For all my Bengali Readers, I am writing in Bengali for the first time.

রহস্যময়, রোমাঞ্চকর, রাত

রাত ১০:৩০: বোন পড়াশুনো করছে,  আমি whatsapp করছি। আমাদের বাড়ির পাশে একটা নতুন ফ্ল্যাট হয়েছে, সেখানে দাম্পতি তাদের ২বছরের মেয়েকে নিয়ে হয়তো কোন জাগায় ঘুরতে ,কিংবা ইনভিটাশন আটটেন্ড করতে গেছিলেন। ওনাদের ফ্লাটে এক above ৬০-৬৫বয়স এর এখন সবসময় থাকবার কাজের মহিলা থাকেন। ওনারা 'মাসি' বলে ডাকেন।

তারা ঘুরতে গেলে বাড়িতে থাকেন দরজা খুলে দেন ,কোনো দিনও call তোলে না তা হয়নি।
সেই কখন থেকে মোবাইলও call করে যাচ্ছে কিন্ত মাসি phone তুলছে না।

এখন রাত ১১:৩০ এক ঘন্টা ধরে বেল বাজিয়ে যাচ্ছে, ডেকে যাচ্ছে , call করছে কিছুতেই মাসির সাড়া শব্দ নেই।

ওই ফ্ল্যাটের ২'তলার বাসিন্দারা Main Gate খুলে দেন। দরজায় অনেক ধাক্কা দেওয়া হয়, ডাকা ডাকি, call সবই চলতে থাকে কিন্তু মাসি সারা দেন নি।

ফ্ল্যাটের প্রমোটার চলে আসেন ,  পাড়ার লোকজন জড়ো হয় , হাতুড়ি থেকে যাবতীয় দরজা ভেঙ্গে দেওয়ার সামগ্রী আনা হয়।

কৌতূহল, রোমাঞ্চকর ব্যাপার। যত রাত গাঢ় হচ্ছে তত লোকজন রাস্তায় নেমে পড়েছে কৌতুহল নিয়ে। নানারকম আলোচনার মাঝে একজন অন্য ফ্ল্যাট থেকে চিলিয়ে বলে উঠলেন :"পুলিশ ডেকেছেন ? শুনছেন পুলিশ  কে আগে বলুন এখানে আসতে"

দরজা খোলা যাচ্ছেই না। বেশ পোক্ত।
তাছাড়া ভেতর থেকে ছিটকানি লাগানো। রাস্তার দিকে এসে বারান্দার দিকটা দেখে দম্পতি বলেন "নিশ্চই কিছু হয়ছে, আমরা কত দিন নাইট stay ও করেছি কোনোদিন এরম হয়নি।
তাহলে বারান্দা দিয়ে ঢুকে কাউকে ছিটকিনি খুলতে হবে।" কিন্তু দেখুন মাঝের ঘরে  light ta ঝলছে তার মানে মাসি অপেক্ষা করছিলেন।

"পুলিশ আসছে ," এটি শুনতে না শুনতেই সাইরেন এর জোর আওয়াজ। Fire ব্রিগেডিয়ার গাড়ি এসছে। সাথে আশের পাশের সব বাড়ি , ফ্ল্যাটের লোকজন প্রায় ঘুমকতে না পেরে উঠে বারান্দায় কিংবা রাস্তায়।

প্রশ্ন: "কি হলোটা কি?
মারা গেলেন!
কিভাবে?
কোনো দুর্ঘটনা?
আত্মহত্যা?
খুন!?
লুঠ?
পলাতক?"

"সন্দেহজনক ব্যাপার!"
"নিশ্চই কিছু তো হয়েছে!"

যত লোক তত কথা।
যাইহোক  , Fire ব্রিগেডের গাড়ি থেকে নেমে সবাই প্রায় দৌড়িয়ে বোরো বোরো লাল  সাঁড়াশি , চেনি আর কিসব লোহা লক্ষর নিয়ে নেমে পড়লো।

এদিকে রাস্তায় দাঁড়িয়ে থাকা  মানুষজন , বারান্দা দিয়ে উকি মারা public ভাবছে "আমাদের পাড়ার নামটা বধোয় Newspaper এ এলো বলে"

প্রায় রাত ১:৩০ta: দরজা ভাঙতে fire ব্রিগেডের অধিকারীরা দরজায় একবারই মারার আগেই দরজার ওপর থেকে দরজা খুলে গেল।
মহিলার কন্ঠস্বর
বললেন :
"আমি ঘুমিয়ে পড়েছিলাম ! এত আওয়াজ শুনে আমি ভাবলাম বাড়িতে ডাকাতি পড়েছে। এসে শুনি আপনারা!!"

