Osama bin Laden -- the musical

In a village in rural India, the world's most-wanted man - or someone who looks rather like him - is putting on a show. PHIL REEVES bought a ticket.

The young man belonged to that sinister and irksome category of government security officials who make a point of being as obstructive as possible. You find them all over the world, men whose swagger and self-importance far exceeds their status as small-time agents of the state.

A Hollywood casting director could not have improved on this one: he had a glistening Yamaha motorcycle, dark glasses, a flashy but fake-looking watch and an even flashier fake-looking smile.

We had entered an "extremist-prone" area of India without permission, he declared, apparently referring to the occasional guerrilla attacks by local Maoists in the name of a small and wholly obscure war against feudalism; we would have to report to the police or leave. Our hearts sank.

Few places are as hospitable as India. The countryside seems populated with people willing to drop everything to help an unknown foreigner find his destination, to feed him or to serve him tea. But life can come to a halt if you get snagged in the cogs of bureaucracy.

We had a mission that now appeared in jeopardy. Only a few moments earlier we had arrived by train from Kolkata in Ghatsila, a shabby industrial and mining town.

We did not wish to divulge the purpose of our journey to the local plods: it was to find Osama bin Laden. Not the Evil One himself, who continues to elude the CIA's spy satellites, but the play that takes his name.

In recent months there have been at least three attempts by Indian playwrights to write dramas about bin Laden for troupes of roving players who tour northeast India during the cool winter months. These companies, primarily from Bengal, are the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns of this era, peripatetic thespians who clamber into buses with steel trunks loaded with costumes and props to perform jatras. The jatra is a traditional form of Bengali drama, performed to non-stop live music, interspersed with syrupy love songs, wild stage fights and, these days, spectacular pyrotechnics.

In outlying villages, where there is little entertainment, the travelling players can pull in 10,000 people paying 30 rupees ($1.15) a ticket, so profits can be hefty. The troupes can perform up to 100 shows in a season that lasts from September to April, and the themes tend to be sensational; those in the business have yet to forget the controversy that erupted over a jatra called Hitler.

We had set out on our expedition after hearing on the grapevine that Indian Special Branch and anti-terrorist squad officers, armed with red pens, had been perusing at least three bin Laden scripts, striking out material that might trigger sectarian violence in a region through which the Hindu-Muslim fault line runs deep. A play called Biswatras Laden - Laden, the Terror of the World - had reportedly made it to the stage, and been closed down. And another didn't get past the point of advertising its work-in-progress before being told by the authorities to cancel it.

It was a reminder of the region's communal tensions only the previous week, when 213 men, women and children, many of them snake-charmers, were stranded for several days in the no-man's land between India and Bangladesh: India said they were Muslims trying to sneak into India from Bangladesh; Bangladesh said they were Muslims being driven out by India's Hindu nationalist forces.

Two of the bin Laden jatras had reportedly been banned. But one, by a Kolkata-based group called the Star Opera, had passed the censors. We had heard that a performance was planned in a village in Jharkhand, the newly created state that borders West Bengal. So we set out to see it.

However, as we sat in the starkly lit police station, being grilled by the still-grinning local intelligence agent and a weary-looking desk cop - Who had invited us? Why had we not obtained "permissions"? What did we plan to photograph? Why did we have a visa for Pakistan? - the odds of getting there seemed to be diminishing fast.

Worse, I had forgotten my map of the region and neither I nor Tom Pietrasik, my photographer colleague, had the slightest idea where to find the village in which Osama bin Laden was that evening to be performed.

We had underestimated Jackie, our translator. He was as keen as we were to see a jatra; although he has lived all his life in Ghatsila, he hadn't been to one for years. But the police delayed us by nearly three hours, and it was beginning to look unlikely that we'd make it by curtain-up.

We had shown our passports, visas and press passes, all of which were in order. Even then, the obstructive intelligence agent wasn't happy. He wanted us to report to another Government office in another distant town, a journey that would have demolished the day completely, destroying our plan to find the Osama bin Laden production. So I took the decision to leave.

Luckily, Jackie knew exactly where the show was. After one and a half hours weaving our way in a four-wheel drive through the pot-holed mud lanes, we finally arrived in a place called Domjuri, home to 5000 people, of whom about half are literate.

The scene of the jatra was marked by what looked like a miniature version of the Millennium Dome. A vast tent made of jute and held up by poles, which protruded through the roof like cocktail sticks, had been erected on the dust-covered village football pitch.

Every now and then, garishly coloured posters showing a sinister-looking Osama bin Laden were illuminated on the mud walls of the village. A van festooned with posters was rattling around the chicken-cluttered lanes, the phrase "Osama bin Laden! Osama bin Laden!" blaring repeatedly through a loud speaker.

