I had the privilege of experiencing a Bangla play titled Katha Chilo Hente Jabo Chhayapath (lit. We Had Planned to Walk the Milky Way) yesterday at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata. As I gradually realised while watching, the play was based on Mirza Ulugh Beg (the grandson of Timur) who was an astronomer and mathematician.
Because I do not have a full grasp of Bangla, I could not understand most of the dialogue. I had to piece the story together through the actors’ delivery of lines and, more importantly, through the stage picture, particularly the incredible lighting and set design. It was a heavily mounted musical, I honestly did not expect this level of scale and ambition.
This experience reaffirmed something important: comprehensibility, even in text-driven stage dramas, does not depend solely on text. I found myself unengaged and confused only at moments where spoken dialogue alone carried the drama forward. Since humour is especially text-dependent, I often felt isolated when the Bangla-speaking audience around me burst into laughter. I could sense that a punchline was coming, but I couldn’t grasp the setup or the joke itself.
What helped bridge this gap were the performances. They were theatrical in tone, as they should be. The actors clearly marked shifts in mood, drawing a wide and legible line between moments of seriousness and moments of levity. Even without understanding the words, I could sense when the play wanted me to lean in or relax.
Setting aside my complete inability to comprehend the jokes and the overall flavour of the dialogue, I want to focus on what genuinely moved me.
The first was the entry of Timur, the grandfather of the main character, Ulugh Baig. His violent nature was established using deceptively simple tools: he repeatedly banged a stick on a wooden table and then treated the stick like a sword, tucking it into his waist once he was done. This directorial choice, using the raw, percussive sound of the stick to emulate the violence Timur inflicted in his time, made me flinch repeatedly.
There were other powerful moments, but going into them would take me beyond the scope of this post, so I won’t digress further.
The second major contributor to my experience was music, the one pure art form that operates beyond the logic of conventional comprehensibility. I almost welled up during Ulugh Baig’s wedding sequence. It wasn’t necessarily designed as an emotional scene, but the music carried it to that place regardless.
The third factor was lighting and set design. The set was ingeniously conceived, stripped down into levels that revealed different locations, as if it were unfolding along with the story itself. I marvelled at how the same elements could be repurposed into entirely new spaces as required. The table on which Timur bangs his “sword” reappears throughout the play in various contexts. That table is as integral to the play as the actors themselves, perhaps that is why it occupies the centre of the crew photograph posted above.
The lighting was exquisite. No camera could capture what the human eye experiences on stage. Theatre demands a greater suspension of disbelief, but it also offers a more haptic experience than an optic one. You feel close enough to touch the light. Unlike cinema, where we try to hide light sources, here the sources are visible, you see them move, you notice them working, yet they remain enchanting. It’s mysterious how that enchantment persists.
Enough digression. The point I’m making is this: theatre is a text-driven medium, and despite my near-zero understanding of Bangla, I still enjoyed the experience. Why? Because of the elements mentioned above.
This brings me to an attempt of my own: my long-take exercise, A Prison on the Equator. My aim was to create a deeply ambiguous film, valid ambiguity, meaning there exists at least one coherent version of the story that is true and known to me, the crew, and some of the actors. At no point would the film attempt to expose this version. Instead, it would truthfully recreate the milieu of The Prisoner’s conflict, a man trying to mathematically comprehend the date of his death, only for the unpredictability of the event to dismantle his rational understanding of the world.
I was eager to see how this incomprehensible film would be received by a visually literate audience at SRFTI. From conversations I’ve had, people seem to pick up on the themes but remain unsatisfied with the experience itself, perhaps because the film lacks the comfort that comes with narrative clarity.
Where I think I may have misjudged things, based on limited feedback, is in expecting catharsis without providing the necessary ingredients for it. I now believe that while comprehensibility may not be essential for engagement or even emotional response, it is absolutely essential for catharsis. Catharsis is the pleasure-giving function that makes us remember a work for years, the one that truly alters us.
That is the adventure I am choosing this time.
My script mentor for my next short film asked me a simple but piercing question: are you still trying to expand your stylistic explorations, or are you trying to give the audience a cathartic experience? After much deliberation, I chose the latter. I decided to write a fully comprehensible screenplay, one that audiences across all levels of visual literacy can decode.
Watching this Bangla play and arriving at this decision felt like a watershed moment. While I was often moved and consistently engrossed, I never experienced the catharsis that the Bangla-speaking audience around me clearly did when the play ended.
Whether a translated version of the play would have given me catharsis is not the question. The experience planted a deeper one:
Is comprehensibility a necessary condition for catharsis, even if emotion and engagement can exist without it?
Cinema, as an art form, buries its answers in posterity.
Thanks to Subhajit Paul for an invite to the play, like he promised: I did enjoy the experience.
Unobjective 