সারা পাড়া জুড়ে, একটা থমথমে রোমাঞ্চকর পরিবেশ। ঠিক একটা ক্রিকেট ফাইনাল ম্যাচের মতন। কি হবে কি গল্প হবে, এত Sabdhan India হতে হতে কমেডি Nights হয়ে গেল,😑

Almost after years, I am writing a new chapter of my blog . With a belief in my heart that it will touch your thoughts and beliefs.. I will soon post the new one digitally penning down my imagination, my deepest thoughts, experiences I have had all over these years and my dreams which I see while I am sleeping, sometimes when I am awake.. Keep me in your prayers and oneday I might see the impossible possibilites turning into possible possibilities... "Dream come true.. "

Concluding...

In the end I conclude with... 

                                   The vastness of Nautanki.. was not known by me before I started this blog. I am obliged to Sarita Bose Mam and Priyam Basu Thakur Mam to help me selecting the Topic. I have searched many sites available in Google to do this project..
From the origin and the existence now the types and districts where this folk culture form for entertainment is persisting..
I came to know about the schools where this folk form is being taught its even practiced in foreign schools and also the famous personalities involved..
To inculcate and incorporate various data, information's about Nautanki from n number of sites like... Eg : google books.com, britanica.com, devnautanki.com, theaterBernade.com
I thank Rabindra Bharati University Mass com & videography department allowing me to pen down a folk form which is interesting and entertaining form of folk traditional leisure of India..
I feel proud to be Indian to born in the richness and diverse panorama of culture..

films based or realating to this subjects are Nautanki Sala Directed by Rohan Sippy and Tamasha Directed by Imtiaz Ali .while the hero was in love with the versatility of Tamasha "Indian folk theatrical culture with a tint of romance and finding one's own interests bigger than social acceptance .Lastly he became popular by directing "Tamasha" the folk drama.

Nautanki is one of the types of folk drama which do communicate with mass It has stories to tell and also entertain people. Theatre , culture and art loving people will continue their interests while the youth and new generation will want something new out of it. and in the race of earning money and fame the originality of this folk form will decrease and decrease day by day .This is also true that there are few people who are still restoring the essence of originality of Nautanki one of the Indian folk drama culture

Few more branches of Nautanki ..

Few more branches of Nautanki ..
 

Two extremes of folk theatre in North India : the secular Nautanki and Naqal, and the religious Ramlila and Raslila.
Nautanki, an operatic drama, is performed in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan.  The earliest dramas of this form were called sangeets (musicals).  One such musical, Shehzadi Nautanki ("The Story of Princess Nautanki"), became so populas in the nineteenth century that the people started calling the form "Nautanki".

 The Akharas:
                                     There are 5 important akharas (schools) of Nautanki: Hathras, Muzafar Nagar, Saharanpur, Kanpur and Kanauj, each named after the town in which it originated.  Of these, Hathras and Kanpur stand out for their individual styles.  The Hathras was given a robust form by Indarman and perfected by his pupil Natharam Gaur of Hathras.   The Kanpur is led by Srikrishan Pehalwan, an actor-singer-composer-wrestler of Kanpur who owned a Nautanki company.  Both these men were exceedingly popular fifty years ago.
Because of its commercial character, Nautanki has attracted women performers.  Its secularism has wiped out almost all of the religious elements, and it has become increasingly lewd.  In Maharastra, the Tamasha woman sparkles in a performance; In the north, the Nautanki woman is emerging.  After the adoption of Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act in 1959, many prostitutes and nautch girls, forced to leave their professions, joined Nautanki troupes.  In Kanpur, a Nautanki Company consisting solely of female artists makes use of film tunes and other cheap melodies and emphasises tantalizing gestures in its performances.  The city corporation has banned the performance of Nautanki companies within municipal limits.  The troupes perform on the outskirts of the city, and the townsmen flock to gay performances.  But it is the old Nautanki troupes with their all-male cast that preserve the vigor, singing style and the operatic beauty of the form.

BHAGAT depicts:
                                 Bhagat, a four-hundred-year-old form of operatic drama,  (This form of entertainment is mentioned in Ain-i-Akbari, the monumental sixteenth-century record of Akbar's court) was in its earlier stages a dramatized Keertan singing with a thin story.  Nautanki owes its birth to this old form and is called its "daughter".  The word Bhagat means the "devotee", and those who perform the drama in the earliest times were devotees of Vaishnava cult.   Later stories of kings, historical romances, chivalric tales were introduced, but the form never lost its religious pattern.   Today there are Bhagat akharas in Mathura, Vrindaban, Agra and places associated with relious fervor.  In Agra, in 1827, Ram Prasad of Amroha and Johari Raya of Motikatara produced a legendary folk play, Roop Basant, the story of 2 brothers who suffered at the hands of their step brothers.   The akhara was founded, and Johari Ray was acclaimed as its first Guru.

