Chetan Datar. A Telegraph picture

Just a year back, The Telegraph carried an interview with Chetan Datar. Being the active theatre person he was, one felt there had to be another interview in the offing. But Chetan startled us all with an abrupt exit on August 2, when he died of a cardiac arrest in Mumbai.

Last August he was in Calcutta with an innovative dance-theatre rendition of Tagore’s Giribala at Rabindra Sadan. In March this year he was back to attend a translation seminar organised by Natya Shodh Sansthan. One could hardly recognise him. “I was ill but am ok now,” he said, though, smiling warmly, and reeled off the names of projects he was working on. He was excited about his adaptation of Brecht’s Three Penny Opera as Mastana Rampuri urf Chhappan Chhuri, set in 1964, which director Sunil Shanbag was about to stage. He was contemplating “some work in Calcutta”.

As a child who was often ill, Datar would spend hours in bed listening to “aunts, cousins, their friends and my grandmothers. It was women I knew the most. Women of all ages — how they speak, think, react,” said Datar, who considered his first original work Saavlya (Shadows) his best. It was live theatre that gave him confidence. With plays like Ek Madhav Baug, Zulwa, Cotton 56, Polyester 84, Ram Naam Satya Hai, Jungle Mein Mangal and Gandhi Ani Ambedkar, Datar established a niche in experimental theatre as one ready for challenges. He ignored commercial theatre. “It is good to know I have disturbed a few and entertained some.”

“Comfortable with Marathi, Hindi and English, Chetan was the critical multilingual and irreplaceable bridge for Mumbai theatre,” says Shanbag. Calling his death “totally untimely, not because he was 43 or 44 but because he was at the peak, as a writer. He had been through the grind, he had trained under Satyadev Dubey and afterwards too, sharpening his skills to the superiority displayed in Cotton and Mastana Rampuri.”

Dubey said: “We used to live very close to each other in Bandra East. Last month we spoke for a long time. He seemed a little depressed but we had plans of collaborating on a new Girish Karnard play. He would always look after me, but now he is gone.”

Director Ramu Ramanathan said: “His life mirrored the modern theatrewallah’s story; of disaster, failure, frustration and loneliness, without cultural supporters or institutional backing.”

In Calcutta Rudraprasad Sengupta remembered Chetan’s play Jungle Mein Mangal, which had come for the Nandikar festival. “He was one of the finest and adventurous directors who displayed great variety and a constant search for excellence.” Kaushik Sen said: “We had become friends only in the last few years though I had always admired him.”

During the seminar Datar said that the Mumbai audience did not accept foreign plays unless they were adapted to the Marathi-speaking milieu. Working on material from Tagore to Ramu Ramanathan had taught him that “change and adaptation are necessary to make a script relevant and aesthetically meaningful”.

He had discussed his struggles with translating into mixed dialects, often combining Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, English and Urdu to get the nuances right. He said he had began translating merely 'because there were so many fantastic works I wanted to stage and there was no other handy theatre person who could translate”.