Few plays hold us spellbound when we see them unfold on stage. Tiner Talowar or The Tin Sword by People’s Little Theatre did — Satyajit Ray hailed it as the best Bengali production of the last century. Bohurupee’s Raktakarabi or Red Oleanders did — Nehru stood up in reverence when the curtains came down. Add to that list Ritwik Ghatak’s Sanko or The Bridge.
Sanko was staged recently at Calcutta’s Girish Mancha by the not-so-illustrious Ruptapas group from Belgharia.
Ghatak was indeed a superb dramatist. Other than Sanko, he wrote Dalil or The Deed and Jwala or Agony. Here too, like his films, the quintessential Ghatak flowered, tormented by Partition and fratricide, and redeemed by his immovable faith in
the innate goodness of human beings.
Still from Ghatak's play 'Sanko', staged at Girish Mancha by Ruptapas.
The storyline of Sanko is as clear and cogent as Euclid’s geometry. Its backdrop is the communal frenzy of the late 1940s and its continuation. Mohsin, who is from East Pakistan, is hacked to death in Calcutta after Sagar hands him over to rioters. Sagar, who is a decent and educated young man, is thereafter racked by feelings of guilt. He crosses the border to meet the family of Mohsin. His only mission is to seek forgiveness.
This storyline is rocked by breathtaking turns of events, one dramatic swerve after another, agonising doubts and bold resolutions. That September evening at Girish Mancha, the audience was swept away by the theatrical onrush. Its startled reaction is best described by a phrase borrowed from the title of one of Bishnu Dey’s poems. It goes, “Uttare Thako Mouno”, meaning, we remain silent in our answer.
No, Ghatak did not offer any anodyne. His Sagar, who started out saying, “Muslims have tyrannised Hindus for centuries. I am a Hindu, I shall take my revenge”, eventually realises that this narrative is atrociously false and his thirst for vengeance pointless.
Opposed to this bigotry is the nameless mother of the dead Mohsin. She lives in a remote village of East Pakistan. When she receives news of her son’s death, she tells The Maker, “Your mercy is so boundless. You have taken Mohsin away from me but you have given me another son, Sagar.”
Still from Ghatak's play 'Sanko', staged at Girish Mancha by Ruptapas.
That day when actress Sumita Basu uttered these hymnic words in a chaste dialect of East Bengal, it was difficult not to be moved.
Basu is a seasoned actress. She played the junior Andrea in Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo staged by Bohurupee. In this play, however, she outdoes herself.
It is she who holds together the intense second part of the production.
Mohsin’s mother finds solace in the 20-year-old Jaba, who declares, “That Hindu-Muslim divide, I have dumped it long ago. I am a human and a Bengali.” Jaba was born Muslim.
But the million-dollar question is, will Sagar hold her hand and join her in her rebellion? The audience waited with bated breath to see the outcome of their growing intimacy crumbling corrosive creeds.
The ravaged Ghatak dreamt of this union defying all hurdles of actuality. The play ends where Jaba and Sagar head out together towards some undefined realm of revolt and communion.
Still from Ghatak's play 'Sanko', staged at Girish Mancha by Ruptapas.
They are inflamed by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s deathless The Principle of Hope, they are inspired by the “infinite dream, dream which brooks no pause” to recall the memorable opening line of another defiant poem by Dey.
Not only Basu, Tanushree Saha who plays Jaba and Sumit Kumar Roy, who plays Sagar, performed with verve and vigour. The lumpen Dasarath and the Muslim-baiter Chaudhuri-babu were so good in their respective roles that they had the audience seething.
Of course, Ghatak could not use the Rabindrasangeet he so loved in the play but he did insert a haunting bhatiyali song that serves like a refrain. It goes: Oarsman, my dear oarsman/I have not found the shores of this earth/Black clouds have erased light, hardly did I know/I seek the shore ardently, but I cannot find it.
This song gestures at the limitlessness of the emancipatory impulse and binds together the repentant Sagar and the murdered Mohsin.
The last scene of the play focusses on Jaba and Sagar trampling upon divisive religiosity and is reminiscent of one of the poems of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s unforgettable epic poem West-östlicher Divan or West-Eastern Divan. It was inspired by the Persian poet Hafiz, whom Goethe revered as his guru. Goethe writes in the closing lyrics of the epic: Then let my beloved songs go to sleep/In the fervent breasts of my countrymen.../Where only youth blossoms all through life/Crores of humans dwell in blessed love.
Olympian Goethe in Weimar between 1815 and 1820 and Ghatak in Calcutta of the early 1950s. Both so far and so distant from each other, yet so univocal in their individual prayers, erasing the barriers of centuries and continents.