The Mobile Theatre That Rocks Assam

By Shreya Roy Chowdhury

Despite bomb blasts and terror attacks, the mobile theatre Kahinoor continues to be a runaway hit in the boondocks of Assam

Jatin Bora lives in rooms with gaping doorways, uses bathrooms with no basins and sleeps in beds without mattresses. But he earns a staggering Rs 39 lakh a season — 10 months — for his pains. Bora, 40, is the Shah Rukh Khan of the ‘mobile’ Kahinoor Theatre, which performs to packed houses in the remotest outposts of Assam.

Kahinoor Theatre is masala unlimited — dances, romantic romps, good-natured teasing, a dash of violence and, occasionally, a triple role for its lead man. The hero fights with friends, saves the heroine from villains, and defends his homeland in war. In the interiors of Assam, these plays stand in for films, the troupe performing at over 70 locations between August and April. They have even performed their own version of Ben Hur, Jurassic Park and Titanic, which ran for a record four years.

Itinerant it may be, but the 34-year-old outfit does not travel light: lights, tents, sets, cookingware and 2,100 chairs are carted from village to village. Last month, they performed for the first time outside Assam, in Delhi. The posters are unabashedly filmi, with the opening credits as long as any film’s. A mix of stock footage — horses, rapids, hills — forms the background. “Kahinoor Theatre” slips out from behind a rotating earth to take position in front — remember Universal? “We’re experts at chamak,” laughs the troupe’s 70-year-old producer, Ratan Lahkar. Special effects, such as they are, are almost entirely manual. Viewers can see both the hand moving the light and the trolleys used for backdrop changes.

Touring uninterrupted for months is a challenge . The hero may get respect and love from his fans but he still has to carry his bedding along. Where possible, Bora is allowed a luxury accommodation in a PWD guesthouse that may be as far as 15 km from the performance venue. His entourage consists of a driver for his Innova and a ‘caretaker’. Still, he could have done worse. At least he didn’t have to build his own toilet by placing bamboo poles over a pit. Lahkar, who shared that experience at Rampur with actor Mahananda Sarma in the 70s, relates with relish and helpless giggles the unfortunate incidents related to the makeshift contraption.

Poorly maintained cinema halls and frequent bomb blasts have affected the film industry, he says, but Kahinoor has flourished. One reason for this could be that Lahkar is daring in his choice of scripts, even introducing the classics to a rural audience. With a master’s in political science, he’s one of the first educated artistes to join mobile theatre and widen its horizons. Over the last three decades, Kahinoor has produced plays based on The Mayor of Casterbridge, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the Greek and Indian epics. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Sudraka are all part of their repertoire.

The mobile theatre remains a largely male world. Of the 120 members in Kahinoor, less than a dozen are women. “People know what kind of lifestyle it is,” says Aichengfa Boruah, Kahinoor’s 28-year-old heroine. “( But) My parents believe in me.” This is her first stint with a mobile theatre. Girls, she says, stay with small families and are well taken care of. “They cook what we like, give us gamuchas (cotton scarf) and stay in touch,” says Boruah. “The boys in the team are like bhaiyyas.” She, like Bora, has her own car, driver and a caretaker who cooks for her. Her college-professor mother encourages her fiancé, a Guwahati-based businessman, to chaperon her. “He’s seen me perform so many times, he must know the scripts by heart,” she laughs.

The only problem is there isn’t a break. “Even if we die, we can’t stop,” she says dramatically. She once performed with a festering boil that she’d taken antibiotic injections for. “In three plays, I had five dances. I got picked up and flung about. It was painful.” Bora’s father was in the ICU with a brain tumour on the first day he performed for Kahinoor, back in 2007. The play was Abuj Dara Achin Kaina (Insensitive Bridegroom, Unknown Bride) where he had a triple role — possibly a first in theatre — of a film actor, a policeman and a dwarf. He recalls, “I was under a lot of stress. But kisi bhi condition mein (in any condition), the show must go on.”