Keyabat Meye

The queer-feminist theatre troupe 'Samuho' performed the twentieth century morality play ‘Keyabat Meye’ (Wow Woman!) which parodied the figure of the new woman – who was educated and had the freedom to move freely in society. A large section of Bengali society saw these initiatives for women’s education, and the ways in which they could exert their free will, as going against their culture – so the satirical plays were devised to express their displeasure.

In the rendition by Samuho, Jnanadnandini Debi devised the Brahmika style of draping a sari, Nati Binodini rued her theatrical history as written by men and Indira Debi and Pramatha Choudhuri exchanged letters across seas. The performers used the entire space of North Kolkata’s Barrister Babu’s house, as it is now known, to present various sections of the play, creating spaces of intimacy and engagement.

Yellow, Blue and Art on the Move

On the seventh day of the festival, we gathered at the Esplanade Bus depot in central Kolkata to observe something that we see every day, but do not look closely at – bus art. The artist Sumantra Mukherjee introduced us to the concept of vehicular art, which takes the form of artistic interventions on government stipulated yellow and blue coloured buses that ply the city.

city. We were also joined by the bus artist Bazlur Rahaman, who explained the concepts behind various motifs on the bus and the different ways in which drivers personalise their vehicles, almost as if it were their own room. He demonstrated this by painting the word ‘Pilot’, which is typically written under the driver’s window, and transforming each letter into miniature figures of umbrellas, hand fans and cricket balls.

In Search of Sandesh

Standing before the Rajbati building on Chitpur road, one can see the entire process of transformation of the sandesh, from milk to sweetmeat. As cans of milk were wheeled away on bicycles, the sharp hammering of the mould-maker’s chisel brought us to workshops filled with fish, rose, chandrapuli and modak-shaped woodcuts which would ultimately shape the sweet.

From chaana-making stores, we arrived at the famed sweet shops of Makhan Lal Das and Nalin Chandra where they mixed the chhana (cottage cheese) with syrup and pressed the mixture against the solid wood, now tinted black with age, as the jolbhora design emerged on soft chhana.

Mise-en-Stage

Modern artists in Bengal like Jamini Roy have been instrumental in designing sets for theatre and performance. At the theatre archive at Natyashodh Sansthan, Trina Nileena Banerjee spoke about how set design is often an ignored aspect of theatre criticism, even though it adds another framework of interpretation for the play and traced the works of significant set designers in Bengal theatre—who drew from the work of Bengal modernists like Chittaprosad.

Sora Brittanto 

On the penultimate day of the festival, we travelled to Taherpur to learn about the practices and genealogies of sora-making with artists Ratan Paul and Gopal Paul. The artist-writer Dipankar Parui, who has been researching the sora for many years, explained how styles of storytelling through particular motifs have carried on through generations of sora makers and how they have changed depending on the socio-political circumstances surrounding them, like the partition of 1947.

The artists then demonstrated how they painted various kinds of soras, and the division of labour in finishing different segments like jewellery or fine lines. The participants painted their own versions of the sora, taking inspiration from the traditional line-drawing in soras, pairing it with themes from their own lives.

Gab-Sur-Kinnar

The third edition of ‘The City as a Museum’ came to an end with a tabla concert at the historic building of Jorasanko Thakurbari. Curated by the sitarist Subhranil Sarkar, tabla artists Rohen Bose and Asif Khan spoke about the history and nuances of their own gharanas, namely the Benares and the Farrukhabad gharanas respectively – focusing on tabla-making, patronage, courtly practices and instrument design as an evolving practice.

This was accompanied by a short film where Shyamal Das demonstrated the different stages of tabla making in his workshop in Kolkata. The concert came to an end with Bose and Khan coming together in a ‘sangat’ with Alla Rakha Kalawant on the sarangi.