19th Century India's First Female Theatre Superstar: The Life And Legacy Of Noti Binodini

She was known as Noti — a performer. In 1874, she made her stage debut as the young Chaitanya in an adaptation of Bengali playwright Girish Chandra Ghosh's Chaitanya Leela. She was only twelve years old at the time. Her name was Binodini — she may well have been modern India’s first female superstar.

In the late 19th-century, Calcutta was a city torn between two identities: on one hand, it was the crown jewel — and still the capital! — of the British Empire in India; and on the other, it was the birthplace of the anti-colonial nationalist movement. It was the confluence of two disparate, antithetical cultures — the point of convergence and conflict where the East met the West.

This tense socio-political landscape gave birth to a potent resistance movement which found expression in a new, nationalist canon of literature and the arts. If we look at the literature produced at the time, we see the emergence of a revivalist canon rooted in Hindu mythological and religious narratives. Poets, authors, and playwrights like Dinabandhu Mitra, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Michael Madhusudam Dutt, and Girish Chandra Ghosh were some of the early proponents of this movement.

Unlike earlier, indigenous folk theatre traditions like jatra and palagan, however, the emerging modern Bengali theatre of the 19th century was heavily inspired by the realism of European theatre and led to the emergence of the actress as a key player on the stage. Still, there was social stigma associated with the profession and the 'public woman', and most early actresses were tawaifs recruited from the red light districts of the city. Noti Binodini was one of them.

Born to a poor Hindu family in 1863, Binodini Dasi was trained in the performing arts of singing, dancing, and acting by Ganga Baiji, an early singer-actress who worked at the National Theatre at Beadon Street in the early 1880s. Ganga Baiji was a collaborator of playwright Girish Chandra Ghosh and introduced Binodini to Ghosh, who further trained her in stage-acting. Between 1874 and 1886, she played almost 90 characters in almost 80 plays, mostly written and staged by Ghosh at the National Theatre, Bengal Theatre, and later the Star Theatre, which she helped establish. The 19th-century Bengali yogi and mystic religious leader Ramakrishna was a fan of Binodini's performance as young Chaitanya in Chaitanya Leela and novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, too, admired her performance in the adaptation of his novel 'Manorama'.

A woman ahead of her time, Binodini was a pioneering entrepreneur of the proscenium-inspired Bengali theatre and introduced modern techniques of stage make-up to the Bengali stage through blending European and indigenous styles. In 1886, she abruptly left the limelight at the height of her career, and spent the rest of her life in relative obscurity. In 1913, she published a memoir titled 'Amar Katha' (My Story), in which she reclaimed the story of her life and critiqued Bengali bhadralok society's hypocrisy and her disillusionment with the promises of men as the reasons behind her sudden retirement. Binodini passed away on February 12, 1941, at her home in Rajabagan Lane, Kolkata.

Earlier this year, the Star Theatre was renamed 'Binodini Mancha' in recognition of her achievements and contributions to Bengali theatre.

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