Rangakarmee does Usha Ganguly proud with two brilliant plays

Shoma A. Chatterji says ‘Abhi Raat Baki Hai’ and ‘Pashmina’ not only keep the audience riveted, they also have the potential to make viewers introspect with their spell-binding and powerful themes. With the staging of these two plays, the Hindi theatre group lives up to the reputation of its founder-mentor.

Rangakarmee has been among the very few Hindi theatre groups performing in Kolkata and beyond for over four decades with great success. Founded by the late Usha Ganguly, the group has come together with determination, passion and discipline that their mentor and guru passed on to them after she passed away. In their newly renovated performing space at Usha Ganguly Mancha and Keya Mancha in the city, they proved this again.

These plays also move beyond to other performing spaces within the city and then beyond and is getting critical and commercial success with every successive performance. The first play is called Abhi Raat Baki Hai, an original play in Marathi authored by Jayant Pawar called Adhantar.

Abhi Raat Baki Hai

Jayant Pawar is a noted playwright and many of his plays have been made into films in Marathi. Abhi Raat Baki Hai unfolds the story of how the textile strike in Mumbai in 1980 impacted a single, low-middle-class Marathi family living in a working class area in the city. Translated into Hindi by Kailash Sengar, it throws light on the socio-economic and political situation of Bombay in the last two decades of the last century. It was a time when globalisation was taking the world by storm and all the other industries were being shut. It was adapted to a film by Mahesh Manjrekar titled City of Gold. This family offers a microscopic example of hundreds of similar families that were fragmented, broken, disturbed, destroyed during and following the long textile strike in Mumbai.

It is directed by Souti Chakraborti who has won the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and was also awarded the ‘Manohar Singh Smriti Puraskar’ for his contribution to Light Design. The stage opens on a low middle class family where the mother is the sole bread earner who provides home cooked food to families in the neighbourhood. She suffers from arthritic leg. The daughter is separated from her husband though the husband wants her back. The older of the two sons, lives in a dream world fantasizing about an ideal Marxist, pseudo-intellectual world. He is angry with the entire world because it cannot understand his writings although he does not write a single word but languishes on his bed or walks out to get drunk on country liquor. The youngest son has lost his job and vents his anger on his helpless mother and the separated sister, accusing her for breaking bread in her mother’s home.

The members of the family with outsiders stepping in from time to time, keep temperatures flared every now and the ambience in the home almost violent. At times it surfaces when the second brother, an anti-social, happens to stab a fellow gangster of another party and gets hurt himself, about to be arrested. The closure is open where the family comes together symbolically to light a fire and then stoke it out. The daughter ends everything with a beautiful lullaby. The curtains drop leaving a disturbed audience. The costume designing keeps to the characters and to their lifestyle — the eldest son in kurta-pyjamas before stepping out, the second, violent one in milk-white churidar and tight-collared shirt and the youngest wearing shorts and a tee.

The set design is imaginative and beautiful, combining the cooking space and the bed on one side with the grocery cabinet in the centre and a chair thrown in for visitors. The dead father’s picture is on the wall behind with a garland on it as it is his death/birth anniversary. The acting of the outsiders who walk in and out of the only room is as natural and organic like they too are part of the nuclear family. The sounds of firing and bomb blasts outside gives an idea of the disturbing environment.

Pashmina

The second play Pashmina, authored by Mrinal Thakur and directed by Sajida who is a graduate and a member of the National School of Drama, Delhi, is an emotionally moving story about loss, grief and finally, how grief can rise above communal conflict between two families, one Muslim who runs a business in Pashmina shawls and one Hindu, a middle-aged couple desperately trying to live with the memory of their only son who is killed by PoK (Pak Occupied Kashmir) terrorists when he is returning home with a Pashmina shawl for his mother.

The play opens with the middle-aged couple, Amar and Vibha Saxena who travel every year but keep putting off their long-cherished dream of visiting Kashmir. We are slowly revealed the reason for Vibha’s resistance to the long-cherished vacation because it reminds her of her dead son. Finally, they draw courage married to their dream and set off for a luxury tour of Kashmir. Amar is determined to buy a Pashmina shawl for his wife and the wife finally agrees. Another Sikh couple, very loud and demonstrative and fun-seeking, meets them on the holiday and says they are also looking for a Pashmina shawl. This offers us a glimpse into the nature of different kinds of people making for a colourful India.

Both couples visit the home of a Pashmina shawl seller, a Muslim, who lives with his grown daughter and has also lost his young son to the communal clashes in the state. This is a journey for the Hindu parents and the Muslim father and daughter to open up their emotional wounds and come to terms with both loss – the loss of their sons, and gain – the knowledge that parents cannot be divided by the caste they are born into but can be united in the grief they share of having lost their only son.

The play makes imaginative use of surreal images of the young Hindu boy who is throttled with the same shawl he is bringing for his mother after having been shot. He floats in with a whole bouquet of balloons and dances around his mother very gracefully but does not talk. There is also a scene showing the dead Muslim boy seeking comfort in his father’s lap. The Pashmina shawl seller gives away his precious shawl at a throwaway price to this Hindu couple to celebrate their friendship bonded by their personal loss. The final scene shows the two dead young men facing each other, smiling away and exchanging their caps, the Hindu boy places his cap on the head of the Muslim boy and the Muslim boy places his skull cap on the older boy’s head and the play closes on this beautiful note. There is a colourful chorus dancing group that steps in to add to the entertainment value of the play without disturbing the tenor or the mood. It also establishes the changing scenario of the play as it moves from Lucknow to Kashmir.

Pashmina is also symbolic and metaphorical and may be interpreted as the invisible protagonist of the story that we see and hear only towards the end. The entire cast has imaginatively used the limited space with different set pieces changed within the absolute darkness where the actors step in and out to move pieces of furniture to change the scene and the situation. The discipline put in by the actors and other assistants is remarkable and so is the use of the surreal actions by the two dead young men who float in and out without a line to speak.

The acting by the cast, including the security guards in full uniform holding rifles, the waiter in the restaurant of the hotel and the Sikh couple, is mesmerising enough to avoid even a second’s blink.

Tripti Mitra, who manages the new young team of Rangakarmee, says the group had to put in three long months of rigorous rehearsals for each play and was very punctual. Rangakarmee is certainly raising its own bar on the footsteps of the late Usha Ganguly.