Sunday,14,2019
Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri is a globally renowned Renaissance scholar and Professor Emeritus at Jadavpur Univerity. He was interviewed at the end of June 2012 about his role in the production of his play যাহা চাই.
Interviewed by Dr. Paromita Chakraborty and Sri Abhishek Sarkar.
Did you take a look at the website? Which is what will give you the full background and so on. Do you want to ask questions or shall I talk at length and then you can ask questions. There are also things which are not on the website which I can tell you about. Actually I got to hear about it from Amitava Ghosh when he contacted me, he knew Stephen Greenblatt of course and Stephen was looking around for people in various countries who could take charge of such a translation and production and he had asked Amitava and Amitava mailed me not thinking I’d do it myself, because obviously and very rightly he didn’t associate me with the theatre, but that I might put him in touch with people who might, I’d put Stephen in touch with people who might, and so they sent me the text of the play and it was actually… when I looked at it, and I … you know … I got a kind of idea as to what it was about, and sort of suddenly felt inspired to do it myself though I had never written a play myself before or effectively since.
Now I actually don’t know exactly how much that website actually explains the project as it was to me. The idea is that they take the story of the lost play of Cardenio. In fact, if you actually look at the text of Don Quixote the story of Cardenio as such is something else and this is a story set into the story of Cardenio, anyway the story of the man who has his friend seduce his… who tries to seduce his wife. That Stephen with this off-Broadway dramatist Charles Mee, they had written this English version, which in fact actually got staged pretty late. It got staged after several of the sort of international versions of various languages, which had gotten staged already, because there was some problem with the contract for the staging of the English version. They produced this play, the English one, whose story only very lightly follows that of the original story in Cervantes or that of the Shakespearean lost play. It is set in modern times by an American theatrical family who are celebrating a wedding in the family in Italy. The play is set in Italy though most of the characters are American, and they were circulating this play written by Greenblatt and Mee to various people and not asking them to make a translation. Neither my play nor any other in the group is a translation. These are all kind of original takes on the initial situation. Supposing you were to have this improbable situation of a man asking his friend to seduce his wife. Obviously in different societies, and cultural contexts, such a situation would take very different turns. So the idea was given as such a situation happening in your society, in your linguistic and social community, how would it develop? The stories we write as school children, write a story beginning with the following sentence … that kind of thing. The idea was that they should not be translations, they should not be different from each other, but mine was relatively close to the originalat least in the initial situation in that I deal with a theatrical family. But after that of course the story…in a completely different way. Because in the original English version in that … did you look at the English translation of my version on the website? The original of course was in Bengali. I had to translate it for Stephen to look at because he of course couldn’t read Bengali. So anyway, in their original English play, after the characters have passed through all possible permutations of relationships, the newly married couple actually parted. No doubt their text is also on the website. Now it seemed to be an extremely improbable thing to happen in the context of Bengali middle-class society, however strained the relationship might become and however soon after marriage, that a newly-wed couple would actually walk out on each other, literally within 48 hours of marriage, that seemed so very improbable that I decided to keep them together finally although in a very uncertain relationship. The actual Nandikar production later seems a much happier ending with the newly married couple chasing each other between trees but that was not exactly how my play ends or how I expected it to end on the stage either. But with that very fundamental change in the close and with changes all along the line really, at least I kept something of the initial situation the same, if you look at the others you will find it totally different. And even this basic plot situation of the friend seducing the friend’s wife, and even this is modified quite considerably.
Mine was actually the second, the first one was the Japanese, that had been set in a motorcycle repair shop. I read an English translation of the Japanese text also; I don’t remember it very well, it’s there on the website, I could refresh my memory, and mine was actually the second to be produced, to be written, I presume, and to be produced, I presume. I wrote it off pretty fast, my son was passing out of IIT Kanpur and I was going to his convocation. So I was there for a few days and practically confined within doors because of extreme heat. So I spent that time writing this up, and because it seemed to turn out after a fashion I wrote to Stephen and said I’ve got something going, would you like to consider this? And I sent him a translation also. He thought it was okay, and then I showed it to a few friends of mine here who are more connected with the world of theatre than I was. As you know I have had no connection with the theatrical world before or for all practical purposes since. Ultimately I thought of offering it to Nandikar, because theirs was a theatrical family I suppose and has been associated with it ever since, and also I knew them vaguely. Their daughter Sohini of course was a student of ours at the department. And it also meant quite a bit money for them as there was a grant associated with this project for every reproduction, and that of course went to Nandikar. So it was quite fun. Though I must say I was a little surprised when I saw the direction that the final production had taken, that was certainly not how I had envisaged it and they had written in little bits of dialogue, and unfortunately some of the most … well the explicitly Shakespearean bits of dialogue, everybody would attribute to me, were not by me. I wasn’t going to do anything so directly, not to say crudely, Shakespearean. Those were written in by I don’t know who, Rudraprasad, Swatilekha, or Goutam, or any of them. But they were not mine.
