A couple of days ago, I got to watch ‘Siddharth’, a theatre based on Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel of the same name. It was translated by Zafar Alam, while the theatrical direction and adaptation were done by Reza Asif.
The April 25 show was the 25th performance of this production. It was a lovely evening. The enthralling lighting, the changing, intriguing set design, and the miraculous music, complemented by sublime performances by the actors, made the two-and-a-half-hour-long performance touching and satisfying.
The entire performance echoed the discourses of Lord Gautama Buddha. For my anthropological eyes, this production is not just entertainment or an apolitical retelling of an epic tale. Rather, for me, it was a retelling of history, a refashioning of events, and a reinterpretation of the ethnographical reality of then.
I write this piece to voice my concern about the production’s “innocent” approach to a story written by a colonial ‘white man’. First, I showed the historical context of the original writing as I went along, critiquing it with literary theories. These critiques are highly relevant to understanding the epistemology of theatre production in Bangladesh.
Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha between 1919 and 1922, and it was first published in German in 1922. The years between 1919 and 1922 were not kind to Europe.
A continent bloodied by war and stripped of its philosophical certainties provided the unlikely cradle for Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, a novel born not from comfort, but from collapse (Mileck, 1978).
Hesse, long alienated from Western materialism, had already begun his descent inward, submitting himself to Jungian psychoanalysis under Dr. Josef Lang around 1916–1917, where the architecture of the self became, for him, the only structure worth inhabiting (Mileck, 1978).
His turning toward ‘the East’ was neither sudden nor fashionable; it was historical, rooted in the legacy of his maternal grandfather Hermann Gundert, a missionary-scholar whose fluency in Indian languages had seeded in Hesse a lifelong reverence for Eastern thought (Hesse, 1970).
He had read the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, studied Buddhist texts and absorbed Schopenhauer’s India-haunted philosophy until these traditions ceased to be foreign and began to feel like memory (Hesse, 1970).
His 1911 voyage to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia sharpened this intimacy not through arrival, but through longing, the kind that confirms what the soul already suspects (Mileck, 1978). Against this personal reckoning, Hesse set his fictional Brahmin, Siddhartha, walking the Gangetic plains of 5th-century BCE India beside the historical Buddha, yet deliberately beyond his doctrine because Hesse believed that truth, however universal, must be trespassed upon alone (Hesse, 1922/1999).
Hesse’s Siddhartha arrived at the height of European colonial dominance, and however spiritually sincere, it participates in a long tradition of the Western imagination consuming Eastern philosophy on its own terms, extracting wisdom while remaining indifferent to the living peoples and cultures from which that wisdom breathed (Quijano, 2000).
The novel’s composition enacted this very argument: the first half came in a rush, then silence for more than a year, during which Hesse refused to write of enlightenment until something in him had honestly shifted (Mileck, 1978).
Furthermore, the novel renders ancient India as a timeless, placeless spiritual landscape, emptied of political conflict, caste violence and colonial disruption, a romanticised geography that served European readers seeking refuge from modernity rather than accountability toward the East (Mignolo, 2011).
Published in German in 1922 and translated into English by Hilda Rosner in 1951, the book waited quietly until the 1960s, when a restless American generation, hungry for meaning beyond prosperity, found in its pages a vocabulary for their own unraveling (Mileck, 1978).
Hesse wrote within and subtly against the German Expressionist tradition, honouring its instinct for interiority while rejecting its anguish in favour of something stiller, more ancient, more resolved (Hesse, 1970).
Siddhartha is, crucially, a European interiority dressed in Indian robes; his quest for the self mirrors the Romantic and Jungian preoccupations of the West, quietly displacing the epistemic frameworks of Vedantic and Buddhist traditions with a universalism that is, at its core, provincial (Fanon, 1963).
If we read it from a decolonial standpoint, the novel’s celebrated translation and global canonisation reflect not the universality of its message, but the universality of Western cultural power, the ability to decide which versions of Eastern thought are legible, palatable, and worthy of preservation (Mignolo, 2011).
However, I am not telling you to read Siddhartha to dismiss it, but to hold it honestly, asking whose India is narrated, whose voice is absent, and what it means that the world learned of the Upanishads not from Indian writers but from a Swiss novelist in crisis (Quijano, 2000).
It saddens me to see that the production was very blind to all this understanding. It was just a mere translation. Translation of the storyline, of the history, of the role of people and ecology.
This negligence became even more bitter in the presentation and characterisation of the main female character Komola, who is presented by Hesse as this enchanting ‘Eastern woman’, who is the master of seduction and for whom Siddhartha leaves this ‘holy quest’ of enlightenment and becomes corrupted with worldly pleasures.
Siddhartha, in one of their first intimate scenes in the production, is amazed at how good a kisser Komola is, and throughout Komola and Siddhartha’s monologue, Komola is portrayed as powerful, lustful and drawn into the worldly pleasures of wealth and comfort. All the things that Lord Gautama Buddha has identified as the root of suffering.
This creation of ‘Eastern’ females as mysterious, masters of lust, and eager for wealth and comfort is very understandable for an enlightened white European such as Hesse. But to translate it and present the white colonial gaze on the stage for the 25th time is alarming.
Such a gaze is presented as alarming because this uncritical approach to history is re-establishing colonial norms and people’s understanding of themselves. By being uncritical of the original text and its background, the show illustrated Komola as the sole corruption of the soul.
For many years, theatre shows and productions have been flourishing, especially in Dhaka, where houseful theatre performances are no longer a surprise. In this context, I think producers, directors and all stakeholders of this art form should approach their storylines more critically.
For many years, theatre productions have been flourishing, and in Dhaka, full-house performances are now a regular occurrence. In this context, it is important that producers, directors and all stakeholders in the sector approach their narratives with greater critical reflection.
The effort that goes into staging a production is deeply appreciated. As someone outside the production house and the wider ‘art world’, this critical reading may not sit comfortably with everyone.
However, it is not intended to be dismissive or to position myself as a know-it-all. Rather, it comes from a place of appreciation as a theatre enthusiast who regularly attends productions across Dhaka.
It is also an acknowledgement of the dedication and commitment of the team behind the ‘Siddharth’ production. The hope remains to attend future shows as well.
The writer is a researcher and anthropologist.
