I found Badal Sircar on the street.
When I was in college, in the wee hours of the morning I used to sell newspaper at the Tiptur bus stand. One morning, after some brisk selling, a small piece of paper caught my attention. It was a piece of paper into which Jayanna, who ran a shop at the bus stand, wrapped puffed rice for me. After having my morning breakfast of puffed rice, I was about to wipe my mouth with it and I was struck by a headline. It said, “Arthapoorna Meravanige” (Meaningful Procession). It had no details of who wrote it or when it was written. I was in the habit of reading everything that I laid my hands on – stray essays, books, newspaper articles — it was an insatiable hunger. I fully attribute this hunger to my teachers Karunakaran and Shrinivasa Murthy who inspired me with their teaching and goaded me to read just about everything. I still have hazy memories of what I read that day; it had the story of an old man who was wandering aimlessly looking for a boy lost in a procession. Somehow, since that day, I have always felt that the lost boy is ‘me'.
I spent the whole day in great restlessness. In the evening I went to my teacher Karunakaran's house and showed him the piece of paper and shared my experience with him. He did his bit of investigation and found out that it was about Badal Sircar's Bengali play which had been staged in Kannada. He used the opportunity to talk to me about several Bengali writers. And during this conversation that we had, I was introduced to Utpal Dutt and the Kannada theatre group Samudaya.
It was now my turn to look for the boy who got lost in the procession. Wherever I saw a little boy – on the street, in the bus stand — I would stand and wonder if this is the old man's boy. Somehow that two line story I read in that piece of paper stayed in my head. In my theatre journey, this image kept growing constantly. It grew so gigantic that it merged with Basavaraj in Lankesh's novel “Biruku” and Chenna in Devanur Mahadeva's “Kusuma Baale”. Even after this, it never stopped growing in my head.
It's also a matter of great surprise how I began to feel that this story of Badal Sircar was my own. I'm sure many sensitive youngsters who live and grow up by the wayside would feel like me. The play, the story, all of it integrated in me.
Finally, I got to see the play, “Meravanige”. That day I was transported to an altogether different world. The place in Bangalore where the play was staged seemed like India itself to me. Much later, I saw Badal Sircar's “Evam Indrajit”, “Pagla Ghoda” and read all that he wrote about the Third Theatre, and with it, my bond with street theatre strengthened. Later, my image of the ‘street' kept developing. If I lost hope in street theatre it was after governments and companies took over the form. After I started studying theatre as a discipline, I started academically studying Badal Sircar. He helped me understand Brecht, Grotovsky, and Peter Brook. Badal Sircar was, for me, the most important writer and theatre person, because he helped me shed the hangover of pure literature and taught me the importance of responding to the crisis of the moment.
In the ‘procession' of my life, I later met M.D. Nanjunda Swamy of Raitha Sangha, Lohiaite Gopal Gowda, Kishan Patnaik, Safdar Hashmi, Lankesh, Devanur Mahadeva, Gaddar, Karanth, K.V. Subbanna, Che Guevara and U.R. Ananthamurthy. The encounter was possible only because Badal Sircar prepared me for it.
Even now, I am at peace in the ‘street'. ‘Home' scares me.
(translated by Deepa Ganesh)
