A NIGHT AT THE JATRA

Excerpt from my book Before Tourists Come: Travels & Encounters in Bangladesh

“This is a good jatra group,” the official told us as we purchased tickets for the traditional Bengali stage drama. “In most places, people usually only want to watch the dancing girls, but this group has proved to them that the drama can be an attraction as well.”

An hour later, it was apparent we had been misinformed. My translator, Tapon, and I squeezed onto the couches at the foot of the stage between a coterie of VIPs on the left and a bamboo fence on the right, behind which sat hundreds of men who watched the stage with famished eyes. The music—the same repetitive, tuneless, yet wildly hypnotic keyboard music that had been screaming over the fairground’s loudspeaker for the past hour—became even louder, and with a roar from the all-male crowd, a woman with kinky black hair flowing loose around her shoulders wearing a Wonder Woman-esque pointy studded bra-cum-sari blouse gyrated across the stage to a flood of shrieks and whistles. It was Bollywood meets Bangkok strip bar meets Bangladesh. One of our neighbors in the VIP seats called her over. When she leaned down to talk to him, he tucked a couple of 10 Taka notes in her blouse, shouted something in her ear, and tossed his seat cushion onto the floor of the stage. Our Wonder Woman threw herself on top of it with, shall we say, feeling. The crowd erupted.

After nearly an hour of dancing, the actors took the stage to perform the drama. It was just 15 restless minutes later that the melodrama was drowned out by chanting from the audience: “We want the dance! We want the dance!” When, in the service of their art, the actors refused to leave the stage, they audience pelted them with wads of straw, and whatever else they could get their hands on, until they were finally forced from the stage. As the last actor fled, the wild music started up and a whippet thin fourteen year old ran onstage, convulsing to the roars of a sea of raging testosterone.

After the show, we joined the theatre troupe’s manager and veteran actor, Wassim. He shook his head over the incident. “The Jatra has changed,” he said. “We have always had dancers, but they used to be boys dressed up as girls. Now that real girls are dancing on stage, I fear our days are numbered.”