Kolkata play about Dalit student suicide calls out Bhadralok hypocrisy on casteless Bengal
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‘Oboyob’ offers no easy solutions. It prompts so-called Bengali liberals to accept their role in perpetuating caste atrocities.
DEEP HALDER, (Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
Kolkata: In the setting of a posh Bengali drawing room, an ‘upper-caste’ couple grapples with the complexities of a Dalit student’s suicide. In the play, Oboyob – Silhouette – staged on 5 May at Kolkata’s Proscenium Art Centre, the wife, a journalist enmeshed in researching student suicides for her book, begins to wonder if caste plays a role in such tragedies. She and her husband have so far believed that caste is played up for effect and that economic realities shape people’s life choices. However, a visit from their Dalit professor friend forces the couple to question their preconceived notions.
It’s a Kolkata play that calls out casteism and Bengali Bhadralok hypocrisy in the middle of a bitterly fought election.
Oboyob didn’t mention Rohith Vemula, but his shadow loomed large on the stage. It came, after all, just two days after Telangana Police filed a closure report in the Hyderabad University research scholar’s 2016 suicide case, determining that he wasn’t Dalit.
Vemula died by suicide on 17 January 2016 after the university stopped his monthly stipend due to what it called “delay in paperwork”. His death was termed ‘political discrimination against Dalits in universities’ and sparked nationwide protests.
But Vemula’s suicide wasn’t the only issue that inspired the play’s writer and director, Debasish. He was also moved by the story of Chuni Kotal, a Dalit Adivasi student who succumbed to alleged caste discrimination by her university administrators in 1992. She was the first woman from the Lodha Shabar tribe to graduate.
“The play is not just about a Dalit student’s suicide but about the Bhadralok, mainly of the Kolkata variety, who continue to create a binary between casteist ‘Hindi-belt states’ and ‘casteless Bengal’. Oboyob tries to peel back the layers of the seemingly progressive metropolitan elite to expose the casteism deeply ingrained within them,” he says.
Bhadralok and chotolok
Caste bias creeps in casually in the play, during an animated conversation between the Dutta Gupta couple (Kalyan Sinha Roy and Samriddhi Banerjee). The wife, Shalini Dutta Gupta, says she has done enough research to establish that economic factors are often the underlying cause of student suicides and that reservation, thus, should be based on economic background and not caste. The Dalit professor, Arpan Da (played by Debasish himself), vehemently disagrees. “Don’t say general caste. Say ‘upper caste’,” he thunders, as Shalini’s publisher husband, Dibyendu warns him to remain civil.
As Dibyendu comes to Shalini’s defence, the professor probes the couple about the lack of Dalit nameplates in their upscale neighbourhood. He also wonders about the upper caste composition of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) politburo. “Remember Chuni Kotal? Remember Marichjhapi? Remember how a young man lost his leg to police firing while trying to swim to safety from Marichjhapi to the next island…”
Then, when it is time for him to leave, Shalini appears surprised that he owns a car. Arpan Da takes the opportunity to drive home the point that caste and class are almost inextricably linked. He questions Dibyendu’s pride in his “educated, zamindari” heritage. “What zamindari heritage are you talking about? The one that became the Swadeshi heritage? And the Congress heritage later or the heritage of Lenin and Stalin? And kept the Dalit invisible all through?”
Caste-based social capital allows a Bhadralok like Dibyendu to change his identity as many times as he wants, Debasish tells ThePrint while explaining the professor’s argument. “This perpetuates his dominance in all socio-political spheres while shamelessly denying the existence of caste.”
In another scene, the professor instructs the couple’s housekeeper to keep his empty dinner plate with hers, on the floor. With this statement, he openly emphasises that, while the Bhadralok might seat people like him on their table, he would always remain a chotolok (a person of low birth) for them.
But it is the other chotolok, the housekeeper Chobi Rani Mandal (Tiyasa Chattopadhyay), who truly represents the invisible subaltern in Oboyob despite minimal dialogue.
“Chobi Rani Mandal answers the question that Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak had asked in the title of her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. The answer is no, she cannot. Yes, there are Ambedkarites, like the Dalit professor in my play, who are vocal against deeply entrenched caste bias even within the so-called liberals but they are still too few in number and the Chobi Rani Mandals do not have the agency to speak up for themselves,” Debasish stresses.
Chattopadhyay says that, in the play, Mandal is thrice as oppressed. “Chobi Rani Mandal is pushed to the margins by her caste, her class and her gender. She works silently in an upper caste household and is constantly being spoken down to not just by her employers but even by the Dalit professor even though she belongs to his own caste,” she tells ThePrint.
At the end of the play, Mandal sits quietly in a corner, smoking Shalini’s leftover cigarette. For Debasish, the half-burnt cigarette is a metaphor for the Dalit’s half-life, even in liberal spaces.
“She speaks with the audience through her silence [and] irritates the other characters in the play while they are having an animated debate through her abrupt questions about seemingly unimportant daily chores. To me, she is the most important character of the play,” says Chattopadhyay.
‘No space free of caste bias’
Debasish, 28, is a research scholar at the School of Drama and Fine Arts, University of Calicut. He has not used his surname in the play’s poster because he does not wish to identify with any caste. “In the last 10 years, I must have written at least 20 plays and acted in more than 50. No space is free of caste bias, not even Kolkata’s theatre space. If it is a play on Dalits, almost invariably it would be written and directed by an upper-caste playwright. The gaze is never the subaltern’s,” Debasish says.
After the play, Debasish and his theatre group Bally, Oglam, invites academics and authors specialising in Dalit issues, such as playwrights Samudra Biswas and Asit Kumar Biswas, on stage for a 40-minute forum discussion.
The Chobi Rani Mandals of Oboyob always go to work for the Dutta Guptas and never the other way round, says academic and author Debi Chatterjee, who has translated many Bengali Dalit plays into English.
Debasish then asserts the relevance of his play in post-modern times, even though he is aware that staging it during the national elections will invite questions about his political leanings. “All political parties are vying for the Dalit vote, be it BJP with subaltern Hindutva, Trinamool Congress with its slogan for Ma, Mati, Manush [Mother, Motherland and People] or the Left with its stated aim for a class, casteless society. I am not anti-anyone. I am for the Dalit speaking up for herself,” Debasish says.
Bibhas Chattopadhyay, a member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, Bankura, came to watch Oboyob from outside Kolkata. The long journey did not go unrewarded, he says. “The play offered no easy solutions which I liked. And also threw at us, the audience, a demand. That we, the so-called Bengali liberals, should accept that we are guilty of caste atrocities against the Dalits, overtly or otherwise.”
Courtesy : The Print
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