Swachchhasila Basu visits Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Bengali debut stage on the poet-playwright’s 145th death anniversary
A two-storey structure off north Calcutta’s Belgachia Road nudges curiosity. The portico cuts though the building like a tunnel. Trees grow on the walls, their aerial roots weaving a veil over it. The pink ground floor walls are peeling like scabs, the upper floor is unpainted. The bricks that seal the arched spaces to the right of the portico talk of secrets buried. The red doors to the left are not welcoming either. And yet, once, the doors of this very house had been thrown open to Bengal’s cultural elite.
The Belgachia Rajbari hosted, among other things, the first performance of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Sarmistha, the first original play in Bengali.
According to the Mahabharata, Sarmistha is the second consort of prince Yayati. Says 83-year-old Nityapriya Ghosh, “It was 1859. While translating Ramnarayan Tarakanath’s Sanskrit play Ratnavali into English, Dutt realised there were no original plays in Bengali. Encouraged by friends and patrons, among them the rajas of Paikpara and Jyotindramohan Tagore, he wrote this five-act play.”
This was supposed to be the most productive phase of Dutt’s literary life. In a letter from 1859, written to a friend whom he refers to “as one of the best dogs in creation” he writes, ” Sermista [the English translation by Dutt himself is spelt thus] has turned out to be a most delightful girl… Jyotindra says it is the best drama in the language.”
Ghosh, who used to live in Belgachia Villa – a government housing that came up in a portion of the Rajbari estate – says that around 1836, Prince Dwarkanath, entrepreneur and grandfather of Rabindranath Tagore, bought the estate and a single-storey house and converted it into this palace. In Bonedi Kolkatar Gharbari, Debasish Bandyopadhyay writes that Dwar-kanath had spent over Rs 2 lakh on the estate makeover.
“The who’s who of society would look forward to an invitation to the innumerable parties he threw here,” says 88-year-old Deboprosad Majumdar, who has done much research on the region.
Later, Dwarkanath’s son, Debendranath, auctioned the property. Its new owners, the Singhas of Kandi in Murshidabad, who were the rajas of Paikpara, got it for Rs 54,000.
Paikpara is adjacent to Belgachia.
In Calcutta – The Living City, writer Tapati Guha Thakurta talks about the drawing room of the palace being full of European style furniture, art and sculptures.
Ghosh’s daughter, Sahana, recalls playing with her friends in the palace gardens till the early 1970s, while attending mothers would sit around on marble chairs fixed to the ground, around a marble table, chatting, knitting and soaking up the winter sun.
At that time, the then owners lived in a second house further down, across a large water body known as the Motijheel. Sahana says, “It extended quite a bit across the estate even in the 1970s. An uncle used to take us bird-watching there.” The jheel has vanished in places today and what remains of it are unrelated ponds and garbage dumps.
Theatre artiste Ditipriya Bandopadhyay, who got a chance to enter the palace building recently – she was shooting for a TV serial – says, “I saw some black-and-white photographs. They were captioned but the writing was so blurred that there was no telling what was what.”
Sarmistha opens in the Himalayas. Dutt writes in yet another letter: “Everyone says it is superior to that [Ratnavali] book; as for the Bengali original, the only fault found with it is that the language is a little too high… This I need scarcely tell you, is nothing; for if the book is destined to occupy a permanent place in the literature of the country, it will not be condemned on this head.”
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Calcutta / by Swachchhasila Basu / July 01st, 2018