Shyamanand Jalan

Shyamanand Jalan (13 January 1934 – 24 May 2010) was a Kolkata-based Indian theatre director, and actor.

He started his acting career with play Naya Samaj in 1949, followed by Samasya (1951) directed by Tarun Roy in 1951.

He directed his play Ek Thi Rajkumari (1953), a children's play, written by Roy, in Hindi.

This was followed by Konark (1954) by Jagdish Chandra Mathur and Chandragupta (1955) by Seth Govind Das.

He continued to act in most of his plays, sometimes playing the lead and even into his later years.

He co-founded theatre group Anamika in 1955, impresario organisation Anamika Kala Sangam in 1967, and later in 1972, he left Anamika to form his own Padatik theatre group, of which he remained director for the rest of his life; Padatik Dance Center was launched in 1989, a school for Classical and Contemporary Dance in Kolkata.

He co-founded theatre group Anamika in 1955 with Pratibha Aggarwal, a Hindi writer and a great granddaughter of Bhartendu Harishchandra, which played a pioneering role in the revival of Hindi theatre., and remained with it till 1972, and during this period it created a large audience for Hindi theatre in Bengali speaking Kolkata.

At the time, Usha Ganguly of Rangakarmee' was only other director, to be actively involved in Hindi theatre in the city, just as Satyadev Dubey was in Bombay.

He translated plays by Henrik Ibsen like Janta ka Shatru (An Enemy of the People) in 1959, Brecht, Raja Lear from Shakespeare's King Lear, and Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentleman and The School for Wives.

He is credited for the renaissance period of modern Indian theatre and especially the Hindi theatre in Kolkata from the 1960s to 1980s.

He was the first to perform modernist Mohan Rakesh, starting with Ashadh Ka Ek Din (One Day in Ashad) in 1960 and in the coming years bridged the gap between Hindi theatre and Bengali theatre, by mounting Hindi productions of works by Bengali playwrights, like Badal Sircar's Evam Indrajit (1968) and Pagla Ghora (1971), which in turn introduced Sircar to rest of the country.

He was the first theatre director to recognise the plays of Mohan Rakesh, when he staged his Ashadh Ka Ek Din (One Day in Ashadh) in 1960, which had a competition organised by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1959, and was soon established as the first modern Hindi play.

This was also a breakthrough play for Jalan as well, as for the first time he was able to showcase an in-depth study of the complexity of human existence, to critical acclaim.

He subsequently staged Lehron Ke Rajhans (Swans of the Waves) in 1966 and Adhe Adhure (Halfway House) (1970), where he and his wife Chetna played the leads.

He often invited playwrights to the rehearsals, Mohan Rakesh who had been sceptical to excessive directorial influence on the integrity of the drama-in-performance, spent three weeks with the group, in Kolkata ahead of the 1966 production of Lehron Ke Rajhans, and even rewrote the third act several times, completed two days before the opening night of the production, and revised it yet again before its publication in late 1966, and in time it became one of the important productive playwright-director relationship in Indian theatre.

While working on Evam Indrajit he extensively collaborated with Sircar.

His other plays include Kauva Chala Hans ki Chal, Gyandev Agnihotri's Shuturmurg (Ostrich) (1967) and a production of Romanian playwright Mihail Sebastian's Breaking News as Chhapte chhapte (Going to Print) in 1963, in the arena format.

His production displayed his respect for the script as he didn't alter a word, and over the year he started a collaborative approach towards his productions with the playwright, a new trend in Indian theatre.

He co-established the impresario institution Anamika Kala Sangam in 1967.

His Hindi productions captured the magical realism of Bengali playwright Badal Sircar's Evam Indrajit (1968), Pagla Ghora (Mad Horse) in 1971 in brought Sircar to national limelight.

He was equally adept in handling harsh realism of Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar' s Sakhārām Binder and Khamosh Adalat Jari Hai (Hindi version of Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe), Panchi Aise Aate Hain (Thus Arrive the Birds) from his Ashi Pakhare Yeti in Marathi in 1971, Gidhade (The Vultures) in 1973 and Kanyadan (1987).

Subsequently, along with his wife Chetana Jalan, the well-known Kathak dancer and stage actress, and actor Kulbhushan Kharbanda, he left Anamika in 1971 and established Padatik (literally foot-soldier) theatre group in 1972, of which he was the founding director.

This gave him a chance to venture into bolder themes, like those in Vijay Tendukar's plays like

He received the 1972 Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Direction, awarded by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy of Music, Dance & Drama, and later remained the vice-chairman of the Akademi (1999–2004).

Born in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, to a Kolkata-based Marwari family of Ishwari Prasad Jalan who was a solicitor by profession and later turned to politics, Jalan studied law at the Scottish Church College of the University of Calcutta, and was a part of the Burrabazar Students' Congress.

Jalan started his career as a lawyer and subsequently headed a legal firm in Kolkata, and at the same time also worked both as a theatre actor and director.

He also acted in Bengali productions, like Tughlaq (1972), a Bengali version of Girish Karnad's play performed by Padatik under his own direction, for Pashchimbanga Natya Unnayan Samity, which featured stage actors, like Sombhu Mitra, Debabrata Dutta and Rudraprasad Sengupta.

He is credited for not only reviving Hindi theatre in Kolkata, but also by performing plays by Bengali playwrights like Badal Sircar's Paagla Ghoda and Evam Indrajit in Hindi, bridging the gap between North Indian and Bengali theatre.

Gidhade (The Vultures) (1973) and Sakharam Binder (1979), and Mahashweta Devi's Hazar Chaurasi Ki Ma (Mother of 1084) (1978), with his new venture he stepped beyond Indianism, modernism, or experimentalism.

Padatik in the coming years, started inviting outside directors like, Ranjit Kapoor, Satyadev Dubey, Bennevitz, Rajinder Nath, and Rodney Marriot, and soon the group was performing three productions in a year.

In time, dramatic speech and theatricality became the hallmark of Padatik plays and most notably Badal Sircar's Evam Indrajit (And Indrajit) remembered for its stylised movement and speech.

Along with his wife he founded Padatik dance school in Kolkata, for classical as well as contemporary dance.

He also remained associated with Natya Shodh Sasthan Kolkata, an archive of Indian theatre for many years.

Long before trend government funded festivals started, he organised the first performing arts festival, a "Chhau Festival" bringing together three forms of Chhau dance, i.e. Seraikella, Mayurbanj, Purulia, together on one platform, in March 1977 in Kolkata.

Padatik also organised workshops on dance, lec-dems of Gurus of Indian dance including Kelucharan Mohapatra, Vempati Chinna Satyam, Guru Bipin Singh, Birju Maharaj, apart from organising three major international theatre, dance, martial arts conferences in which theatre personalities like Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba, Tadashi Suzuki, Richard Schechner, Anna Halprin and leading theatre directors and actors from all over India, participated.

He brought Kalidasa`s Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam as Sakuntala to stage in 1980 with lyrical dance movements of Odissi, and G. P. Deshpande`s politically charged Marathi-play Uddhwasta Dharmashala (A Man in Dark Times) in 1982.

He acted in Mrinal Sen's television series, Tasveer Apni Apni, and later in Arohan by Shyam Benegal, Kahan Kahan Se Guzar Gaya by MS Sathyu, and Chokh (1982) by Utpalendu Chakrabarty.

As an actor in stage plays, he appeared as the don in Roland Joffe's 1992 film City of Joy.

He also worked with parallel cinema directors.

In 2005, he directed his first and only film Eashwar Mime Co., which was an adaptation of Dibyendu Palit's story, Mukhabhinoy, by Vijay Tendulkar.