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Between heroism and villainy

Alamgir Khan notes the line getting blurred
Manoniyo Prodhanrnontree (Honourable Prime Minister) is a collection of four plays by Raahman Chowdhury, which was published by ARIAL in December 2011. All the four plays in this collection were published earlier. Shotru Ghare Baire was published in 2000 by Protibuddhijeebee Prokashan, Nishshankachitto in 2004 in the Theatre, a quarterly magazine edited by Ramendu Majumder, Shotru-Mitro in 2011 in the Natun Diganto, a quarterly journal edited by Serajul Islam Choudhury, and Manoniyo Prodhanrnontree in 2011 in Ferari, a bimonthly literary magazine. His plays are political in content and western in form. Raahman Chowdhury believes that there is no great play in the world that is not political. And he admits proudly, T do not have the ability to compose plays that do not deal with political and state affairs.’ (preface to the book). The political connection in these four plays is not at all remote or hidden. They can rather be categorized as direct political plays.
Shotru Ghare Baire (Enemies within and without) deals with the inner contradiction of the 1971 liberation war. Nishshankachitto (The Heart without Fear) is about the extreme left movement in independent Bangladesh, which aimed to establish a socialist society with the help of terrorism. Shotru-Mitro (Friend and Foe) holds forth this present time of predatory capitalism in the eyes of a one-time revolutionary. And Manoniyo Prodhanrnontree is today’s politics of confrontation and a proposal for a way out.
All these plays have a factor in common and that is the matter of drawing a line between a person's villainy and heroism and how that line gets blurred, making a person a villain in the eyes of some men and a hero in those of others'. There is also the question of how one's foe turns into one's closest friend when the background of an event changes. In the eyes of Raahman,
there is no hero or villain in the real world except human beings playing their own roles on the stage of history.
In Shotru Ghare Baire, an old Pakistani soldier captured by freedom fighters in 1971 opens the pages of history from the British period to Bangladesh's liberation war before the eyes of a young boy who has been fighting for the freedom of Bangladesh. In Nishshankachitto, a police inspector continues inhuman torture on the leader of an underground left party to force him to reveal the names of his comrades but later begins to think him as one of the noblest men on earth. In Shotru-Mitro, a young bone marrow transplant surgeon denies treatment to a one-time
revolutionary who is her father’s killer and in the end knows him to be nobler than her father. In Manoniyo Prodhanrnontree, a young economist comes to the office of the prime minister to have an interview, but the prime minister threatens to throw him out of her office and then, suddenly, knows him to be more powerful than anyone in her life and cries before him like a child. The Pakistani soldier, the police inspector, the young surgeon and the prime minister, all lose their professional identities at some critical moments in their own professional fields and become nothing but simple human beings with their small joys and sorrows and thirst for love and compassion.
The strength of the plays of Raahman Chowdhury is that they are full of drama, of the kind hardly to be found in contemporary Bangladeshi theatre; and the weakness is that they do not give ample scope to actors for movement on the stage. He makes no attempt to avoid stories. On the contrary, his plays are based on stories which are absorbing. The dialogues in his plays come wrapped in socio-political debate and subtle wit.
Raahman Chowdhury's dialogues deal with serious issues, as in Shotru-Mitro. Quddus, the revolutionary politician who has suffered twelve years in jail for murder, wonders, 'It seems the country has been rolling over money.' Altaf, his onetime disciple and now a physician, responds 'Not the country, some people. Many of the rest either have to work day and night only for a hundred taka or go on starving.'
Manoniyo Prodhanrnontree is as good as a thesis in a form of theatre on forty two years of persecution, corruption and muddled politics in Bangladesh and on directions for a way out of it.
ALAMGIR KHAN IS PROGRAM MANAGER, RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT COLLECTIVE (RDC)