Notes for 'It Must Flow' A Life in Theatre by Habib Tanvir

 'It Must Flow' A Life in Theatre  - Habib Tanvir

Habib Tanvir -

-one of the most popular Indian Urdu, Hindi playwrights, a theatre director, poet and actor

-writer of plays such as, Agra Bazar (1954) and Charandas Chor (1975)

-He won Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1969, Jawarharlal Nehru Fellowship in 1979, Padma Shri[2] in 1983, Kalidas Samman 1990, Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship in 1996, and the Padma Bhushan in 2002.

The noted director Habib Tanvir, delves into his childhood as he traces the story of his life in theatre. Interjections by ANJUM KATYAL and BIREN DAS SHARMA appear in italics, within brackets. 

He begin by telling about his family. His family was a religious one. His elder brother used to perform in plays with his friends. So from childhood onwards he was influenced by theater. He was born in 1923 in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. When he was in school he used to go to see plays many of which were in Urdu. Many of the plays belong to the Parsi Theater tradition, because of the professional companies owned by Parsis. He describes how the plays begin by placing the actors, curtains, musicians etc. 

"Then they'd sing the vandana-the opening song, a hymn to Saraswati or to Ganesh or something like that, just like the Sanskrit theatre tradition" 

The comic interlude was the part of Paris theatre plays , no play belonging to this theatre seen without comic interlude. He recalls his first experience of taking part in a play was when he was 11 or 12 he performed in a role from Shakespeare's King John, he played King Arthur. At the same time he started writing Urdu poems. He still remembers every dialogue and action associated with his roles. He got many trophies for drama, elocution, debate etc.

Now your father, you said, wouldn't have approved of all this?-AK

Yes his father didn't approve of the theatre activities in general but as a school activity he had no issues with it. His brother would perform secretly. His father was hoping that he would go for ICS as Habib Tanvir was a bright student. His teachers asked him to go for science but he was interested in Arts. He went to Nagpur, to Morris College, Nagpur University. It was a very good college at that time, with a good reputation. Then he went to Aligarh for his Masters in Urdu but couldn't go beyond first year as he lost his interest for ICS and wanted to do films. 

He saw an advertisement for the navy: they required officers. There were to be several tests: the district level interview, the provincial level interview and the final one, which was in Lonavla, beyond Bombay. He was hoping that he'd get through the district and provincial levels, and that if he had to fail, it would be at the end, so he could get close to Bombay. He couldn't afford to go to Bombay on his own. 

When he reached Bombay he did several jobs . One day he meet director Suryam in a restaurant who offered him a movie named Aap ke Liye. Then he met Mr Mohammed Tahir who was found of Urdu poetry, so he appointed him as his secretary. He had a ammunition factory. The language change in Bombay also interest him. He also worked as a content writer writing film reviews. Then he became the first assistant editor of Filmindia- a monthly magazine. Then he joined IPTA and PWA (Progressive Writers' Association) because of his poetry and voice he was quite popular.

Despite your interest in classical poetry, yon were also interested in folk?-AK 

His literary interest brought him to this field and in dialects.

What kinds of plays did you do at that time? Social themes?-AK

He wrote and directed a street-play called Shnntidoot Knnagnr. After the break-up of IPTA, he left Bombay and went to Delhi with the sole intention of getting out of the, way of temptation to act in films. He felt that even as an actor, doing a role, there is a certain social comment that you can bring to bear upon that character. But that kind of autonomy wasn’t given. In 1954 he wrote his first hit play Agra Bazaar. 

How did you find the milieu different, shifting from Mombay to Delhi? AK.

In terms of Drama he liked Delhi . He started his life at Elizabeth Gauba's school. She was a good friend of Krishna Menon's and Jawaharlal Nehru's and Indira Gandhi's and it was Krishna Menon's advice which made her evolve a new system of schooling for children. He talks about her schooling model. At this time he got interested into Children's Literature. He wrote 6-7 plays for children and they were published. In 1954 , Athar Parvez his friend approached him and asked if he can do something to celebrate Nazir Diwas. Nazir Akbarabadi was a very fine, a very interesting 18th Century poet. He goes on to talk about Nazir's poetry and style of writing. He wrote a play on him.

Did you always have a preference for 'comedy?-AK

He was quite inclined to tragedies. He was equally attracted to both comic and serious plays, but my folk actors have a predilection for comedy. He talked about tragic comedies and the figure of clown in the plays.

