Unlike many other initiatives that fail to fulfil their vows to continue, Happenings determinedly held its second annual Rabindra Utsav, aided by the government of West Bengal. It even expanded to embrace all three performing arts — music, dance and theatre. Yet it also maintained the Indian habit of bardolatry, virtually commanding the VIP artists and left-leaning mandarins present to offer floral homage to a large portrait of Tagore, who would have disapproved of such image worship.

Ironically, the play that left the greatest impact was the iconoclastic Bisarjan in its Tamil incarnation, Vituttal (picture) by Kanchipuram’s Kattaikkuttu Sangam, which imparts professional training to young villagers in traditional Terukkuttu. Unconsciously, it follows Tagore’s footsteps: in 1936, he had abridged the top-heavy tragedy for a show by the schoolchildren of Santiniketan. If directors P. Rajagopal and Hanne de Bruin consult that text, their adaptation would benefit from Tagore’s excision of the extraneous subplots in the original. Still, the tremendously talented kids (including girls, normally excluded from Terukkuttu), their high-pitched singing, kirukki pirouettes and ornate bujakirti costumes make it a treat. The conflict between religion and State remains as relevant, Rajagopal (Raghupati) and R. Devan (Govindamanikya) adding a local Tamil angle too. The troupe intends to create an eight-hour overnight version: a stirring prospect.

Inspirational in content, if not form, is Stay Yet Awhile by Prayog (Delhi), based on the Tagore-Gandhi correspondence and essays, obviously in English. The deep love and respect they had for each other, despite major disagreements on many points, completely dwarf any attempt to represent it. M.K. Raina, justifiably, refrains from depicting realistic characterizations, but errs in the other extreme by directing it as a reading without getting the cast to memorize their lines. Large chunks are delivered by them looking into their scripts, the resultant loss in eye contact undoing the value of live performance. Avijit Dutt (Tagore) steps out of this straitjacket occasionally, more so toward the end, but Dhruv Jagasia (Gandhi) does not, while Danish Husain appears superfluous as the sutradhar. Raina should also refer to Tagore’s Prayaschitta (1909), which projected a Gandhi-like figure and satyagraha years before Gandhi arrived in India.

Chetan Datar’s Marathi dramatization of the short story, Manbhanjan, as Giribala, for Awishkar (Mumbai), uses an attractive formalism of three couples in white simultaneously acting, dancing and singing the tale of Giribala and Gopinath.

Awishkar’s young team is highly accomplished in all three areas, but Datar distorts the secular drama in which Giribala had triumphed on stage at the end. He turns it into a Ram-Sita mythological, with Giribala enacting Sita swallowed by mother earth, thereby negating the popular empowerment Tagore gave her. He also drops the last paragraph, where the police drag off Gopinath after he recognizes Giribala and dementedly starts shouting at her.

Calcutta’s own Swapna-sandhani took the brief parable titled Bidushak in Lipika, and had it elaborated by Ujjwal Chattopadhyay into a full-length play as an artists’ protest against “recent developments in West Bengal”. Thus, it need not qualify as strictly Tagorean, particularly in the Picture of Dorian Gray-like introduction of Kanchi Raja as a sculptor (enacted by director Koushik Sen) and the new character of his queen. But it gathers force in the concluding Tagorean passages — the war-hungry king’s atrocities on innocent children of the enemy, the incompatibility between violent politics and idealistic art. Aesthetically, the best thing about it is Ashok Pramanik’s textured lighting.

I could not see Ranan’s dance-theatre production Chitra, scheduled at the same time as Vituttal, but director Vikram Iyengar assures me that he has revised it. Based on his earlier version, I felt he takes a radical stand on Chitrangada, through which “Tagore’s insight led us …to a Manipur which he could have never known in his lifetime.”

But, in practice, that promise to see the Manipuri princess through the prism of today’s strife-torn state remained theoretical: eventually, Ranan’s Chitra turned out as rooted in pretty aestheticism and choreogra- phic convention as every Chitrangada before it. I hope now he actually stages the revolution that Chitrangada cries out for and has never received since Independence.