Kolkatar Elektra

Buddhadeb Basu’s ‘Kolkatar Elektra’ is a dark and grim portrayal of a woman’s obsessive love for her dead father, an obsession that leads her to nurse a rabid hatred for her mother and the man she remarried.
Convinced beyond conviction about their role in the death, 12 long years have not been able to efface either the scar or the love for the only man she has ever had in her life-her father. I could at various points, personally relate to Shampa-the Elektra of the play-and her predicament. The disgust she feels for her remorseless mother, the antipathy towards her mother’s new husband, the nauseating repulsion at the casual, unhindered flow of daily life, are all familiar and easily identifiable emotions. Of all things however, the feeling that most touched a raw nerve, was Shampa’s ever-increasing distance with her mother, concurring with her mother’s increasing closeness and dependence on her new husband.
In that sense, Shampa is a true Elektra, or rather, best exemplifies the ‘Elektra complex’. Since Freud never spoke of such a complex and it was only his student Jung who came up with the female version of the Oedipal complex, it may auger well to judge Shampa by Jung’s definition alone. In his scheme, the complex-i.e., the sense of acute possessiveness leading to deep insecurities and paroxysms of jealousy- may not necessarily be directed towards the parent of the opposite sex. More so, in the case of the girl-child, who latches on to the mother with the same intensity as with the father, even eyeing her mother’s chores-whether at home or outside it-with hostility, distance as it does, her mother from her.
Buddhadeb Basu’s Elektra, Shampa, is that. Just that. And it is difficult to put a finger on Shampa’s object of wrath, precisely for this reason. That a deep sense of betrayal gnaws her hollow is amply established. But for whom and why, are questions, that perhaps require a far greater level of personal empathy to figure out, than may be ordinarily expected.
Shampa misses her father, yes. Loves him, yes. In a manner ‘unbecoming’ of a ward, yes. With an intensity that was tantamount to frenzied obsession, yes. May even be clinically labelled a schizophrenic for all this, yes. But beyond everything, what is it that made life un-livable for her, every waking hour a torture? What, I wonder, agonised her more? The fact that Ajen-her mother’s lover- took away her father’s life, ensuring she could never see him again; or the fact that he took away her mother from her, ensuring this time, that she saw her everyday, every minute and every second, and reduced her to a constant witness to the celebration of a life of which she was not, and would never again be, a part of. Raising an expensive toast to his successful design, Ajen seemed to have had the last laugh. Sinister, no doubt.
Even then however, for all the spite she felt for him, Ajen was not Shampa’s ultimate foe. He was, but an outsider. An outsider from whom no sympathy can or should be expected. It was her mother. She was the one who had let Shampa down. A letdown so abject and complete that she never recovered from it. Shampa’s is the classic predicament of an unvanquished hero succumbing only to the blow dealt by the loved one. And for Shampa it was a double-blow. Not only had her mother aided in the murder of her father, she had allowed a third man, a complete stranger the right over her own life, her children’s’ lives and their lives together. Ajen therefore was the ‘other man’ who came in between not only her father and mother, but far more importantly, between herself and her mother. And that leeway was given to him by Manorama, her own mother. I could almost breathe with Shampa the same stifling fury, the same bitter anguish, and the same muffled venom, every time Manorama turned to Ajen in oh-so-fragile helplessness, let him decide the fate of her own children, in her own house, and sought permissions and offered explanations when none was necessary. The referral to Ajen as that man and Manorama as that lady whom our father had married, rings like a refrain throughout the play amply bearing out the deeply-entrenched odium/spite.
But it is to the credit of the author, that ‘Kolkatar Elektra’ never relapses into predictable monochromatic binaries, infact swinging the grey zone with mischievous infidelity. Shampa’s hero therefore is not a pristine, untainted figure who makes it almost obvious for the reader/audience to lay all their love on him! An alpha-male from the word go, he wasn’t, to cut a long story short, the best man to have a family with, spin dreams around or expect their fruition from. His character is etched out mostly from Manorama’s version, but then, it is corroborated by Shampa, albeit with ready justifications for every slip of his. This part-the dialogue between mother and daughter, Rashomon-esque in its spirit-I think is the high point of the play. And it is from here, that I believe, the sympathies that Shampa had so far hogged, begin to fade away. One begins to see Manorama’s point of view, learns to ache with her for conjugal bliss at the prime of her youth and pine for the little things that maketh a house a home. I was reminded, repeatedly at this point, of a movie made not very many years ago-Unishey April, by Rituparno Ghosh, exploring the complex dynamics of a mother and her estranged daughter. The ‘influence’(to be polite) of the play on the film, from content to exact dialogues, is hard to miss; particularly the manner in which, over the course of the play/the film, the object of vilification slips from oh-so-obvious to not-so-sure-anymore. And I do not remember having seen any acknowledgements where they were due.