Yes, it was a long time ago. Indeed, a very long time.
We were kids growing up in a small town in West Bengal. The year was 1966, the month, February. There’s no mistaking the year or the month, because something happened just a few days later which has seared into the collective memory of our generation.
Our quiet little town erupted in noisy but determined student protests against the increasingly more desperate food situation across the state. Localised at first, the protests soon swelled into the historic Food Movement of 1966 which was to eject, in a few months’ time, the Congress party from power in the state for the first time.
Predictably, the police came down hard on the protestors. I happened to catch an irate policeman’s baton on my rather frail shoulder but managed to hide the bruise from my mother for a few days – until the pain and the swelling got the better of me. A schoolmate was shot shrough his leg and spent days at the hospital. Meanwhile my father, who, as always, was at the centre of all the action, got picked up by the police and whisked away to a Calcutta jail – and the situation quickly became more volatile. Even after those arrested were released, the fires smouldered for several months before they were somehow doused as election day approached.
But I am digressing. I wanted to think about what happened before the trouble started, not after. Over four or five days in early February that year, we had what then used to be called the Youth Festival (Jubo Utsab, in Bangla) – something that happened every three or four years under the auspices of the All India Youth Federation, the Communist Party of India, and probably also the All India Peace Council.
For those few days our little town looked and felt very different to its unremarkable persona we were all so familiar with. There was music, there was theatre, there were films, there was mime, there was dance, there was the occasional aerobics virtuoso laying out his wares, there were talks and seminars on war and peace, – and there were electrifying prabhat pheris (early morning processions) alive with songs and slogans.
For those few days, and for some leading up to the festival, our house buzzed with activity of every kind, for my father happened to be the chief patron, main organiser and principal ideologue, all rolled into one, to the festival. There were feverish comings and goings, animated discussions around what all was not going right, rehearsals for the ceremonial choric songs for the evening, volunteers dropping in to report which guest was expected to arrive at what hour – and even my usually unflappable mother would lose count of how many plates of breakfast she needed to rustle up in the next half-hour.
Through all of this, unburdened with any responsibility one could write home about, we kids were over the moon.
And what sublime fare awaited us in the evenings! There was the inimitable Hemanga Biswas – doyen of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) – singing some Paul Robeson numbers one evening, first the original song and next its Bangla version, and the rapt audience lapping up every word, some joining in with gusto. ‘Old Man River’ is still ringing in my ears a full 58 years after, as is the mesmeric Lead Belly song that also he sang for us: “We are in the same boat, Brother”.
Then we had the noted Rabindra Sangeet singer Sagar Sen with his mellifluous voice and clear diction, followed by Tarun Bandopadhyay, in his day one of the leading exponents of Adhunik (‘modern’, i.e., post-Rabindranath Tagore) Bengali music, enchanting the audience with his lilting numbers.
One evening’s programme featured the peerless ‘Poet of Silence’, the mime Jogesh Dutta, whose ‘comic’ business inevitably reminded you of Chaplin, except that Jogesh’s was an entirely solo act. Unless my memory is failing me, we also had the Uday Shankar troupe (minus the great man himself, though) with one of their shadow plays (I don’t remember now which) on one of those days.
The Russian consulate in Kolkata had also been roped in to lend prints of two prized items on their collection: a film rendition (1957?) of the classic Pyotor Tchaikovsky ballet Swan Lake, and Sergei Eisenstein’s timeless epic, Battleship Potemkin. I cannot be sure if my memory of the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin is from that first viewing or an extrapolation from some years later, but I remember that the audience were up on their feet, cheering and applauding, at the film’s cliimactic encounter between the Potemkin sailors and the Tsarist fleet. When the Tsar’s soldiers refused to deploy against their Potemkin brothers, I thought the flag fluttering atop the rebel ship looked a deeper shade of red than before.
But for me the piece de resistance of that festival was the performance by the Kolkata theatre group Nandikar, helmed at that time by the legendary thespian Ajitesh Bandopadhyay. He presented two Anton Chekhov creations (adapted into Bengali) from Nandikar’s repertoire, one-act plays, both of them, The first was Prastab (‘A Wedding Proposal’), a rip-roaring farce built around a feckless, not-so-young bachelor, a freeholder, who desperately seeks an attractive but shrewish neighbour’s hand in marriage, only to blight his own chances as he puts his foot compulsively in his mouth every time he is about to propose.
The other piece was Naana Ranger Din (‘Swan Song’), in which the forlorn figure of an old theatre actor, long past his prime and now a hopeless drunk, finds himself trapped in the theatre hall for the night as his troupe, oblivious to his presence inside the green room, fast asleep, lock the whole place up and leave. As he emerges out of his drunken stupor, the man stands alone in the dark, deserted proscenium, overwhelmed by memories of his halcyon days as a virtuoso character actor, but keenly aware that he now has reached the end of the road. He has no family, no one to go home to, for a woman he once dearly loved would be his wife only if he left the theatre and settled for a more ‘respectable’ career. Presently, he recalls some of his most stirring performances that once earned him high praise from audiences and critics, and, on an impulse, plays out some of those dazzling parts to himself once again, all by himself. In his heart of hearts, he knows he hasn’t lost his touch; that, given the chance, he can still mesmerize audiences. But, equally, he knows his time is up, for people no more have any use for his kind of talent. The wreck of his dearest dream and his fondest hope stares him in the eye. And yet, the actor draws himself up to his full, magnificent height before he storms out of the stage, defiant one last time, crying out with Shakespeare’s Richard III:
A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!
Every time I think of Ajitesh Bandopadhyay in the middle of that rousing performance that distant February evening, I get goosebumps, even now.
Today, a look back at that far-away point in time gives one a sense of the enormity of the changes that have taken place since then. Our town didn’t have a direct rail link to Kolkata at that point. The road distance was a mere 60 or so kilometres, but it took buses two-and-a-half hours to cover that distance. Telephones in that pre-STD (and, of course, pre-cellular) age were few and connections overwhelmingly unreliable. And yet our little town of about 50,000 inhabitants could proudly host, over four or five days, a festival celebrating some of the finest human achievements anywhere in the world in music, films and the theatre. The festival could at best have been funded by a shoe-string budget. Most programmes were held al fresco, under the open sky, partly on the grounds of the town hall and partly on the girls’ school playground, with only a couple of seminars – I remember one focused on America’s war on Vietnam, which was turning more vicious by the day then – and probably also the Swan Lake screening, being accommodated inside our school auditorium. But all that didn’t seem to take anything away from the zest of the audience or the passion with which the many volunteers, my father’s students, many of them, embraced their labour of love.
Let me hasten to add something here, however: I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that the town I happened to grow up in was special in any way. It was not – not in the state of West Bengal in our time, at any rate. Fifty or 60 years ago, nearly every second district – or even subdivisional town in our part of the world took pride in engaging with the big, wide world outside of their own communities in their own unostentatious ways. It was not only a matter of being politically aware or alert: small-town communities also strived, albeit with limited resources, to access and savour the best products of human culture. Often, the results were not necessarily spectacular, but the bona fides of the quest were beyond doubt.
Off and on in recent years, I have journeyed back to the town of my most impressionable years. And each time I have caught myself shaking my head in despair: “Is this where I come from?”I almost wish I didn’t. But then, doesn’t the same disquiet assail me when I think of my country also today?
Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com. His verified X handle is @basuanjan52.
