Article of the Week

The Blind Opera

You go up a rickety stairwell, dark even in the daytime. The building on crowded Nilmoni Mitra Street in north Calcutta has seen better days, like many others in this older part of the city. You enter a small room. The red cement floor is cool to the bare feet, reminiscent of a past era.

The center of the room is empty but the corners are stacked with bedrolls, utensils and water bottles. Musical instruments, drums, cymbals, gongs are piled in a corner. Today, the room is filled with the laughter of men and women in colorful attire. Two garlands of sweet- smelling flowers and boxes of sweets are arranged on a stool.

Two members of the group are getting married. They exchange the garlands, bonding as husband and wife. Someone breaks into a lilting Bengali song. Among the happy chorus of congratulations and laughter you notice one difference.

Both the bride, Chuki Pal, and the groom, Sandeep Chatterjee, are blind, as are most of the people surrounding them. Chuki lost her sight at the age of two due to incorrect treatment for an ailment. She is wearing a bright turquoise blue sari with gold trimmings for this memorable day.

She said that she knew her sari was blue because people had told her but she could not imagine it. But she said that when she dreamed, she did so in color. Sandeep is an undergraduate student majoring in music at the Rabindra Bharti University.

Their romance blossomed when they met as members of the Blind Opera, a performing arts group of Calcutta and the only one of its kind in the country as well as Asia that consistently puts on professional shows.

The 36 members of the Blind Opera, most of whom are totally blind, demonstrate that physical disability is not an obstacle. They enact plays like Raja (King of the Dark Chamber) or Raktakarabi (Red Oleander) by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

These plays are considered challenging even by veteran theater groups. Since it was launched, in 1996 in Calcutta, the Blind Opera has performed in other cities as well. The Opera is the product of four-theater enthusiasts - Ashok Pramanik, Debashish Choudhary, Subhashish Gangopadhyay and Prasanta Chatterjee - who took it as a challenge to get together the talents of these visually impaired men and women.

Except Sandeep, who is a social activist, all of them used to be members of a well-known theater group of the city but broke away to devote their time and energy to the concept of the Blind Opera.

Why the label "opera" for a drama repertoire?
Their director, Gangopadhyay, said that earlier all plays were in opera style. There was singing, dancing and dialogues accompanied by instrumental music and that is what they do. The idea of the Blind opera germinated in 1994 when they conducted a workshop at the Kolkata Blind School at Behala to produce the play Jai Durei Jai (Lets go far beyond) for its centenary celebration.

After the event, the participants wanted to continue their training in performing arts. The challenge to present the cast on stage is immense since space management is a problem. To solve this, the director uses ropes to separate the stage and the wings.

When the actors step on the rope they know that it is the entrance to the stage. Gangopadhyay says that even though the members cannot see, they can smell, hear and touch - the three elements inherent to any theater.

At the Blind Opera they believe that the blind can see i.e. that is they see in their own way with the help of their abilities. Gangopadhyay believes that, for the visually impaired, theater is the best medium for expression of their creative urges.

They respond instinctively; they cannot copy anyone else because they cannot see. Their body language tells the story and hence it is very spontaneous. In the beginning there was apprehension even among the founders: would the productions be considered "artistic," or remain just "productions"? To their credit, the members have earned kudos from Calcutta audiences.

All the members take part in the productions, no one is left out and it is very democratic. However, when they conceived the idea of such a group, the foursome did not visualize it as just a performing arts troupe. Though artistic qualities were given due importance, the focus was more on "drama therapy" through which they could communicate better with the world around them.

For the members of the troupe, discovering the language of the body is in a way also a journey of the personality. Coming from diverse backgrounds but bound together by the same disability, they have found an outlet for their creativity through the plays. They do not feel isolated anymore because they could relate to their fellow performers.

As Debashish Das, 18, a partially blind boy, said that he had to leave his studies after the school finals. He was sitting around at home, doing nothing. But now he feels useful as he belongs here. Marzina Khatun, mother of a young child, echoes the feelings of others when she says that this work builds a bridge between the "seeing" world and the dark world of their own.

They sing, they dance, and they experience joy. The joy of being able to communicate, both at the personal level and to the audience, is so great that they do not mind traveling two to three hours in crowded buses and trains to reach the venue. One day of the festival is marked as a Paan-supari Utsav (betel nut festival).

On this day, different groups exchange the traditional symbols of friendship, an effort at bridge building within the community. There is also a greater purpose behind it: to use theater to build a community and mainstream the huge number of disabled living in isolation. Together they can be a force to demand better facilities in public life.

For instance, members of the group attended a December 2004 presentation at the American Center in which Elizabeth Kahn of Arts Access in Raleigh, North Carolina, demonstrated the technologies of audio description, a narrative service that attempts to describe the image of theater, film, television and other art forms so that the visually impaired can enjoy them.

Without such help, a blind person can experience theater only through the whispered asides of a sighted companion. Pramanik also believes that blind children should enter the mainstream from the beginning and take part in as many physical activities as possible because often, parents hide away a child with a disability or do not pay as much attention.

It's like asking a grown man to play football and he would not be able to as his body would have already become stiff with disuse!

Source: The Blind Opera. The Excelsior, Jammu, 22 January 2006.