Syed Jamil Ahmed

Early Life and Education

Syed Jamil Ahmed was born in Dhaka city in 1955. He remembers his schooling, family life, and the world around him as narrow, difficult, and oppressive. "As he searched for fuller meaning in life, he was suddenly thrown into the Liberation War in 1971 as a freedom fighter." The violence of the war left a deep scar inside him as a sixteen-year-old, for “having seen dead bodies rotting with gaping holes and the charred remains of abandoned homes, [for] having walked the streets of Dhaka city, clasping the clip of an unpinned grenade in [his] trousers pocket.” Quite accidentally, Jamil came in touch with an amateur theater group named Dhaka Theatre in 1974. "Theater appeared not only creative but also meaningful,” he recounts, “since the group worked out of a deep seated conviction that its action could generate positive social action." In 1975, Jamil received a scholarship from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), and dropped out of English Literature BA (Hons) programme at the University of Dhaka to join the National School of Drama in New Delhi. Here, from 1975 to 1978, he studied for three years and worked as an apprentice fellow for another year, under the guidance of two iconic figures of Indian theatre, Ebrahim Alkazi and B. V. Karanth. One of them, Alkazi, guided him through ‘Western’ theatre, and the other, Karanth, through the indigenous/traditional theatre of South Asia. He received his Diploma in Dramatic Arts with distinction from the National School of Drama in 1978.

Stage Design, Higher Studies, and Applied Theatre

After his return from the National School of Drama to Bangladesh in 1979, Jamil “successfully saturate[d] the local theater scene with new ideas and concepts that simultaneously drew from the local and the international theatre practices.” Soon, he emerged as a leading stage and light designer whose “designs created great impact for their compositional richness, expansive power, and poetic visualization” in productions such as Achalayantan (the Immovable), Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders) and Chitrangada by Rabindranath Tagore, Kittankhola and Karamat Mangal by Salim Al Deen, Sat Ghatr Kanakadi by Mamtazuddin Ahmad, Ei Deshe, Ei Beshe by S. M. Solaiman, The Tempest by Shakespeare, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Measures Taken by Bertolt Brecht in Bangladesh, and Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides and the Good Woman of Setzuan by Bertolt Brecht in Calcutta, India. Indeed, he can claim most of the credit for the radical shift that Bangladesh theatre witnessed, from the painted scene design of the 1970s to the realist, symbolic and surrealist design in the 1980s. Consequently, he was awarded the prestigious Munir Chowdhury Samman in1993. After eight years of free-lance theatre practice in a country that knew no professional career in urban theatre, Jamil departed from Bangladesh to study under Clive Barker at the University of Warwick in England, in 1987-88. Clive made a deep impression upon him by introducing him to Theatre-for-Development (what goes by the name of Applied Theatre today), and the praxis of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, N’Gugi wa Thiong’o, Ross Kidd, Michael Etherton, David Kerr in Latin America and Africa. Their work deeply resonated in Jamil because he was “passionately search[ing] for valid reasons for engaging with theatre amidst all the poverty and gloom” of life in the Third World, and because he wanted to believe “that theatrics, the ‘art’ of theatre and not histrionics, could add meaning to life". Upon his return home, he set himself to put his learning into practice by first engaging with a left-leaning landless farmers’ political party, and then with international and national Non-Governmental Organizations working in Bangladesh. In 1992, he was also elected to the Ashoka Fellowship by the Ashoka Foundation (USA), for seeking “through children’s games and simple theater performance, to help poor working children realize that their lives can be creative and meaningful, that the world is changeable, and that human beings are the ones who change it.” However, by 1995, he was disillusioned on all applied theatre fronts. As he argues in an essay published in 2002, Theatre for Development employed by Non-Governmental Organisations in Bangladesh, “which is almost entirely funded by international donor organisations, serves globalisation in the name of poverty alleviation.” Jamil continues to engage with Applied Theatre, but maintains his distance from the NGOs, and is highly critical of the manner that neoliberalizing institutions continue to appropriate and domesticate the liberating potentials of theatre.

