Theatre was her calling & mission

Nonika Singh

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On stage or off it, her enthusiasm was palpable and infectious. Renowned theatre person Usha Ganguly’s dynamic visual vocabulary set the stage on fire and embellished many a thought-provoking productions.

She breathed her last on Thursday. It’s not only Kolkata where she lived that would miss her robust and feisty presence, but also Chandigarh. A regular in the city, she staged many a play, including Anhi Mai Da Sufna, based on Partition. She took pride in being political and her plays invariably delved into socio-economic concerns.

From expose of vestigial religious practices to caste system to drug addiction to woman’s repression, her subjects centred on her concern for humanity. A former Hindi professor, self-trained in theatre, this trained bharatnatyam dancer used her dance experience to illuminate her plays with a unique visual language. A perfectionist to the core is how theatre person Sahib Singh recalls her. A one woman army, she designed as well as wrote plays that often took inspiration from the works of literary giants such as Tagore and Manto.

If her play Chandalika was based on Tagore’s story, his four writings were the inspiration behind her Bengali play Manushi. Though she created space for Hindi theatre in the Bengal heartland, she rightly believed that theatre has its own language. No wonder, her plays in Hindi found a resonance across continents and in countries like Germany. A Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee, she served as Akademi’s executive committee member, member of the National School of Drama, Satyajit Ray Film Institute et al.