Rangakarmee’s Chandaa Bedni Challenges Patriarchy And Caste

Alakhnandan’s original play Chandaa Bedni had its maiden stage performance in 1989 by the Bhopal-based Nat Bundele in Nagpur. It was staged again in April 2012, soon after the playwright Alakhnandan passed away in February that year, Chandaa Bedni was staged once again as part of a two-day drama festival in the same city by another group.

On 13th March 2025, Rangakarmee, the Kolkata-based theatre group focused mainly on Hindi theatre, stages Chandaa Bedni as part of the META Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards 2025 in Delhi staged at the Kamani Auditorium in its 20th Edition.

The play bagged not less than six awards in different sections which underlines the hard work put in by the theatre-workers-activists of Rangakarmee even after the tragic demise of its founder-director Usha Ganguli, during the pandemic.

Chandaa Bedni, authored by Alakhnandan is a lesser known play on this side of the country so it came as a pleasant surprise for theatre aficionados in Kolkata where it is being staged to packed auditoriums.

The play is not in Hindi but in Bundelkhandi, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Bundelkhand region of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, considered to be a western form of Hindi and is known for its lyrical nature and rich folk traditions, including plays and music.

Bundeli is a dialect of Western Hindi. The natives of Bundelkhand speak this language. Bundelkhand is inhabited by the Bendelas which is a clan of Rajputs. It is spoken in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and certain parts of Bihar.

Rangakarmee's play based on Bundelkhandi folklore uses the "swaang" style, a folk theatre style popular in North India. Bundelkhandi Swang is a traditional folk theater form from the Bundelkhand region of India, known for its humorous portrayal of social issues and its use of imitation or "copying" as a core element because the word word "Swang" itself means "to imitate or copy".

Who is Alakhnandan? He was a renowned playwright and Hindi poet, a master in children’s theatre. At 63, he began his theatre career as an actor before delving into direction after an extensive study of North India’s folk and traditional forms. He innovatively re-imagined the Bundelkhandi Swang for contemporary stages, earning acclaim for his poetic approach.

The first thing that strikes the audience is the huge cast of actors who also dance and sing alongside acting without prioritizing the one for the other. One of them also plays on the dholak right through the performance as he acts, dances, sings, laughs, has fun and in sum, enlivens the play as much as the other actors do.

The second outstanding feature of the performance is the director Anirudh Sarkar’s command not only over the performance of his twenty-plus cast often occupying the entire proscenium space but also on the symmetry, the synchronization and the harmony in every single scene of this 100-minute performance without an interval.

Chandaa Bedni is not just a play to be seen, be entertained and forgotten after a while. It is a performance that includes colourful costumes, with the women wearing colourful ghagras and cholis they swirl around them as they sing and dance in and around their leader Chandaa Bedni.

She belongs to a tribe of women, known as “bednis” in a little-known district of Madhya Pradesh, cursed by tradition to a life of prostitution, tries to live life on her own terms, independent of men who try to woo her and take her into their fold for her beauty and her talent in dancing and singing.

Chandaa Bedni belongs to a very low caste, an untouchable, but seeing her perform in the village play, Lakhan, the young son from the Brahmin community falls in love with her at first sight and is ready to join her tribe, learn to sing and play music and get married to her to live happily ever after.

Chandaa tries her best to dissuade him and turn him away but she too, falls helplessly in love with him. The entire tribe of Brahmins in the village are scandalized, including the young man’s father. But he sticks to his determination not only to marry Chandaa Bedni but also to join her performing troupe.

This harps on both the caste question which is very strong in the geographical and ethnic backdrop the play is set against, and the patriarchal practice of the woman forced to follow in her husband’s footsteps after marriage. Here, Lakhan is ready to follow Chandaa wherever she goes and in whatever she does for a living, just to stay with her!

But both these questions are over-ridden by the deep love the lovers have for each other on the one hand, and on Chandaa’s social concern to take a life-threatening risk to save the village landlord’s (Raja’s?) dying son on the other. She volunteers to walk on a tightrope right across to reach the mountain peak just to save the life of the little one she has hardly set eyes on.

Though the performance space is filled with the huge cast constantly dancing and singing just to earn their daily bread, one cannot but fail to notice the rigorous rehearsals that have gone behind the final performance.

It is not easy at all to dance, sing, deliver dialogues and interact with fellow actors at the same time but these actors have mastered it after months and months of rigorous rehearsals and training.