When Sushila Koirala, a classical Kaththak dancer, also known by the people as the wife of B P Koirala had made history by staging a modern Nepali play (Ma) with her friends in 1951 in Biratnagar, perhaps little had she realised that so many Nepali theatre artists would one day gather to establish a modern performance culture in Biratnagar. As an individual, she lived with the dream of emancipating Nepali women. Her body-theatre itself was a trope that aimed to function as a model of change for Nepali women. Trained in the classical dances, she took up the task of directing the modern Nepali play.
I was struck by this unwritten history of theatre of this historical place. What surprised me most was that the very people who have been my seniors and inspirers had blazed a trail here. Audiences across different times in Biratnagar saw theatre artists of successive generations make struggles to plant a theatre culture in their city. Youths like Chaturbhuj Aashabadi, Madhav Sapkota and Abhi Subedi, among others, staged popular theatrical performances in the sixties and seventies. Sunil Pokharel, Badri Adhikari, Basanta Bhatta and Desh Bhakta Khanal, among other theatre artists, established Aarohan theatre group and set to stage performances on a regular basis in Biratnagar in the eighties. All of them realised how hard it was to nurture a dream of creating theatre culture in a city like Biratnagar. Many of them moved to Kathmandu in search of a better future.
It looked as if the theatre practitioners based in Biratnagar had taken upon themselves some karma of dramatic nature that they would follow and live with in their careers. Subedi moved to Kathmandu to pursue his career as a writer in the 1970s. He acted and made reviews of the performances before he finally started writing plays from the last years of the 1990s. Pokharel and his friends too moved to Kathmandu in the 1980s to pursue their dreams. In Kathmandu, they worked with Ashesh Malla, a pioneer of the street theatre in modern times, before they embarked upon the task of staging modern theatrical performances on a regular basis.
Sushila Koirala, since the 1960s, got caught up with yet another karma that was very personal as well as public in nature. She had to live with B P Koirala in political exile in India and look after her children and their education at a time when Nepal under the Panchayat autocracy was against her husband and his political visions. Chaturbhuj Aashabadi and Madhav Sapkota remained in Biratnagar as respectable artists of yesteryears until they died some years ago.
Despite all that, the Biratnagar phenomenon in Nepali theatre had not ceased to function. It was taking another important course. Aarohan theatre group revived itself by staging both translated as well as Nepali plays in cooperation with different cultural centers, NGOs and INGOs in Kathmandu in the 1990s. Interestingly, Subedi, Pokharel, Nisha Pokharel, Bhatta and Khanal along with other new talents finally came together to create a new but strong theatre force in the early years of this decade. This creative force has given the modern Nepali theatre of our times a crucial departure. Subedi’s words and characters and Pokharel’s sense of Nepali theatre’s idioms have given the Nepali theatre of the present times newer identities at the national as well as the global levels. As a result, Gurukul as a centre for theatre activities has come to exist for some six years in Kathmandu. To this date, under the direction of Pokharel, Aarohan Gurukul has architectured two theatre halls, produced over one and a half dozen performances and run several workshops and theatre festivals in Kathmandu. Now the opening up of Gurukul Biratnagar with inauguration of the Sushila Koirala theatre hall and a month-long theatre festival marks the magnitude of a journey that the theatre practitioners from Biratanagar have finally managed to accomplish.
This particular theatre event reminds one about Gyan Bhikshu, the protagonist in the play Fire in the Monastery (“Agniko Katha”). Gyan is a very good musician. He plays Kanglin, a ritualistically important musical instrument. He is shell-shocked as the library inside the monastery gets burnt down. He decides to leave the monastery in search of meaning.
During this process, he reaches the holy mountain Kailash and returns to the monastery with a realization that he needs to take yet another journey of carving out a musical path that can help him articulate his personal experience. He is full of hope as he sets out for a new journey that is very internal but full of creativities. As the Biratnagar-based theatre artists and audiences watched the play Agniko Katha written by Subedi and directed by Sunil Pokharel in the newly-inaugurated Sushila Koirala theatre hall on that particular evening, they were metaphorically watching the traces of the struggles of the theatre artists from Biratanagar of three different generations.
As Dev Kumari Thapa, an octogenarian litterateur who knew Sushila Koirala very well, and the Cultural Consular of the Norwegian Embassy to Nepal inaugurated the Aarohan theatre festival and the Sushila Koirala theatre hall respectively amidst theatre artists and audiences, theatre in Biratnagar revealed to us the circuit of the journey that it has followed from the local to the national and global and back to local again. This comes at a time when the government in Nepal is showing indifference to art and cultural activities, and academies and other cultural centers throughout the nation have become dysfunctional. The opening of Gurukul Biratnagar evokes not only the creative strength that the theatre artists based in Biratnagar have lived with but has also given hope to the great many theatre groups based in different parts of the country that creating theatre resources outside the capital city is possible.
Theatre in Biratnagar now stands at a juncture of convergence of the great many voices, visions and challenges of different times. This is the time when its custodians must realize that a new journey has just begun. They now have both “hard” as well as “soft” wares at their disposal, so essential to continue theatre culture. But much depends on how they are going to make use of it. Theatre survives in a place where its sadhakas or practitioners and lovers live. Let us wish great days ahead for Aarohan Gurukul Biratnagar.
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