Just before Independence Day,the ongoing freedom struggle in West Bengal intensified. A Midnapore farmer was denounced as a Maoist and slapped with non-bailable charges for asking Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee uncomfortable questions. Shortly thereafter,the State Human Rights Commission ordered her government to compensate a teacher whom she had set the police on for passing around some harmless cartoons. Banerjee retaliated on the eve of Independence Day. Even as President Mukherjee was warning the nation of the dangers of undermining democratic institutions,in the assembly,Banerjee accused the judiciary of putting rulings on sale. She said that she was happy to risk jail for saying her piece,but she simply had to express her opinion somewhere.
It is 15 months since Banerjee wrested West Bengal from 34 years of communist rule. Such cataclysmic change is usually forged by powerful,pervasive,material urges to develop and prosper,to seek the appurtenances of happiness. In West Bengal,these forces had been at work for two decades,to no avail. The tipping point was provided in 2011 by a non-material urge expressed by the intelligentsia the urge to speak,to be heard and to dissent without fear. After the insupportable violence at Singur and Nandigram,popular actors,poets,painters and musicians like Satabdi Ray,Joy Goswami,Shuvaprasanna and Kabir Suman had stepped out of line and into the street to give legitimacy to Banerjees politics. But her government has proved to be more of the same. It now faces a tipping point of its own. Ironically,it is again about freedom.
Bratya Basu,a college teacher,is now minister for higher education of the West Bengal government. His play,bitingly critical of communist control over the arts,traces the rise and fall of the amazing baritone Debabrata Biswas. He was estranged from the Indian Peoples Theatre Association,with which he identified closely,when P.C. Joshi,general secretary of the communist party of India,was replaced by B.T. Ranadive,who tried to turn theatre into a vehicle for blatant propaganda. Later,he fell foul of Visva-Bharati University for improvising on Rabindranath Tagores canon. It owned Tagores copyrights and when it refused to clear Biswass recordings,his career was effectively over.
Kaushik Sens adaptation of Macbeth follows Shakespeare faithfully until near the end,when Malcolm,the rightful heir to the throne,briefly departs from the script to echo Mamata Banerjees stirring promise from the 2011 elections: We shall do the work of 10 years in 10 days. Later,the play has an extra scene. After Macbeth is slain by Macduff,the darkness lifts from the face of Scotland,freedom and hope live again and the murdered kings son Malcolm returns popular legitimacy to the throne. After the first performance,Banerjees quote was withdrawn by the theatre group apparently a case of self-censorship but reinstated later by popular demand.
A palpable hit,the quote never fails to elicit thunderous applause but after his coronation,Malcolm is a changed man. He dismisses the amazed Macduff,who had been looking forward to participating in some energetic poriborton . But his brother Donalbain detains Macduff to sketch his portrait. The extra scene recalls portraits of Macduffs family shown earlier in the play,which were used by Macbeths murderers to identify and kill them. And incidentally,Mamata Banerjee is a painter.
Biswass autobiography is not a literary stoning of the communist devil,but Basus dramatic version is a shrill,unrelenting diatribe against the Left. Sens Macbeth is easier on the nerves,ending as it does with improvised black comedy. And it features the most amazing trio of witches to ever tread the boards. Like before and after snapshots,these plays mirror popular feeling in West Bengal before the fall of the Left and after Banerjees honeymoon period ended,leaving the viewer with the impression that nothing has changed.
Banerjee is intolerant of dissent and uncaring of the flak she draws for misusing the state machinery and the law to stifle criticism. But the national uproar over her excesses is helping everyone to forget that the communists she replaced were not significantly more civilised. They were only more sophisticated,which isnt quite the same thing.
pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com