•Theatre training in Britain

In 1955, he went abroad and recieved scholarship. He went to England by boat, and joined RADA. But he fed up within a year. He discovered that discovered that language is connected with speech, which is connected with movement and therefore, quite simply, a change of language makes a change of movement and character and cultural ethos. He finds the teachings of RADA opposite to Indian ethos. He wanted to come India to apply his knowledge into movements. 

•'I was travelling to meet Brecht.' 

He was travelling all across Europe to understand theatre. He went to Paris and explored the culture there.

 " I'd gone with money enough to live in youth hostels and a meagre sustenance for 10 days. Paris is a great city; you can go absolutelv lavish or you can live in poverty and sustain yourself easily. I enjoyed that city very much, except for their chauvinism regarding language. In Avignon I started picking grapes to make a living, to see the festival" Here he narrates his experience in different cities of France.

•'When I arrived in Berlin, Brecht had died…

From Prague he finally went to Berlin. But when he arrived there he got to know that Brecht has already died few weeks before. He was disappointed but then met Brecht's crew. He remained there for 8 months and has a great experience.He travelled all over Germany-Nuremburg and Heidelberg and Munich and Vienna. By then he was already in 3rd year about to go Delhi where he can live his dream theater life. 

•Coming Home 

He came back in the summer of 1958. His only dream then was to produce a play on Mrichchakatika. He gave the proper detailing of set, actors and props for the same. 

•Trying to start a professional theatre 

He become friend with Moneeka. She found a garage in Janpath and that's where they started Naya Theatre with 9 members.  Moneeka directed a one-act play Habib Tanvir wrote called Saat Paise, which was based on a Czech story.  It was a lovely story of a mother and a child: the child was the son of a railway worker and he is trying to collect 7p for a cake of soap. And the mother plays with the child very poetically and talks of the money in terms of a butterfly, which they'd catch hold of. After one year's work the company broke up without them being able to show the play. They were stuck, with their cast and everything. Moneeka had helped him a lot-initially he learnt quite a lot from her, in the matter of grouping. Another thing also, she took over occasionally-when she had gone to the Phillipines at the time of Mitti Ki Gadi she directed.

And they were living together, Moneeka and he-it was just a room and she improvised some trunks. Very neat looking, nice arrangement for sleeping, for working, for everything. There was a public bathroom and public tap that they used to take water from. It was clean, though-an outhouse.And then, of course, they were in a barsaati in Karol Bagh. And they got married in 1960 or '61. He got employed in the Soviet publishing department as a senior editor. He continued with amateur theatre and journalism. He produced a biographical play on Ghalib. 

•Naya Theatre turns professional 

By now they were getting enough money. So they decided to pay Rs 150 to each actor every month. By 1972 they had become professionals, in a small way, with their own momentum. There was a Department of Culture subsidy for professional theatres, and in 1973 they got it. It used to be Rs 300 a month each for 10 actors. It came up to Rs 750 and for years it remained Rs 750 per head [increased to 20, because he had 30; but never less than 20,22,25]. It was possible to make two ends meet even then with Rs 750. Last year it became Rs 1500 per head for 20, which they're yet to receive. 

Question -So you've used Chhattisgarhi actors front that production onzvards?-AK 

Yes. Of course they let him down too, these actors, saying that they want to go off for a short while, and producing some false telegram or something-they never came back. He got two or three of them in 1960 for my production of Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentleman. But in 1970 they all came-Madan Lal, Thakur Ram, Jagmohan, Devi Lal. Brij Lal he used to know as a child,they used to sit in Lalu Ram's pan thela to sell pans. What he is trying to say is that this has been my handling in his maturer years. And it has worked very well. 

 Question -So Naya Theatre is a professional company-they are paid actors of that company? -AK

They're on a regular salary and it's this kind of a policy, no written agreement, nothing. And in Tanvir case it seemed to work very well. As a matter of fact when Peter Brook came, he wondered how I have had them for so long, with no trace of staleness or being tired. You've no idea how difficult it is to live with them and work with them. The tantrums, the scenes, the gaalis (abuses), he can't even go on record saying what else. 

•Mother tongue and freedom of movement

It took him time to realize two basic approaches to working with these folk actors: mother tongue and freedom of movement. He was trying to apply his English training on the village actors-move diagonally, stand, speak, take this position, take that position. He had to unlearn it all. He saw that they couldn't even tell right from left on the stage and had no line sense. And he'd go on shouting ki tum dahina haat se kya karte ho, bayen haat se kya karte ho, itna nahiti samjhte? Don't you know the difference between the hand you eat with and the one you wash with? 

