4 min readJun 5, 2026 08:46 AM IST
First published on: Jun 5, 2026 at 07:00 AM IST
By Indrapramit Roy
One summer afternoon in 1948, outside Calcutta University, 22-year-old Kumar Roy was introduced to Bengali theatre legend Sombhu Mitra. The catalyst for this was Ritwik Ghatak, not yet the film maestro. Mitra was already famous for directing IPTA’s landmark production, Nabanna — a play by Bijon Bhattacharya that brought the reality of the man-made Bengal famine to the stage. This chance encounter set the course of Kumar Roy’s life — he joined the newly formed theatre group Bohurupee, devoting himself to the stage till his death in 2010.
One of my fondest memories was painting in my drawing book with Baba, my father, Kumar Roy, sitting on the deck of a houseboat on Srinagar’s Dal Lake. We divided the painting horizontally into two halves — I painted the top, he did the bottom. During the annual family trips, a drawing book and paint materials always accompanied us. This interest in visual art remained with him from childhood. While the passion for theatre defined him, his talent for the visual arts found expression in his quest for excellence in stage, light and costume design.
The first half of Kumar Roy’s theatre life was built around acting — a very diverse range of characters in plays directed by Mitra, like Gobindyamanikya in Rabindranath Tagore’s Bisarjan, Gossain in the landmark production of Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders) and Thakurda in Raja (The King of the Dark Chamber). These became the gold standard of how to stage Tagore’s plays. The 1960s and ’70s also saw him as Dr Roy in Putul Khela, an adaptation of Heinrich Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the chief of the chorus in Sophocles’s Oedipus, Satu in Badal Sirkar’s Pagla Ghoda and Mr Kashikar in the Bengali production of Vijay Tendulkar’s Marathi play Shantata, Court Chalu Aahe, among others.
Kumar Roy’s directorial journey began in 1979 with Shudraka’s classical Sanskrit play Mrichhakatika, in which he starred as Charudutta. Over the next three decades, he directed more than 20 diverse plays — ranging from Girish Karnad’s Yayati and Tagore’s Malini to the musical Piriti Param Nidhi and his final verse production, Buddhadev Bose’s Kaal-sandhya. Each production reflected his commitment to socially relevant theatre. While Mrichhakatika tackled adapting a classical Sanskrit play for the modern stage, Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo questioned how authority manipulates science through a flawed, fallible protagonist. Manoj Mitra’s satire Rajdarshan saw Kumar Roy — then approaching 60 — deliver a remarkable performance as a greedy villager who gets to inhabit a dead king’s body. His altered vocal pitch, dialect, and comic timing surprised even long-time admirers. I recall a childhood experience that showed a glimpse of how an actor prepares. During a trip to Nepal, I was astounded to find Baba speaking in Nepali on the second day of our trip. It felt like magic, how could he? I realised later that it was not the language but the accent and diction with a few Nepali words that made all the difference to commonplace Hindi.
In his centenary year, Kumar Roy is remembered as a director, a prolific writer, editor of the theatre journal Bohurupee, a mentor to generations of artists and a gifted administrator, but his real legacy is how the consuming passion for theatre kept him going for 60 years without a care for either recognition or any material gains. He embraced the ideal of the “total artist”: One who creates, directs, performs, writes, teaches, and leads with equal passion. Incidentally, Bohurupee completed 78 years this May.
The writer is a visual artist and art educator
In his centenary year, Kumar Roy is remembered as a director, a prolific writer, editor of the theatre journal Bohurupee, a mentor to generations of artists and a gifted administrator, but his real legacy is how the consuming passion for theatre kept him going for 60 years without a care for either recognition or any material gains. 
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