-The Hindu
A retelling of Rabindranath Tagore’s celebrated play Muktadhaara, often interpreted as Tagore’s nationalist critique of colonial exploitation, came under fire from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s culture police on Saturday evening here.
Tamasha Naa Hua, directed by noted director Bhanu Bharti, was staged at the city’s famous Bharat Bhawan cultural centre as part of the Rangmandal theatre festival on Saturday evening.
Muktadhaara considered one of Tagore’s finest plays is about the reining in of free river waters by a dam built by a despot and its subsequent demolition. The complex subtext deals with ideas of nature, science and nationalism.
Tamasha Naa Hua, which has been staged several times across the country, is about a play where the differences between the director and the actors are expressed in the form of an inconclusive debate involving several ideologies, including Gandhism, Marxism, the nature vs. science debate and the ideas of Tagore.
At certain points, one of the characters criticises India’s hydro projects —Farakka Barrage on the Indo-Bangladesh border and the Baglihar project on the Chenab river — as spelling doom for people in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
The BJP’s objection was to these parts.
As the play concluded, state convener of the BJP’s culture cell Rajesh Bhadoria, himself a theatre aficionado, walked up to Mr. Bharti and reportedly argued with him over the play’s “anti-national” content and warned him of a police case for “treason.”
“In the name of juxtaposing the differences in the ideologies of Tagore and Gandhi, the play openly expressed anti-India feelings and supported Pakistan and Bangladesh, even justifying the influx of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh into India,” Mr. Bhadoria told The Hindu .