Mohit Chattopadhyay - Literary Work

Literary Work

Mohit Chattopadhyaya started his literary career as a poet and later shifted to writing plays. He started writing prose poetry along with his friends, and had little interest in rhyming. At first his poetry was published in various magazines and shortly it was published in book format as his anthology of poems.

Subsequently he stopped writing poems and devoted entirely to writing plays. From the very beginning he avoided writing realistic plays and wrote esoteric often highly political plays. Though he refused to be labeled as an Absurdist playwright, claiming his plays do not conform to the Philosophy of “The Theatre of the Absurd” but frequently he is referred as an exponent of Indian Absurd Drama. The cryptic nature of his plays encouraged critics to call his plays “Kimitibadi” (Kim+Iti) in Bengali, which in English meant, “What is it?”

As a prolific playwright he has written over one hundred plays. Some of his plays have been translated in different languages and have been regularly performed by various theater groups around India. Other than full length plays, Mohit Chattopadhyaya has written One Act plays, Verse plays Curtain Raisers, Microplays; he has adapted, edited and translated a number of plays in Bengali from other languages.

His play Raajrakto (Guinea pig) is considered as a milestone in the history of Bengali political drama. Kolkata based theatre group Theatre Workshop under the direction of Bibhash Chokrobarty first performed the play in Kolkata. Later the play was translated into various languages. In Delhi Rajindernath directed the Hindi version. Famous actor Kulbhushan Kharbanda acted in the play. In Mumbai, Satyadeb Dubey directed the play and Amrish Puri acted in it. Amol Palekar acted in the Marathi version and Shymanand Jalan produced another Hindi version of the play. For political reasons the production was banned by The Indian Government.