Rabindranath Tagore’s abstract dance-drama to get film adaptation

Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s most complex work Rakta Karabi, will, for the first time ever, be turned into a film soon by a young director though with a modern interpretation.

The highly metaphorical work had been staged in the past by several famous theatre groups like the Bohurupee of all-time great Shambhu Mitra and Tripti Mitra.

Bohurupee’s was the first stage adaptation of the dance-drama back in 1954 while the latest stage presentation was made in 2010, directed by Goutam Haldar.

Amitabh Bhattacharya’s directorial venture will have stage and film co-existing to present an altogether new experience.

“We are daring to open a fresh dialogue with Tagore and trying to evaluate the present condition through interpretation of the text while conforming to the format and essence of the original,” the young director told PTI.

With the music scored by ace music director Debojyoti Mishra, cerebral Bengali stage and film actor Kaushik Sen will essay the pivotal role of Bisu Pagol while Mumtaj Sorcar of Bhooter Bhabisyot fame will be seen as Nandini.

“My character Nandini is a modern-day girl wearing specs and she is like a typical university-going girl, a revolutionary, definitely a Marxist, who is not bothered about fashion but how the country should be run,” Sorcar said on location of the shooting here.

The director, who was standing by her side, interjected, “The film interpretation will have Nandini who looks like a typical JU student, an idealistic and simple girl, who talks in commonplace dialect but in pure, unadulterated Bengali. But, when we shoot the stage play of Rakta Karabi you will see a typical Tagorean Nandini as originally envisaged by Tagore in the drama written in 1923-24 during a visit to Shillong,” he added.

Red is the recurring theme of the play, inspired by the image of a red oleander plant crushed by a discarded piece of iron that Tagore had come across while walking on Shillong streets.

So, the costumes and colour scheme will be dominated by red contrasted against green, the colour of freedom and exuberance. The filmmaker said, “Debojyoti Mishra has used the Rabindra Sangeet Poush Toder Daak Diyechhe to define that mood of joy and freedom. We are deciding on other songs also. “In my Rakta Karabi the stage play shot will be taken in a heritage Bengali theatre, and the film adaptation at modern day houses and studio floors and in some rural settings and the two strands of stage production and real life will run parallel, side by side,” he added.

“The Tagore work deals with unscrupulous capitalism, environmental exploitation and the importance of human relationships and these things have not been obscured with the passage of time but became more pertinent in today’s world,” he explained.

“The poet himself had said in his Sesher Kobita that he was not being interpreted the way he himself would have liked to be.”

The director said he had consulted noted Tagore scholars as well as veteran actors like Kaushik Sen and Shantilal Mukhopadhyay before embarking on the project. Mumtaj said she did not dare to be compared with Tripti Mitra who played Nandini’s stage version which had set a benchmark of acting.