Theater through Water Stories: Kolkata Ki Jalkatha brings myth and music to Kolkata

Living Waters Museum hosted yet another episode of Kolkata Ki Jalkatha at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity carried out by the East India Dastangos. The lineup featured Palash Chaturvedi (writer), Zahid Hossain (storyteller), Swati Sharma (Storyteller), Sukrit Sen (Curator and Music Composer), and Soumalya Sareswari (Sarod).The theatrical ode to the city’s soul lit up the amphitheater like a battlefield. The story imagined the colonial era-mansion, Clive House, among Kolkata’s oldest standing structures, becoming the unlikely epicenter of a war between good and evil. Into that darkness stepped Devi, in her fierce Brahmacharini avatar, appearing before Job Charnock the man credited with founding Kolkata, and giving him a mission, to summon the city's guardian spirits, hidden not in temples or shrines, but in the very waters that have nourished Kolkata for centuries.

What followed was an evening that wove history with the otherworldly. What could have been a simple piece of theatre turned into a communal ritual by a live-choir composed of students from schools in and around the city.A moment that quietly stayed with the audiences, was a charming detour into etymology, recounting how Achi, a Chinese trader, is believed to have introduced sugar to Kolkata generations ago, gifting us the word for sugar, chini, in the process. A small historical footnote, dropped almost in passing, it captured exactly what Kolkata Ki Jalkatha does best: finding the extraordinary tucked inside the ordinary, the mythic inside the mundane.

The warm applause that greeted the artistes said much about how Kolkata Ki Jalkatha wasn't merely a performance but a love letter to Kolkata. Written in water, memory, and… a little bit of magic.We tried to celebrate life through the performance. Life, afterall, is the awareness of being alive -Palash ChaturvediHope is key to our performance. Today, we spoke about not science and logic, but emotional longing - Sukrit SenIt was a special performance, as it’s the first time we did it with school students and also used Bengali during it -Zahid Hossain-Monodeep Dey