NDA (II) 2016 General Ability Test · Question 89 of 150

Correct — C, a mobile theatre personality. Achyut Lahkar, born on 9 July 1931 and dead on 12 June 2016, is recognised as the father of Assam's Bhramyaman or mobile theatre. He was a dramatist, actor, director and producer, and in 1963 he founded Nataraj Theatre at Pathsala in western Assam, the company that established the form. A Bhramyaman troupe travels with its own portable stage, lighting, generators and technicians, pitching a temporary auditorium in one town after another through a long touring season, and Lahkar's company kept that circuit going for close to four decades. He received the Kamal Kumari National Award in 1997.

• (a)sports administrator — Nothing in Lahkar's career touched sport. The option is there because obituary questions in this paper are drawn from several fields, and a candidate who half-remembers the name will guess from the field they read about most.
• (b)wildlife photographer — An Assam connection makes this the sly distractor, since the state's national parks give it a well-known wildlife photography tradition. Lahkar's work was in touring drama, not in the field.
• (d)bureaucrat — He held no government office. He built and ran a private theatre company, and his standing rests on founding an entire performance industry rather than on any official position.

Bhramyaman theatre is a professional touring drama industry peculiar to Assam. Companies travel through the season with a full production — stage, seating, generators, sound and light crews and a resident troupe — set up in a town for a few days, perform several plays, then move on. The repertoire mixes Assamese social drama with adaptations and spectacle, and the scale of the staging is a large part of the appeal. Achyut Lahkar's Nataraj Theatre, founded at Pathsala in 1963, is treated as the point at which the form took its modern professional shape.

This is a pure recall item and there is no way to reason to it, so the value lies in what it teaches about Assam's cultural map and about how NDA builds an obituary question. Lahkar died on 12 June 2016 and the paper was written in September 2016, so the reading window was about three months — the same pattern as the journalist item earlier in this paper. Assam has two distinct theatre traditions worth keeping apart: the devotional Ankia Nat, the one-act form created by Srimanta Sankardeva in the sixteenth century and performed in namghars, and the twentieth-century commercial Bhramyaman circuit that Lahkar shaped. An examiner can ask about either, and confusing them is the commonest error. Reading this paper today, note only that the form has outlived its founder and continues to tour in Assam; Lahkar himself belongs to the 2016 news cycle.

• Achyut Lahkar lived from 9 July 1931 to 12 June 2016 and is called the father of Assam's Bhramyaman or mobile theatre.
• He founded Nataraj Theatre at Pathsala in 1963, and the company toured Assam and other states for close to four decades.
• He received the Kamal Kumari National Award in 1997.
• Ankia Nat, Assam's other well-known theatre form, is the devotional one-act drama created by Srimanta Sankardeva and is a separate tradition altogether.

• Mixing up Assam's two theatre traditions — the devotional Ankia Nat of Sankardeva and the modern commercial Bhramyaman circuit.
• Guessing a field from the sound of a name; obituary items in this paper span sport, journalism, science and the arts.

NDA carries at least one persons-in-the-news item per paper about someone who died in the months just before the exam, so a running list of recent deaths with the one field each person is known for is the only preparation that works.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Bhramyaman theatre, a professional touring drama tradition, belongs to which Indian state?

  • (a)Odisha
  • (b)Assam
  • (c)Manipur
  • (d)West Bengal

  Answer(b) Assam — companies tour the state through the season with portable stages and full technical crews.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Ankia Nat, the one-act devotional drama form of Assam, was created by

  • (a)Srimanta Sankardeva
  • (b)Madhavdeva
  • (c)Jyoti Prasad Agarwala
  • (d)Bishnu Prasad Rabha

  Answer(a) Srimanta Sankardeva — the sixteenth-century Vaishnava saint whose plays were performed in namghars.