Jatra has become rife, running both in high and low repute: it is deprived of enjoying the sublime attention of literary criticicm and at the same time suffers the base association with cultural narcissism. Jatra is abject unless it exposes itself to bull's horn. Any taciturnity about this dominating avatar of contemporary performance is almost risking cowardice or mendacity for one, who has devoted his life to the cause of theatre. Denigrating the genre, on the contrary, would be a slinky pretension and irrecusable for this practicing playwright/director. But grazing the bull's horn, one becomes tangents to himself and the universe.
This author does not intend to find an access to such grace. He has personally worked as a playwright and a director in the Jatra Theatre from 1983 to 1992. These ten seasons of explorative involvement, after working with the painters, sculptors, musicians and choreographers for two decades in the past, was quite profitable in another direction of this writer's exposure to theatre experience. Besides, it has given this writer a sprawling vista of new relationships and adventure: moving on truck boards to remote parts of Orissa, trekking on the forsaken parts of our countryside and feeling the emotional rhythm of Odia folks on different patches of ground, under different marquees. Going on leave without pay from the college, disappearing from the monotony of scholarly studies and teaching to the same unwilling, stupid lot who search for trivia and entertainment from the class room course, fixed long ago by a languishing Board of Studies that prescribed out dated books on which cheap guide books are available, was like a refreshing escape.
Beyond that, living the ecstatic moments of one's creative floruit is obviously an elusive pursuit. It is also a tortuous trajectory to opt for the inferno, a sado-masochistic, slickly glide.
Some of this author's modernist fellow travellers of literature considered his involvement with Jatra as a kind of degradation. Their underestimation gradually grew satirical and their offending comments at my ability generated a Sartrean hell in my psychic space. The part played by human jealousy was obvious in this case; my infernal experience was no doubt a weakness, though. But I observed human jealousy was juxtaposed with modernist taboos of our literary intellectuals/professional critics and the changing proportions of the two elements were not discernible to the surface at all. It was a cultural-political-ethnic game played by a group of 'modernists' for whom intellectualism meant shrewd gameplaying. Creative writers become most vulnerable and unprotected at imaginary sites of their creative experience, and since this author's involvement with visual imagination was accompanied by literary one (this author's dramatic writing goes simultaneously on space and time since he is a director and his virtual direction of seeing his own configuration went simultaneously in the process) he was still more vulnerable.
It is a pity that the Oriyas have not yet endeavoured to occupy even a small space in the Indian theatre map after 75 years have passed since the emergence of Orissa as a linguistic state. However, the scenario is actually not that bleak as it is thought disdainfully of by our elites. This author, in the course of his surveying the malady, has finally discovered that on about 90 stages glow the foot-lights every night, an amazing record in India. About 95 Jatra repertoire companies tour over the state and perform under marquees at different places, urban as well as rural.
The Jatra Theatre companies are autonomous units of theatre repertoires that put-on board mostly pop pastisches. Each company is constituted of aound 60 performers and technicians on an average; and this means that the Jatra sector accommodates around 5, 500 art-minded people of the state currently. This justifies that the repertoires pay them sustainable salary. At least it generates employment avenues of a sizeable proportion. A postgraduate student from Vani Vihar asks this author to find out an acting job in the Jatra sector since he was the best actor of the year in some campus theatre competition. A graduate girl from a rural college, too, aspires in the same manner. Trained graduates from the Utkal Sangita Mahavidyaya (A postgraduate college of drama, dance and music run by the state at Bhubaneswar) find an opportunity to earn their livelihood from the Jatra sector. These instances mean that more and more people want to become artists. One can also feel the increasing appeal of histrionic arts in Orissa. Educated young men and women take up theatre arts not as a leisure time activity, but more as a career, as source of livelihood. Perhaps there is much more of a philosophical impulse than we outsiders commonly conceive of behind the contemporary generation's theatrical energy. It seems to have spilled over to the FM Radio jockeys. These private radio stations operate only in the metropolis. Theatrical energy is also evidenced in the histrionic compering of the music melodies on the streets. Interestingly enough, the new generation political congregations and protest demonstrations/speeches on the streets also evidence theatrical manoeuvres.
If meaning is harder and harder to come by and the ordinary symbolic structures of dramatic arts are crumbling both in the class rooms and in cultural fora, they appear burdensome rather than liberating to serious thinkers, if they still survive residually in these 75 years old linguistic state.
However, to a practical surveyor like this writer, the constantly increasing appeal of Jatra theatre proves that the histrionic art is continuously trying to symbolize and express popular images. Despite tremendous critical underestimation, academic hatred and sneers, probably Jatra Art does thrive, or at leat, has increased its energy level.
Perhaps this emphatic effort comes because there is a threat to its existing structure.
But seen from the reverse point of view, there is an unprecedented resurgence of Jatra literature and our orthodox critics have nothing to do with the qualities of the merchandise sold in the entertainment market. The publicity department of the Jatra sector, including the Jatra-journalists could be able to smother and kill the critical capacities of the customer-spectators like an opiate or outright hypnosis. The consumers of the Jatra market, however, do not admit this. The captains of promoting Jatra consciousness "educate" the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for the theatrical goods but for new experience and personal fullfillment. It upholds Jatra consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction; at the same time, it creates new forms of discontent peculiar to our global commercialism. It plays seductively on the malaise of industrial civilization. Is your life boring? Do you feel that the award maffia in literature have marred your career? Do you feel that your literary avant-gardism is futile at your family frontiers? Jatra consumption promises to fill the aching void. Hence, they attempt to surround their theatrical commodities with an aura of romance, even with images of female breasts and thighs from which all blessings flow.
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