•Gaon ka Naam Sasural, Mor Naam Damaad 

In 1973 he had a workshop in Raipur, month-long, one of the best he had, the first and best. He got many Nacha parties to participate for as long as they wished, observe, be there, go away. There were some city boys, students, scholars, Surajit Sinha from Calcutta, Komal Kothari from Rajasthan, R. P. Nayak, an authority on Madhya Pradesh tribals, who at that time held some high post in the government of M. P. And they wrote some good papers, and there were some professors of anthropology from the university; and city actors and lots of these folk actors of Chhattisgarh. Many Nacha groups came as observers. The Nacha form is three or four skits, which go on all night, and in between they have dances and songs by men dressed as women.Sometimes they would have Devar girls, like Fida, singing and dancing. He saw her just before the workshop in a Nacha, in the village, singing and dancing. A boy in the audience whistled and accosted her, making a pass. And from the stage, on the microphone, she abused him and stamped her foot, saying that I'll crush you like this, and he subsided. And Tanvir decided then, that's the girl who can act. He gave brief detailing of the skit performed there which was named 'Gaon ka Naam Sasural, Mor Naam Damaad'. So Gaon ka Naam Sasural, Mor Naam Damad was the collage that he produced out of three different short plays, by adding link scenes and changing the story a bit. 

•Charandas Chor

In 1974 came a workshop lasting about a month, in which he produced a number of small plays.Various groups came (all Chhattisgarhi), and he had a workshop in Bhilai. They produced six little skits of 45 minutes to an hour. They got a very good response from the local village audiences. They were their own plays-he just did some work on them, injected some elements. Towards the end of the month's workshop, in the last four days, he began to work on a thief story, which wasn't called Charandas Chor at that time. He thought this was the best story to try; but the story failed. In three or four days he realised they were lacking in actors. There was only one good actor they had, a wonderful actor. Otherwise their whole strength lay in music. Wonderful singers. And their form was opera-the little scenes that they enacted had feeble acting. So he abandoned the thief-story. He went to Chattisgarh and it was Satnami occasion. Habib thought of staging a play. He called the play Amardas. Amardas happens to be one of the gurus of the Satnamis, and they all protested that it can't be named after their guru. Then he called him some other Das, that was another guru. So finally he said Charandas can't be a guru and it was not. The original story has no name, he's just chor. At that time he didn't know the story except orally. Subsequently it appeared in a collection or Vijaydan Detha's storie. 

 Question -Did the comic sequences come from actors' improvisations or from things you've seen in other skits?-AK

No, no, most of it comes quite effortlessly to them, except that he was clear about the character of the thief. He did not want to romanticize or produce it in a heroic style, but to play him simply and produce a character who, because of his, let's say naivete, ignorance, conservative nature,old-fashioned belief in vows, is so caught up in the web of his vows (which he really took inadvertently as a jest), that he doesn't think that he's going to really face death; and when he's threatened with it, he cowers, cringes, supplicates and shows all the fears of the commonest man. But at the same time he has a total inability to find a way out of it, because he is caught up in a vow. He happened to have taken it. Having taken it, he faces the consequences. Madan did it exactly that way, Tanvir didn't have to hammer it in. Govind did it the same way. 

Question - And you've received awards for Charandas Chor?-AK

Yes, in 1982 we got the Fringe First award at the International Drama Festival in Edinburgh. The Scots newspapermen asked Tanvir,  how come they were using their own language which we didn't understand a single word of, and yet we liked it, quite genuinely, so much that we wanted to not only give it the first award but also announce it before time; traditionally we don't announce it in the middle, we announce'it long after the festival is over. 

•'I've learnt many things from watching Nacha' 

His long courtship of the Chhattisgarhi folk player from 1958, off and on, upto 1973, got a breakthrough in 1974-5. After all, 'what happened in all this time? Several things happened. One of them was what he just described. But many things, improvisations, his watching Nacha and how they moved and why they couldn't be rigidly choreographed-. . . the Nacha itself is a form with two or three players, not requiring any intricate grouping, and they were just moving any old how, anywhere, wherever they got a response from. And so it was difficult for Tanvir to get them to move with motivation on a line in a certain way, which is what Tanvir learnt in England. He had to unlearn all these things; he still choreographed them, but his method changed; he gave them all the freedom and then he brought all his authority to pounce down upon them and freeze it, crystallize it and that was the grouping, otherwise they'd never remember if they had to go right or left. So his methodology became perfected over these years and things became easier. 

