Department of English and Humanities of ULAB organized its first seminar of the Summer semester, 2012. The seminar was presented by Professor Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman.

Professor Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman’s seminar

A Historiographical Account of Ibsen in Bengal

Held in R 401, Campus A on 12^th July,  2012

Mr. Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman, Professor and Chairman of the English Discipline of the University of Khulna presented a seminar entitled “A theatre historiographical account of Ibsen in Bengal,” in which he explained how Ibsen’s plays are to be evaluated, and how the value of the plays is altered, shifted, transferred and appropriated, when localized in new cultural contexts.  

While explaining how an Ibsen play is recreated, and how it gives birth to new meanings and thoughts when it is localized in a new cultural context, Prof. Ahsanuzzaman referred to old newspapers reviews, bills, performance notices and other documents to give a historiographical account of the staging of the play, A Doll’s House in Kolkata from the late nineteenth century. He also compared the play with a close Bengali version of it, Putul Khela (Playing with Dolls) by Sambhu Mitra, and said that not only in Bengal, but Ibsen’s play is still widely staged both in translation and adaptation in different parts of the Indian subcontinent.  

Prof. Ahsanuzzaman pointed out that the important reason for Putul Khela's fame is that Mitra made a Bengali experience lived through out of Ibsen as he set the play in his contemporary Bengal, replacing the Christmas by the Durga Puja, the biggest Hindu religious festival of the region, and inserting a Tagore poem in lieu of dance and allowing Nora-Bulu to rub off the emblematic vermilion mark (sindoor, worn by married Hindu women) from her forehead, which itself was a severe blow to the institution of marriage.

The seminar ended with a question-answer session which was also very informative and interactive.