of unease because this was effectively the first time that a girl from a respectable family – Gouri, the daughter of the artist, Nandalal Bose – would be seen dancing in a theatrical performance. To tide over the problem, Rabindranath created the only male character of Upali and played the role himself. For the later dance dramas, he made it a point to be seen on the stage in a bid to give legitimation to the performances. The Statesman noted with approval Rabindranath’s on-stage presence during a performance of Parishodh (the original version of Shyama) in October 1936: “He makes the stage human. Everyone else on the stage may be acting but he is not. He is reality. Moreover he gives a dignity to the performance – nautch is transformed into dance.”2
Scene from a Tagore dance-drama
each of these he experimented considerably with the dramaturgical structure, but the performance of the two seasonal plays in the open-air ambience of Santiniketan encapsulated his notions of a new theatre scenography in a manner that would not/could not be available in any other ludic space. Though Raja, Dakghar and Tasher Desh were INDIA PERSPECTIVES
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produced by Rabindranath, he could stage neither Muktadhara nor Raktakarabi, though he read them out before several people on different occasions. In 1926, Rabindranath took yet another bold step as he introduced dance as a medium of theatrical expression in his play Natir Puja. When it was decided to take the production to Calcutta, there was a sense
Rabindranath by this time had paid several visits to the Far East: he went to Japan thrice, twice in 1916, and again in 1924; to Java and Bali in 1927. To him, the Japanese dance “seemed like melody expressed through physical postures… The European dance is … half-acrobatics, half-dance… The Japanese dance is dance complete.”3 Of the dance of Java
he observed: “In their dramatic performances [he uses the term yatra], there is dance from the beginning to the end – in their movements, their combats, their amorous dalliances, even their clowning – everything is dance.”4 This exposure to the dance-languages of the Far East inspired Rabindranath to evolve his own theory of ‘theatre as dance’, which resulted in the crop of the dance dramas of the final phase that commenced with Shapmochan (1931). With the following trio – Chitrangada (1936), Chandalika (1939), and Shyama (1939) – Rabindranath went even further with his experimentations of the dancedrama form. Rabindranath adopted the style of kathakata, so that the lines of the prose play (of 1933) were easily set to tune. The Statesman remarked: “The technique of the dance-drama in ‘Chandalika’ is in many ways a revival of the ancient Indian form in which the dialogue is converted into songs as background music, and is symbolically interpreted by the characters through the dances.5” Though Rabindranath maintained his search for an alternative language for the theatre, yet it must be 4
2
3
The Statesman, 14 October 1936; cited in Rudraprasad Chakrabarty, Rangamancha O Rabindranath: Samakalin Pratrikiya , p.298; emphasis added. Japan yatri, Rabindra Rachanabali (Complete Works) Visva-Bharati Edition, vol. 10 (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1990) p.428.
5
Java-yatrir patra, Rabindra Rachanabali, (Complete Works) Visva-Bharati Edition, vol. 10, 1990, p.525. The Statesman, 10 February 1939, after the performance at Sree Theatre in Calcutta (9 & 10 Feb); cited in Rudraprasad Chakrabarty, Rangamancha O Rabindranath: Samakalin Pratrikiya , pp. 271-272.
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remembered that when it came to matters of actual performance he was never rigid or inflexible. Because he combined in himself the roles of author-actorproducer, he was ever alert to the requirements of production and reception, kept adapting his staging principles accordingly, and thereby gave his theatre a broader perspective. If Tagore was imagining a liberally comprehensive concept of a nation, he was also imagining a more inclusive kind of theatre, as is evident from his later experiments (as actor and producer). He retained his fondness for the indigenous resources but never believed in a blind replication of the jatra or yatra-model. At the same time, though largely critical of the Western stage importations, he did not reject them outright if they served the purposes of theatrical exigencies. As a producer, he often conceded to the actual staging conditions at hand to uphold the model of an eclectic theatre where components realistic and non-realistic, urban and rural, borrowed and indigenous, Western and Eastern, could all co-exist. ◆ The author teaches English literature at the Department of English & Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.