Interestingly, the final play by the late lamented Mohit Chattopadhyaya and the latest productions of Bohurupee — now bereft of their frontline members after the passing of Tarapada Mukhopadhyay — all returned to classical Indian mythology and legend for inspiration. Chattopadhyaya composed an epic drama titled Tathagata based on the Buddha’s life for the group, Rangapat, while Bohurupee’s Biryashulka (picture) and Nana Phuler Mala both drew on the Mahabharata’s storyline.

Over the last twenty years, Chattopadhyaya’s output had become more economical and his subjects consisted mainly of ordinary people tackling dreary, mundane, daily routine, trying to find some meaning or humanity in life. Bengali groups welcomed his themes, but often pressurized him to add or flesh out scenes in order to create fuller works to meet perceived audience expectations of duration. I felt sad at this unwarranted imposition on a master craftsman who, like Beckett, had consciously moved towards aesthetic minimalism. Imagine companies forcing Beckett to write two-hour plays!

Suddenly, as if determined to go out in a blaze of glory, Chattopadhyaya undertook this three-hour researched hagiography, a startling turn for someone who rarely even referred to religion. Yet he remained true to his humanistic faith, for Tathagata deals with one man’s quest for humanity, which spread worldwide to cover all of humanity. Of course, no one can incorporate all the wonderful tales surrounding the Buddha into one drama. Chattopadhyaya’s selection begins with Sujata offering food to the skeletal Gautama, continues to Mara’s onslaught, the conversion of the first five disciples, the betrayal by Devadatta, political persecution, the family joining the Sangha, and ultimate Nirvana.

It is a difficult job for director Tapanjyoti Das to supervise the larger picture as well as act such a larger-than-life lead. Sometimes it does look and sound too top-heavy to suit the Buddhist middle path: Sanchayan Ghosh’s massive backdrop of 168 illuminable Bodhisattvas dwarfs his delicate Bodhi tree in front, whereas Mara (who does need spectacular magic) comes off weak. As the Buddha, Das maintains a conflict-less composure right through. The supporting cast varies, from Senjuti Mukhopadhyay’s powerful performance as the hurt Yashodhara changing to dignified devotion, to Arna Mukhopadhyay as a young and impressionable Ajatashatru, in grave danger of making mannerisms into his style after Caesar o Cleopatra.

Bohurupee’s Biryashulka has a strong feminist stance, going back to the Amba-Shikhandi episodes of the Mahabharata, questioning the conventional role of a woman. After Bhishma abducted Amba and she revealed to her husband her love for Shalya, nobody accepted her: not him, not Shalya, not even her father. Reborn as Shikhandini, she helped Arjuna kill Bhishma, extracting her revenge.

Amit Maitra’s original text had a Yakshi narrating to Shikhandi the background to the latter’s gender change. The director, Tulika Das, who also enacts Amba, rightly theatricalized this entire dialogue into separate scenes peopled with the dramatis personae, which works much better. At the same time, she needs to smoothen the transitions between them, especially since two women and a man perform as Amba-Shikhandini-Shikhandi. Strikingly, Biryashulka gets a contemporary frisson from Shikhandi marrying “his” betrothed, the princess of Vidarbha (Sujata Sarkar, one of Bohurupee’s promising new recruits), who accepts her even after she confesses her true female identity, thereby setting up a same-sex pairing rarely seen on the Bengali stage.

Nana Phuler Mala, by Alakh Mukhopadhyay, has also been reduced into compact form by the director, Debesh Raychaudhuri, from a sprawling script that could not possibly do justice to all aspects of the Kurukshetra war. Mukhopadhyay depicts Duryodhan as the hero — a much more democratic and federal ruler than the Pandavas, who intend to centralize everything in a monocultural Hastinapur. The garland in the title becomes symbolic, as it moves from hand to hand, from its weaver, a young girl of a forest hunting tribe, eventually to the ideologically-converted Yudhisthir, who places it on his mother, whose divine lovers sired an India of different sons. But for Yudhisthir to discover this so late seems somewhat incredible.

Nevertheless, Nana Phuler Mala stimulates thought about the ideal political structure of the State. Raychaudhuri himself leads the team as the sympathetic Duryodhan, followed by Gautam Chakrabarti as the subaltern hunter.