1963 Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit
WHEN Badal Sircar’s absurdist play Evam Indrajit was staged in 1963, it foreshadowed the angst of the Naxalite movement and created a stir in theatre circles. Sircar would later pioneer Third Theatre, which looks beyond the proscenium format and engages with the audience interactively, making them participate in the unfolding action.
The protagonist Indrajit’s frustration with his meaningless life painfully held up a mirror to the 1960s reality for India’s middle-class youth. The euphoria and hope of the early Nehruvian years was over; there was a cloud of doubt in the aftermath of the loss against China in 1962; the gulf between rich and poor was widening; and refugees from East Pakistan were trickling into Sircar’s home State. It was time to introspect and that is what Indrajit does. And he finds his own life
wanting, he is unhappy with his job, and his romance too fizzles out. Indrajit is left alone in embittered and relentless questioning.
When Sircar moved to what he called anganmanch or courtyard theatre, his aim was to remove conventional theatre paraphernalia that created an illusion of reality. In 1967, he started the theatre group
Shatabdi, which performed its first anganmanch play Spartacus in 1972.
Theatre in India in the 19th and 20th centuries was an important site of social and political questioning. Sircar anticipated, enriched and reinvented that tradition in ways that would endure.