Dissent : Writings on Nandigram and the State of West Bengal

Saoli Mitra’s theatre work is conducive to dissent. Pacham Vaidik, her theatre company has presented Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, her own Bitata Bitangsha (A Web Spread Wide) and her recent adaptation of Poshukhamar (George Orwell’s Animal Farm). Mitra has used theatre as a medium of focusing on the ugly face of state-sponsored terror. When the ruling Left government in West Bengal went on an industrialization overdrive immediately after winning their seventh successive five-year term-having systematically destroyed the state’s industry in their first decade-Mitra travelled across the state to find out more about the victims of displacement. She met the dispossessed farmers of Singur, the family of the teenage activist Tapasi Malik who was gang-raped and burnt alive for her involvement in the protest against forcible land acquisition; the maimed protestors of Nandigram who refused to part with their land and with the tea garden workers in north Bengal, who must give up their livelihoods to make way for realtors.  She gives voice to her outrage, shared by a growing number of uneasy citizens, must be analyzed and shared.

The articles, translated for the first time, combine research with on-the-field activism, trying to make sense of each situation in terms of the lessons drawn from the writer’s years of involvement in meaningful theatre. Unlike a purely academic treatise or a journalistic account, Saoli Mitra’s account is charged by both emotion and righteous rage and is an appeal to humanity.