Rajdeep Konar

Rajdeep Konar is a researcher and writer based in Kolkata. He has done his PhD from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. For many years he has been associated with Anyadesh, a theatre group of visually impaired people, in various capacities. He is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Science, IIT Delhi. 

This grant will enable Rajdeep to study the theatre practices of two Kolkata-based blind theatre groups – Blind Opera and Anyadesh. He will explore how theatrical training, techniques and practices work as tools for blind pedagogy, healing and care. He will attempt to understand the nature of customised theatre practices adopted by the two groups that make them effective for blind individuals. 

India is home to the largest population of blind people in the world. However, there is a lack of social awareness about blindness and a coordinated remedial programme. The state policies on health and wellbeing largely consider disability a disease and its understanding remains entrenched in superstitious belief systems. The prevailing social beliefs confine blind people to their blindness alone. Consequently, they are subjected to malnutrition, ignorance, superstition, physical and psychological abuse, and in general a crisis of care and loneliness. Broadly speaking, disability in India could be equated in many ways with the caste experience where the disabled are often treated as outcasts. In the case of women in a predominantly patriarchal society, the physical and psychological abuse is particularly gruesome and the aftereffects of it exponentially hard to bear. Rajdeep will examine how Blind Opera and Anyadesh have tried to overcome these daunting problems by successfully using theatre as a medium to transform the lives of blind individuals. 

By looking into the history of blind theatre practices in Kolkata, Rajdeep will study the effective pedagogies, methods, and techniques devised and utilised by the two theatre groups in the past twenty-five years for the benefit of blind individuals. He will conduct a series of immersive workshops with the members of Blind Opera and Anyadesh with the help of artistic director Subhasish Gangopadhyay. From the group, six senior blind performers: Subhash Dey, Shib Shankar Prasad Verma, Janardan Choudhary, Rinku Mondal, Marjina Mistri and Nepo Mondal will act as resource persons. To get a comparative perspective, Rajdeep will also organise dialogue sessions with blind individuals who have no experience of theatre. This will follow workshops with blind theatre experts who have been in the field for considerable time to understand the evolution of blind theatre pedagogy. 

Rajdeep will also study various concepts and forms around the ideas of darkness, seeing and not-seeing. He will pursue these concepts through the lens of blind theatre practices, daily lives of blind individuals, existing discourses on blindness and present sociopolitical conditions. In-depth interviews with blind theatre practitioners and experts from the field will form the ethnographic component of this project. 

IFA has been seriously thinking about the dearth of discourse and work around disability and the arts in the country. With support from the Wellcome Trust, UK in 2020 IFA scoped a study to explore the intersections of arts, therapy and mental health in Bangalore. The report submitted to the Trust will enable them to support areas that need help in India. This grant is the first project that IFA is supporting which is investigating the intersection of an aspect of disability and an art form. 

The outcome of this project will be a monograph. The Grantee’s deliverable to IFA with the final reports will be the monograph and extensive audiovisual documentation generated during the course of fieldwork.