Four great plays of the tragic playwright (Budha Chingtham)
- Part 1 -

Dr Salam Shantibala Devi *

Budha Chingtham (Centre) announcing beauty of floating huts of Loktak highlighted through experimental theatre on Sep 05 2018 :: Pix - TSE

Budha Chingtham (b. 7 December 1957) is one of the great playwrights in Modern Manipuri dramatic literature. He is also a highly regarded theatre and art critic, a multifaceted personality, he is a director as well as choreographer. He had been shortlisted four times in the Best Original Script Writer Competition organized by the Mahindra Theatre Festival People, moreover he had been awarded the META Best Original Script writer 2011, in the same event.

META is one of Indian theatre industry's premier awards. META provides a concrete platform to celebrate and promote theatre's varied elements like playwriting, set design, costume and light design, direction and performance. Instituted by the Mahindra Group, META aims at bringing together the best of Indian theatre from the years gone by. The awards consists of a specially designed trophy and a cheque of Rs. 1,00,000 for the Best Production, Rs. 75,000/- for Best Original playwright and Rs 45,000/- for all other award categories.

A few words on META Festival in short for Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Award is called for in this connection. Every year the organisers select a minimum of ten (10) entries from the length and width of the Indian sub-continent and on an average they receive 300 to 400 entries. Out of these, the ten (10) shortlisted plays will be given a chance to perform on stage in the city of Delhi from which a final jury will be asked to select the best of the best. The Best play Award will be given over a sumptuous dinner in the world class luxury hotel, the Hotel Taj Mahal. META has followed the tradition inexorably upto the present.

Budha Chingtham happens to be the only person who had been nominated four times in this prestigious festival and who had received also the best Original script Award in the history of META. That must be why it is written on the Coffee Table book of the 10th Edition of META – "Budha Chingtham is greatly respected for bringing Manipuri theatre to Indian masses. Chingtham's work as a playwright has evoked fervid emotions. His Manipuri plays are crafted around a central theme of the troubles faced by the locals due to AFSPA."

Budha Chingtham had penned more than eighteen plays till date. His journey from a theatre critic to a playwright with his stage play Black Orchid that had bagged him an entry to National as well as international festivals. The play Black Orchid was written in 2009 and was produced under the Direction of Toijam Shila Devi of Prospective Repertory Theatre, Nambol.

Some other important plays of the playwright are
1. Mythical Surrender (2010),
2. A Far Cry (2011),
3. The Priestess (2012),
4. Sub-Human People (2013),
5. Dreams From My Room (2014),
6. Kaidongpal (2015),
7. Venomous People (2015),
8. The Suicide Room (2016),
9. Lamdaithel (2017),
10. House of Fire (2019),
12. Lampi (2017),
13. Lampi II (2017),
14. The Smoky Lake (2018),
15. Imagidi Ningthem Yeknabagi Macha (My Royal Son the son of my Enemy, 2019),
16. Hi-O Hi (Boat-O Boat, 2016) and
17. Wild Water (2020) etc.

The only published play is the Conflict Tetralogy that had brought Budha the Meta Award. This volume has also given us a chance to analyze his experimental dramaturgy in book form enhancing the study since we had already enjoyed it as stage plays. I had personally been waiting for this opportunity since a long time. It won't be out of context to remind the reader that I myself had been insisting upon him to publish his plays as well as his critical appreciation of theatrical products on stage.

I, having tried my hands on some plays had an eagerness to study the intricacies of his play structures. So I had a mind to study his plays in script. Therefore, on many occasions I used to bombard him with many questions on his stage craft and dramatic structures. On such occasions he had replied almost glibly "My plays are based upon reality, upon real acts that we see and fixed around us. Only thing is that I had added a little dramatic fiction on my own". Such was his answer.

Again when I asked him about the method on theory of writing experimental plays he would say "First, we have to think realistically. Next we must turn it into an experimental play. We can turn towards experimentation only after digesting something. We can close the gap between the audience and the experimental performance with that means. Because the experimental theatre takes birth when a conventional play cannot voice what we are trying to speak. If we want to do experimental theatre we need to possess a philosophy of our own."

Budha Chingtham's plays have been able to make a place of their own at present. In his play structure as well as his diction, emotion reaches out to people as the most powerful factor, Alongside this factor of emotion a lyrical element is inherent throughout, After reading his play we come across a benign poet. His dialogues run with a poetic vein.

Some examples are taken from his published plays :-

No, no, mother !
Never say such words
Your child is afraid terribly.
My body trembles uncontrollably
Don't extinguish this life inside your womb.
On this earth closed with fine granary
Under this green circular vault
Filled with silver light
Upon the lap of Mother Nature
Allow me to play in liberty.
Mother: My sweet child,
The first sight your eyes will set upon
When you open your eyes in this world
Will be
The curly smoke rising from funeral pyres
Black and thick
Then again dried blotches of blood
That have dried upon corpses,
Yet once again the fresh spurts the blood
Gushing out of young bodies,
And these are not all,
When you open your eyes in this world
The color that you will see,
The white color only, white cloths be during bodies
In every house,
My sweet child, the first sound you will hear
Is the pitiful laments,
Of someone who has lost her child,
Of someone who has lost her husband
Only the painful lamentations of separated people
Yes, my sweet child, these are all
That you'll see, you'll hear
Today I also lament freely
After the enemy had left me totally violated
After
A poison plant sneaks into my womb.

