The political context of the formation of IPTA was, to put it mildly, grim. Germany had overrun much of Europe during the Second World War. As discussed in the previous essay, in 1935, a global coalition of artists had created a platform to protest against the rising tide of fascism that threatened to submerge major parts of the world. Members of IPTA were greatly influenced by this coming together of artists and literary luminaries to resist the ideological onslaught of Nazism, which at that moment appeared alarmingly powerful.
The formation of IPTA is, in many circles, credited to the Communist Party of India. Like the PWA, many though not all members belonged to the organized Left. But they were all progressive and this tied them together. Dedicated to struggles against the ills that had stalked the lives of millions of Indians, IPTA firmly believed that theatre was a way of reaching out to the masses and mobilizing them.
In 1943, theatre activists and cultural organizations met to discuss the situation in the country in the wake of the Great Famine in Bengal. Gross mismanagement of the disaster resulted in the death of more than two million people. In light of this tragedy, the role of theatre in particular, and of art in general, had to be rethought. The commitment to art not for the sake of art, but for society, had been formulated by the Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936. It was precisely this commitment that was reiterated by the IPTA.
Even the admittedly scant material on the history of the radical cultural movement that is available is inspirational. IPTA drew into its fold actors, directors, writers and musicians who would later be recognized as major figures in their fields, while linking professional cultural workers with workers’, peasants’ and other popular movements. Among its members were Sombhu Mitra, Bijon Bhattacharya, Utpal Dutt, Bhupen Hazarika, K.A. Abbas, Balraj Sahni, Pandit Ravi Shankar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishan Chander, Inder Raj Anand, Prithviraj Kapoor, Kaifi Azmi, A.K. Hangal, Durga Khote, Sushil Majumdar, Dina Pathak, Bimal Roy and Salil Chowdhury. Other members included Satyen Bose, Basu Bhattacharya, Shaukat Azmi, Satyen Kappu, M.S. Sathyu, Anant Nag, K. Pattnayak, Raja Rao, S. Srinivas Rao, and luminaries from various other parts of the country. All of them were motivated by an intense and passionate commitment to change reactionary traditions that held Indian society in a vice-like grip.
The objectives of IPTA were ambitious and its methods innovative. Across the country, its strategy of taking theatre to the people was imaginatively put into practice. From makeshift stages, often set up in deserted courtyards, actors spoke directly to audiences, spreading awareness of injustice and social discrimination and expressing a determination to challenge both. Plays were thus taken out of closed halls and away from elite audiences; they were performed under open skies and attracted audiences that ran into the thousands. In Bombay and Ahmedabad, the workers of the textile industry flocked to see these plays, which gave voice to a distinctly working-class worldview. The working classes had been struggling against the colonial state for some time now. Theatre reinforced and represented their struggles.
Members of the audience were asked to come up on stage, and very often they were encouraged to act in plays. IPTA sought to bring down the invisible wall that separates the audience from the actors in normal theatre halls, to subvert the idea of darshan that M.K. Raghavendra speaks of, where the audience is a passive recipient of messages that flow from actors on the screen/stage. Actors were the people; people were the actors. This was the line taken by radical theatre throughout the world: the communication of high art through popular language.
The theatre inspired by the writers and actors of the IPTA was realistic, vibrant and intimately related to life experiences, particularly problems faced by women who shouldered the double responsibility of working long hours in the factory and at home. The objective was to express, through art, the predicaments and the aspirations of the masses. Artists addressed social abuse, religious bigotry, political oppression and economic exploitation. And when that happened, ordinary people who were otherwise too preoccupied with the problems of quotidian existence realized that their deprivation, their hunger and their pathetic livelihoods were not because of the workings of a malevolent fate; they were the product of human design.
Credit is due to Urdu writers and poets, who brought with them a history of radicalization of the language, and a keen awareness of the social and political function of language in an unequal society. They influenced PWA, IPTA and subsequently, Bombay films. The influence of the movement on cinema, writes Gautam Kaul, is evident in films such as Dharti Ke Lal (1946), Neecha Nagar (1946), Samaj ko Badal Dalo (1947), Biplabi (1948), Mana Desam (1949), Do Bigha Zamin (1953), Garam Coat (1955) and Jagte Raho (1956) among others.
In particular, audiences rallied around the depiction of the Bengal Famine, the tragedy that was a result of not only colonial policies, but also of the feudal zamindari system that had bled the peasant slowly but steadily. Staged in 1944, in the wake of the 1943 famine, Nabanna (‘bountiful harvest’), directed by Sombhu Mitra, lays bare how the exploitation of peasants by landlords drove them into poverty, starvation and death; it is widely regarded as IPTA’s first major production. The play was written by one of the founding members of the Association, Bijon Bhattacharya.
The great famine, Bijon Babu stressed, was man-made. It was not a natural disaster; it was the product of intense deprivation and mismanagement. But something positive could come out of the tragedy. The play shows a group of peasants who leave their famine-stricken village and make the long journey to the city only to find themselves confronted by the indifference of the metropolis and the sight of people begging for alms. Their stay in the city makes them aware of the power of political resistance, and they decide to return to the village with a new political awareness. They are ready to struggle.
People who had resolutely turned their faces away from the corpses that littered Bengal in 1943 wept when they saw Nabanna. The play, according to the great filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, who was deeply influenced by the IPTA, demonstrated that theatre was not only a part of social struggles, but their weapon. Bijon Babu first showed, he said, how theatre had to be committed to the people, and how to portray a fragment of reality as an undivided whole on the stage.
Sajjad Zaheer’s Bimar, a one-act Hindi play written in the early 1930s, and published in 1941 in an English translation, The Living and the Dead, was also enacted by IPTA. It presented sharply and evocatively the opposition between the peasant and the worker and the middle classes.
Excerpted with permission from Speaking Tiger Books.