 •'What an actress!' 

Now, in the context of what he said about the Devar tribe, they had invited trouble when they asked Fida bai to join them. She came to live with them and after a day or two came her husband, Rohit, and her mother-inlaw, and they brought a lot of trouble. The mother-in-law was a very energetic old woman, very quarrelsome with a big voice, noisy, making a racket all the time. So was the husband, and they began to make trouble by fighting over every scene. And Fida herself objected to being betrothed to Thakuram as an actress in a scene, because of the authenticity of the ritual. That was, for her, as good as getting married to Thakuram and Thakuram himself claimed that now he was as good as married to her. 

•Bahadur Kalarin

The story was very different, a tragedy, and he was stuck for two years on how to tell the story, how to dramatize it. You see, there is this wine-seller girl called Bahadur Kalarin and she has a son from a king who passes through and meets her, promises to marry her, takes her and doesn't return. And the son marries 126 girls. One hundred and twenty six is a magical figure in folklore; in Chhattisgarhi language it's called chhe agar chhe kori, which means six plus six times twenty, which is one hundred and twenty six. Their counting goes from twenty to twenty, not hundred, just like the French Counting. 

•Has there ever been an instance when your actors have come and asked to do a particular legend or story?-AK

No ... that way they've been passive Tanvir said .  They've never heard the name of Shakespeare, Moliere and all these writers, even Kalidasa. And what they do in nacha is from what they know of pauranic tales, most of them religious. Some secular story is concocted by them on a very elementary level, the evils of drunkenness or an unfaithful wife or husband, something like that, and they do a song and dance and all those little subjects and scenes, or something reformatory, occasionally a brilliant satire like Jamadarin about casteism, but not beyond that. For that they needed some catalystic approach like Tanvir. 

•Do you work on invitation on plays on certain issues?-AK 

This was commissioned by the Literacy section of the Department of Culture, government of India, supported financially and organisationally, and that's how Tanvir had the workshop; only, he didn't concern himself so much with nksltar. This had consciousness, gnan or awareness, more than letters or akshar They wanted akshar at the end, and so for their purpose on National Literacy Day, they had the song oil literacy which they've still got, but they're not using in the play. And they're not ending on the importance Of akshar but where the play genuinely finishes, which is a satire on development, trying to suggest that there're many paths to development, and that for the indigenous people, the tribals and others in the Country, there must be different paths; that what is mainstream development for the whole country, in a regimented fashion, leads to underdevelopment for large sections of the people. This is the theme of the play. 

Once he was asked to do something on Family Planning because despite governmental effort, dull plays were coming out. He explains each step in the making of such plays. 

•'Theatre Always Held a Fascination for Me'- Pradeep Muley

Pradeep Muley is a theatre designer for the Marathi stage, who has been associated with plays written by the foremost Marathi playwrights and directed by the major contemporary directors. In this interview with SHUBHADA SHELKE he explains his design philosophy and talks of specific assignments. He tells about his journey- he has a diploma in commercial art but-to tell  the truth-by the time he went into the third year, he had lost interest in it. But since he had already put in three years he thought he should put in two more and complete the course. Actually he was more interested in fine arts-I thought he could have done something in that field. A commercial artist is basically restricted by his clients,products. 

Despite of it he went into commercial- art because of his friends. In fact, he was more interested in literature. He even thought he should join some arts college at the same time but it was impossible to do both. He even wanted to do cinematography in the Film and Television Institute of India but that required a diploma in fine arts! So he couldn't have gone there. He spent three years in Film City and that's where I learnt a lot. Even in J.J Arts school, he learnt a lot more in the Foundation Course than in the subsequent years. The film City was a very good place to learn the things. Then the 'elders' in  the commercial art field gave him doses of advice that he was wasting his life etc. So he went into advertising photography, did a lot of work, earned a lot of money.  There is a lot of money in advertising. Good money doesn't necessarily mean good work-or that anyone who makes money is a person of high calibre.  He had been doing theatre from my college days so he naturally turned to theatre. Theatre always held a fascination for him. The kind of plays that were written during that period, starting from Vijay Tendulkar's Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe to Satish Alekar's Mahanirvan Begum Barve and G. P. Deshpande Udhvasta Dharmashala were all rich in content and created new idioms in theatre. The he goes on to describe all the detailing of his plays. 

