Shudrka Hyderabad production brings on their latest production, Phiribar Poth Nai (No Way Out), to Kolkata. Performed on the 5 September, the play is a meditation on the poetry and inner world of Jibanananda Das. The play is written and directed by Swapan Mondal, starring Souravi, Sawan, and Sohini. Light design has been done by Joydeep Roy, stage design by Monali and Swapan, and music by Abhimonyu, Swapan, and Dwijoy.
Jibanananda Das was a voice that stood distinct in the modern period of the world. Writing contemporarily to Tagore and Nazrul, Das did not let their style of poetry influence his works. He remained modern, imagery-heavy, and surprisingly rustic in an urban setting. This work is not a biography but a ritual of listening: an act of return to a poet whose life and literature remain profoundly relevant to our time of ecological grief, existential fragmentation, and longing for connection.
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Created by Shudrka Hyderabad Shilpitirtha Trust (alias Shudrka Hyderabad) in 2024 to mark the poet’s 125th birth anniversary, Phiribar Poth Nai unfolds as a layered tapestry where poems, letters, essays, and critical voices are interwoven on stage, embodying an intertwined act of offering and receiving. The performance becomes a living archive where language breathes, silence speaks, and forgotten voices are heard again. Das’s poetic syntax, surreal nature imagery, and melancholic beauty reveal a world where healing is not loud, but slow, internal, and reflective. His solitude is not absence—it is a space of listening. His refusal to conform becomes a gesture of defiance. In today’s hyper-mediated world, his words teach us how to be present again, with breath, with land, with memory. The staging of the play draws from minimal gesture, layered soundscapes, and immersive atmospheres. The performance asks audiences not to watch but to witness, not to consume but to co-sense. This is theatre as ritual, where memory becomes a shared offering, and presence is the medicine.
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Shudrka Hyderabad is a multilingual theatre collective founded in 2004, rooted in the belief that performance is both a tool of resistance and a site of healing. Operating under the Shudrka Hyderabad Shilpitirtha Trust, the group has developed a distinctive artistic language that merges classical texts with contemporary concerns, folk idioms with modernist experimentation, and multilingual dialogue with embodied practice.
Shudrka’s repertoire spans Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, and English, exploring themes of gender, caste, ecology, political memory, and the sacred in everyday life. Their work is characterised by a minimalist aesthetic, ensemble storytelling, and a deep engagement with physical theatre and traditional South Asian performance forms. Their productions often unfold in unconventional spaces—rural fields, community halls, ruins—as part of their mission to decentralise theatre and make it more accessible.
The group has participated in several national festivals of repute. Shudrka’s members have trained and presented internationally in Austria, Italy, Germany, and the UK, and regularly conduct performance workshops with youth, women, and marginalised communities.
Shudrka Hyderabad is not just a theatre group; it is a collaborative practice of listening, making, and remembering through the living body of performance.
The celebration of Das has always been troubling because the poet is a walking contradiction, which is also the reason why Das remains largely non-translated. You can translate the language, but never the essence. Jibanananda Das remains thus a watershed for the alienated yet warm, and brings on the poetry of flashing images which are fleeting at best.
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