Sombhu Mitra

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Sombhu Mitra (also Shombhu Mitra or Shambhu Mitra ; Bengali : শম্ভু মিত্র , Śambhu Mitra ; born August 22, 1915 in Calcutta ; †  May 19, 1997 ibid) was an Indian director and actor in theater and film and wrote plays. He worked in the languages Bengali and Hindi and is one of the most important representatives of Indian theater in the 20th century.

Life

Contrary to his father's ideas, Sombhu Mitra was already interested in theater performances when he was still at school. From 1931 he attended St. Xavier's College in Calcutta and dealt with the performing arts. His acting career began in 1939 at the age of 24. He played on various stages in Calcutta, where he appeared with the renowned mimes Sisir Bhaduri , Ahindra Choudhury , Naresh Mitra and Manoranjan Bhattacharya . Dissatisfied with the prevailing style of dramatic representation, Mitra left the commercial stage and joined the left-wing theater movement Indian People's Theater Association (IPTA) in 1943 . He staged his first production in 1944, Bijon Bhattacharya's current political play Nabanna (1943) about the Bengali famine of the same year. With this peasant drama Mitra helped identify the IPTA, with whose activities he was connected until 1948. Nabanna was successful with the audience because it brought the problems of simple peasants onto the theater stage for the first time in their village dialect and also differed from the usual productions in terms of stage design and choreography.

In 1948 he founded his own theater group "Bohurupee" consisting of 15 actors. On the side he appeared in film productions to bridge the financial bottlenecks of his independent theater. Mitra made his film debut in 1946 as an actor in the IPTA-produced film Dharti Ke Lal by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas , which was partly a film adaptation of the play Nabanna . Bohurupee's first important productions in 1950/51 included Tulsi Lahiri's socially critical plays Pathik and Chhenra Taar, as well as the modernized staging of Rabindranath Thakur's Four Chapters ( Char Adhyay ) in 1951 . Mitra put Western plays in an Indian context and brought them to the stage as adaptations. He reached his audience with indexed versions of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People ( Dashachakra ) and Nora or A Doll's House ( Putulkhela ) as well as Chekhov’s Das Jubiläum ( Sedin Bangalakshmi Bankey ). Mitra took the title role in Oedipus von Sophocles , while his wife Tripti played Oedipus' mother Iokaste. The Bohurupee production of Thakur's Red Oleander ( Raktakarabi ) won first prize at the National Drama Festival in 1954.

Following this success, and a few film appearances Sombhu Mitras in the early 1950s, including in Paul Zils ' Hindustan Hamara and Debaki Bose Pathik (1953) after the play of Tulsi Lahiri, hired him Raj Kapoor , along with Amit Moitra the directing Chased Raho to take over. The film won the Grand Prix at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1957.

In 1961, the year of Rabindranath Thakur's 100th birthday, Bohurupee performed the author's plays Red Oleander and The Sacrifice ( Bisarjan ). Mitra treated the texts presented with pathos in traditional Bengali theater as normal dialogues. In doing so, he created a reference to the present and finally ended its reputation for being impossible to perform. Other Thakur performances by Bohurupee in the 1960s were The Post Office ( Dakghar ) and The King ( Raja ).

Mitra also wrote and performed his own Bengali plays: Bibhab (1951), Ghurnee (1952) and Kancharanga (1961) - a satire about a man who is flattered by his wife and children for supposedly making money, but who is mistreated and insulted before and afterwards . The most important pieces by contemporary Indian authors performed by Bohurupee include Badal Sircars Pagla Ghora (1969) and Chop, Adalat Chalchhey (1971) by the marathic author Vijay Tendulkar .

In 1968 Mitra founded the Bengal National Theater Organization (Bangla Natmancha Pratistha Samity). He was the head of the acting department at Rabindra Bharati University in Calcutta.

Sombhu Mitra had been married to the actress Tripti Mitra since 1945 , whom he had met at IPTA. Their daughter Shaonli Mitra is also a stage actress.

Awards

In 1959 the Sangeet Natak Akademi in New Delhi voted him the best theater director of the year, and in 1966 he became a fellow of this institution .

The Indian government awarded Sombhu Mitra the Order of Padma Bhushan in 1970 , and in 1976 he was awarded the Philippine Ramon Magsaysay Prize .

Filmography

actor

  • 1946: Dharti Ke Lal
  • 1947: Abhiyatri
  • 1949: Abarta
  • 1950: Hindustan Hamara
  • 1953: Maharaj Nandakumar
  • 1953: Pathik
  • 1953: Bou Thakuranir Haat
  • 1954: Maraner Pare
  • 1954: Shivashakti
  • 1955: Durlav Janma
  • 1956: Hunted Raho / Ek Din Raatre (Hindi / Bengali)
  • 1961: Manik
  • 1962: Suryasnan
  • 1967: Panna
  • 1969: Natun Pata
  • 1971: Nishachar

Director

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.indianexpress.com/news/57-yrs-of-theatre-and-still-not-hamstrung/419034/

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Miter, Sombhu
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Miter, shombhu; Miter, shambhu; শম্ভু মিত্র (Bengali); Miter, Śambhu
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian director and actor
DATE OF BIRTH August 22, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Calcutta
DATE OF DEATH May 19, 1997
Place of death Calcutta