The discussion on jatra at Thema. Picture by Rashbehari Das

It?s a scene from the jatra, Karna-Shakuni. Abhimanyu lies dead on the battlefield. Accused by the widowed Uttara, Lord Krishna launches into a monologue, describing the chariot of death that has come to carry off Abhimanyu. As he points skywards ? ?oi dekho rath? ? the gesture makes the audience turn towards the tattered shamiana of the tent, actually expecting the messengers of the netherworld.

?It is this achievement of the maximum effect through the minimal that theatre can learn from jatra,? stage personality Shyamal Ghosh was telling a roomful of listeners at Thema.

What added to the discussion was the fact that three of the panelists were performers. Hence Ghosh?s ?oi dekho rath? also carried the listeners to the ceiling of the room.

Moments were created through the evening though the speakers never left their seats. Surajit Bandyopadhyay, the youngest of the speakers and a member of Natyaranga, drew applause by delivering dialogues of the play, Shah Jahan, once in jatra doyen Nirmalendu Lahiri?s high-octane style and then in his own toned-down manner.

?Who says jatra is all sound and fury?? moderator Samik Bandyopadhyay countered. He followed it up with accounts of the Phanibhushans. ?The taller of the two, boro Phanibabu (Phanibhushan Vidyabinod), was called the Ahindra Chowdhury while chhoto Phanibabu (Phanibhushan Matilal, of short stature) the Durgadas Bandyopadhyay of jatra,? he said, indicating how the two arts were perceived as related.

He remembered seeing Matilal as Siraj-ud-Daulah at Beadon Square in 1961. ?He was in his 60s then, essaying a teenaged Siraj. There was a scene where he went down on his knees and offered the crown to Mir Jaffer. The scene was marked by amazing movements of the fingers and the eyes. As he bended, a section of the crowd started complaining that they could not see. Such was his concentration that while continuing the act, he slowly turned to them and repeated the movement.? A popular art like jatra, Bandyopadhyay said, is answerable to the paying public at every moment unlike theatre, which has moved away from this immediate give-and-take in preserving a structured style. ?The theatre audience is trained to distance itself.?

Added actor-director Ashit Basu: ?Jatra has lost its ground, yet the audience remains. Today, theatre groups rue the lack of spectators. Why don?t they stop looking in the city and return to the districts and the language of the jatra? They may have to bring down their ticket prices but they will earn more. Otherwise, they will only keep shedding tears in seminars on marketing theatre.?

Stage historian and critic Prabhat Kumar Das put the discussion in historical perspective.