Colonial Modernism and Actor Training in the Late Nineteenth-Century Bengali Stage

 

The drunkard who immerses himself in drunkenness by drinking will not be able to act, even as a drunkard. An actor seems to divide his mind into two while acting—while one part is immersed in his role, the other watches as a witness, whether the immersion is adequate, the lines are being spoken correctly, the co-actor is moving correctly…the audience is hearing him till the last limit of the auditorium or not. The actor has to keep an eye on all these things while acting at the same time, by the merit of his technique.

— Binodini Dasi (Allana 15)

 

I am gradually inching towards final bell in this stage of life. Decimated, hopeless, every single day is passing in the same mundane fashion; despair has limited the flow of my life. You had repeatedly assured me that God doesn’t create any being without a purpose, everyone is born to fulfill a divinely ordained plan and once that’s accomplished, they have to leave behind this human form. I have discussed this so many times with you, but looking back on my life, I fail to grasp what purpose God has fulfilled through me, what part of it have I accomplished and what is left to be done? Isn’t my task over yet?

—Letter from Binodini Dasi to Girish Chandra Ghosh (Dasi)

 

The aforementioned excerpts bring out two important facets about the identity of an actor in the late nineteenth-century Bengali professional theatre. While the first excerpt reflects on an actor’s confident assertion of the double-consciousness underlying naturalistic acting[i], the second one comes from an identity crisis, where the female actor is seeking validation for her life’s journey from the male actor-manager. Before we jump into exploring the problematic nature of this shift in tone, let’s contextualize the characters of Binodini Dasi (1862–1941) and Girish Chandra Ghosh (1844–1912).

 

In her essay The Birth of Realism and the Training of the Actor, Amal Allana proposes that we comprehend this theorization around acting through the lens of colonial modernity, which determined the birth of proscenium theatre as the ‘culturally appropriate’ form of entertainment for the Indians. She traces this back to the moment of Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s Minute on Education (1835), which called for training/civilizing a new class of Indians who would ease the process of colonial governance. It can be argued that Girish Chandra Ghosh was one such intermediary agent who determined the development of a new nationalism in the arts, and who wrote extensively on the training of the actor, vis-à-vis training in other popular modes of performance. 

 

If one were to break down the term actor-training into its component parts, we would observe that in the context of late nineteenth century, the overwhelmingly historicized actor is the prostitute actress whose presence on stage created new circuits of desire in the cosmopolitan space of Calcutta. Sumanta Banerjee’s analysis of the popular modes of entertainment of this particular spatio-temporal juncture alerts us to the birth of this new professional class, existing in tandem with the courtesan, the jatra actor, the nautch girl, the female impersonator and the singer of folk forms like thumri and kirtanas. All these art forms had their own models of training the performer, pedagogic models which remain largely undocumented or scattered sporadically in testimonials like Binodini Dasi’s autobiographical writings, Amar Katha (My Story) and Amar Abhinetri Jibon (My Life as an Actress).  Recent scholarship by Amit Maitra has broadened our understanding from the account of one actress to others like Jagattarini, Golap Sundari, Elokeshi; hagiographic narratives which share a set of overlapping features.

 

The prostitute actress is recounted in terms of her physical appearance, her ‘god-gifted’ voice, her constant battle for respectability in the professional theatre and, finally, her ignorant self-doubting existence as a student of acting. This writing of history becomes circumspect when we grasp the fact that the memoirs of actresses from that period were heavily edited and re-written by the self-appointed pedagogues of the theatre like Saratchandra Ghosh, Amritalal Mitra, Amritalal Basu, Biharilal Chattopadhay, Ardhendu Shekhar Mustafi and, lastly, Girish Chandra Ghosh. This editorial intervention stems from an internalized logic of the Bengali stage—the intellectual advancement of the masses was tied to the dialogues uttered by the actor whereas the sensorial entertainment could be obtained from the body of the actor.