              A Short Note on Neela 

           By- Rudraprasad Sengupta

Amongst the noteworthy productions of Bengali plays based on Ibsen, Nandikar's Neela done in 1986, deserves mention, although the link with Ibsen in this case was rather indirect. Nandikar, a leading theatre group of Calcutta, based their production on Ingmar Bergman's Nora, itself and adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House. Rudraprasad Sengupta, the director, discusses this production with BIREN DAS SHARMA.

-Ibsen, in the Bengali context, is generally understood, often wrongly, as an author of problem plays, as a writer with a mission, a playwright-preacher. Certainly at one level plays like An Enemy of the People or A Dolls House can be called 'problem plays.' But such an interpretation excludes the real Ibsen-Ibsen the writer of tragedies. 

-When Sombhu Mitra did Putul Khela he did not rewrite the play, he Indianized it. Yet Sombhu Mitra retained the essential Ibsen, and the profound tragic essence of the playnot just the surface realism--came out very clearly. Despite the realistic trappings, the scenography of Khaled Chowdhury, the design, the acting style-everything contributed to achieving something beyond realism and it almost became a tragic, existential experience. One rarely sees an Ibsen production which puts forward such a profound understanding of Ibsen. 

-Bergman's adaptation was fascinating and at the same time very complex, very challenging. In the adaptation I found-and Bergman also talks about this in the prefacethat he had successfully got rid of a lot of realistic trappings. In an interview Bergman said, 'It's always said that Ibsen was a marvellous architect of the drama-but in A Doll's House he still has immense difficulties with the building, the construction of the drama. So if you make cuts, you make it easier for him, you make it easier for the actors and you make it easier for the audience to grasp what he means.' 

-Perhaps all these things made me choose the play and try my best. The translation was done by me and it was a very authentic translation. I also followed Bergman's production note. I only changed the names and the costumes. There was a smaller stage within the bigger stage and all the actors were there all the time. So there was no entry or exit in the play, just as Bergman had conceived. The play ran for fifty nights. The audience reaction was very interesting. 

-The adaptation of Rosmersholm, the third play under discussion, has been produced by one of Calcutta's lesser known, yet distinguished, theatre groups. The adaptation was done by the director himself after consulting several English translations. As far as adaptation goes, Rosmersholm is rather a difficult play, with its subtle associations of Christianity and the connotation of original sin haunting the characters, especially Rosmer. In Sada Ghoda the Bengali version, the mantle of Christianity is changed to one of conservative Hinduism and Rosmer transformed into the last of a wealthy and famous family of zamindars, known for their orthodox views and attitudes. Instead of defrocking himself, Niren (Rosmer) decides to break down an old family temple and use the land to build up a workshop for landless refugees who, he dreams, would thereby be able to earn their own bread. The Bengali adaptation is placed somewhere in the fifties, when India was passing through the heady, exuberant days of newly gained independence. 

-What is interesting to note, however, is that each time Ghosts was translated, almost never adapted. One adaptation attempted by the late Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay was rather a failure and was seldom put on stage. An obvious problem in adapting Ghosts is the important role the character of the Pastor plays in the plot. 'it is very difficult to find an equivalent of a Christian Pastor in the framework of a Bengali middle class society. The other difficulty is to find a parallel to the background of Oswald's character.The life of complete freedom he had witnessed in Paris does not have an equivalent in the Indian milieu and for a young man belonging to a middle-class family to be sent to Paris to learn painting is rather unusual. There may be other minor problems in adapting Ghosts to the Bengali situation which made most producers turn to direct translation. 

- Dhruba Gupta, another theatre scholar, writing about tragedies in our times, has regarded Ibsen as a writer of modern tragedies. Judging Ibsen's plays by classical standards, Gupta has found in the social catastrophes and the individual crises of Ibsenian plays the inevitability characteristic of Fate in Greek tragedies. He has also discerned in Ibsen the unity of plot so emphasized in Aristotle, though character is never secondary to plot in Ibsen's plays, according to him.

- Another theatre critic, Dipendu Chakraborty, feels that the Bengali drama critic has not developed any indigenous standards to judge the literary quality or the performance potential of a play and still depends on standards set by western playwrights such as Shakespeare, Ibsen or Brecht to evaluate even Bengali plays. Further, he thinks that despite quite a few Ibsen productions on the Bengali stage, original Bengali play writing has taken up the Shavian style-if any western style at all-rather than the Ibsenian.  

