The need to focus on the shackles of superstition and conservatism deepened within the next two years, propelling us towards Rabindranath’s Bisarjan in 1990. It provided us with an apt metaphor for our predicament. A line from the play was quoted in all our advertisements, tickets and posters ‘ Man loses his humanity in the name of God’.
It was evident to us that the characters like Raghupati and Chandpal were still active on the arenas of religion and politics, busy devising stratagems to obscure the truth, and that our politics had failed to check the waywardness of organised religion, just as religion has been unable to infuse contemporary politics with a sense of morality. We had but no inkling then that the frenzied demolition of the Babri Masjid would take place in the very near future. We had been invited to perform this play at the Rabindra Janmotsav and the Sampradayik Sammhati Utsav organised by the government of West Bengal in 1991, as well as at the festival organised at Delhi, in the same year, by Sahitya Akademi, Lalit Kala Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademi to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Rabindranath’s death.
Credits –
Lights – Tapas Sen
Music - Partha Sengupta
Set Design – Gautam Basu
Stage – Ashoke Banerjee
Costume – Debashish Roychoudhury
Direction - Salil Bandyopadhyay