And then in fact it was quite a box-office success, it really played to packed houses. And then it stopped because Goutam of course left the company and you know about that story, and one of the other actors also, one of the actresses, she who was not really a member of Nandikar in the first place who had joined them for this particular performance, she also left and it never got off the ground again. And one of these days I may offer it to some other company, I can get it printed, which I keep thinking I will, but never get around to doing. But it died a rather quick death actually, but it had quite a good kind of successful stage run for about 4 or 5 months, I suppose. And then stopped and has never been performed since. That is it really. If there was anything to add it would be about the way I dealt with a lost play of Shakespeare which of course could not turn up in the middle of Bengal. So I substituted this lost play by Rabindranath, a dramatized version of Nashta Neer, and there I had a bit of fun playing around with the names of various Tagore characters including those from Ghare Baire. There was this sort of Satyajit Ray- Tagore film motif in the background also, though I was very careful as not to use any dialogue from Satyajit Ray. I actually sat and … I mean I have seen it before as well as several times, but I actually sat through and I played the videos of both these films, both Ghare Baire and Charulata just to make sure that there was no overlap in the dialogue except at one point where I deliberately wanted it. But for the rest I made sure that there was no overlap but there were these evocations, and I named the two characters, the male characters Nikhilesh and Sandeep and the wife was Amala, because I mean you couldn’t really have someone in today’s middle class Bengali society named Bimala, for one thing, and also I thought that this was apart from Amal in the and so it linked up with the sort of scenes of the play-within-a-play and those were great fun to write actually, and I was trying to do a Tagore pastiche. That’s the part of the writing I most enjoyed actually. That’s it, I suppose. I don’t really have very much more to add. Its not as if I have some kind of illustrious stage history.What I was a little put out was the way they produced it. They, I think both Rudraprasad and Goutam were of the opinion that I didn’t agree with them, but it was their production though it might have been my script. That this was a play you could not as it were kind of play straight. They have to have a certain amount of irony, facetiousness, call it what you will. They meant it to be funny, anyway, but they, especially with Goutam’s very stylized acting. In fact, I remember Ananda commented on it, in his review of the production that it has become very clichéd by now, I certainly felt that most of the audience felt that this was not the most appropriate. Even Stephen, who came for the second performance, thereby hangs a tale I’ll tell you. Even Stephen, though he couldn’t understand what was being said he kind of said at the end, that this man’s acting style, and his projecting the character seems to be at odds with everything else in the play. And I think he was right actually. Stephen was late because he didn’t know he needed a visa to come to India. So he went to the airport and they wouldn’t let him get onto the plane. He phoned me from Boston airport. But I suppose that this project commands a large expense account, because instead of taking the next flight to Kolkata he took a flight to Washington and the next day he got one of these express visas which you can get from the Indian embassy there, for which they charge you extra, so he got his visa on the spot and took the next flight out, so he was there on the second day, he missed the premiere, but he was there for the second performance, he lectured here, he came to Jadavpur to lecture.
PC: But haven’t they made a book out of it?
They haven’t, they have made this website out of it, because I don’t think a book could really after all, all the plays are in different languages and the translations… I don’t know if they actually did translate all of them, maybe they did because everything is about Stephen and its Stephen, and how effective the translations would be, but certainly that website, I looked at the text of my own play yesterday for the first time, I didn’t know it was on the web, the English translation, and certainly there are… its riddled with terrible mistakes, just typos. I suppose this website is the nearest it will ever get to it. Stephen had some grand plan of a theatre festival where all these plays would be enacted together but obviously who is going to find the money for that sort of thing.
PC: What was behind this project?
On Stephen’s part, this idea of cultural mobility. You will have to look it up on the website, he will explain it better than I could.
PC: Why Cardenio then?
I have no idea, I mean look, I came into the story at chapter 6 as it were, I don’t know how it began. Stephen has these ideas.