Two of the prison inmates rehearse a scene from the play Begum Sumroo

A group of Calcutta convicts is racing against time — and Tigmanshu Dhulia — to mount an English play based on the life of a courtesan-turned-provincial ruler who is also the subject of the Paan Singh Tomar director’s next film.

The 17 amateurs, most of them serving life at the Alipore Central Correctional Home and Alipore Women’s Correctional Home, have been rehearsing the play Begum Sumroo for the past eight months under Rohit Pombra, founder of the city-based English theatre group Stagecraft.

In the lead role of Begum Sumroo, who went from courtesan to the lone Catholic ruler of an independent Indian principality of the late 18th century, is former schoolteacher Aditi Kanjilal. The other key members of the cast include Kunal Majumdar, playing the role of Begum Sumroo’s husband Walter Reinhardt Sombre, and Farukh Ehsaan as Father Georgio.

If Dhulia’s challenge is to live up to the reputation of his last film, Pombra’s team started off with more hurdles than Paan Singh Tomar had to cross in his steeplechase career.

Only two of the six women acting in the play know English, the rest are all learning to understand and speak the language for the first time. Ditto for the men, though a couple of them have CVs that would do most educated people proud. Utthan Kumar Paul, one of the male actors, is a gold medallist in political science.

The inspector-general of police in charge of prisons, Ranvir Kumar, said Begum Sumroo had brought out the best in the convicts. “They are all determined to put up a stellar performance,” he said.

Madhusudan Sarkar, the superintendent of the Alipore Women’s Correctional Home, lauded the cast for taking up the challenge. “This is not the first time inmates of a jail are staging a play as part of culture therapy. But we were really apprehensive about whether this one would materialise. The inmates have surprised us with their perseverance and will to succeed,” he said.

Dhulia, who came to know about the competition from Metro, is impressed as well. “I am surprised but happy — thrilled actually — that convicts in Calcutta are staging a play on the subject of my next film. It is undoubtedly a very good effort and I would like to wish them luck,” said the acclaimed director of Paan Singh Tomar.

While the stage presentation is based on The Rebel Courtesan: Begum Sumroo, a play by the late actor, author and documentary film-maker Partap Sharma, Dhulia’s script has been adapted from Amritlal Nagar’s novel Saat Ghunghatwala Mukhra.

“Shooting starts in 10 days. I hope the play comes to Mumbai. I would love to watch it,” the director said.

Prisoners who are not acting in the play are contributing in other ways, according to a jail official. The period costumes have been designed by Perin Pombra and are being stitched by the prison inmates.

A team of inmates is also handling other pre-production nitty-gritty like props, background music and sound effects.

“We want to stage the play as soon as possible. My team knows that Dhulia is making a Hindi film on the same subject and they are all very excited. We would like to invite him for one of our shows,” Pombra said.

For now, the focus is on classes to improve the actors’ English pronunciation and dialogue delivery. Rehearsals are being conducted twice every week at the women’s correctional home. Jail officials say members of the cast are often spotted rehearsing their parts in their wards or cells.

Pombra, whose group has staged 46 plays in the past 25 years, counts this effort among his most satisfying ones. “The idea of staging an English play with convicts first occurred to former IG (Prisons) B.D. Sharma, who contacted us. We started our workshops immediately after selecting the play, which has been staged only once before in Mumbai in the 1970s,” the theatre veteran said.

“The way these untrained actors have picked up stagecraft is truly commendable. Being a part of this project has been an extremely exciting experience,” he added.

Begum Sumroo a.k.a. Begum Joanna Nobilis Sombre, a diminutive woman whose intelligence and grit turned her from courtesan to the ruler of the principality of Sardhana (near Meerut) in the late 18th Century, would probably have been just as proud of this motley bunch of men and women finding new meaning in life behind bars.