Evam Indrajit Existential Crisis :
Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit is a drama on the Existential crisis of human beings in the modern world, the prime focus being on the lives of four protagonists – Amal, Vimal, Kamal and Nirmal ( Indrajit). These four friends represent the Bengali middle class life and the boring, uninspiring repetition of aimless action. The presence of the persona of Writer, Sircar’s mouthpiece, adds to the effect of the play and he is the agent through whose psychological dimension the readers view the story and the characters. A Romantic-cum-philosophical dream about a boring reality, Sircar’s play makes the reader rethink and question his own existence and purpose.
What is the most striking Existential feature in the play is the intolerable similarity and ordinariness of events and characters. The phonetic congruence between the names Amal, Kamal, Vimal and Nirmal predicts their extreme lack of uniqueness. Sircar’s heroes are too common to be protagonists and too condescending to be antagonists. All of them lead their life with an unimaginable disinterestedness. They go to school and take exams only because it is the norm. They have neither genuine interest in education nor serious planning for the future. The utter ignorance is evident from Indrajit’s conversation with the Writer : “I don’t know… Sometimes I just want to run away… some place, you know, somewhere far away.. outside – beyond”.
Substitution of linear progression of time with circular motion is another typical Existential quality in this play. The distinction between past, present and future is absolutely missing because with change of time,no change in action happens. The repetitive monotony and lack of genuine involvement persists : just the locales keep shifting from school to office to home and so on. Quite significantly the Writer remarks that despite knowing our aimless proceedings, we could help nothing but continuing this facade simply because we have no way out : “what is behind is ahead”.
The dilemma of Indrajit is quite different and worse than all other characters because unlike Amal, Kamal and Vimal he has no faith in life and God. They also feel unhappy but they are engaged with some or the other “targets” in life, like business, children’s education or other family issues. Indrajit even has no target because he knows how worthless all these activities are but simultaneously, finds no other engaging activity to be involved in. He can neither accept nor discard his way of life. With no choices left, his existence has become the “cursed spirits of Sisyphus”. While Manasi also recognised the worthlessness of life, she accepted it with its flaws and engaged herself but Indrajit could not do so. He is living only because he is still not dead.
The metanarrative of dramaturgy in the form of the Writer also helps to condense the Existential crisis. The Writer, too, feels the purposeless repetition because he is still writing the play despite having nothing to write : “language is senile and words are battered and maimed”. His hope in life is still not lost because “the audacious assertion of life claims immortality in its brief spark” and if the fragmented self can be united by emotions and involvement, life sounds sweet in its “symphony composed of atoms”.
Thus, Sircar’s Evam Indrajit can be considered a valid play on the Existential crisis along with its deviation from the European counterpart. The “and” (“Evam”) here serves as both conjunction and disjunction since it connects Indrajit with other characters for his repetitive action and alienates from others for his inability to accept this repetition. The objective crisis of two world wars is replaced with subjective and personal crisis in the Indian setting and that is why Indrajit looks like an absurdity within absurdity, whose Western understanding couldn’t make him adapt to his Indian circumstances.
