Azhar Alam as Shah Jahan in Yadon Ke Bujhe Huye Savere

There was a time when Urdu (or Hindustani) theatre jostled with the commercial Bengali stage in this city to scale the heights of musical poetry, lavish spectacle and popular entertainment.

Travelling Parsi-theatre troupes put Calcutta on their map over a hundred years ago. Then J.F. Madan set up the famous Madan Theatres here, at the Corinthian (now Opera Cinema) on Dharamtala Street, even employing the national celebrity Agha Hashr Kashmiri as resident dramatist in 1916. Later, ?Master? Fida Hussain made a name at his own Moonlight Theatre (fully professional, though, no moonlighting), continuing to stage plays right up to 1968, virtually the last Indian company operating in the Parsi-theatre style.

Now, Urdu theatre is like the proverbial Id moon, not just in Calcutta but, unhappily, across the country. After its appropriation by the Bombay film industry, Urdu more or less ceased to be a language for theatre. A real pity, because it had such a long and rich tradition of poetic dialogue.

Therefore, one must credit the young group Little Thespian (not so little any more) for persisting with attempts to revive Urdu locally. For its latest production, Yadon Ke Bujhe Huye Savere, the director Uma Jhunjhunwala selected A River across the Unseen Divide, written in English by Ismail Choonara, who lives in London, and had it translated into Urdu by Sabir Irshad Usmani.

The choice of language is appropriate as the subject is Shah Jahan, languishing in house arrest under Aurangzeb?s dictates. Not much takes place by way of physical action; what happens occurs in the mind of the former emperor, lost in memories of Mumtaz, his son Dara Shuko and old glories, and attended to by his daughter Jahanara. Choonara suggests that Shah Jahan?s liberalism and strength was the syncretic product of Islam and Rajput blood, and contrasts Aurangzeb as a communal zealot.

The situation may remind Bengali playgoers of DL Roy?s five-act, 15-character, blood-and-thunder classic Shah Jahan. But this chamber piece is more elegiac, shorter and with only three main parts. Meanwhile English students will remember Macbeth in at least two scenes, when Dara Shuko?s ghost appears, and when the servant ? like the Porter ? blabbers in drunkenness. In fact, the latter scene does not enhance Choonara?s drama at all.

However, lead actor S.M. Azhar Alam pours everything into the title role, transforming his young form into the old, lonely, broken frame of the once-proud badshah of Hindustan, yearning for the past and hallucinating. He receives capable support from Heena Parvez as Jahanara. Suresh Dutta?s set and Joy Sen?s lighting make the vista of the distant Taj Mahal on the horizon across the Yamuna a beautiful sight, almost mocking frail mortality with eternity.