A recent book on Badal Sircar puts the spotlight on the inner life of his works.
In the trajectory of West Bengal's modern theatre, Badal Sircar is one of the figures who stand out as mavericks. Anjum Katyal's book Badal Sircar: Towards a Theatre of Conscience is a much-needed comprehensive endeavour towards an 'authentic' and contextual study of the playwright's work.
Katyal begins by discussing the challenges of building a "thick" description of a theatre process of which the final performance is only a fragment. In search of "authenticity" she draws on many resources for her book – play texts, her own experience of watching his plays, theoretical essays and autobiographical pieces by Sircar, literary criticisms, scholars and journalists who have written about Sircar, interviews with his colleagues, audience members and contemporary theatre workers who have been influenced by him.
Katyal alternates between anecdotal, critical and descriptive voices to produce a book that is accessible to the casual reader as well as the academic. To grasp the significance of Badal Sircar's trajectory as a 'play-maker', towards what Katyal calls 'a theatre of conscience', it is very important to understand the social-political scenario in which Sircar is developing his work. Almost equally important is to place him in relation to his contemporaries or immediate predecessors in theatre.