TELL IT TO THE BARDS: Nandikar troupe members rehearse for Jaha Chai..., with Rudraprasad Sengupta directing. Picture by Aranya Sen

Calcutta will discover Shakespeare’s famous lost play Cardenio through Rabindranath Tagore — and explore the universal truths of sexual love and jealousy that intrigued both the bards — later this month.

Jaha Chai..., a modern play written by Prof Sukanta Chaudhuri on the lines of Cardenio, is part of the “cultural mobility” project initiated by American Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and sponsored by Harvard University.

Greenblatt’s motive is to look at how conjugal relationship and jealousy — thought to be the theme of Cardenio — develop and vary from culture to culture. The project’s first production was staged in Japan a year ago.

Shakespeare is said to have written Cardenio inspired by an episode from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, where the character Cardenio tests the chastity of his wife by asking his friend to seduce her.

“Greenblatt wanted a play located in India and so he approached writer Amitav Ghosh, who asked me to write it. I took a look at the play written by Greenblatt and Charles Mee, and wrote Jaha Chai... in Bengali. Then I translated it into English for Greenblatt. He liked it and Nandikar liked it, too,” says Chaudhuri.

Greenblatt and Broadway playwright Mee had constructed their version of Cardenio based on 18th Century Shakespeare scholar Theobald’s adaptation. They set it around modern American characters, located it in Italy and also wove in the actual discovery of the lost play, which is then enacted.

With that as the basis, Chaudhuri has transplanted the context to an upper middle-class Bengali family, where a triangular relationship unfolds between Nikhilesh, his wife Bimala and friend Sandip from Tagore’s Ghare Baire. They discover Tagore’s Nashto Neer — supposed to be lost just like Cardenio — and enact it.

The play-within-a-play in Jaha Chai... reflects the Bhupati-Charulata-Amal triangle. “But I took particular care not to repeat lines from the film Charulata, except one which has been deliberately kept,” adds Chaudhuri.

Rudraprasad and Swatilekha Sengupta play the theatre couple Pramathesh-Sarojini, whose home in a Santhal district is the venue for the sub-play. Sohini Sengupta Halder is Bimala, Goutam Halder is Nikhilesh and Debshankar Halder is Sandip. “There is an interplay of illusion and reality. Initially, we spent a lot of time to decide on the acting style. But finally, we went ahead with whatever the text threw up,” says Rudraprasad, who is directing Jaha Chai... along with Goutam.

Jaha Chai... will premiere at the Academy of Fine Arts on January 12, to be attended by Greenblatt and Mee. “The aim has been to bring out the maximum ironical and comic potential of the play and lightly touch upon the philosophical questions,” says Chaudhuri.