The feudal grandeur of the name tagged to him at birth — Kumarendu Narayan Roy Chowdhury — must have caused discomfort fairly early. Scion of landed gentry, he grew up in opulent surroundings. A child reared in Bengal in the late 1920s could not, however, remain unaffected by the turmoil in the air. Indian nationalism was soaring to its peak. It was almost like the unfolding of a Passion Play. Never mind in whatever way, patriotic valour must find its expression. While Gandhiji was preaching and practising non-violent resistance, the call to arms by restless Bengali revolutionaries captured the imagination of even kids born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Sublimation of a sort took place though. The elegant mansion in the town of Dinajpur had a library crammed with books, including many historical novels and plays. That apart, to stage an occasional amateur play was a normal ritual in comfortably placed households. There was, in fact, attached to the main building owned by this Dinajpur family, a miniature theatre with a raised platform for a stage. It was Bengal mofussil, the props and accessories were of a mundane, rudimentary kind. The thrill and enthusiasm for dramatic performances compensated for all that. Patriotic emotions found an outlet in such performances even in a family whose prosperity was a gift of Lord Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement. Plays put up had in the beginning puranic themes based either on the Ramayan or the Mahabharat. But the transition to the enactment of romanticized history was swift, thanks to the flurry of plays that had emerged in the first decade of the century from the pen of D.L. Roy. Several of Roy’s works were marked by a stylized depiction of resistance offered by Hindu chieftains to marauding Pathan and Mughal adventurers. This was interspersed with pious discourses on the need for Hindu-Muslim amity. And one could almost catch the wink in the eye: why don’t you look behind the façade, the real intent of the plays was to invoke the strength lying dormant in patriotic souls; once the slumber terminates and patriotism awakes, the British infidels will flee with their tails between the legs.

For Kumar Roy, the emission of nationalist fervour was, of course, the main issue. But a parallel fascination lay in exploring the mechanics of putting together a play. Then an accident happened. He went to college at Rajshahi and was befriended by that mad genius, Ritwik Ghatak. The universe was suddenly, totally transformed. The convergence of events that followed was overwhelming: the Second World War, the Quit India movement, the people’s war policy adopted by the communist party and the Bengal famine. Layers of arguments got sandwiched with layers of felt passion. Producing amateur plays for domestic entertainment was displaced by the lure of mass theatre. Kumar Roy discovered himself as a partisan with a cause. The cause he opted for was less overt than that of a political activist. He had nonetheless neatly worked out a neat syllogism. Man exists to serve society. Man has to choose a specific calling in order to serve society. Kumar Roy found his calling. He, the landlord’s son, became a workman for that impressive social endeavour, the theatre group, Bohurupee. Bohurupee was his cause for the rest of his life, a stretch beyond 60 years.

The workman was at work, relentlessly, over these six decades, in the course of which Kumar Roy emerged as the Compleat Thespian. He, the artisan, worked and learnt everything that was necessary to learn about drama and aesthetics. He learnt to be daringly innovative too. His initiation into the mystique of acting was partly under the tutelage of the towering actor, revered as Maharshi, Manoranjan Bhattacharya. But, during the rest of the apprenticeship, there was only one guru, Sombhu Mitra. Kumar Roy was putty clay in Sombhu Mitra’s hand and was shaped, as Sombhu Mitra wanted him to be shaped. It was absolute devotion on Kumar Roy’s part which withstood all shocks and interruptions, including the great schism of 1978 which saw both Sombhu Mitra and Tripti Mitra detach themselves from Bohurupee. With Khaled Chowdhury and Tapas Sen lending helping hands, he grasped the essentials of the different aspects of stagecraft, including décor, fittings, lighting, voice modulation and sound control. Following Sombhu Mitra’s decision to sever his links with the group, Kumar Roy was voted by colleagues and associates into assuming leadership of Bohurupee. It was an astoundingly smooth transition. None of the group felt that they were being led — or even nudged. That surely was the truest criterion of effective leadership. Kumar Roy would be taken aback at the showering of plaudits on this account: why, all he did was to adhere to what Sombhu Mitra had grilled into him. There was more to it than his modesty would allow him to admit. Drama builds itself on tension, the tension must rise and rise until the heat reaches the point of explosion. The magic reposes in the director’s ability to ensure that even when tension reaches Fahrenheit Three Thousand, it is not allowed to explode. Kumar Roy did reach the pinnacle of that achievement.

It is at this point that the standard accolades fail to satisfy: Kumar Roy was a great theatre personality, an outstanding producer, an outstanding actor as well, and an equally eminent director. His long tryst with Tagore’s plays, and — with the spell of Raktakarabi refusing to dissolve — his obsession to interpret, re-interpret and re-re-interpret their inner meaning have already contributed to legend. He was, besides, a great communicator; a successful thespian has to be one. Communication in the role of director means engaging now and then in controversies in the public domain. Such controversies often tend to be both sharp and bitter. Here, too, Kumar Roy succeeded to be different. It will be difficult to recollect any incident in his life and career where he caused offence or hurt anybody. He might have differed, he might have argued, he might have chosen to part company, but he would never have parted with rancour.

This person stood way apart. Despite his feudal antecedents, he was a democrat non pareil. He would on occasion be unbending because the discipline he owed allegiance to necessitated such demeanour. Even so, whether it was within the close group of Bohurupee or within the precincts of the wider theatre world, none could ever complain that Kumar Roy was less than generous. And that assertion would receive generalized endorsement.

Much hilarity and some banter have crowded the debate about what constitutes the perfect image of a sophisticated Bengali gentleman. At one end was Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the Bengali babu, who wanted hard to be an English gentleman and ended up as a caricature of both species. At another extreme is the picture of a Bengali bhadralok supposedly belonging to the intellectual breed, who dresses impeccably, wears his Derrida on his sleeve and nurtures the notion that run-of-the-mill hauteur is appropriate proxy for high thinking. Yet another category consists of a species belonging to the Bengali middle class who dresses with elegance and talks a language a Tagore devotee would be expected to talk, but his intellectual horizon is suffocatingly constricted and he reeks of mannerisms that are sickeningly provincial.

Kumar Roy occupied an altogether different slot. He was perhaps the last representative of a generation of individuals who were gentle to the core and magnanimous towards each and all, full of grace and dignity, extraordinarily affectionate in manners and possessing the ability to keep under wraps the wisdom and learning that was their accumulation. Globalization is a merciless process; it is rapidly making a comprehensive nonsense of sectarian cultural mores. So, in any event, the civilization represented by the archetypal Bengali bhadralok is soon going to be extinct, not even to be found on display in an old curiosity shop. There would still be a left-over pride in some people’s memories: Kumar Roy, the nature’s gentleman, personified that civilization, and they had the great good fortune of knowing him.