Evam Absurd: Badal Sircar and the Matrix of Absurdism

Abstract

Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot was originally written in French as En attendant Godot in Paris between 9th October 1948 and 29th January 1949, perhaps as much as a response to the changing socio-political climate in post-World War II France as a consequence of the philosophical and artistic ferments of the time. Somewhat similarly, Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit was born in, and out of, a time of intellectual, political and cultural flux. Originally written in London in the form of a draft poem in 1957, the play was produced in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1963. Only ten years then separated the staging of the two plays, since Beckett’s play had been first enacted on stage in 1953. If Beckett’s pen had moved in a current of change and unrest, Sircar’s too had been written when Indian, and especially Bengali society and culture, were in the throes of a radical conversion.

Drawing upon Martin Esslin’s monumental work Theatre of the Absurd to define the matrix of absurdism, I have in this paper tried to locate the absurdism of Badal Sircar in Evam Indrajit with reference to the critical envisioning of western theoreticians like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus et al, and occasionally argued against Indian critics like Rustom Barucha, Manujendra Kundu and Subhendu Sarkar who would deny Badal Sircar the status of being an absurdist.