Teaching, Directing, and Writing

Jamil joined the University of Dhaka in 1989, to teach at a nascent course in theatre, and went on to found the Department of Theatre and Music in 1994. Guided by his vision of bridging the ‘West’ with the indigenous/traditional of Bangladesh, he built a strongly performance-oriented pedagogy, which led to its recognition as a major centre of experimental and innovative productions. His major contribution to the pedagogy of the department, now grown into the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, has been the introduction of Theatre-for-Development, Theatre-in-Education, Performance Studies, Sociology of Theatre, and Psychoanalysis in Theatre. His academic work led him to be awarded Fulbright Fellowship twice. The first time, in 1990, his award took him to the Antioch College, Yellow Springs (Ohio, USA), as a scholar-in-residence, where he taught and directed (with Denny Patridge), The Wheel, an English translation of Salim Al Deen’s Chaka. The second award took him to the San Francisco City College (California, USA) in 2005, as a Visiting Specialist under the programme ‘Direct Access to the Muslim World’. Along with his academic career, Jamil continued to direct plays, both at home, and abroad. In all of his directorial ventures in Bangladesh from 1991 to 2010, his “signature brio” has been a “strong predilection for indigenous archetypes and popular myths.” In 1991, he created an uproar in the spectators of Dhaka city by the ingenuity of a performance vocabulary that borrowed from the indigenous theatre. In 1992, “his intellectual probe into [a] localized Islamic narrative” based on the Karbala legend, led to a recontexualized production of Bishad Shindhu, a six-hour epic tragedy based on Mir Mosharraf Hossian's acclaimed novel. As Guhathakurta observed in 1994, because “the theme and presentation of the production are very relevant today”, Bishad Sindhu “represents contemporary theatre in Bangladesh in every sense of the word.” From 1993 to 1997, he embarked on “voyages” to distant rural pockets of Bangladesh, spurred by his PhD research. He lived there, attended numerous performances of the indigenous theatre in situ, and discovered for himself “a tradition of wisdom and creativity which is the collective product of the people.” He was awarded PhD by the University of Dhaka in 1997 for his thesis on “Indigenous Theatrical Performance in Bangladesh: Its History and Practice”. Part of his PhD research was published as Achinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre of Bangladesh, which was praised as “a major contribution to the cultural richness and history of Bangladesh, and to any possible methodology for theatre anthropology.” Most importantly, his “voyages” to the rural pockets served as a strong empirical foundation, on which he devised a re-visioning of a number of indigenous theatre productions. These were Kamala Ranir Sagar Dighi (based on the indigenous form of narrative performance Pala Gan) in 1997 in Dhaka; Ek Hazar Aur Ek Thi Rate (based on The Thousand and One Nights) in 1998 in Karachi; Behular Bhasan (an adaptation of the Padma Puran) 2004 in Dhaka; Pahiye (Hindi translation of Chaka) at the National School of Drama in New Delhi in 2006; and Shong Bhong Chong (based on the indigenous theatre form of Shong Jatra), in Dhaka in 2009. All these productions were extremely well received by the critics as well as the theatre-goers, and contributed to his winning of the coveted Nandikar National Theatre Award, in Calcutta, in 1999. Perhaps, the one of the most acclaimed of all his productions is Behular Bhasan, which participated in Bharat Rang Mahotav, New Delhi, 2006, and Leela: South Asian Women’s Theatre Festival, Kolkata and New Delhi, 2010. Commenting on Behular Bhasan at the Leela Festival in New Delhi in 2010, The Hindu observed, “this production from Bangladesh would be remembered for long for its rich musicality drawn from traditional sources, excellent performances and the artistry of the director.” The Telegraph hailed the production as a “revelation”, not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of its politics that privileged women as actors “by casting them in all the roles, including those of men, [and] relegating the male performers to the music.” Most importantly, by “excavating” into the collective psyche of the people by means of these productions, Jamil has “demonstrated [..] his effort to redefine post-colonial locationality, [and] helped develop a unique set of working principles for others to follow.”

Research and Productions

Since 2002, Jamil has devoted more time to research, which he has presented in numerous international conferences, and published in journals such as TDR: The Drama Review, New Theatre Quarterly, Asian Theatre Journal, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, Research in Drama Education, Asia: Magazine of Asian Literature, Asian Ethnology, and South Asian Journal. Some of the research papers have been translated in Korean, Chinese, French and Norwegian. The cumulative result of his research work and theatre making led the National School of Drama to confer on him B. V. Karanth Smriti Puraskar in 2009. At present, Jamil appears to be moving away from his “signature brio” underpinned by indigenous archetypes and popular myths. Macbeth, directed at the National School of Drama in 2010, was found to be “remarkable for creative collaboration between director and light designer, which produced the right atmosphere to reveal a story of darkness and hideous evil with intense dramatic force,” but, at the same time, was devoid of the indigenous performance idiom Jamil is so well known for. The same observation is applicable to the other production, Shyamar Udal, directed in Kolkata in 2012. Based on “a performance-text collating passages from Tagore’s poem Parishodh, the natya-giti Parishodh and the dance-drama Shyama, plus songs and excerpts from elsewhere”, Shyamar Udal has been praised as “a milestone [that] displays encouraging signs of adventurous experimentation so often lacking in Bengali theatre.” Perhaps, Jamil has embarked on a new “voyage” that will take him beyond the shores of the indigenous theatre of Bangladesh.

Books

Chapter in Books (selected)

Journals (selected)