The actors - some of them big-chested, cello-voiced men, with plumes of black hair and the sort of booming presence of which Richard Burton would have been proud - were loafing around a nearby schoolhouse, sleeping or resting before their night's work. Among them was the 35-year-old writer-director, Raja Sarkar, a science graduate from Kolkata who started out his literary career writing radio advertisements for shampoo, biscuits and soap.

Though he still knocks out the ads, he feels now that he has a higher calling: Osama bin Laden was written "to enlighten my fellow Indians" - especially those who, stuck with a national media that gives short shrift to international news, may not have caught up with the last two years' events in Afghanistan.

His script had, he said, been vetted by Special Branch, the Intelligence Bureau and the anti-terrorism unit, none of which objected to its content.

So, as the outside world prepared for war with Iraq, Sarkar had set out to remind his fellow countrymen about what he claims is fast being forgotten - the United States' "assault" on Afghanistan and the installation of the Northern Alliance Government.

Not that this meant he was pro-bin Laden, he stressed. "We condemn all forms of terrorism. But a lot of people are keen to know more about Osama bin Laden, so we have to satisfy their curiosity," he said.

"Some people in India think he is a kind of prophet, but we want to break that illusion. We are very clear that we condemn his thinking and what he did in New York and Washington." Osama bin Laden, a tall, lean and friendly-faced Bengali actor called Akash Kumar, was standing next to Sarkar. He nodded in agreement.

But the conduct of the US appeared to be Sarkar's principal target. "I am very keen to write about Saddam Hussein and Iraq next," he said.

"People want to know the facts behind what is going on. And people want peace. That's our main message. My aim is to educate local people and, if possible, narrow the communal divide."

As the crowds gathered outside the tent for the performance later that chilly night, it was clear that Sarkar was right in at least one respect. Some of the audience had walked through the countryside for several kilometres to be there. They appeared to have come to learn as well as to be entertained, driven by curiosity about a subject that many of them, especially those unable to read, seemed to know little about.

"I don't know much about bin Laden, except that he is a terrorist," said 16-year-old Samir Das, an employee at a nearby cement company. "I have just come to hear about him. I want to know more. I heard all about the Hitler jatra a while back. Now I want to see the bin Laden one."

"We have heard a bit about bin Laden and the World Trade Centre on the radio. But this is a quiet place. What we are really interested in here is cricket, especially the World Cup," said a 13-year-old boy called Kumar.

"That seems much more important to us at the moment. But I am interested in knowing more about Osama."

The show finally began at 11pm. Some 1500 people, many of them women, gathered in the tent, an audience that would have gladdened the heart of any British repertory company, but was relatively modest by jatra standards.

They came with babies and small children, knowing that the performance would run for three hours and perhaps more - some jatras have been known to last all night. And they seemed oblivious to the chill though, as it was a clear, star-filled night, it cut through to the bone.

The audience surrounded a stage that looked like a boxing ring, but with a cluster of microphones hanging above it. Around the edge sat the musicians: a clarinetist, a drummer, an accordion player and one or two others, who began playing and did not stop for the following three hours.

The crowd watched in silence as the story unfolded. Scene by scene, they saw the fall of the Twin Towers, the ensuing assault on Afghanistan, the ousting of the Taleban and the escape of bin Laden, all interspersed with the occasional song and several hair-raisingly fierce explosions, meant to denote gunfights.

There were occasional swipes at Tony Blair, but the Americans took a hammering. The upper echelons of the US Government were represented by a portly, Burton-esque actor dressed in a clownishly ill-fitting jacket and a fat floral tie, and an oil-obsessed gangster wearing wraparound sunglasses, an even more sinister figure than the intelligence officer who had sought to stop our journey earlier in the day.

The soldiers of the Northern Alliance were portrayed as grotesque, snarling beasts who raped women and, in one particularly disturbing mime, urinated in the mouth of a Taleban captive. By contrast, bin Laden and his small band of bearded followers - though unpleasant and clearly fanatical - seemed relatively tame.

Sarkar was true to his word: as the play came to an end, the actors filled the stage and sang in unison. A world away from Hyde Park, Baghdad and the Pentagon, a makeshift tent in rural India filled with a cry for peace, not war.

And, at 2am as the crowd filed thoughtfully away into the night, huddling against the cold as they trudged another two or three miles home with their children in arms, it was possible to hope that, at least in this remote corner of the world, the message had got through.

Raja Sarkar certainly thought so. "I am very, very happy," he said, as his thespians packed up their costumes and made ready to leave. "We have educated the people. It could not have gone better."

- INDEPENDENT

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