Based on the life of the 18th-19th century Bengali freedom fighter Syed Mir Nisar Ali a.k.a. Titumir, Dutt’s play is a blistering attack not just on the marauding, vampirically-taxing East India Company in 18th century pre-British crown-ruled India, but also on the new, emerging comprador class of zamindars who facilitated Company rule while gorging themselves on the scraps. The Muslim peasant revolutionary Titumir became a lightning rod against Company Raj and its local stooges.
Titumir’s resistance force caused serious damage to the zamindar-British indigo planters’ alliance in rural Bengal in 1830-31.
For a brief while, after defeating a Company-led force in what is considered the first armed uprising against the British, he even became the de facto ruler around Narkelberia, where his legendary Bamboo Fortress stood. It was only after governor general William Bentinck sent a military column with two cannons to lay siege to Titumir’s HQ at Narkelberia, leading to a decisive victory at a pivotal battle on November 19, 1831, that Company order (and tyranny) was restored – with Titumir and some 50 others bayoneted.
Watching Joyraj’s production and actor Anirban Bhattacharya as the eponymous lead – whose first Hindi movie alongside Rani Mukherjee‘s ‘Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway’ was released last week – was a deeply immersive, goosebumps-inducing experience. Why Titumir was suddenly pulled from Bharat Rang Mahotsav remains a mystery to me, especially after watching it. Some cited sotto voce that it was considered too ‘political,’ too ‘anti-government’. Which anyone familiar with Utpal Dutt’s text – as the organisers must have been since the script was submitted well before being chosen – it is: anti-19th century East India Company government. So dropping it at the last minute was exceedingly strange, especially when a festival theme this year was ‘Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav’.
But I got lucky. Titumir was being performed in Kolkata. So instead of taking the Delhi Metro to Kamani Auditorium last month, I took the Kolkata Metro to the Academy of Fine Arts last week.
The very moment I faced the uncurtained stage, I knew this was not going to be just a theatrical experience in the performatory sense, but also an iconographic one, in the way a viewer takes in a painting with all its details. Sitting three rows away from the proscenium, I rediscovered my peripheral vision. A character’s actions, say, near the wings were an essential part of characters delivering their lines centre stage. And the perennial bamboo construction criss-crossing the stage loomed above all as a giant tic-tac-toe representing both Titu’s Bamboo Fort and the Company-zamindar’s spider’s web. Anirban’s performance as Titumir dripped physicality, and was ably framed by supporting roles. Especially stand-out was Loknath Dey as Company agent General Crawford Pyron, the proto-Macaulay connoisseur of Sanskrit and medieval Bengali texts whose ‘civilising mission’ in India predates the British crown’s. The constant cri de guerre regularly punctuated by the low comedy that Utpal Dutt borrowed from jatra – pop theatre, whose successor today is the TV serial – to highlight the buffoonery of the babus, Titumir is a searing indictment of a ruling class and its cronies asset-stripping a country, and a people making a desperate bid for swaraj – that almost succeeded.
Peripheral vision is a powerful thing. Not only does it make one see the whole picture that goes on onstage, but also in real life, past or present. Footnotes, like the story of Titumir, surface as the main text when channelled through powerful productions. So what did the worthies of NSD see in the play that made them recoil? A clue may lie in Utpal Dutt’s line in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1979 film, Gol Maal: Jiske paas mooch nahin, uske paa mann hi nahi hai.