Jogesh Dutta is probably the most famous mime artist in India. For over fifty years he has pioneered the art of mime in the country.
In India, mime and the name JOGESH DUTTA are synonymous. Talking of one evokes the image of the other. In this post, we will explore the life of work of one of India’s greatest stage performers.
Biography of Jogesh Dutta
Jogesh Dutta was born in 1935 in the Faridpur District of Bangladesh and spent almost 11 years in his native village of Haatshiruaail. When India awoke to a ‘new dawn’ on 15 August 1947, Dutta – then a 15-year-old boy – along with his parents and five siblings found themselves on a platform at Calcutta’s Sealdah railway station. Penniless refugees from East Pakistan, the family, like many others, faced a dark future. Soon an orphan at the mercy of distant relatives, he washed dishes at a tea stall, was a grocer’s assistant, and worked at a construction site before finding his true calling.
The exposure to life and people through the hard and grim reality provided him with knowledge and experience gained firsthand. This knowledge urged Jogesh to give it a vent through a form of expression. While eventually, he would describe Charlie Chaplin as an inspiration, at first Jogesh keenly observed young couples snatching a few private moments on the banks of a lake in the city and started imitating them, much to the delight of his friends and associates.
“I was always a keen observer of people and their acts. As a teenager, I used to imitate people, and as word spread, I was invited to perform at colleges, office functions and private soirees. Meanwhile, I also did some acting on stage with a theatre group,”
Dutta says.
In 1956, he created his first actual mime routine – a lady dressing up in front of a mirror. The same year, he regaled spectators with this, in his first stage mime performance, at Bally near Calcutta. Initially starting as a comic and an actor, Jogesh was a founder-member of Sundaram and acted in two early plays: Pather Panchali and Mrityur Chokhe Jol by Manoj Mitra.
But how to express basic human emotions and instincts when even words are redundant? This was the birth of the Indian’s mime art in 1956: Dutta had found a form of expression, and become the “wordless wonder”. Learning by himself, Jogesh was unaware of the traditions of mime or the ancient Natya Shastra. Once the technique had been found, the art was not late in coming. He has toured through the length and breadth of India showing his art, charming people everywhere, and infusing them with enthusiasm and interest. Later, he considered 1960 as his breakthrough year when performances at the National Youth Festival in Calcutta led to a flow of invitations to perform from all over the country and later the world.
As an exponent of Indian culture, he has circled the globe several times, bringing tribute from abroad several times including the U.K., u.s.a., U.S.S.R., Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Holland, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Canada. He was a delegate to the 9th World Festival of Youth and Students in Sofia (Bulgaria) in 1968 and was awarded as a performing artiste at the 10th world fair held in G.D.R. in 1973.
The Dutta Academy for Mime Artists in India
Dutta’s final appearance on stage was in his hugely popular The Thief at the Rabindra Sadan in 2009. After 53 years and countless laughs, the Charlie Chaplin of Kolkata took his final bow before the audience. Silently, as always. Jogesh reappeared after his final show on stage, dressed in a white shirt and trousers, and laid his wig and costume on the floor. As the ‘poet of silence’ he didn’t utter a word. To those who clamored for the show to go on, he assured them that he would continue to teach mime. And thus, mime will live on.
“I’m old and can’t take the rigors of staging an act anymore. Mime shows require agility and swift physical movement and that’s becoming difficult for me,” he said.
After he had given shape and depth to his art, and mime art in India as a whole, other artists began to follow. As the father figure, Dutta helped in the initiation and glooming of many others in this art ultimately came the national homage paid to him in the form of Jogesh Mime Akademi, established in 1971 with the help of the Bengal government, where he now imparts his talents and technique to the budding artists such as he once was, having retired from the stage in 2009. The mime academy has a four-year course that includes students from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Switzerland.
The Greatest Mime Artist in India
Dutta is without a doubt the greatest mime artist in India. His repertoire includes well over a hundred acts, most of them short and hilarious recreations of scenes from everyday life with a strong undercurrent of sympathy for the poor and underprivileged, with whom he still closely identifies. “I can never forget my early childhood and the difficulties we faced. We were very poor,” he says.
The Films Division made a documentary on him in 14 Indian languages in 1983, followed by similar documentaries made by Germany, Britain, and France. He received the Shiromani Purashkar in 1985 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 1993.