KHYAL, says:
                                 The Khyal of Rajasthan is lyrical in temperament.  The name probably comes from the Urdu word khyal, meaning "imagination", perhaps because of the Khyal is an operatic drama without realistic setting or decode, which depends upon the imagination of the audience.  It is also possibly a corruption of the Hindi word Khel, meaning "a play.

Tales of "MAANCH"
                                Maanch is the lyric drama of Malwa region in Madhya Pradesh.  The name Maanch originates from manch, "the stage".  A week before the performance, the flag staff,or stage pole, is fixed according to the old Sanskrit tradition and the Guru, generally the playwright-actor,performs the ceremonial worship. The stage is open on all sides. In earlier times, it had and extension where the village nobility and the officials sat. There was also an arrangement for instrumentalists to sit at another stage level.


source google and Britanica.

Conventional Theatrics

  Introduction

    Indian theater has it's roots dated back to the history for over two thousand years. Almost at the same time of Aristotle's poetics, ancient India had developed an encyclopedia on theater called "Natyashashtra" ascribed to Bharata which gradually became the basis for Indian theater performances for centuries to come. This means that there was already a rich tradition of performance practice long before such a week appeared. The theory of Rasa in Natyashashtra has influenced Indian traditional theatrics greatly. This was the second phase of the evolution of theater in India which was based on oral tradition.

Traditional Theatrics

 

 An important point needs to be made at the very outset: the word "tradition' carries within it a contradiction charged with repercussions. Traditions remain very much alive in our times. One can find precise point of contact between Tradition and Theater in vital immediacy a quality reflected in its oral transmission, in its constant reference to the present moment and to experience in the present moment.

Ritual Theatrics

 Scholars say that the ritual theater emerged as a result of the Bhakti Movement. Unlike orthodox Hindus, followers of the Bhakti Movement believed that man could approach God directly. Thus, theater becomes the perfect vehicle for communicating the faith through depicting the acts of God both for those performing it and for those witnessing it. Ramleela, Krishnaleela and Rasleela, performed in various North Indian states are excellent example of this kind of theaters.

Rise of the Modern Theatrics

   The  development of Modern Theaters in India may be attributed to change the political set-up in India. The 200 years of the British rule brought the Indian theater into direct contact with the Western Theater; the seeds of the modern theater were sown in the late 18th century , with the consolidation of British power in Bengal, Maharashtra and Tamilnadu. It was the first of the thriving metropolises of Bombay,Calcutta and Madras that London based theater models were introduced in India.


Source: Google and a few personal contacts

Eminent Contributors to the Art

Eminent Contributions to this field of art done by:-

  

  1) Nandini Bannerjee is a first year student in the Ethnomusicology PhD program at Columbia University. Her interests lie in Hindustani Classical music, in the musical works of Rabindranath Tagore and in exploring the effective roles of tradition and modernity in Indian immigrant communities. 

 

Presentation: :"Bauls and the popular music of Bengal"

 Bauls are the wandering musical minstrels of Bengal. Originally from the district of Birbhum (which is now in West Bengal), they epitomize the spirituality and musicality of both the East and West Bengal. The word Baul comes from the Sanskrit word "Vatula", which roughly translates to mad or lashed by the wind. Bauls stem from the history of non-conformism and have upheld music as their religion. In their songs, they explore

the state of disconnect between the earthly souls and the spiritual world and offer a subtle revelation of the spiritual force as an inner God that transcends formal and organized religious doctrines around schools. Every year in the month of Pausha (approximately mid January), the district of Birbhum holds a Baul festival called the Kenduli Mela. The three day open air festival celebrates the musical art of Bauls, which is a peripheral but thriving art in Bengal. Nandini will be presenting some videos taken at the Kenduli Mela and will discuss some of the unifying and contextual similarities between Baul music and Rabindrasangeet (the songs of Tagore).

2) Deepshikha Chatterjee is the costume design faculty at Hunter Collge CUNY where she enjoys teaching a diverse group of students courses in design, costume history, costume technology, and crafts. She has a MFA degree in costume design from FSU. Deepshikha also has been researching and presenting on theater, dance and film costumes from India and Southeast Asia. She recently got a grant from CUNY to study Chhau dance masks and costumes in Purulia, India.

