Director Pradip Bhattacharya reinterpreted Tagore’s classic play, Rakta Karabi, along with a team of 21 prisoners. It was meant to be therapy for the actors while at the same time addressing the larger concern of the domination of technology over everything. By Chahak Mittal

What is it with classical literature? People might shrug it off as old-fashioned and trivial, however, there’s a reason that these books and works have been read over and over again despite the passage of decades. From exposing sexism and toxic masculinity in Sylvia Plath’s works, a modern speech from a Shakespearean play, today’s rom-coms which have a definite Jane Austen flair, to timeless moral of parenting that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein taught — the truth is that these classics continue to be relevant even today.

One such was also Rabindranath Tagore’s Rakta Karabi or Yaksapuri, written in 1923 in Bengali, which people saw as a chronicle that foretold the future.

Director Pradip Bhattacharya recreated the iconic play as Jakshapuri at the NSD’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav. The adaptation brought together 21 murder convicts who are serving life term at the Berhampore Central Correction Home in Bengal.

He believes that it was important to retell the play especially by the team from the Berhampore Repertory Theatre of Murshidabad.

The director, who has been conducting theatre therapy at the correction home since the last 12 years, says that when he had first interacted with the prisoners and local administration, examining everything for 20 days, he realised that the Tagorean philosophy taught three things — who is a human being?; every human should have humanity and if one has that, only then will s/he attain salvation (mukti). He says, “The prisoners are always eagerly waiting to get rid of the captivity, thinking about the time when they can return to their homes and hence, they are rootless. They become labourers inside the jail as a part of its routine. But somewhere they are always looking forward to get out.”

He realised that the prisoners needed to do something beyond the labour. It was an initiative to “recycle” the waste and give them a new life. They started with Tagorean classics after getting the permission from the local authorities.

He chose Tagore’s plays to make them get rid of the “masks” that they were wearing. “I did Tasher Desh, Tota Kahini and then Jakshapuri or Rakta Karabi. He relates the situation of two kinds of people to explain what “masks” signify here — people from the higher class and the prisoners.

“All the people from the higher class in our society are the dominating lot. The rule of cards is the face or mask they wear. The true human energy lies somewhere inside them. Similarly, prisoners are also masked. They are devoid of life after they have committed some crimes and landed in prison. To bring out the energy that they have inside them, we need to take off that mask,” he explains.

There was always a risk involved. “There is a prison law that prohibits any interaction — verbal, sexual or physical — between a man and a woman inside its premises. Koi aadmi aankh utha ke nahi dekh sakta kisi aurat ko (no man could look at a woman directly). And the play direction brought them together.”

He narrates that even though they are not literate and belong to native villages, they had a lot of questions, “Since Rakta Karabi spoke volumes about a jailer’s lives, they wanted to know if Tagore ever went to prison? And when they came to know that he hadn’t, they were astounded as to how he could understand their real experiences.”

However, they related to the play’s theme of captivity so much that they “owned the story” and portrayed it well. He says, “Acting can’t be taught. But this is a part of their prison experience, hence they did it with utmost honesty.”

The play’s protagonist, Nandini is an individual pursued by abstraction. Bhattacharya explains that she is not a reality. He says, “For me, Nandini plays three characters. She sheds light on everyone and there is darkness when she leaves. She is an illusion.”

He derives a metaphor for this from the prohibition law in the prison when in the play, neither Ranjan nor Kishore nor even the king are able to meet Nandini. It’s because of the king’s greed for power and money, Ranjan’s bond with his mechanised world and Kishore’s eagerness to live a life of abundance. This also influenced the way that he shaped her three distinct characters.

Drawing a comparison with the literary concept of Sophocles, he says that they are like Electra and Oedipus, “who never meet their desired partners as per the rules of nature.”

The king is blinded by greed, and doesn’t consider the gold mine workers as humans. Even the labourers are bonded with the machinery to such an extent that they completely delink themselves from love just like Ranjan.

The director explains that he never changed the original script, rather just rigorously edited it. “I edited the script and changed the chronology. There were a few characters in the original play which I didn’t include. However, I didn’t change a single word or line,” he informs.

However, he says that he did twist the climax in a way that it leaves the audience with the hope that the  characters will attain salvation one day. He says, “Towards the end, all the labourers of Yaksapuri’s gold mines break through the administration and king’s rule in the original. But my play doesn’t show that. I can’t break the system. Similarly, in real life too, I go inside the jail and change some nut bolts through therapy and mental rehabilitation. Hence, the play’s ending portrays hope through one of Tagore’s songs where all of them pray that light will come to them and relieve them of all their sorrows.”

He feels that theatre is something which is an evidence that only “words cannot fulfill the blankness.” There are a lot more things like “action” and this is the way any play is designed. “One needs to look for a meaning and find a connection with the reality,” he says.

In the play, as in real life, he also searches for a balance between materialistic mechanisation and nature as well as breaking the blindedness of machinery. He strongly believes in the simplicity of a man than in the prolific use of technology that is overpowering everything. Nandini, for him, is the bearer of the message of reality, the saviour through death. She is nature — unfettered, unspoilt.