Four great plays of the tragic playwright (Budha Chingtham)
- Part 4 -

Dr Salam Shantibala Devi *

Budha Chingtham (Centre) announcing beauty of floating huts of Loktak highlighted through experimental theatre on Sep 05 2018 :: Pix - TSE

What is the meaning that the writer gives to Mythical Surrender; and how does he try to interpret the word 'rape' in a conflict zone where a marauding force uses it as a tool to dehumanize the spirit of a vanquished people is clearly shown. While showing the disintegration in human spirit we are reminded how the art of rape has been used in different parts of the world as a weapon to kill the spirit of other vanquished people.

Such incidents had taken place in our land not so long ago. O Women, the stories of your suffering is unending. Let us near the heart wrenching story of such a girl who had been tormented cruelly by a group of marauders.

... My daughter refused to obey the order to get undressed. So they ordered her to choose between rape and death. She choose death, so they started to torture her cutting off her breasts one at a time with a knife, then her ears lobes and then they opened her belly … after a time of agony, my daughter breathed her last...I was powerless, I wasn't able to protect her.
(International Alert 2004, Women's Bodies at Battleground, Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls During war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, P.35)

This is how Mythical surrender keeps on drawing out and displaying such garish incidents for everybody to see. How did the rape victim Sanarei carry on her life? Budha Chingtham had thus used his power of imagination and poetic vision to create such an unforgettable character in Manipuri theatre.

A Far Cry is another play that had successfully introduced Budha Chingtham in the International theatre scenario besides getting nomination in the Best Original Script and Best Innovative Sound Design Award in the Meta festival. Though other plays had got entries in International Festivals, the play A Far Cry was selected to represent India in the Four Yearly Theatre Olympics International. One of the biggest theatre event in the world.

Luckily I got the opportunity to view the play in the 8th Theatre Olympics in 2018 at the Birla Auditorium in Kolkata where the Festival was First hosted in India. He became the first Theatre Olympian to represent Manipuri playwright in the Theatre Olympics which is a landmark event in India.

It continued for fifteen days in seventeen cities of India. The event is regarded on Olympic in the matter of theatre all over the world. It has fourteen juries selected internationally on their merit. As I happened to be in Kolkata for medical check-up I got the golden chance to visit the Theatre Olympics and view the play A Far Cry.

The play is based on a very sentimental theme. A young sister writes to her brother constantly to come back to the free world where she could play with him nagging like a normal child. A few days later she found both her brother and her father bound to an old bullock cart and shot to death. The young girl became eventually demented.

A noted theatre critic Diwan Singh Bajeli writes in March 29, 2012 issue of The Hindu on this play like the following –
The thematic core of the play is a letter being written by a sister to her brother who joined the underground movement of insurgency. Full of Pathos, the letter is heart rending. She beseeches her brother to return home and clean his blood stained hands. A blend of the stylized and realistic mode of production, the most outstanding quality of the production is highly imaginative..."
(The Hindu 29/3/2012)

The play develops with a philosophical turn. The evil tradition of the times, the writer condemns scornfully. The character of the father (Birahari) in the play speaks thus in one of the dialogues –

... The pair of bullocks cry every night.
The wheels go on rotating anti-clockwise for that the pair cries every night.
This wheel of time does not bring anything good.
What he brings us is only bloodshed and violence.
It wants to go on rotating in the stream of blood all the time.
(Four Plays of Conflict, P.17)

The writer has taken his position by the ordinary citizen. And he dreams of a common place where there is found no disparity among men where there is no rich nor poor as well as no violence. When the sister is on the verge of losing her mind, a police officer comes forward to comment –
The many fall a victim to the ongoing turbulences, political conspiracies, inter community conflicts and disturbances, social economic clashes, insurgency related activities. Who gets greatly hurt in a conflict zone is none other than the common man".
(Four Conflict Plays, P. 26)

The play's production is highly stylized, uses flashback technique, distorted speeches and the movement are a combination of realistic, expressionistic as well as unconventional attitudes. In short Budha calls it "a non-realistic tragic play".

When I asked further about the play he replied "I feel a huge dissatisfaction seeing the conventional realistic tragedies full of cries of laments. The real sorrow in the heart cannot become satisfied with lament only. How should on try to express the ineffable feeling of grief is what my theatre always seeks to express."

This is what the reality of Budha's tragedy is. Another one of Budha's plays that received nomination for the META Best Original Script Category and Best Innovative Sound Design is The Priestess which is yet again another serious tragedy.

It concerns the fate of a couple and their little boy. One night the man was secretly arrested by the security force. When he became untraceable, an old man in her neighbourhood guided her to use her clairvoyant ability to trace her husband. The distressed woman formerly used to be a female shaman and using her long list shamanic powers, she came to know of her husband's whereabouts. He was found confined inside an army camp being put under third degree method torture.

Strangely the playwright employs supernatural elements in a scientific manner in this poetic construction. The play in essence is highly abstract and may prove hard to be grasped for the common viewer as it verges on "post-modern concept performing art" that uses the concept of installations.

In the course of the play sorrow and suffering has been added to tragedy when her husband was shown murdered followed by the rape that ravaged the female Shaman's body before she was dumped as garbage in wilderness. Then people started calling her bad names in their ignorance. Finally she met with the Chief Priestess who pitied upon her and gave refuge in the coteries of female shamans. The play closed in a hard to answer riddle like enigma.

Thus all the mentioned four plays of Budha belong to the group of highly serious tragedy. And peculiarly the titles are given in the English language about which I asked him the reason, to which he explained –
"It doesn't mean that I want to neglect my own language. But it is not new that a language that is naturally rich gets richer by inducting other vocabularies. On the other hand I had wanted other viewers who understand English to feel through these plays the heart of the matter that we face today in our land that is filled with untold number of problems. You may consider it my individual desire".

To conclude, besides these four award winning tragedies I found some other tragedies by him which are not yet published reflecting scene of violence of blood-shed, cruelty to the helpless weak – such cases that have led many to mental depressions in fact a virtual dystopia like state that is our land each one of them constituting a climatic event.

The tragedies that the playwright had penned happen to be real life tragedies. From these plays we can construct extraordinary laws of tragedy found in the marginal or fringe areas of the country–tragedy of the periphery, we may call it.

It is Budha's success that he could bring about a major thematic change in the course of play writing in India. Today we have successfully conveyed the message to the mainland people of how those people living in their own land spend their lives like refugees, facing the fear of imminent arrests and torture through this peripheral nature of tragic drama.

Another remarkable innovation of Budha is the projection of the female protagonist in the land where only women had undertaken major social reforms and changes. He has put under deliberate use unconscious and sub-conscious techniques to put a big social question. His tragic plays had been directly contextualized in his social settings.

However he has broken the tradition of realist tragedy, only to be substituted by a tradition of the characteristics of non-realistic tragedy where he has put into use female protagonists within a psychological frame. So, when we read his tragedies it feels like we are viewing a painting of mankind's tragic literature that had been going on through the past centuries.

Budha Chingtham is certainly a multi-faced playwright, Director and Critic who has been crying his heart out for his land and people.


Concluded...