Colonial History and Post-Independence Bangla Drama: Reading Badal Sircar’s Sukhopathya Bharater Itihas (Indian History Made Easy)

Abstract

Badal Sircar’s Sukhopathya Bharater Itihas (Indian History Made Easy) was first performed on 17th December 1976 in Kolkata around three decades after the winning of our Nation’s Independence. The play is one of Sircar’s most ideological works for it is a dramatic adaptation not of another play, film or work of fiction, but of a book on the economic history of India written during the colonial times which had been banned in India by the British authorities. Published in London in 1940 by the Cambridge and Oxford educated communist Rajani Palme Dutt, the original text from which Sircar adapted his play had the title India Today. Here, Dutt who had an Indian father and a Swedish mother, depicted with detailed illustrations how the colonial masters of India had looted the nation and had left it in poverty and destitution. As befits an economic history, Dutt provides here a dispassionate account of systematic imperial plunder. With statistics, tables and facts, Dutt’s book shows how the British colonization of India had robbed millions in the country of the most vital of their resources, financial, material, natural and technological. India’s Independence came within seven years of the publication of Dutt’s treatise, and among its readers was Badal Sircar who drew upon it to write his own play Sukhopathya Bharater Itihas (Indian History Made Easy). This drama was written some years after Independence, but at a time when the memory of the Bengal Partition of the subcontinent had not yet faded from public memory with entire populations having been serially uprooted and displaced from their native soil till well into the 1970s. As a mature 50- year old socially conscious and committed playwright, Sircar looked back in Sukhopathya Bharater Itihas to the origins of the history of the suffering of the Indian people. But while the play engages with the long shadow of India’s colonial past, the argument of this essay will concern the spectre of neocolonialism and dependence on a colonial heritage which Badal Sircar saw as a danger threatening the socio-economic fabric of the country being ruled over by a centrist Congress government. This paper will therefore examine Badal Sircar’s play as an ideological construct reflecting upon a post- Independence national consciousness, the idea of the state of the nation, and the importance of returning to history.