Book review: Sarvani Gooptu,The Actress in the Public Theatres of Calcutta

This slim book contains more than its title suggests—it is a brief but lucid history of a Bengali public theatre from its formative days to the mid-twentieth century. Drawing mostly from a very rich corpus of Bangla theatre studies—scholarly as well as anecdotal—it is a useful text, especially for non-Bangla-reading theatre enthusiasts.

There has been a great deal of work on the Parsi theatre and Urdu drama, much of which dwells on actresses. Very recently, Veejai Sai’s book, which provides a general survey of ‘drama queens’, has introduced a new focus on great actresses and women singers in Indian public theatre. ¹ This survey actually covers some of the figures mentioned in Gooptu’s work and puts them in a larger context. But barring the seminal work on a single actress of great significance by Rimli Bhattacharya, Bengali actresses have not received much attention so far. This book, therefore, is a welcome departure.

The Introduction, expectedly, provides a short history of works on Bengali actresses. It also does something unusual. It traces the scholarship on Indian drama—something that does not often find a place in theatre histories. It brings together works by western—Sylvain Lévi and H. H. Wilson, among others—and Indian scholars on Sanskrit dramatic conventions. It is interesting to observe the overlaps between the perspectives of the western and Indian Orientalists. However, Gooptu does not explain the larger intellectual contexts behind the overlap in the perspectives of such scholars. Nor does she look at any other theatrical tradition except for Sanskrit drama. There is important work on Bengali Jatra and other folk theatre traditions which, obviously, shaped the language and themes of the early public theatre. Yet another problem with the Introduction is that it entirely focuses on theatre studies and totally neglects histories of Bengali literature, which have been particularly attentive to this strand of performance. There were, for instance, women’s-only folk theatre groups, which began at least as early as the nineteenth century and survived well into the twentieth century.

The first chapter of the book goes back to 1795 and the curious beginning of the modern Bengali drama, with the Russian Gerasim Lebedoff’s translation and staging of The Disguise in Bangla. The play put actresses on stage. Gooptu sees Lebedoff’s play as a mere translation, whereas evidence suggests that it was an interesting adaptation of a foreign text for the Bengali audience, with a number of farcical figures displaying familiar Bengali rogue types. Gooptu then provides a succinct summary of the appearance of actresses on the public stage and of the nineteenth-century controversies surrounding it. Simultaneously, she narrates the development of the public theatre.

She misses out on an important formative stage, however. In the 1870s, when the public theatre began to function properly, and the use of actresses became commonplace, there was a long period of dramatized social satire, commenting on contemporary scandals of power. It was this phase and genre that ensured the huge popularity of a poorly funded and rather ill-equipped public theatre, which otherwise was no match for the opulent and sophisticated private theatre. Strangely, all this has entirely escaped the attention of the author—a significant and unfortunate omission. Another omission is the history of European theatre in Calcutta (now Kolkata), since most Bengali directors—especially Girish Chandra Ghosh—learnt about stagecraft from it. The dramatic styles of Europe would have surely been imported into the training of Bengali actresses, at least to some degree. British newspaper reviews of Binodini’s performance compared her with Ellen Terry; so, obviously, similarities did exist.

The second chapter is important as it discusses the deployment of largely uneducated sex workers to work in theatre. The chapter also sheds light on their training process and their relations with their directors. This, again, is rarely found in any detail in studies of the Bengali theatre. A discussion of attire and makeup, of how different social types were clothed and how these conventions changed over time, would have added to the value of the chapter, especially since there exists a somewhat sizeable visual archive that Gooptu could have used. On that note, one wishes that the very interesting photograph on the front cover, depicting an actress on stage, could have been explained—who has been depicted and from which play.

The chapter also uses a few theatre review journals such as Natyamandir, but does so rather abruptly, without any explanation of when this important critical genre developed and what its functions were. Moreover, it would have been important to study the process of recruitment for the stage. Since actresses were sex workers—unfortunately once described as ‘women of easy virtue’ ² —it is essential to contextualize them against the places they came from, and their subsequent relationship with their original homes, once they emerged, literally, into the public limelight.

The author sensitively retells the well-known story of how great actresses were simultaneously exploited by their patrons and their teacher-directors. It is, clearly, a story of unalloyed victimhood and it is, of course, a necessary perspective. However, they were also among the best-known women public figures of their times, often controlling a great deal of wealth and power that few other women, ‘respectable’ housewives, for instance, could command. Victimhood would take on important nuances had it been framed within a more complex interplay of power and vulnerability.

