Date: 29/01/2022 Shift: 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM Q. No: 43

You go up a dark, rickety stairwell of a building on a crowded street in Calcutta. You enter a small room. The centre of the room is empty but the corners are stacked with bedrolls, utensils and water bottles. Musical instruments, drums, cymbals and gongs are piled in a corner. Today, the room is filled with the laughter of men and women in colourful attire. Among the happy chorus of congratulations and laughter, the bride Chumki Pal and the groom Sandeep can be seen smiling. They are both blind, as are most of the people surrounding them. Pal is wearing a bright turquoise blue sari. “I know it’s blue because people have told me but I can’t imagine how it looks. But believe me, when I dream, I dream only in colours,” she says. Their romance blossomed when they met as members of Blind Opera, the only one of its kind in the country as well as in Asia.
The 36 spirited members of Blind Opera demonstrate that physical disability is not an obstacle. They enact plays by Rabindranath Tagore, considered challenging even by veteran theatre groups. Blind Opera was launched in 1996 by four theatre aficionados, who took it as a challenge to get together the talents of these visually impaired people. The challenge to present the cast on stage is immense since space management is a problem. To solve this, the directors use ropes to separate the stage and the wings. When the actors step on the rope they know that it is the entrance to the stage. The members cannot see, but they can smell, hear and touch – three elements inherent to any theatre. At Blind Opera, they “believe that the blind can see. That is, they see in their own way, if not in our way, with the help of these abilities.”
For the visually impaired, theatre is the medium for expression of their creative urges. They respond instinctively; they cannot copy anyone else because they cannot see. Their body language tells the story and hence it is very spontaneous. The members have earned kudos from Calcutta audiences. For the members of the troupe, discovering the language of the body is in a way also a journey of the persona. Coming from diverse backgrounds but bound together by the same disability, they have found an outlet for their creativity through the plays. They do not feel isolated anymore because they can relate to their fellow performers.
There is also a greater purpose behind it: to use theatre to build a community and mainstream the huge number of disabled living in isolation. Together they can be a force to demand better facilities in public life. Blind children should enter the mainstream from the beginning. The big dream of the group is to establish a drama school following the ideal of Tagore’s Shantiniketan, offering a platform for creative expression to all those who are economically and socially forced to stay in the periphery. Like Chumki Pal, they all dream in colour.