As the State of West Bengal rejoiced in the victory of the green 'poriborton', a historic figure of revolution that also constituted radical change, passed away. Badal Sircar, a theatre revolutionary who broke every rule of the bourgeois stage and rejected the proscenium to transform theatre into a weapon of mass awareness and uprising, passed away in his Kolkata home on May 13 2011 at the age of 86. Sircar's theatre was identified with Sircar himself who conceived it, created it, defined it and presented it in various forms undiluted by the bourgeoisie existence of the proscenium that creates and sustains a hierarchical relationship between the actor and his audience. Like the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, he rejected extravagant costume, make-up, set design and lighting and minimized the use of props. His medium of expression, agency of exchange and instrument of communication, was the actor's body- trained and honed to become a powerful tool in itself.

In December 2008, Gorky Sadan and the Eisenstein Cine Club of Kolkata screened four films on Badal Sircar, each projecting a different perspective but basically stressing the great man's unique vision of breaking the barriers that divide the audience from performer and performance. The films were - Sourav Sarangi's Collage, Pakhira (Asim Choudhury, Sibananda Mukherjee and Debashish Chakraborty), Third Theatre in Bangla in two parts, directed by Goutam Sharma and Swapna Dutta's Ebam Badal Sircar. The 80+ Sarkar was present at the screenings and the spacious hall was packed with people standing at the aisles to see this great innovator who turned traditional proscenium theatre on its head and radicalized this once-feudal, sometimes fascist form of entertainment to make it an agency of social change, invest it with a language of its own that evolved with time, and turn it into an active, dynamic and moving weapon of attack against the powers-that-be.

As playwright and director, Badal Sarkar evolved and defined his individual content, form, aesthetics and philosophy he called 'Third Theatre', which, in course of time, became synonymous with his name. Third Theatre is that kind of performance that establishes and continuously reinforces maximum intimacy between actor and spectators. His strategy and methodology appeared simple and uncomplicated. But peeping behind the apparent simplicity was a philosophy that made theatre a performance for the people, of the people and in a manner of speaking, even by the people. He began by performing in small halls and with benches and stools to create varied shades of relationship between actors and spectators. He moved on to the open streets, gardens, parks, everywhere, turning the whole world into a stage without any reference to Shakespeare. He drew theatre out form the confines of the folk and the urban styles and into the Third Theatre to expose us to an unconventional theatrical dimension of free theatre, courtyard productions and village theatre.

Sudhindra Sircar, born in 1925, famously known as Badal Sircar, passed away into the other world in a Dickensian house in one of the many labyrinthine lanes off North Kolkata's Beadon Street. In the 1940s, Sircar then very young, and a civil engineer by education and vocation, restlessly moved from one job to the next, from engineering to teaching, and took some time off to dabble in Leftist politics. He then moved to Europe. He watched a lot of theatre, soaking in all kinds of forms and styles paying the cheapest gate money. He took time from his town-planning work to write his own plays. He decided to turn to theatre seriously when he returned to India.

In a 2004 interview, he detailed his distancing with the proscenium as a space for performance. 'Historically, my separation from proscenium theatre was not a matter of political perspective. It was a question of theatrical communication. In the proscenium theatre there is too much distance between the viewers and the actors. The audience is engulfed in artificial darkness as if it was not there, whereas the whole set of activities is meant for the audience alone. I wanted more participation from the audience, less silence, and more attention. I wanted to see them seeing each other. Thus I came to Anganmancha. I felt there was no need to delude the audience with tricks of set and light. Everything was so close that there was no need for make-up. Thus our theatre was stripped of the weight of superfluity and also became inexpensive. Eventually, I realised that through these processes, there arose the possibility of a portable, flexible and therefore inexpensive theatre. I had never thought of theatre of this kind before. We could visit places, even villages just carrying one kit bag with us. There was no need to depend on money anymore. This was a great realisation,' he said.

His plays became part of a counter-culture, designed to expose media lies and government untruths, uncovering blatant lies and myths such as news that perpetuated myths like nuclear tests being safe and being used for peaceful purposes. His research was intense. He explored the predicament of a middle-class man in his seminal play, Evam Indrajit. Written fairly early on in his career, it was initially performed in a conventional indoor setting, highlighting the existential angst of his protagonist who reflected the preoccupations of an entire generation growing up in a newly independent India.

He wrote more than fifty plays of which Ebong Indrajit (Bengali), Basi Khabar, Bhoma, Michhil, Hottomalar Oparey, Baki Itihas, are some of the well-known pieces. He rose to prominence in the 1970s and was one of the leading figures in the revival of street theatre in Bengal. He revolutionized Bengali theatre with his angst-ridden, anti-establishment plays during the Naxalite movement. He was bestowed with the Padma Shri (1972), Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1968) and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship (1997.)

For Badal Sircar and his group, the reward for their tireless efforts came in a different way. While touring the villages in Bengal they came across audiences willing to sit through a performance in any kind of weather. He recalls one night when they performed through a continuous drizzle interspersed with heavy showers. So enraptured was the audience, that about 3000 people sat through the play for about three hours. Finally, when showers came down heavily Badal Sircar called it a day and begged leave of his audience. That they were interested enough to sit through the rain meant that the message was getting across.

The tragedy of Badal Sircar is that the Indian theatre archives do not have a single documented biography on his life and work for future generations of theatre enthusiasts and practitioners to fall back on. As mentioned earlier in this article, we once got to see four different documentaries films on Badal Sircar, each projecting a different perspective. Each of them basically tried to underscore the great man's unique vision but sadly, do not possess the qualities demanded of archival excellence in quality of presentation, treatment, or even quality of the film per se in terms of projection on screen. The attempts are good but the vision is rather myopic in retrospect.

Swapna Dutta's Ebam Badal Sircar (2008), a 47-minute documentary, looks at Sarkar from a different angle. We find the octogenarian engaged in freewheeling conversations with a group of children. It is a process of discovery on both sides. In course of this interaction, we are gradually introduced to Badal Sarkar as the eminent theatre personality, as a keen social commentator even at his age, as the grandpa next door. Rare archival photographs provide the perspective while he reflects on his experience or explains his philosophy of theatre. The background scores used in the film are from Badal Sirkar's compositions, played by the child artistes. The other films mainly focussed on his 'third theatre' practice. Shot in Black-and-White, they suffer from lack of preservation and that has affected the quality of the prints.

*Shoma A. Chatterji is a freelance journalist, film scholar and author based in Kolkata. She holds a Ph.D. in History (Indian Cinema) and is currently a post-doc senior fellow of the ICSSR, Delhi. She has authored 17 published books of which seven are on cinema, six are on gender, one is on urban anthropology and three are collections of short fiction. She has won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema twice and the Laadly-UNFPA Award for consistent writing on gender issues in 2010 among other awards. She is currently commissioned to write three books on Indian cinema. She has been on the jury of several film festivals abroad.