The slogan of “Jab tak suraj chand rahega, tab tak Arjun nam rahega” rings through the stage. The play Legacy Code 19.05.1961 is underway.
The cryptic title is a combination of a thing and a date. Legacy code is a unique 11-digit number assigned to residents of Assam based on the 1951 National Register of Citizens. It is meant to be proof of citizenship. And the date stamp refers to what is possibly the first Bengali language movement in the subcontinent, not the one that happened in 1971 in East Pakistan, but the one that erupted in Silchar, a whole decade before that.
The play itself is set in 2012. Its protagonist is Arjun Namasudra, a fisherman from Assam who committed suicide after a case was filed against him in the Foreigners’
Tribunal. It was alleged that he was a doubtful citizen or a D-voter. At the time, Tarun Gogoi of the Congress was the chief minister of Assam and the UPA II government was at the Centre.
At south Calcutta’s Tapan Theatre that day — May 19 — two back-to-back plays on the same theme are being staged. The auditorium is quite full, and most of the audience stays back for both the productions — by Ganasur, a theatre company from Silchar — till a quarter past 9, on a very humid night.
The play is nearing its end. A crazed Arjun is running around for his legacy data. He keeps muttering “dor laage”, meaning “I am scared”.
Last scene. Arjun is on a deserted platform of Silchar station, when a teenaged girl appears before him. She introduces herself as Kamala and tells him that he is knocking on all the wrong doors. She says, “Your legacy is May 19, 1961.”
And that’s how in one defining moment, playwright Arijit Aditya solders two different events in history, two different narratives with an identity crisis in common.
Subrata Roy, who plays Arjun and is also the director of the play, says, “For those of us who are from the Barak Valley, our main identity is the 1961 Bhasha Andolan. It inspires all that we do and all that we protest against.”
He is talking about the time the Assam government declared that only Assamese would be the state’s official language. The Bengali population that formed a majority in the Barak Valley, the southernmost region of Assam comprising Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi districts, rose in protest. On May 19, men and women showed up in numbers at the Silchar station. The police opened fire and 11 died. Kamala from the last scene of Legacy Code is one of those martyred.
At the entrance to Tapan Theatre, there is a display with all their names printed on it — Kamala Bhattacharya, Chandicharan Sutradhar, Birendra Sutradhar, Sukamal Purakaystha, Sachindra Paul, Tarani Debnath, Sunil Sarkar, Kanai Lal Niyogi, Satyendra Deb, Hitesh Biswas and Kumud Ranjan Das.
Back to the play. Kamala cannot save Arjun; a red noose appears. A speech from 2014 plays in the background, the then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi saying, “I assure you that if the BJP comes to power, no Arjun will be pushed to detention camps, no one will have to live in fear or commit suicide.”
“I wrote this play in 2017, when Assam was in the middle of a citizenship crisis,” says Arijit Aditya. This time the BJP government was at the helm of affairs. Based on his experience, Arijit Aditya wrote a book titled D: Rashtroi Jokhon Nipirok, meaning, when the state turns tormentor.
“D, this letter alone, strikes fear in our hearts. In my travels, I found many who had their legal documents in place, still their names appeared on the D-voter list,” he says. Arjun too was one of them. Arijit Aditya continues, “The legal route to get their names off the list is long, tedious and expensive. I have even seen people show up at court with nothing but a goat. They would offer it to a lawyer to get him to argue their cases.”
After his death, Arjun’s mother Akolrani too was declared a D-voter. Her name was cleared eventually. The second play Atmahatyar Pore chronicles Akolrani and Arjun’s wife Basana’s lives after the tragedy.
Sharmila Dutta, who plays Akolrani, talks about the time they visited Arjun’s mother in Haritikar village near the Indo-Bangladesh border. Dutta says, “She embraced me and wept. And this is just one story, there are thousands of Akolranis and Arjuns out there.”
Roy says, “Between 2017 and 2019, each one of us was scared — what if the government served a notice, asked us to prove our citizenship.” Arijit Aditya adds, “Both Hindus and Muslims shared this misfortune. While the middle class could fight their way out of it legally, the poor didn’t have the means. And it remains that way.”
In the last few days of his life, all Arjun could keep muttering was “dor laage, dor laage”. Roy recalls, “When we met Akolrani, she seemed to have caught this fear from her late son. All that she could say was ‘dor laage’.”
The cast of Legacy Code and Atmahatyar Pore could never meet Basana. Rumi Roy, who plays Basana, says, “Arjun left behind four children. Basana feared that her children would get deported. So she sent them away to work in Meghalaya.” Eventually, Basana too joined them.
Subha Prasad Nandi Majumdar, a writer and singer from Silchar, is the chief guest at Tapan Theatre that night. He tells The Telegraph, “May 19 shows the path to multilingualism. It is not just our legacy, it is the legacy of all those minorities who have to fight against the erasure of their languages."
Arijit Aditya adds, “Our foremost identity is that we are Bengali. When our identity is questioned, we should overcome all our other differences and unite.”