Pyapyaa pyapyaa pyapyaa (wail of the siren)/Kagoj aamra dekhabo/Dekhaboi dekhabo/Karon amader kaachhe kagoj aachhe…We will show you our papers/We will, we will
Because we have papers on us.
Ever since the Bengali band Hooliganism first performed this song titled Tumi Mosti Korbe, Jani at a concert in Calcutta sometime end-August, it has gone viral. Love it, hate it, the irrefutable fact is that the face of the nine-member band and actor-director Anirban Bhattacharya is getting the most flak for it. Gibberish, over-the-top, attention-grabbing tactics of an out-of-work actor, are just some of the comments. A BJP leader has lodged a police complaint against him and the band for offending Hindu sentiments.
At the concert, the band members wore shiny jackets and peaked caps fitted with trekking lamps and pranced about the stage, poking fun at polity, policy and ribbing politicians. Later, when chatting about it in his home in south Calcutta, the actor tells me gravely, “Of the seven songs we performed that day, five were in classical Bangla. None of those went viral. Only this one, which was a khilli or kheur, did.” The closest translation of both terms would possibly be slapstick.
From this point, the conversation takes many turns. One such is language and prejudice, the need for purity and the need for pollution, if you will, of idiom, of diction even. Anirban talks about effective communication, but what he seems to be looking for is a communion with his audience, a huge amorphous group that he describes as lying in but also beyond predictable urban pockets.
Off-stage, the 38-year-old actor — by his own admission, that is his core identity — has none of the flibbertigibbetness that his pyapyaa persona exudes. On the contrary, he is all shuddho Bangla, neatly combed hair, “aapni” in place. He comes across as very earnest about his craft, his beliefs, weighs every question asked, engages with each. More than once, while talking about the political climate, global and local, he resorts to weighty words such as suffocation and betrayal. He says, “I am pi**ed off with almost everything.”
And who appointed him spokesperson? Has he been handed the baton by some senior artiste who shall remain unnamed? He replies, “I am not trying to assume someone else’s mantle. My actions might echo someone else’s, but truth is I am singing and saying out loud what I am singing, because I am really very angry.”
He continues, “We expected to live and work in a healthy environment. But we have been cheated…” He puts down the coffee mug without taking a sip because he has so much to say, keeps pushing up his spectacles frenetically onto his forehead only to have them plonk down again.
Because of this impassioned persona, Anirban has rightly, or mistakenly, become the poster boy of dissent. A section of the citizenry seems to hold him accountable when he doesn’t speak up, as in the case of the protests following the rape and murder of a postgraduate trainee at R.G. Kar Medical College. The man knows. He says, “I know exactly where your question is coming from. I have answered it clearly before, and more than once. I think people are either not getting what I mean, or the answer is not to their liking.” In news reports from the time, Anirban has been quoted as saying, “If I want society to change then I need to do something; commenting does not make a difference.”
As if pre-empting the next question, he says, “Except for my band Hooliganism, I do not create content. I usually have to work under a producer or a director, I do not have creative control. It is less so in theatre, but I haven’t been doing theatre for years.” Listening to him, watching him, I get what his performance didn’t quite capture, the broad arc of his disillusionment, the great ambition of his creative impulse. I tell him this and he laughs.
He says, “You know, the uniform we wear, it was adapted from an earlier act. It had a chorus and they were called hooligans. I had imagined it as a set of dead people. The denim shirts were punctured with bullet holes. We had wounds painted on us to suggest that we had been beaten up for singing the truth to the world.” He adds, “I am sure no one got it but us.”
He has a certain way of looking at the world, of despairing and of fighting back. He says, “Everyone is blaming the Modi regime but aapni bolun, has this country ever really embraced progress wholeheartedly? No ruler has tried to improve our society.”
I am waiting to see how he is going to connect this with hop, skip and jump on stage, chanting “rege jaabe”, when he says, “I believe art and culture are connected with this, this concern for humanity. Art and hunger are connected; historians and economists have said as much.”
If this conversation could be put through some kind of data visualisation tool, it would be all jagged ends and zig zag patterns. One minute, Anirban is talking about the Kennedy Center, watching a production of Les Miserables there and its criminal takeover by an “utterly right-wing whimsical politician”. The next minute he is dissecting for you in clinical terms the film technicians’ issue.
One minute he is talking about his idea of “desh” as shaped by his school in Midnapore, his mastermoshais, and his classmates who were a mix of converted Christians, Muslims, poor Hindus and privileged Hindus. The very next he is talking about his nearly 20 years in theatre, the udaar and progressive tutelage of theatre people such as Adrija Dasgupta, Suman Mukhopadhyay, Debes Chattopadhyay, Abanti Chakraborty, before moving on to Thomas Ostermeier of the Schaubühne Theater in Berlin and Robert Icke of the UK’s National Theatre and his productions such as Hamlet and Doctor. “They can question everyone, everything,” he says.
So he is saying art is a corrective for all that ails society? “While entertaining,” he adds. “First, ananda and only after, discourse, debate. People in the industry say I am the most hotash person around but if I am not full of hope, who is?”
Pyapyaa pyapyaa pyapyaa…