In The Bengali Drama: Its origin and development, Prabhucharan Guha-Thakurta writes about the “first Bengali performance produced on a Bengali stage and acted exclusively by Bengali men and women”. The play, Vidya Sundar, performed in 1833 at the Shyambazar residence of Nabin Chandra Basu, was a dramatized version of an episode in Bharat Chandra’s Annada Mangal.

Guha-Thakurta remarks, “It was quite theatrical, but would hardly be called dramatic. To display properly certain scenic effects like thunder and lightning, Nabin Basu imported stage-materials from England at a great cost. The play had to be staged at different parts of the building; and with the change of scenes, the audience had to move on continuously from one place to another.” A few prosperous theatre lovers and amateur actors, including Nabin Basu, had borne the entire cost of the production. Guha-Thakurta writes, “Nabin Basu was untiring in his enthusiasm and was so recklessly lavish and extravagant that he came almost to the verge of financial ruin.”

The passion with which Nabin Basu produced his play is perhaps still alive in Bengali group theatre today, almost two centuries later. What else would explain the continuous mushrooming of theatre groups in Bengal — not only in Calcutta, but also in remote towns and villages — amidst a dire lack of funds?

But passion, too, changes its hue. Life today leaves little scope for the pursuit of fruitless whims. Theatre workers now need something more than the elusive ‘passion’ to keep them going. They need food not only for their thoughts but also for their stomachs.

Even a couple of decades back, remuneration was a distant dream for a stage actor. Apart from one or two big theatre groups, none could pay its actors. So, the pursuit of theatre had to be essentially voluntary. This had made many actors either leave the stage or continue in a state of penury. Later, when television soaps became popular, most actors would opt for a parallel occupation in television to sustain themselves.

But Miska Halim, a young stage actor, told me that the situation has changed somewhat today. She is an independent actor who belongs to no particular group. She acts in theatre productions for payment. Once she used to belong to a group where her services were voluntary. After she left her group, she received some payment for the productions she would take part in, but that payment would be sporadic. Further on, when she realized that there was a demand for her work, she asked for a specific amount of money. “I couldn’t ask for too much since I know that there is not much money in theatre. But I decided that like a technician gets paid for his or her service, an actor, too, should get paid. After all, you cannot stage a production without actors. Why should they not expect to be remunerated, when they put in so much hard work?”

But Halim added that groups are yet to make enough profit from ticket sales to recover their costs. Most of them are run by individual contributions, while some, including the prominent ones, receive government funding. But government funding is often not enough. As a result, most groups cannot afford to pay their actors. The actors in the groups which receive State funding also receive individual remuneration from the government. But groups are often in such dire need of money that the actors have to contribute to the group’s general fund from their own salaries.

Halim says that although funding is an issue, the attitude towards paying actors must also change. It is often expected of stage actors that their work should be voluntary, perhaps because this has been the practice for too long. Halim and some of her colleagues want to change that by demanding payment. “It is not that we are not passionate about theatre. I don’t act in television. I act in some short films, but otherwise I dedicate all my time to theatre. There should be some incentive to sustain my passion. We had first seen Debshankar Halder getting paid for his acting. He has inspired us to see ourselves as professionals,” she said. Halim still cannot live off her earnings from theatre, but they at least cover a sizable part of her expenses.

The man who inspired Halim, Debshankar Halder, sounded surprised by the idea that one could live off theatre in Calcutta. “Have you seen anyone earning his or her livelihood entirely from theatre? That is still as impossible as it was before. Things have changed a trifle, but not significantly.” He said his group, Nandikar, has been paying its actors regularly for 25 years. There are many full-time actors in Nandikar. But this does not mean Bengali group theatre has been able to achieve the standards of professional theatre in terms of paying its actors, Halder said. “I have tried to live off theatre for 15 years, but I have had to sacrifice a lot. Not everyone will be able to do that, and it should not be expected either. Why shouldn’t an actor aspire for the basic comforts in life? It isn’t wrong to earn from television, since one needs money to survive.”

The only place where an actor gets paid substantially and regularly is the Minerva Repertory Theatre. But the amounts earned by actors are often just about enough to sustain them. Halder said that the reason for this was that Bengali group theatre lacked the basic infrastructure needed to perpetuate a professional environment.

In this age of consumerism, many young Bengalis still join theatre. Why do they choose theatre as an occupation if it can rarely become their full-time profession? According to Halder, the aim is often to groom oneself as an actor by joining a theatre group so that one can be successful in television later. “Some actors do have the kind of passion for theatre to make it their priority, but people mostly come to theatre groups for training. And I am not saying that is a bad thing either.”

Is the stage, then, fated to remain a training ground for television artists? How will it keep its actors if it cannot pay them their dues? Or is it just that careers in television have offered actors the option to earn a living without having to leave the stage? Answers to these questions may still elude us, but the questions need to be recognized as real, and important, questions.