 

Following Tracy Davis’ model of looking at the Victorian actress as working women, one can summarise that the actor-manager figure symbolized the voice, and the prostitute actress figure was the site of the body. We see this hierarchy emerge in the relationship between Girish Chandra Ghosh and Binodini Dasi, through their respective writings available in the late nineteenth-century public sphere. As part of this essay, I would focus my attention on ‘Acting and Actors’ (Obhinoy o Obhineta) and ‘The Education of Impersonators’ (Bohurupee Vidya) by Girish Chandra Ghosh and excerpts from Binodini Dasi’s My Story and My Life as an Actress (a English compilation of Amar Katha and Amar Abhinetri Jibon, edited by Rimli Bhattacharya) to foreground the classical guru-shishya tradition or mimetic model at the heart of the actor-training pedagogies. What remains to be seen is that when does the prostitute actress break out of the discipline imposed by the patriarchal actor-director and what does it do to her self-identification as an actor?

 

In The Colonial Staged, Sudipto Chatterjee alerts us to the project of colonial modernity that swamped the definitions of theatre held by Girish Chandra Ghosh. While on the one hand, Girish Ghosh is remembered to be influenced by the traditional performing arts (like jatra[ii], kheur[iii], khemta[iv]) of what was known as ‘Black Town’ of Calcutta, on the other hand, he was in contact with the British culture through the personages of Mrs George Benjamin Lewis and G.B.W. Lewis and through British newspapers and magazines, which published stories of British actors and new happenings on the European stage. We find proof of this practice in the international section of two important Bengali magazines of this period, Natya Mandir and Roop o Rango[v]. These would include the serialized biography of Edmund Kean as ‘Obhineta Kean’ (The Actor Kean), or reviews of performances of Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth or Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet or Ellen Terry as Ophelia.

 

While looking at Girish Ghosh’s writings on acting, we find an overarching influence of these models. For instance, while taking about the aspect of physical appearance and casting in a play, he would take recourse to examples from British theatre reviews[vi]. Girish Ghosh would cite Miss Budet of the Bandman Group to stress the point that if the actor internalizes the image of the actor as the writer/poet as imagined him, she or he would be able to essay it out on stage. Not resting with highlighting this development of imagination of the actor, he adds a Sarah Bernhardt anecdote to didactically lay down the need for sincere effort, not ego or arrogance. While observing these dictums by Girish Ghosh, one must not forget that he constantly cites British actresses to create role models for the moral behavior of a new class of professional actors being born on the Bengali stage. Uncannily enough, we find Binodini Dasi creating her framework of aspirations, through the stories narrated by the actor-manager:

 

I did not care very much for conversation and stories. But I liked very much the stories narrated by Girish-babu about famous British actors and actresses and whatever else he read out to us from books. He explained to us the various kinds of critical opinions expressed about Mrs. Siddons when she had rejoined the theatre after being married for ten years…I did not merely listen to these stories, but absorbed from them whatever I could of their bhava and then constantly meditated on it…In order to experience as many bhavas as possible, I kept my mind constantly occupied, living in the world of imagination.   (Allana 31)

 

We are able to observe that Girish Ghosh exerted considerable influence on the minds of actors who lacked formal education to engage with these magazines themselves, with his criticism and borrowings from the bhava-anubhava model of affective utterance in Natyashastra merging with a proto-Stanislavskian[vii] approach to building a character. The vibhava-anubhava-vyabichari model of rasa-nishpatti[viii] is something that finds photographic validation in a legendary series of nine photographs of Girish Ghosh. In this series of monochrome images, he is seen to be depicting the nava-rasas[ix] in their ideal facial manifestation, so that his students and successive generation of actors can derive inspiration from it. Inspiration becomes a much debated word in the late nineteenth-century Victorian or French stage, as actors started wondering whether acting is something born out of divine inspiration in a genius-like artist or through the efforts of an actor in designing the external manifestation of a character. This latter trend is identified as proto-Stanislavksi, as it represents one of the earliest moves in formalizing methodologies of actor training. Girish Ghosh, inspired by his British contemporaries, tried to replicate this model in context of the Bengali stage.

