original and individual creativity to permeate it. Assimilating the known with the unknown, he invented a novel cultural tradition while remaining true to his own spirit. He was neither a professional composer nor a well-trained dancer. But under the aegis of this thinker, seer, executive cum supervisor, the essences of the East and the West were infused within a new ethos of dance. His eagerness to develop a contemporary as well as cosmopolitan style of dance is evident from his restless search for dance languages from different parts of India, even across national boundaries. Ghosh’s chapter here tries to represent, discursively, Tagore’s alternative understanding of Indian culture on the one hand and performance of dance and drama as praxis of his holistic philosophy of life and education on the other. Such an endeavour, says Ghosh, can help us see his uniqueness not only as a modern Indian dramatist but also as a modern thinker.

Chandrava Chakravarty’s ‘Place and Space in Tagore’s Raktakarabi and Muktadhara’ begins with the idea that Tagore’s plays have been mostly conceived as elusive and philosophical, and supposes it as the reason for their being more impressive as closet plays than theatrical performances. She stresses on Tagore’s creation of complex visual and ideological registers through the use of place and space in the plays making performance an uphill task, particularly studying two plays Raktakarabi and Muktadhara, to critical exploration. The plays, Chakravarty believes, are amenable to post-structuralist understanding of spatiality as an indispensable component of social existence, and they offer profound insights into the themes that Tagore repeatedly evokes in his plays – human greed, power, justice, the value of common human experience and freedom.

‘Tagore’s Artistic Rendering of Spiritual Realism in Dak Ghar’ makes an interesting attempt to study Tagore’s symbolic rendering of the play Dak Ghar (The Post Office,1912) in relation to spiritual realism that distinguishes him from other mystic poets and dramatists. According to Papiya Lahiri, Dak Ghar belongs to the Gitanjali (1910) period of Rabindranath Tagore’s long literary career dealing with reflections on death, man in relation to God and the mysterious call from the far-off world. Protagonist Amal’s innocence, curiosity and ability to imagine the world outside delight the passers-by, when they communicate with him through the little window of his room and learn the secret of living happily.

Tagore’s Upanishadic sensibility is woven intricately in every dialogue and scene of Dak Ghar, magnified with Amal’s guileless and spirited understanding of the universe where he equally embraces all. It is this devotion to the Infinite that removes any trace of vagueness and negativity from the heart and mind of the ailing child, filling others with wonder for his ability to see the good in people. The article sheds light on the doctrine of deliverance and spiritual consciousness through the seamless rendering of Amal’s vision of life.

Arnab Bhattacharya’s ‘Tagore and the Indian Tradition of Hasyarasa: A Study in Tagore’s Shorter Humorous Plays’ covers another yet unexplored area in Tagore’s drama, the humour dimension in his plays. Tracing the humour tradition in Indian drama from Sanskrit drama accentuated by Bharata Muni’s Natyashastra through Bengali drama to Tagore’s plays, Bhattacharya traces the interesting trajectory of humour, from the critical to the creative, establishing solidly that Tagore leaves his distinctive mark in the use of humour. Incidentally Bhattacharya restricts his study to the critically unexplored shorter hasya plays or playlets of Tagore called as Hasyakoutuk.

Deboshree Bhattacharjee in her chapter ‘The Comic Genius of Tagore: Interplay of Humour and Reality in Chirakumar Sabha’ attempts to interpret Tagore’s well-known humour play, Chirakumar Sabha, discussing the interplay of humour and reality in a subtle manner. Chirakumar Sabha is here seen from a semiotic perspective through a performance analysis of his plays. It views Tagore’s humour as not merely meant to invoke laughter, but to present the sociopolitical reality in the garb of laughter thereby combining both entertainment as well as educative value. Humour is in itself the supreme element of ‘disguise’– a tool most often used by Tagore in his comedy of errors, says Bhattacharjee.

IV

The second part of the book contains chapters crucial to the understanding of Tagore’s drama from a theatre/performance-oriented perspective. The chapters listed here mostly discuss aspects of Tagorean theatre such as mise en scène, performance styles, and so on. Dattatreya Dutt’s chapter titled ‘The Unrealized Theatre of Tagore’ commences with the contention that, contrary to popular notion, there is no single dramatic genre called ‘Tagore Drama’. To prove this point Dutt traces his dramatic journey from Tagore’s deliberate absorption from diverse authors such as Shakespeare, Wilde and Maeterlinck to his adherence to operatic, historical, symbolic and even melodramatic styles with the professional stage in view, and finally ending with the dance-drama form of the theatre. But in the meantime, he had also written Rangamancha (The Stage) – his famous tirade against the illusion-oriented stage. Other than the above, one can address how he had put up a strong case in favour of allowing free play of the spectators’ imagination, while witnessing the action on the stage and also advocating an unadorned, suggestive stage setting.

