As Utpal Dutt’s play ‘Barricade’ completes 50 years, a look at how the thespian spoke truth to power

The immediate trigger for the play was political and topical. West Bengal, in 1971, was passing through extreme instability

Fifty years ago, Utpal Dutt’s play,  Barricade, stormed Kolkata. Since I believe its content has great relevance today, I decided to translate it. A political play, it is apparently about the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, but is really about events taking place in India in the turbulent years leading to the Emergency. 

Here I pause to introduce Dutt to today’s readers. Acknowledged as among the trailblazers of post-1947 Indian theatre, he and Badal Sircar stood the tallest in original Bengali drama, with over 50 plays each. While several of Sircar’s plays have been translated into English, Dutt never received the same recognition. Dutt pledged allegiance to Marxism from an early age. The eminent Bengali critic Kironmoy Raha called him “the foremost proponent of political theatre with a pronounced leftist orientation. Dutt staged his  Angar (1959) on a coal-mine disaster, the first of a series of spectacular productions in which he aimed to cast a spell on audiences through the use of lights, sound, music, visual grandeur, tense acting and melodramatic situations... the spell held viewers captive and receptive to the message.” 

There followed such powerful hits as  Kallol (1965),  Tiner Taloyar (1971),  Barricade (1972) and  Duhswapner Nagari (1974). Leading cultural commentator Rustom Bharucha says that  Barricade “stunned” him with its “huge shadow of Hitler gesticulating like a madman, intricately choreographed street fights, the jury sitting with their backs to the audience in the orchestra pit — memorable theatrical effects.” Dutt continued staging remarkable plays like  Ajker Shah Jahan (1984) and  Janatar Aphim (1992).

The immediate trigger for  Barricade was political and topical. West Bengal, under President’s Rule as the Naxalite movement crumbled in 1971, was passing through extreme instability. Hemanta Basu, a respected 75-year-old leader of the leftist Forward Bloc party, had been stabbed to death in February 1971 outside Kolkata, which had seen many politically-motivated assassinations. Occurring just before the general elections in March, the killing horrified everybody. The Congress Party and others blamed the CPI(M) for the murder, making it their campaign plank for the legislative assembly elections, which was held simultaneously.

Nevertheless, as Dutt pointed out, “the CPI(M) emerged as the largest single party in the State”. However, a Congress-led coalition formed the government, lasting merely three months before collapsing into another spell of President’s Rule. “In 1972,” wrote Dutt, “we had to take the offensive. They were making a Reichstag Fire trial out of the murder of Hemanta Basu. They were trying to put the guilt on the communists and hoping to win the elections that way... and to the shame of the intellectuals, not one voice was raised against this naked aggression against democracy.”

He found near-identical parallels to the Nazi takeover of Germany. The decision to describe  Barricade as a “historical drama” was a wise move that protected him from political vendetta and prosecution, whereas spectators understood the implications  without any difficulty. Bharucha recalls, “I can still hear the audience cheer the climactic moments of the trial and abuse the Congress government with gusto.” 

Dutt himself commented ironically about the reactions: “IPTA [Indian People’s Theatre Association] and the windbags in its leadership found nothing in the play worth liking, and though they themselves were doing absolutely nothing, so scared were they of the Congress brownshirts, they furiously attacked our play.”