 

While this methodology might be seen as empowering the prostitute-actress to transcend from her dreary conditions of existence by escaping to a world of imagination, it also reflects an attitude of prioritizing one’s mental existence over the physical one.

 

Girish Ghosh does talk about developing the physical dimensions of an actor, focusing on the importance of stage make-up and costuming, but they constantly betray a reliance on the aesthetics of the Victorian stage. Even in this discussion he is deliberately gendered. When Girish Ghosh has to talk about how an actor’s imagination of the character improved upon the conceptions of the playwright, his examples are exclusively of male actors like Nagendranath Bandopadhyay as Birendra Singha or Ardhendu Shekhar Mustafi in Meghnadh Badh Kabya. In these examples, we see Ghosh contrasting his ideas of training the actor with that of these male actors/pedagogues on the principle of intonation and diction:

 

I have come to know a new thing about Ardhendu Shekhar from a critic which I could never share with Ardhendu myself although I stayed so long with him. He explained that the syllables “e” or “ee” when used by actors can make their craft superior. My personal opinion is different. (Obhinoy o Obhineta)

 

This insistence upon voice training seems to dominate as the parameter for judging the merit of acting on the late nineteenth-century stage. Girish Ghosh points out the intonation and pronunciation of the people of East Bengal as the hurdle for any aspirant to the stage. This observation by the foremost actor-manager of the early phase of professional theatre in Calcutta  alerts us to the fact that the literary renaissance tied to Bengali nationalism was not inclusive of all communities and regions. In light of such a development, we are able to see how Girish Ghosh was convinced that in his role as Natya-Adhyaksha (Theatre Pedagogue), he was being an agent of emancipation for the middle-class Hindu prostitute:

 

Through your life, a lot of important tasks have been achieved. Your work in the Rangalay has given pleasure to countless audience members. Onstage, your miraculous force of personality has given shape to such vivid and diverse characters, that one can’t but laud your efforts. In my production of  Chaitanya Lila (1884), your impersonation of Chaitanya has inspired spiritual raptures in so many people, that these Vaishnav’s have blessed you immensely. You are not a person of ordinary luck, by means of a divinely gifted power of concentration had you been able to comprehend these characters. If you have not been able to appreciate the fruits of this labour, its not your fault- while bad days have pulled you down, your sense of empathy reveals that you will soon be amply rewarded. (Girish Ghosh’s reply to the aforementioned letter by Binodini Dasi)

 

The above passage can be taken as example of the Vaishnav value system within which Girish Ghosh would always configure the identity and work of an actor. This value system finds mention in a lot of women’s autobiographies emerging at this hour of cultural nationalism. Tanika Sarkar would identify that in the imaginary lives of Bengali middle/upper caste women, subversive circuits of desire would open up in a Gopi-like desire for the divine figure of Krishna. This was achievable through an expression of bhakta rasa, which allowed an individual to challenge patriarchal prescriptions of everyday life by finding validation on a transcendental plane. Girish Chandra would actively promote this value system to the point that one finds it hard to ascertain whether the bhakta rasa[x] is directed towards the deity of Lord Krishna or towards himself, the confident assertive cultural impresario of the nationalist stage.

 

Notes

 

[i] In the Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts and Analysis, Patrice Pavis says there is no such thing as 'natural kind of acting that can do without conventions and be received as self-evident and universal. Any acting is based on a codified system (even if the audience does not see it as such) of behaviour and actions that are considered to be believable and realistic or artificial and theatrical.' From Binodini’s own writings, naturalistic acting seems to suggest a form of acting in which an actor is able to express the gestures and emotions of a character, as it would be in real life. But Girish Chandra Ghosh, in an obituary of the actor-trainer Ardhendu Shekhar Mustafi, proposes a very different definition. Ghosh suggests that Ardhendu Shekhar Mustafi wouldn’t exactly replicate the behaviour of the character but embellish it with gestures that would communicate the affect of the dramatic sequence more effectively.