How successful he was in his actual practice of his theatre theorizing is questionable, as the extant photograph of the Dak Ghar (The Post Office) production under his own direction amply demonstrates. But of course there were extenuating factors like audience expectation – or what the contemporary audience expected the theatre to be. Yet the idea remained with him, and he attempted to embody his vision of theatre in the written text of his plays. Therefore Dutt attempts to show through analyses of Tagore’s later plays that in his search for an ideal unadorned theatre, Tagore had finally moved (at least in his theatrical imagination) beyond the walled proscenium into the open-air theatre form. The texts of his plays show a gradual rejection of the proscenium paraphernalia, and a strong tendency to utilize natural spaces as he had found in Santiniketan. As Dutt rightly points out, in this as in so many other fields, he had anticipated the future trends of world theatre.

Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam takes up a full intercultural analysis of Tagore’s Muktadhara in ‘Encounters and Exchanges: An Intercultural Interrogation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Dramaturgy in Muktadhara’. Beginning with a brief encapsulation of the trauma of India’s colonial experience, the chapter maps out the country’s and Tagore’s sociopolitical awakening during freedom struggle to move towards interculturalism in art and politics. According to Sen, Tagore’s exposure to foreign cultures equalling his awareness of the limitations of Calcutta’s public theatre and folk forms catalysed his development of an intercultural, Santiniketan style of theatre. Further, she highlights the significant influences on Tagore and the aim of his theatre of ideas brought out in the symbolic, poetic, non-naturalistic nature of Tagore’s dramaturgy highlighted before Muktadhara, with the aim to view them as a concretization of Tagore’s political philosophy and personal ideology. This helps to understand how the play reflects the milieu of the period and the manner in which it interweaves Western and native cultural elements and constructs, thereby enabling to highlight Tagore’s ideas on kingship and the machine and the triumph of Tagore’s dramaturgy.

Debopriya Banerjee in her chapter ‘Performing Chitrangada: From Tagore to Rituparno Ghosh’ discusses performance of Tagore’s dance drama Chitrangada in two filmic representations of two different eras: Tarun Majumdar’s popular family melodrama Dadar Kirti (1980) alongside what can be considered film-maker Rituparno Ghosh’s swansong Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012). These two Bengali films become significant artefacts of critical examination to comprehend/appreciate Tagore’s dramatic contemporaneity. Banerjee successfully brings the question of gender identity to critical crossroads through her analysis of gender identity in Tagore and the two films, one exploring a normative course and the other a transsexual one.

In ‘Visarjan as Performance: A Road towards Ritual Healing’, Seetha Vijayakumar believes that Rabindranath Tagore’s Visarjan (1889) brings magic on stage by resonating the social realities of its times, and making a mark on Tagore’s foresightedness, expressing these through the ritual of performance on stage. She particularly explores the tradition of sacrifice which is deeply rooted in Indian society with the aim to examine and understand the myth of sacrifice, thereby offering a ritual reading of Visarjan, transforming the theatre apparatus to comment and criticize the phony and credulous society he lived in and offer them the solace of ritual healing.

‘Valmiki Pratibha and Its Afterlife’, written by Sharmila Majumdar, discusses a particular production of the play Valmiki Pratibha by the inmates of different correctional homes in the Indian state of West Bengal, one of its kind in the history of production of Tagore’s plays that happened in 2005, under the guidance of Alokananda Roy, a celebrated danseuse of Kolkata, who worked with the inmates of the Presidency Correctional Home. Such a social reform movement through Tagorean theatre, which took place within the four walls of a prison, namely producing Valmiki Prativa, in 2007, became a phenomenal success. Such critical attempts take us back to the question of timeless relevance of Tagore in the dramatic world.

Sneha Kar Chaudhuri transports the main strands of this volume to yet another relevant dimension of Tagore studies, as she critiques a film adaptation on Tasher Desh (1933) in ‘Postmodern Subversion and the Aesthetics of Film Adaptation: The Example of Tasher Desh’. Specifically, she explores a recent