A small theatre movement emerges in the Naxal stronghold of
Borotolpada.
Snatches of
torchlight roll off ripples around lotus leaves. The summer evening is dank
with the fragrance of mahua flowers, acrid whiffs of hariya, a local liquor,
and leaves rotting along the edges of the pond, “jol” to the residents of
Borotolpada, a village in West Midnapore, West Bengal. Some 70 villagers have
descended on the grassy field that ends at the pond. As 10-year-old Surajmuni
Hansda potters down to the banks, a voice breaks out of the restive murmur.
“Not that far, come three steps back. Look how far my light travels. You have
to stay within it,” shouts 45-year-old Motilal Hansda.
Surajmuni
takes off the earphones of an MP3 player, walks back a few steps and looks at
‘Jon da’ for approval. Thirty-two-year-old Jean Frederic Chevallier, busy
directing a clutch of men in lungis and loose shirts to focus the torches they
have in hand at various points of the shallow pond and its bank, looks up briefly
and nods in approval. Borotolpada and theatre professional Chevallier are busy
setting up a “stage” for an impromptu performance of Monsoon Night’s Dream, a
play by Chevallier and the Santhal residents of the area.
As the
minutes tick by, the crowd swells — farmers, daily wage workers, men, women and
children — join in, and move around swiftly, testing errant torches, checking
for tricky stones in the sand bed and helping a young man get his pose right as
he reclines in the ankle-deep water.
Four years ago,
Borotolpada was just another village, drowned in the myths and realities of the
name “Junglemahal”, given to West Midnapore, a Maoist stronghold, on the border
with Orissa. But that didn’t deter Chevallier who, on a trip to Baligeria, a
village neighbouring Borotolpada, with a Kolkata-based NGO for aid work, ran
into Girish Soren, a Santhal, who brought him to Borotolpada. The Santhals are
a shy but hospitable tribe, and when they welcomed Chevallier with their
traditional song-and-dance ritual, he got hooked. “There was an urban
conception about the place I went with. There might have been an unspoken
apprehension somewhere, but these people had not stopped living their lives
because of the conflict. The adivasi performance arts is a celebration of their
own lives — their joys, their fears, even their work,” says Chevallier, a
French scholar and theatre professional, who taught contemporary philosophy and
theatre studies in Mexico for six years, before setting up base in Kolkata
three years ago.
After several
travels to Borotolpada, and stays at the villager’s homes, in order to
understand their culture, Chevallier started Trimukhi Platform, a Santhal
theatre group a year and a half ago. So far, they have staged three plays, such
as Monsoon Night’s Dream, with little resources, where torches make up for arc
and spotlights, and where a speaker, if Chevallier can get one from Kolkata,
for music. Despite such constraints, they have acted in a few shows in Kolkata,
and pulled off a theatre festival in February, when 300 villagers organised the
“Fifth Night of Theatre”, in which Spanish, French and Mexican theatre groups
joined hands with Chavellier and the villagers for two nights of plays.
Trimukhi
Platform is thriving despite Naxal presence — the way to Borotolpada is still
considered unsafe in the night, and it’s not uncommon to spot paramilitary
jawans posted along the road. But nobody wants to talk about the threat. Soren,
Jean’s assistant and translator, says the theatre activities of Borotolpada
“were under the rebels’ scanner but they must have figured out that we were not
up to any disruptive plan, so there hasn’t been any direct run-in.”
For now, the
villagers are cheering the new theatre movement, and how it has transformed
some of their lives. Raimuni Hansda, widowed years back, at first had dismissed
Chevallier’s interest in their art and lives. “A lot of the women and men in
the village were talking about how this man from outside our country was
interested in our songs and dance. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I make a
living out of working in the fields, collecting sal leaves and selling them in
the weekly market. Such things didn’t attract me,” she says. However, when a
few of Hansda’s neighbours came back one day after meeting Chevallier, excited
and confused at his interest in their festival dances, Hansda yielded to
curiosity. “I used to like dancing as a girl. I knew all the local dances very
well. When Jon da said I could take part in his play, I was overwhelmed and a
little scared,” she says.
A few months
later, Hansda, who had only stepped out of her village to go to the nearby
markets, visited Kolkata and performed to an applauding audience in Jadavpur
University and the Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre, a theatre hub. Her happiness
— as her eyes light up and pursed lips give way to a broad smile — is stripped
of the rhetoric of formality. “I had never thought I would mingle with people
like this, step out of my village at this age,” she says, twiddling with the
stray end of her aanchal.
Hansda,
along with fellow villagers and Chevallier, also takes turns to help with the
construction of the Borotolpada Cultural Centre — an earth and bamboo
structure, roughly like a big Santhal home, which will house artefacts made by
local villagers and people from the tribal belt of West Bengal. The
construction began a year ago, and villagers don’t charge money for working on
it. Thirty-five-year-old Falguni Hansda, a Santhal, has given her land for free
for the centre. Once completed, Chevallier wants to get a computer, train the
locals to use it, facilitate documentation and research, and stage plays.
The plays of
Borotolpada defy tested conventions of theatre. They don’t have a story — only
snatches of situations, songs, dances and mimetic acting that with the setting,
invite the audience into an intellectual dialogue. “We have some hundred
different ritualistic dances — for harvest times, for mahul puja, for weddings,
etc. At first, I had difficulties understanding what Jean wanted. But later, I
realised he wanted us to react to a given situation in the dance form or music
we know,” explains Soren.
“Once, he
asked us to do just this movement, like when you are thirsty and want water,
without saying it,” says Molina Hembrom, a 20-year-old student in a nearby
village, running her palm down to her abdomen from her throat in a slow motion,
“I almost laughed and ran away. But then I realised that in our dances, we too
act out feelings, almost like this.” Molina, in a salwar kameez and tightly
pulled back hair, is the quietest in the gaggle of women around her. “Once we
started spending time together on this play, we also started taking more
interest in each other. I knew my neighbour Tibru all my life as a mostly
reclusive, serious man. He wasn’t very approving of this play acting at first.
But when we finally roped him in, he turned out to be such a fantastic madol (a
dhol-like instrument) player,” says Molina. Tibru looks up briefly from feeding
his ducks and smiles apologetically. “I’m not all that great. But I wouldn’t
play the madol before this with so much joy. Way too much work ...,” he trails
off. “There is no one way of development, or one idiom of art. There’s progress
only when disparate philosophies converge,” Chavellier sums it up best.
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