3) Amanda Culp is a student and teaching fellow in the doctoral subcommittee on theater at Columbia University, where she studies classical Sanskrit drama and intercultural dramaturgy. She is a resident dramaturg with NY based company One Year Lease, where her credits include the Killing Room, the Bold Soprano. Most recently, she worked on a production of Vijay Tendulkar's Sakharam Binder at 3LD directed by Nikhil Mehta.

Source: Google and their respective websites

Nautanki Themes

         Themes

     Nautanki, secular to the roots, is a beautiful blend of the Hindu-Muslim folk cultures.   Its language, music, costumes, themes and characters reflect the mixed social set-up.  The austere Muslims who came as conquerors in the eleventh and twelfth centuries slowly adopted the ways of local Hindus, and the Hindus slowly accepted Muslim influence in their arts.  During the long Moghul rule, the arts reflected a synthesis of the two cultures.  The classical Kathak dancers, steeped in Radha-Krishna lore, are dressed in Persian tunics and girdles.  The Rajput miniatures of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries are an expression of the gilded refinement of Moghul courts and Hindu myths and legends.  The Nautanki also manifests the vitality the two cultures.

Religious tales digested in the Nautanki have a secular coloring.  Even in as sacred a play as Raja Harishchandra, ("The Truthful King Harischandra"), when the noble Queen Taramati begs money for the cremation of her dead son, she dances kicking her heels and swinging her lips.  In a religious tale Sita sings of her tragic plight while casting "come-hither" glances.

The Nautankis were mostly written in Personalized Urdu with a mixture of Braj, Hindi and Rajastani.  The courtly language of the Nautankis required the composer to select ornate music and to draw from the classical ragas. the chief regional variants of the classical ragas are bhairavi, bilawal, peelu and kamaj.  It gives the classical melody a directness, an edge, a rural vigor.

Famous Nautankis are: Tippu Sultan, Amsr Singh Rathaur, Prithviraj Chauhan, Rani Durgawati, Panna Dai - all historical plays championing valor, honesty, and faithfulness.  Among the religious ones are: Ram Banwas, Shrawan Kumar, Nala Damayanti, Mordhwaj, Raja Harischandra.  Popular social romances are : Triya Chitra ("Witchery of a Woman"), Reshmi Rumal ("Silken Handkerchief"), Shahi Lakarhara ("The Royal Woodcutter"), Sultana Daku ("Sultana, the woman Bandit"), Siyah Posh("The man in the Black Mask).

The story from which Nautaki takes the name tells of Princess Nautani of Multan, a famous beauty.  In a neighbouring state live two brothers Bhup Singh and Phool Singh.   One day the younger, Phool Singh handsome,adventurous, and rash, returns from hunting and asks his brother's wife to serve him food quickly.  She taunts him saying that he is behaving as if her were the husband of the beautiful Nautanki.  Insulted, he leaves home, vowing that he will not return until he has married Nautanki.  His faithful friend Yashwant Singh accompanies him.  On reaching Multan, they meet the flower woman of the palace and beg her to allow them to stay in her fut.  

Every day this flower woman carries a garland of fresh flowers to the princess.  Phool Singh, expert in the art of floral decoration, offers to weave a garland for the prince if his hostess will cook for him.  The flower woman takes the garland to the princess, who suspects that someone else has prepared it and flies into a rage.  The terrified flower woman explains that her nephew's young wife has been on a short visit and that she had prepared the garland.  The princess commands her to produce the young wife and the flower woman returns to her hut greatly perturbed.  Phool Singh calms her, suggesting that he is in a superb disguise and will not be recognized if he puts on a woman's clothes.  The flower woman takes Phool Singh, disguised as a beautiful woman, to the princess, who is stuck by his beauty.  She offers her friendship and insists that Phool singh stay in her chamber.  He agrees.  At night the princess sighs that if Phool Singh was a man, she would marry him.  Phool Singh asks her to close her eyes, meditate and concentrate on the household deity and invoke her blessings to turn one of them into a man.  This the princess does, and when she opens her eyes, she finds that her friend has turned into a man.  A love scene follows.  In the morning the palace maid reports the matter to the king, who orders the young man arrested and killed.  Nautanki, carrying a sword and cup of poison, reaches the spot where Phool Singh is awaiting death.  She drives off the executioners and challenges her father.  The king, deeply touched, agrees to her marriage with Phool Singh.

Nautanki stories are full of noble bandits, brave fighters and truthful lovers.They emphasize courage, nobility and gallantry.  Events take place at fast pace.  Gods, wizards and nymphs have free social intercourse with Kings, palace maids, robbers and landlords creating a fanciful world with intense appeal. 

Source: Google, Rangvarta magazine