     

                   Polls on Stage 

             By- Paramita Banerjee 

It is definitely not easy to define political theatre, and the postmodernist-cum-feminist challenge against the traditional divide between the personal and the political has made the task even more difficult. Indeed, if politics be 'the actions and activities which people use to achieve power in a country, society or organization or which ensure that power be used in a particular way it is near impossible to think of any theatre that is not  political in some sense, especially if we accept the Foucauldian notion of power as something that is produced in any relationship at any point of time, and which functions through myriad open strategies.

-However, going by the above definition of 'political', it would be interesting to note how far these election plays are political and what kind of an activated ideology they propagate. 

-Prabhat Kumar Goswami in his Uttar Challisher Rajnaitik Natak (Political Plays of the forties and After)(1982, Calcutta) argues that Bengali political theatre in the specific sense of propaganda theatre really flourished around the nationalist issue and it crystallized through the formation of the Indian People's Theatre Association (henceforth IPTA) in 1943.

-The Special Election Issue of the Gana Natya Sangha bulletin offers eight one-act plays, only one of which addresses the problems of Hindu fundamentalist politics in any direct form, though that form does not in any way transcend that of the old riot plays. It sticks to the mode of direct portrayal of how a communal party strives to jeopardize relations between Hindu and Muslim neighbouring peasants, who are otherwise the best of friends. 

-However, this particular play, entitled Did Bandhur Galpa (The Tale of Two Friends), written by Srikanta Bairagi, at least has one redeeming feature. It's the wives of the two feuding peasants; who are'Red Party' loyalists, and who bring their husbands to their senses. While the political significance of such a portrayal remains unclear, it is somehow a relief to see women being painted as more sensible than men-given our general patriarchal set up and the absolute silence of these plays on women's issues. However, all that these two women can inspire their husbands ta do is not to vote for communal or corrupted politicians. I find it almost impossible not to think of a play of the late sixties, Haramer Nat Jamai (Haran's Grand Son-in-Law) dramatized by Sisir Sen from Manik Bandyopadhyay's short story of the same name, %,,,here also the main protagonist is a woman, who comes forward to make clear that real revolutionary action is to deal with a situation through discarding traditional bias and prejudice, if that be the need of the hour for social change. 

-Then he goes on to cite certain examples of plays to elaborate upon his point. 

  

     Imaging Gita-A Polyphonic Discourse 

-It was a play. It was a dance. It was music. It was an amalgam, defying any clearcut categorization, marked style or known genre. Yet it was not an event. Anita Ratnam in her introduction to the performance of Gita-An Imagery an inter-cultural collaborative performance held on 6 and 7 December, 1995, and jointly presented by Arangham Trust, Koothu-p-pattarai, Brahaddhvani of Madras and Kalakshetra of Manipur with support from South Zonal Cultural Centre.

-Gita was to be seen not so much for its conceptual reorientation as for its arrangement of various elements. For, despite the piecing together of Carnatic music, Koothu-a dominant folk art of Tamil Nadu-and Manipuri theatre, at its best it was a polyphonic discourse in which different music and acting styles coexisted. Ever opposed to  the idea of homogenization of cultures, Kanhailal perhaps faced the biggest test of his long career in Gita where he had to constantly satisfy the art forms of different cultures.

•The Cultural Movement in Digambarpur

-Digambarpur is situated in the deltaic region of West Bengal and the members of this team belong to landless agricultural families. But their poverty has never come in the way of their commitment to the cultural movement. As their families depend on the daily wages brought in by them, they cannot afford to devote the whole day to rehearsals and campaigns, so they work all night and all morning to make time for theatre in the evenings. One year ago this team came up with Mukta Mancha (literally, open stage), a project which seemed very ambitious at first but is slowly becoming a reality now. 

-Mukta Mancha was to be situated in Digambarpur village of Pathar Pratima block, South 24 Parghanas. It was to be a hexagonal platform covering an area of about 1000 square feet, with pillars on the circumference, supporting a thatched roof. It was to have two rooms on one side. This Mukta Mancha would be the venue of a performance by local theatre teams and folk artists once a month. 

-The whole Mukta Mancha effort can be seen as a concrete manifestation of the cultural movement that is taking place in Digambarpur Another manifestation is the hugely popular Masanta Parab (literally, end-of-month festival). Started six months ago at the initiative of a group of young boys, it has already become a parab (festive occasion) looked forward to by the young and old alike. On the last Friday of every month (by the Bengali calendar), the whole village gathers in front of the school building and, on a temporary stage, a series of cultural items are held.