When Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore visited Delhi in 1932, the ladies of 'Sen bari' (the family of the famous Dr Hem Chandra Sen) presented a play, 'Balmik Pratibha' for him, in what is believed to be the first instance of a Bengali play being staged in Delhi.
Since then, Bengali theatre in Delhi has grown into a genre of its own. The Chittaranjan Parkbased socio-cultural platform Shapno Ekhon (loosely translated as 'dreaming now'), in collaboration with historians Narayani Gupta and Swapna Liddle, has started a project to document and archive the close to one-hundred-year-old history of Bengali theatre in Delhi.
Begun on May 16 this year, 'Bengali theatre in Delhi — A Journey in Time' aims to features, styles, and content unique to Delhi.
At present, there are around 30 groups engaged in practising Bengali theatre in the city.
'Ishhworer khoje' (Waiting for God) directed by Harihar Bhattacharya, 'Lenin er daak' (The Call of Lenin) by the group Dhumketu, and Manusher Odhikar (The Rights of Humankind) directed by Shakti Mukherjee are a few among the many plays created by playwrights of Delhi in original style and form.
The project, which hopes to take advantage of this scattered movement and helm it into something tangible and substantive, is expected to be completed in three years and will be compiled in the form of multiple publications, an archive of oral history accounts, an anthology of plays in multiple volumes written by playwrights of Delhi, and a database of audio-visual material of plays by practitioners in Delhi.