As public theatre constructed a segregated space for secluded women viewers, a complicated dynamic emerged between the prostitute-actress on stage, enacting both respectable wives and themselves, and secluded women, helplessly yet fascinatedly watching public and successful women who were often their rivals in real life. A lot of contemporary Bengali literature has commented on that, including some of Tagore’s short stories. I have reflected on this in my article, ‘Performing Power’, which, incidentally, also discusses Sukumari Dutta and her play. ³ Gooptu, however, does not consider this, nor does she consider the far-reaching implications of prostitutes enacting holy figures—saintly and divine—and embodying sacrality within their own stigmatized bodies, and what such role-playing did to ideas about the profane and the sacred. Gooptu’s analysis precludes a substantive understanding of the reception of and expectations from plays, though quite often it does refer to reviews of individual performances. The gap is not filled even in her all-too-brief fourth chapter, which is about the actresses and their audience.

The third chapter narrates how two great literary figures of the time—Rabindranath and Dwijendralal Roy—entered the world of theatre as their plays were picked up and performed on the public stage. This is really an exciting chapter as it introduces a virtually unknown theme. These great literary texts were crucially modified by their theatrical interpretation on the stage. Roy was directly involved with the public theatre and with the training of actresses, whereas Rabindranath was far more preoccupied with home-based and, later, Shantiniketan-based performances. Incidentally, Abanindranath Tagore’s memoirs contain interesting information about how towering artists such as Nandalal Bose and Abanindranath himself decided on stage décor. ⁴ Gooptu might have used this when she discusses Tagore’s performances. It seems that both Roy and Tagore became important resource persons at the time of the Swadeshi upsurge, and their plays with nationalist potential attracted considerable theatrical attention. In this context, some mention of the hugely popular Swadeshi Jatras of Mukunda Das would have been relevant to understand the popular taste for patriotic drama. It would have also been fascinating to know something about the dramatized versions of Chokher Bali and the alterations from the novel text that must have been made during its performance. In contrast, Raja O Rani might have been a more faithful rendition of the original, as it was written as a play.

One of the significant problems with Gooptu’s book is that it refers to dramatic texts and dramatization of fiction without describing what the narratives were about. One cannot, therefore, follow either the controversies about their performance or what they presented to their viewers. There is far too little about the use of music and practically nothing about the female singers who provided background songs. There is quite a bit on Sukumari Dutta’s life and her play, which, by the way, was the only play written by a woman and an actress which was actually performed. However, the highly significant textual content of the play is not even mentioned, apart from an excerpt in the appendix. This is all the more surprising since Bijit Dutta has produced an excellent edition of Apurba Sati.

The fifth chapter—‘Caught between Tradition and Modernity’—is almost entirely about theatrical factions and the roles of Amarendranath Dutt and Girish Ghosh. Fairly interesting in itself, one does not quite see its relevance to the theme of Gooptu’s book. The chapter is also misleadingly titled. It has some important material on theatre management, albeit widely dispersed over time. But it has no serious discussion of theatrical conventions—old or new. So, even though we hear a lot about ‘change’, we cannot form a clear idea of what exactly had changed and into what. Though Gooptu does refer to Sudipto Chatterjee’s excellent study of the stage in her bibliography, ⁵ she does not use it for describing changing stagecraft and what it meant for actors.

Again, the sixth chapter introduces a new theme and some very new material as it looks at some significant court cases that involved well-known actresses. The cases—involving Tarasundari and Amarendranath, for instance—involved family property claims and sexual relations within theatre, as Amarendra left home to live with Tarasundari, who later left him and returned to acting. A vengeful Amarendra demanded the money he claimed he had gifted her. Although this was about the breach of trust, in another very significant case, Sushilabala brought a suit against Minerva Theatre, challenging her work contract. In fact, this should have led us to some important reflections on the actress as a working woman, possibly negotiating the terms of work with some more leeway than other women employees would. That aspect, however, only appears briefly in several of the suits discussed, which either actresses brought against their employers or vice versa.

The seventh chapter ‘Artistic Identity or A New Family’ could have been fascinating, as in this chapter the actress negotiates her relationships in a new environment, which becomes as compelling and as absorbing as family life. But it is, again, a dizzyingly brief flash, which presents us with marvellous snippets from the life and relationships of the actress—with old and new families of natal and theatrical worlds. But that is all that there is to it.

The concluding chapter is rather an unfocused jumble of stray ponderings. Maybe some observations on changing social norms in the late twentieth century and the actress’ new status, and the new catchments areas from where she now came, would have fixed the focus. Another important area that one misses in the book is the development of the cinema and its relationship with theatre—how much cinema draws from theatrical conventions, and vice versa, and about how many theatre persons and film actors circulated between the two fields.

Theatre studies have added a new dimension in South Asian historical writings. Gooptu’s work certainly adds much to them.