Sapmochan and Chandalika

As a part of the commemoration of 150th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, his famed theatrical productions Sapmochan and Chandalika were recently staged at the John de Silva Memorial theatre and at the Ramakrishna Hall in Wellawatte by a troupe from Santiniketan.

Significantly, Sapmochan was enacted in Sri Lankan for the first time in 1934 by an ensemble headed by Rabindranath Tagore himself. In the audience was young S.W.R.D Bandaranaike. As a young fresh graduate from the University of Oxford, S.W.R.D Bandaranaike wrote a review of the play to the Ceylon Daily News.

His review of Sapmochan was important as it is an authentic and first- hand account of the original production. Bandaranaike wrote;

“I had not been particularly impressed, I must confess by Tagore, the philosopher, or Tagore the painter. It was, therefore, scarcely with the expectation of seeing anything out of the ordinary that I went to the performance of his play on Vesak day, for which, with some difficulty, I had been able to secure a seat.

“The curtain went up, and my first impression was one of aesthetic satisfaction at the setting and the grouping, which had the simplicity and the beauty which Greek drama alone has yet been able to achieve. There was Tagore seated at one end, appropriately garbed in a yellow robe, a typical bard and seer with his flowing grey hair and beard. The first thing that struck me was the beauty of his shapely hands and the long tapering fingers: only a great artist could have hands like that.

“The music started, low and soft and the slow movement of the dance……

A great critic, writing of the poet Blake, said that there is a point of heat at which prose melts and fuses into poetry, and a point at which poetry fuses into poetry. But as I sat there, I began to realise that there is a further point at which music fuses into the mute beauty of rhythmical movement.

Love and wrath and sorrow and joy and chivalry – all human emotions find their place in this play, and the delicate and sure touch with which they are conveyed by the music and the dancing is a revelation of art at its highest. An attempt to describe it within the cold limits of prose is impossible, and I can only quote the words of Tagore’s great countrywoman, Sarojini Naidu:

The music sighs and slumbers,
It stirs and sleeps again….
Hush, it wakes and weeps and murmurs,
Like a woman’s heart in pain;
Now it laughs and calls and coaxes,
Like a lover in the night,
Now it pants with sudden longing,
Now it sobs with spent delight.”
“Like bright and wind-blown lilies,
The dancers sway and shine,
Swift in a rhythmic circle,
Soft in a rhythmic line;
Their lithe limbs gleam like amber,
Thro’ their veils of golden gauze,
As they glide and bend and beckon,
As they wheel and wind and pause.”

Discordant tones

To some of us whose spirits had been saddened and ears deafened by the creaking ‘seraphina’ and discordant tones of Tower Hall actors, this was like the breath of another and better world. Our local musicians should learn a lesson from the manner in which even the homely drum becomes, in Tagore’s hands, an instrument of delicate expression.

Tagore hinted in some of his addresses that he is not appreciated in India. If this is so, it is more a reflection on his countrymen than on himself. A great poet does not belong to his own country or age alone, or to any particular passing political movement; he belongs to the whole world and to all ages. India has as good reason to be proud of Tagore as of Gandhi; for he has made an original contribution to art which can stand the test of comparison with anything of the kind the West has evolved.

It is interesting to note that W.B. Yeats, to whom perhaps Tagore owes more than to any other individual for the recognition of his art, has himself published a volume of plays, Four Plays for Dancers, of a similar type. They possess a strange beauty of their own:

A woman’s beauty is like a white
Frail bird, like a white sea-bird alone
At day-break after stormy night,
Between two furrows upon the ploughed land….

The words alone are his. For the music and the dancing, Yeats had to depend on others. Unfortunately, beyond writing the plays, Yeats made no serious effort to have them performed. But anyone reading them will be struck by the great superiority of Tagore.” Observing the peerless greatness of Tagore and foreseeing his profound influence on the entire mankind and true nature of a great poet, Bandaranaike wrote; “A great poet does not belong to his own country or age alone, or to any particular passing political movement; he belongs to the whole world and to all ages. India has as good reason to be proud of Tagore as of Gandhi; for he has made an original contribution to art which can stand the test of comparison with anything of the kind the West has evolved”.

What is significant is that Tagore has effectively used dance drama as tool of liberation. His attempts towards that end in the productions of Sapmochan and Chandalika should be viewed against the socio-political backdrop in which the productions were made. At the time Tagore conceived Chandalika (also known as Rabindra Nritya Natya) British colonial administration deemed such productions as unacceptable within the Victorian cultural code. It has been pointed out that middle-class of the day and urbanites, in compliance with the British rules, considered ‘dance’ vis-a-vis prostitutes, courtesans and village folk.

In defiance of the accepted notion of the day, Tagore not only used it as a potent tool to defy social taboos which were deemed as norms. Tagore produced Chitrangada, Notir Puja (The Dancer’s Prayer) and Shyama to eliminate social taboo associated with dancing on stage. It is obvious that Tagore through the production of Chandalika and other similar productions not only questioned the oppressive caste system but also liberated dancing from the social taboos associated with it. What Tagore wanted to convey was that dance is an idiom of emotions in spiritual ecstasy.