Play portraying Ghatak, Jyoti Basu, Promode Dasgupta, slams CPM’s ‘repression’, touches many a nerve in the party

* “When your party will sit in power, can you guarantee that they will not open fire on the masses?”

* “Yes, it will never happen. Our party can never open fire on rural agricultural farmers and mill workers.”

* “Let’s see, I believe from my heart...power is power. Power kills you. And it also justifies killing. That’s the irony of power.”

This is a dramatic exchange between two actors — one playing legendary filmmaker Ritwick Ghatak and the other the avant garde Tagore exponent and Communist dissenter Debabrata Biswas — in a theatre production based on Biswas’s work Bratyajoner Ruddha Sangeet (Stifled Songs of the Outcast).

Opening just before the Lok Sabha elections, the play, with its stinging indictment of the CPM establishment in the state, has tapped into a fierce debate between intellectuals in the run-up to voting next Wednesday.

The play has created ripples across the political and cultural spectrum especially after a report in CPM party organ Ganashakti last month suggested that artists critical of the state government were “under watch.” That prompted the forum of intellectuals against the CPM to issue a statement against the “veiled threat” by the ruling Marxists.

The play strives to capture what it calls the “ruthless domination” of cultural personalities in West Bengal under a repressive Communist regime. And what has touched many a nerve in the comrades is that its dramatis personae includes, among others, real-life characters Jyoti Basu, Promode Dasgupta and their adversaries like Ghatak, Suchitra Mitra, Salil Choudhury and Biswas himself.

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