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THEATRE

KALANTOK LAL FITA (The Deadly Red Tape)

About the play

Warren Hastings, the Governer General of East India Company, had a business deal with Babu Balaram Pathak in the year 1777. The deal was to supply 1000 lambs to the troops of the Company during the war with Tipu Sultan in Mysore. The British army lost, the lamb flocks got scattered. Baburam raised a bill for his delivery. The file got stuck in bureaucratic red tape. Since then, seven generations of Balaram's heirs died out of despair in their vain attempt to retrieve the money. The payment was irretrievable from the confines of official red tape. The writer Sibram Chakrabarty, being one of the descendants, started his search to reclaim the money in independent India, present India. He faces the same predicament of his ancestors. He ran from post to pillar. Finally, he committed suicide out of hopelessness.

Director's Note

Sibram Chakraborty is one of the important writers of Bengali literature. But, noteworthy, he is rarely adapted to stage or screen. The problematic of this evasion lies in his language. The literary metaphors are so strong and rooted in their own form that it is almost impossible to adapt them to visual language. The puns, literal alliterations, linguistic symbols are difficult to tackle with. In the process of adapting the play, with the help of playwright Bratya Basu, we took an indefinite leap in abstraction. The literal absurdities in Sibram's story are transformed in to visual parallels. Nothing in the space remained 'normal'. The properties and the characters are given an 'abnormal' context, quaint acting styles devised. Immediately, we developed a very fresh communication with Sibram's language and were able to contextualize the visual expression with much more ease and elan. To give a literal analogy, I would say, we handled the matter in a Kafkaesque mode.