Kitareba 2.0, a dance performance by Sapphire production creates a wonderful tribute to the women and children of the newly formed East Pakistan who suffered the impact of forced, political migration, writes Shoma A. Chatterji.
Kitareba 2.0 is a stage performance presented as the annual performance by Sapphire, a post-modern dance company founded and directed by the ever-enthusiastic Sudarshan Chakraborty. Kitareba is a word in Sylheti dialect which indigenously means ‘How do you do?’.
Sylhet is a metropolitan city in the northeastern region of Bangladesh. It is situated on the banks of the Surma River. The city has a population of approximately 700,000 people, making it the fifth-largest city in Bangladesh.
Lord Mountbatten’s partition plan announced on 3 June 1947, provided inter-alia for a referendum to be held in the Sylhet district of Assam to decide whether it should remain a part of the Indian province of Assam or go to East Pakistan. The Sylhet referendum was held on 6 July 1947 and the result went in favour of a merger with Pakistan. Broadly following the Hindu-Muslim population break-up of the district, Sylhet voted to join East Bengal. Other than a small Hindu-majority pocket, most of the district was transferred to Pakistan.
But what happened to the people directly affected by this sudden division of their homeland into two different nations? It created a storm in the lives of those who preferred to stay back, but were forced to become Pakistani citizens.
What happened to the huge number of men, women and children who were forced to identify with a new nation? The very word “Partition” within India immediately associates us with the forced migration of masses into Punjab and from Punjab which was now divided. But Bengal was not focused on too much. Kitareba attempts to do this by focusing on what happened to women and children in Sylhet.
Just after Partition, large numbers of Hindu Bangalis started to migrate across the border back to Assam, allowing politicians in Assam to eventually frame the pre-1947 question of cultural homogeneity as one of infiltration by foreigners.
Sapphire, through its annual performance Kitareba 2.0, has created a wonderful tribute to the women and children of the newly formed East Pakistan who suffered the impact of forced, political migration.
Sudarshan Chakraborty says, “Although I or my family never experienced the impact of partition, I grew up hearing stories from my parents about the struggle and the memories that were edged in their minds about East Pakistan and atrocities faced by their forefathers, friends or relatives. I too carry these emotions in my DNA which made me wonder about this and the idea of the play developed through an osmotic process year after year.”
Sudarshan decided to visit Sylhet taking a road trip on the same path taken by migrants in 1947 and later in 1971. “This journey to Sylhet and touching the soil of my forefathers in Bousi village made this production complete and emotionally anchored with the true sense of questioning the futility of physical borders and investigating the shared cultural and social history of the two parts of a river/mountain (Jantia Khasi Hills) which suddenly became two nations! I was involved in this concept over the last ten years.”
Sudarshan thanks dancer Lubna Mariam, based in Dhaka who connected him to a dance organisation based in Sylhet named Nritya Shailly run by a Hindu dancer which made his story more relevant as a role reversal of looking into the idea of being a ‘minority’.
About the dance performances enriched with a dynamically moving backdrop with a sound track filled with the impact of rushing trains as the passengers seated on the stage swing this way indicates the movement of the train carrying the sad and abused commuters away from their homeland.
For years together, Sapphire attempted to narrate a story integrating with many art forms but without diluting the concept or the vocabulary of Sapphire known for cautiously layering it with ritualistic folksy moves and body language that concretises and addresses the aesthetics of the songs and the stories.
“At the same time, it depicted the integration of day-to-day material we see as props like newspapers or fences but reinventing them in a way to be used in dance to narrate the story and at the same time, demonstrate the power of contemporary dance in such situations”, Sudarshan elaborates.
The songs were very carefully selected from the heritage songs of Sylhet such as “sona bondhu re”, “Ami tomar naam loiyya Kaandhi” because these songs express the pathos and pain of separation and isolation between lovers/kin that transcends borders of geography. The solo song by Joy Sankar that goes Habiganjer jalali kabutor, Sunamgunjer Kura’ by Hemango Biswas known for his songs/poetry on his immense sense of loss of identity in a new city where he was among strangers!
The dance performances however, framed out of modern dance forms appeared a bit repetitive over a period of time where facial expressions tended to be overshadowed by the slightly acrobatic dance postures. Sudarshan gave the opportunity to students of dance of his academy to participate in the performance without exception and he explains that this may have led to the apparent repetition.
The costumes were ethnically designed to keep to the tradition of the poor village folk, mainly women and children – on one hand comprising the red-and-white checkered traditional “gamcha” and on the other, in keeping with the East Bengal colours of the Dhonekhali and even ikkat.
“The lighting by Dinesh Poddar used red and amber, traversing from violence, warmth and dream, creating a constant negotiation for the dancers and the audience to find their state of mind and situation as nothing remained constant. In some scenes, we used pastel colours and blue signifying innocence and flow of life immediately succumbing to threat, fear and bloodshed!” Sudarshan sums up.
In his directorial statement, Sudarshan says, “KITAREBA is aimed at narrating the plight of the migrants of different parts of the world and how decades of political fiasco kept separating communities but failed to separate people from a mutual love for their homeland. The spirit of KITAREBA celebrates these stories of hope and conviction using dance, multimedia and spoken words/poems.”
Shoma A. Chatterji is a freelance journalist, film scholar and author. She has authored 17 published titles and won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema, twice. She won the UNFPA-Laadli Media Award, 2010 for ‘commitment to addressing and analysing gender issues’ among many awards.