Jogesh Dutta says goodbye to Mime

Santanu Saraswati
Kolkata, August 21—There will be mime, but the father of Indian mime will never be on stage. There will be different shades of light, the background music, and the performer, but Jogesh Dutta will never be there, giving his ‘solo’. Friday the 21st would remain as the day when the conclusion of the ‘his-story’ was written as Jogesh Dutta bid adieu to stage.

The Rabindra Sadan auditorium saw a jam-packed crowd—there were mime-lovers, few eminent Tollywood faces of yesteryear, flashes of cameras, and even people, who just entered the hall by force after failing to get tickets—all for a just cause—to give a standing ovation to this septuagenarian maestro of Indian performing art.

Dutta gave some of his memorable mime numbers—the thief climbing the wall, the expectation—mesmerised the autumn gathering, but for the last time. “I am 76 now, and has suffered two major cardiac unrests few months back. I may not be on stage, but the art, which I introduced just at the age of 14, will never die. It will flow just like a river that flows through all these years without any sound—its ‘mime’ after all,” Dutta told Hindustan Times.

Dutta might be very honest about his confession when he said: “I have my best students, whom you saw on stage today. I hope they lived up to your expectation.” True, Srikanta Bose kept the entire few hundred audiences clapping when he mixed the Pythagoras of geometry depicting a hawk. All his numbers were simply amazing, if one wish to conclude in just a sentence. The maestro’s baton will now be in his hand to make the river flowing, silently. The maestro made this art immortal all over the world, so how far his best student could carry this out, only time can say. But if morning speaks about the entire day, Srikanta surely proved himself with a letter.

The recipient of Sangeet Natak Academy Award has opened a mime school in Mumbai, especially for the spastics and disabled apart from successfully running home for the physically challenged children—“Silent World”—at Behala. His organisation wished to create another history in nation’s cultural capital—Kolkata on the day the founder said final good-bye to stage. Dutta, however, think saying: “I don’t remember when I took up the art of mime. I have not yet attained perfection. Hence I am taking leave from the stage with a feeling of insatiety.”

The journey that began as a little boy of a roadside tea stall has surely concluded on Friday evening at Bengal’s most prestigious auditorium—Rabindra Sadan, but also with a new beginning. Arjuna had Dronacharyya in Mahabharata, and Srikanta had Jogesh Dutta. “I am happy that I am successful in imbibing these qualities in my students. I know even drops of tears rolled down the cheeks when Sunil Gavaskar retired from cricket. Tears, too, will roll down my cheeks. There will always be a pain, a pain to the art I loved most throughout my life. But everything should have an end, and ends are always painful,” Dutta said.

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