Recasting Tagore

My review of the play Her Letters: Qissa Kothi's Hindi adaptation of Tagore's story 'Streer Patra'

Indian artists tend to treat the celebrated work of Rabindranath Tagore with kid gloves. But in adapting the master's 1914 Bengali short story Streer Patra, the Mumbai-based collective Qissa Kothi has taken a bold, and mostly successful, approach.

Tagore's tale is a first-person narrative, framed as a letter in which a woman explains, with quiet resolve, why she has left home. But in playwright-director Sharmistha Saha's able hands, it becomes an intense two-person performance in Hindi, Her Letters, which comes to Mumbai's Kala Ghoda Festival on February 5 after performances in New Delhi last month.

"To Thine Auspicious Lotus Feet", Mrinal's letter begins, marking the abyss of inequality between an Indian wife and her husband. Few women would use such an expression today. But even a century later, candour and reflectiveness like Mrinal's rarely emerge from the confines of a marriage. For her marital household, she was only Mejo Bou, 'Middle Daughter-in-law', a label she cannot squeeze herself into any longer. It's taken 15 years, writes Mrinal, but she has finally realised that she has other relationships: "with the world and the World-Keeper".

The terrifying familiarity of Mrinal's epiphany says everything about why 'Streer Patra' still works. No man's path to selfhood has ever been dependent on his marital status. But wifehood still defines women -- enshrined in religious ideology, in social behaviour, in our very language. Think of the Hindi word suhaag, for instance. The state of being married is ostensibly neutral, but really only implicates women. A man's body, like his mind, need never be marked by marriage: no bindi, sindoor, mangalsutra or kangans. There is no male equivalent of the category 'suhaagan'.

That category takes unspoken centre stage here, politically and aesthetically. Markers of suhaag, a tulsi plant, a gota-edged dupatta, a red bangle -- dominate the stage design. The atmosphere is redolent with the sights and smells of traditional Hindu domesticity, its sensory excess deliberately suffocating. A brass diya is lit and blown out; marigolds are crushed in a closed fist; spices are ground on a stone. Actors Manisha Mondal and Bharati Perwani wear the richest of crimson saris, using their yards of silken sheen alternately to suggest unravelling and bondage, eroticism and blood.

Given the reverence with which Tagore is treated, Saha's confident adaptation is noteworthy. She leaves out lines, weaves in the voices of Virginia Woolf and Amrita Pritam, and calls the play Her Letters rather than 'The Wife's Letter'. But its animating force remains the unnamed, unnameable relationship between Mrinal and Bindu, a young girl she takes under her wing and who, in turn, adores her. As in Tagore's tale, Mrinal's husband remains a distant cipher. The greatest irony of all this wifeliness is how little her husband has touched her soul.

Published in India Today, 3 Feb 2018.