Alka, directed by Uma Jhunjhunwala, explores unrequited love of a mother for her adopted children. The director speaks to UK Banerjee
Manoj Mitra (born 1938) is Bengal’s ace thespian today who combines in his persona the gifts of being playwright, actor and director. He has written over a 100 plays, many of which have emerged in other Indian languages and staged all over the land. His acting prowess has been legendary — on both stage and celluloid — with the eponymous role in Tapan Sinha’s Banchharamer Bagan earning him a national best actor award in 1980. He founded his theatre-group Sundaram in the early 1960’s, where he has been directing most of his own plays ever since.
This versatile background of Mitra is important to know, for understanding catholic interests he has evinced in most of his works: always turning focus to newer and unexplored grounds. Alakanadar Putrakanya (Children of Alakanada) is his highly successful handiwork in which he explores the domain of unrequited love of a mother for her adapted children, to the point of overlooking everything else — including their grievous faults — in order to provide them niches in life. The elder Manasi was brought from an orphanage and, to save her from drowning, Alakananda’s husband jumped into the water and hit a rock to become a life-long invalid and a burden on Alakananda. The other adapted sibling Shubho is a brilliant boy, lured by his classmates into alcoholism and criminally implicated for raping and killing a girl, near whose body he was left in drunken stupor. There is a single-mother socialite living next door whose little child she would often baby-sit and, taking advantage of Alakananda’s soft nature, this lady disappears one fine morning leaving the baby with her. And, against every odd, she takes over the baby’s whole-life care!
Alka, presented by little Thespian from Kolkata in the NSD’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav and directed by Uma Jhunjhunwala, is the Hindi version of the play where Uma also essays the eponymous role with aplomb. But most of her dramatis personae verge on overacting. Alka’s own brother and his grown-up son — both crazy on cricket — do not make their mark. It is only Shubho whose trauma, in being forced to extract huge ransom-money from his foster parents, is most palpable. His wayward classmate, responsible for hatching the vicious plot, also fails to impress, notwithstanding vigorous physical acting. Shbho’s biological father — whose initial penury to rear up a motherless child led Alakananda to bring Shubho home in the first instance, but who later made good — seems a good choice.
Dilating on what attracted her to Mitra’s script, Uma says, “While studying his original text, I found that though the play revolved around the mother Alkananda, It also pulsated with every possible human emotion and expression and communicated a tangible feminist stance, apart from noticing several evils. Indeed, I discovered new dimensions and explored avenues to endow a new life to the original script.” On the play’s relevance to our time and clime, she holds, “Analysis of each character depicts the internalised hegemony: in a society subscribing to patriarchy. Through the microscopic happenings in the family, the play eventually pictures the macroscopic society.”