In the 80s, when Habib Tanvir brought Charandas Chor, arguably his most famous play, which he had written and directed in 1974, to Calcutta, the queues for tickets snaked miles long. In pre-FB days, it?s what everyone talked about?the use of song and dance, local dialect and the sheer brilliance of the way the story of a thief is told touched a chord.
In his memoirs, which he started writing when he was 81, we get a glimpse of an amazing theatre personality and how he came about with a play like Charandas Chor.
Tanvir planned it as a three-part autobiography and refused to relent when asked to finish his life story in one volume. This is the first part, which comes to an end before 1954, the year he first did a play called Agra Bazaar (and where the seeds of Charandas were sown) and before he left India to do a course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in England.
As Farooqui tells us in his introduction, the memoirs are a ?mouth-watering peek into life in the second quarter of twentieth-century India? There is an interplay of city life and mofussil life?? and everything that comes with it?religion, politics, social mores, customs and humour.
With Tanvir and his easy writing, we travel on a journey from his childhood in Raipur, his college days in Aligarh and then to Bombay where he landed in the 40s to pursue acting and became an active part of the Indian People?s Theatre Association (IPTA). He describes many of the people he met there?Balraj Sahni, Dina Pathak, Prem Dhawan and Shailendra. But Tanvir realised that beyond the IPTA, the theatre scene wasn?t very progressive in Bombay and that if he wanted to do theatre it would be better for him to do it in Urdu and for that he would have to return to Delhi.
When his friend Athar Parvez asked him to do a play at Jamia Millia Islamia, he chose to set the play in a bazaar in Agra and included villagers from Okhla in the cast. The action on stage was accompanied by song and dance?these would form a staple of his productions when he decided to work with Chhattisgarhi actors and used local songs and dialect as his Naya Theatre was born. Even though this part of the memoirs ends much before his theatrical success, the appendix includes the story, in his own words, of how he achieved a theatrical breakthrough with Charandas Chor.
Sudipta Datta is a freelancer