Of love and a river of sorrow
`When deep sorrow of a woman becomes her innate power'. With this exploration, "Aavartan" (The Gyration), the final production of Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith's first year B. Drama students, left the audience of Shillong and Varanasi spellbound.
"Aavartan" starts with the Aavartak (form of cloud personified) Nachiketa (Joydeb Das), narrating a murder mystery where the mystery is amphibian, i.e. psychological and eternal as well. The play deals with the issue of female foeticide in poetic silence. The decision to abort the foetus makes Dr Kavita Deshpande (Manisha Srivastava) a patient who constantly thinks that she has committed a sin, that's why she has lost her newborn baby Tuntuny. So she decides to atone. But the outsider Nachiketa, who enters to get the diary of her slain husband and makes her a captive, misinterprets the expression of atonement in fear. The last words of the anguished Kavita are addressed to Tuntuni: "You are simply an outsider to me... ?"
Written and prepared by Gautam Chatterjee - not to be confused with the author - the play opens with a climax and finishes in an anti-climax. However sorrowful and meaningless life may be, a woman cannot let her only love rot away. Before we reach the end, there take place some dramatic dialogues of Kavita with her dancer sister Meeta (Seema Rai) and the three colleagues of her divorcee George Deshmukh. The three colleagues are Sir, Deshmukh and Avaak (Kuldeep Jaiswal, Umesh Bhatia and Vijay Yadav).
In accordance with Bharatamuni's Natya Shastra and the aesthetic commentary of Abhinava Gupta, the polymath of the 10th Century, Dr. Chatterjee has evolved a neo-classical theatre with most modern accent since 1990. His several plays like "Apne Apne Nepathya", "Adhure Raag", "Sandhya Bh0asa", "Angira", "Echo Chamber", "Swapna Chhanda", "Tatpurush", "Anubandh", "Waiting Room", etc., develop in an upside-down language, and deal with the rasa theory and other dramatic nuances in the script initially, and then on the stage. Hence his scripts de-condition the minds of the 19th and 20th centuries. He makes no room for words but uses words to create finally a deep silence as rasa. He practices the theory of Bhartrhari for words and dialogue delivery - "Meaning is not conveyed from the actor to the listener, rather, the spoken words serve only as the stimulus to reveal or uncover the meaning which was already present in the mind of the listener."
Here, in "Aavartan", all the scenes co-relate in such a way that finally one can feel that every time or scene is a part of one single eternal time or scene, where the actor is Atman, all-pervasivewith 49 bhavas. This script also deals with the inner meanings of saint Kabir through the relevant dialogues of the main character Nachiketa. Locale in the script is Darjeeling, the mountains, the night, the winter and a mysterious silence.
GAUTAM CHATTERJEE
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