Life & Background
Sudhindra Sircar was born in Calcutta in 1925 into a Bengali Christian family and trained as a town planner, working in that profession in India, England, and Nigeria for years while writing plays. He began with comedies, and Evam Indrajit in 1963 established him as a major dramatist. A visit to Europe and America in the late 1960s, and encounters with Grotowski's poor theatre and with Richard Schechner's work, pushed him to abandon the commercial proscenium stage altogether. He founded Satabdi and developed what he called Third Theatre — performed in rooms, courtyards, and open village grounds, without stage, set, lighting, costume, or admission charge, relying entirely on the actor's body and voice. He toured villages performing free, ran workshops for decades, and refused the Padma Bhushan late in life. He died in Kolkata in 2011.
Evam Indrajit
A Writer sits unable to write, looking for a subject. His Aunt interrupts him. He summons four young men from the audience — Amal, Kamal, Vimal, and a fourth who says his name is Indrajit but who agrees, for convenience, to be called Nirmal. Amal, Kamal, and Vimal move obediently through school, examinations, jobs, marriage, children, and old age, in a sequence that repeats identically. Indrajit refuses: he questions the point of the cycle, has a relationship with Manasi that cannot go anywhere because they are cousins, goes abroad, returns, takes a job anyway, marries someone chosen for him, and becomes Nirmal after all. The Writer, unable to find any resolution, ends with the recognition that the road must be walked because there is no other road, and that the walking is all there is.
The play is the central text of Indian existentialist drama, and its subject is the educated urban middle class of Nehruvian India — a generation with degrees, no purpose, and no acceptable way out. Sircar's technique is anti-illusionist: the Writer addresses the audience, characters are conscripted from it, names are interchangeable, and the same sequence is played repeatedly to strip it of significance, which puts the play close to Beckett while its content is specifically Bengali. The naming is the play's sharpest device: Indrajit is the mythological warrior son of Ravana, and the play's Indrajit ends the evening answering to Nirmal, indistinguishable from the others.
Why Sircar Matters
Sircar is one of the four dramatists — with Karnad, Tendulkar, and Mohan Rakesh — through whom modern Indian theatre is normally taught, and Evam Indrajit is a standard set text. His Third Theatre is the more lasting contribution: a fully worked model of non-commercial, portable, ticketless performance that influenced street theatre and activist theatre across India, including Jana Natya Manch. His essay The Third Theatre sets out the theory and is examinable alongside the plays.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Evam Indrajit1963
- Baki Itihas1965
- Pralap1966
- Tringsha Shatabdi1966
- Spartacus1972
- Michhil (Procession)1974
- Bhoma1976
- The Third Theatre (essays)1978