Soul Searching through Third Theatre: Badal Sircar’s Michhil in Postcolonial Semiotics

Abstract

Badal Sircar’s (1925-2011) Third Theatre, avowedly a synthesis of First (indigenous performance traditions) and Second (proscenium as Western import) Theatres, was conceived as flexible, portable, and inexpensive performance. Cumulatively, these requirements arose from Sircar’s vision of a ‘political’ theatre that would be self-sustainable, and would have empathic value with audiences. Despite a successful stint with naturalistic proscenium theatre, Sircar was still dissatisfied with keeping audiences at safe removes; and was driven by the urge to (con)sensitize his viewers through performances. Borrowing from Western models of alternative theatre(s), he experimented with optimising of body-acting, first in the Anganmancha (Arena Theatre), and then through performances in public spaces (Muktamancha) across urban-rural locations. All of this gave a radical turn to Badal Sircar’s theatre in and around Kolkata, beginning from the decade of the seventies. This Paper concentrates on Michhil (Procession, 1974), an early Third Theatre specific script, that subjectivised the prototype ordinary man ‘lost’ amidst bewildering maelstroms of postcolonial euphoria and the resultant dehumanising anonymity of urban landscapes. Making subversive use of the visual metaphor of incessant processions on various citizen issues as popular representation of ‘political societies’, Sircar’s play deconstructs such euphoria even as it marks a nuanced turn from mass hysteria to individual soul-searching. Thus, the young ‘dead’ and the old ‘lost’ protagonist(s), both metaphorically named Khoka, emerge as each other’s mirror images in their travails amidst disillusionments and failed promises across generations. As wayside performances, this rescinding of the claustrophobia of urbanism, and the concomitant battling against dominant forces transformed Michhil into a whirlwind that stormed the city of Kolkata amidst statist repression of the Naxalite movement. In transcreation, it has travelled through Mumbai as protest against National Emergency (1975), to Lahore where it marked Ajoka Theatre’s debut (1984) amidst martial regime in Islamic Pakistan. In a throwback to difficult periods of sub-continental history at a time when understandings of nationalism in India are faced with radical polemics, this Paper examines the performative relevance of Michhil in intercultural semiotics. It thereby aims to underscore the continuing relevance of Sircar’s ‘political’ theatre as interrogations on postcolonial subject positions after a span of nearly five decades since its first enactment.