(Mythical Surrender, P. 87-88)

* * * * * * * * *

From a wave to a wavelet
From a cliff to another cliff
The cloud thus hanging
Why do you panic in vain
Because you aren't going to fall down,
From a wave to another wave
Free the body gestures.
Ye clouds, cover the cliffs
When your tender fingers touch
Turn O cloud into water droplets
Gather ye clouds over the pinnacle of the sky.

(The Priestess, P. 43)

* * * * * * * * *

Dream, dream red colored dream,
Dream, dream, red colored dream,
No, no, does my dream of pena
Not have any other color
Then this red color
To dream 4

* * * * * * * * *

O! the time is long past
Since I haven't heard the sweet melodies
Of hills, lakes and rivers,
The crystal clear streams of ravine creens
The playfield where they played the bari music
They have not been long sun
Where I once played diving
In the company of silvery fishes
Today this evening has brought
Remembrances only.

(Dreams From My Room, P. 59-62)

* * * * * * * * *

O! What do you call it
O! it slips down, it slips down
The sun having sunk behind the western bears
The night sky clad in black gown
Slips down the shy.
My mind, my thought
Darkness has now covered
Why O Darkness
Your ways so evil
Why do you bind me thus gradually ?
O sailor why
So cruel heartedly
Did you deposit me abjectly?
In a corner of life ?

(Mythical Surrender P. 93)

Not only does his dramatic monologues employ a heavy dose of coined words but uses much poetic elements. His narratives and situation are constructed in poetic fashion. Most of the times his dialogues follow a rhymthmic pattern.

Budha Chingtham uses aesthetic enhancement quite heavily in his dramaturgy highlighting both realistic and antirealist scenes. His most noteworthy characteristics as one of the leading Indian playwrights are found in his techniques where he has converted even mundane local themes into a universal theme and the use of non-realistic dramatic techniques with an overdose of emotion and expression theatrical devices. It has also come to our notice that Budha Chingtham has not discarded the conventional line of dramaturgy in his plays while most of the time making use of anti-realistic techniques especially expressionism, impressionism, theatre of the absurd to name a few while not forgetting to take up the National (Meetei) cultural forms and elements in these plays.

On the other hand, most of the time he habitually rejects traditional form of dramatic expression in his plays being a highly experimental dramatist. His plays are interspersed with such scenes where sudden outbursts take place, such scenes where seemingly conventional dramatic situation becomes alien and neurotic divergences take place where reality is discarded. These scenes may be said to be very akin to expressionistic techniques. In fact "expressionism is ultimately an attitude of mind which can emerge at any time" (Expressionism, p. 96)

Thus when a traditional format play is put on the stage this kind of showing the photographic realities is found unable to exhibit deeper mental angst and conflict in the states of mind of the characters at such times, it requires different experimental techniques. Therefore, what Budha Chingtham wants to express in a subjective realm, an expression that is pure and non-artificial coming out of sincere heart at the spur of the moment, unalloyed and bereft of other conscious feelings.

He felt enough of this external acting filled with surface reality, a reality of pseudo concerns, therefore he starts looking for a non-realistic expressionistic expression in search of an inner realm of pureness. His dramaturgy is becoming clearer now he takes up subjects based on real happenings, thus dealing with real characters he dramatize them going into the characters' subjective status that enables him to create a new reality on the stage and this is the main reason of the attention his plays get from the audience.

I had been an enthusiast of Budha Chingtham for the last ten or so years, and for the last three years approximately he had been not bound to his desk and table for writing his plays. Instead first he would act his play himself. I had seen him many times while in such a situation. In fact I had close talks with him on theatre for these ¾ years in the part.

He suggests that the playwright should also become a co-director in the play he had written. The dramatist will not only be ahead of any director or anybody else for that matter. That way he cannot pass over the sequences of his imagination on the stage while theatrical zing the text. There I may quote Diwan Singh Bajeli, a renowned theatre critic in the Hindu newspaper. He wrote.

"Budha Chingtham is a serious Manipuri theatre artist whose works are for the bitterness and anxieties of the people of Manipur who are sandwiched between the forces of insurgency and counter insurgency, victims of mindless violence, the people are waging a long drawn out forceful struggle to have the Amed Forces Special Power Act lifted from the State. Viewed against this background, Budha's dramatic work assure special contemporary relevance and are a strong protest against the prevailing political system".
(The Hindu, 22.3.2013)


To be continued...