Sudip Sanyal is a man of light. Anyone associated with theatre today knows his name as one of the most respected figures working behind the scenes. In this conversation with TOTZINE, he speaks about his journey into lighting design and about learning the craft under the legendary Tapas Sen.

"I entered the world of lighting entirely by accident.

I was a student of Physics, and alongside that I had an interest in theatre. A few friends and some seniors from my neighbourhood got together and we started working as a group. At that time, I had only one ambition—to become an actor. Nothing else.

We were a small theatre group. We rehearsed endlessly and tried to stage productions. But once we actually began performing, we realised that nothing was really working. I'm talking about 1992–93.

Back then, theatre competitions were held at various places, and we participated in quite a few of them. We invariably finished last—and rightly so. We knew nothing about the stage or lighting. Hiring a professional lighting designer, set designer or make-up artist was simply impossible. We had no money.

So we decided that if nobody else could do these jobs for us, we would have to learn them ourselves. That was how I first began learning lighting. What is important here is that, right from the beginning, I genuinely wanted to understand theatre properly.

Later, I joined a theatre group called Sanglap Kolkata. Under Kuntalda's direction, I even acted in a few productions, playing small roles. During that period, I realised two things. The first was that my interest in theatre lighting kept growing. By then, I had started watching theatre seriously. I was watching the productions of Bibhas Babu, Rudra Babu, Ashok Babu and Ushadi. Among them, Ushadi had a particularly deep influence on me. I became fascinated by the way lighting functioned in their productions.

The second realisation came after acting for some time—I understood that I was a terribly poor actor. Thankfully, I realised that at a very young age!

I could feel emotions deeply within myself, but I simply couldn't express them. As an actor, the tools at my disposal—my facial expressions, my voice—failed to communicate what I was experiencing internally. I realised that I was extremely raw as an actor. On the other hand, my fascination with lighting kept growing. Being a Physics student, I already had a natural interest in light, electricity and the science behind them. At that point, I had no exposure to theatre beyond watching plays. I knew nothing else. Gradually I began to feel that perhaps I should devote myself to learning lighting properly.

But the question was—how?

Around that time, through Ashok Pramanik of Nandikar, I came in contact with Badal Sircar. I already knew Ashokda, and it was under Badalda that I first started working with theatre lighting. Soon another question began troubling me: how could I learn about the history of lighting in Bengali theatre? Before practising any art, one should understand its history. There was no internet then. Still, it was possible to gather a few books and read. But almost everything available was about Western theatre. There wasn't a single book on the history of stage lighting in Bengali theatre.

At that time, we used to publish a magazine. For that publication, I interviewed Rudraprasad Sengupta. During our conversation I told him that I genuinely wanted to understand the tradition of theatre lighting in Bengal.

By then, because I was working with Badal Sircar, I had become reasonably familiar within theatre circles. I had met Shaolidi, Ramada—that is, Ramaprasad Banik—and Salil Babu as well.

So when I told Rudra Babu about my interest, he simply said, 'Then why don't you ask Tapasda?'"

"But Tapas Sen was a legend. How does one simply approach someone like him? I told Rudra Babu, "I don't even know him. Why would he agree to speak to me?"

He replied that he would let Tapas Babu know about me. That was how I was introduced to Tapas Sen.

I didn't think it would be right to meet him empty-handed. So I decided to do my homework first. I thought I should at least prepare a proper questionnaire. I worked extremely hard on it. Time and again I took it to Salil Babu, asking him to go through it. After eight or ten rounds of revisions, it finally took shape. Around that time, Kuntalda was serving as the guest editor of Anustup magazine. They were bringing out a special issue in theatre. This was Kuntal Mukhopadhyay of the theatre group Sanglap. He told me that if I could interview Tapas Sen, Anustup would be happy to publish it. That worked out perfectly.

I met him over two days and conducted the interview. Altogether, it lasted nearly four hours. Those were the days of cassette tape recorders. Unfortunately, I no longer have the cassette—it deteriorated over time. But the interview was published in Anustup as a substantial feature, running to almost forty pages.

We discussed a wide range of subjects. Not just theatre, but politics, society, and the larger cultural landscape. We also spoke about the way he perceived light itself—how a production gradually comes alive from nothing through illumination, and how he approached that entire creative process.

At that stage, I certainly didn't understand everything he was saying. It was only years later, after I had matured both personally and professionally, that many of his ideas began to reveal themselves to me.

After he passed away, sometime around 2010, I reread that interview. Reading it again, I felt my questions had been incredibly immature. Yet, even in response to those naïve questions, he had spoken about ideas of extraordinary depth. Only later did I truly realise how significant those conversations had been.

Tapas Sen looked at light in a completely different way. Take Bappaditya, Nandikar's production featuring Sohini in a solo performance. By then, Sir's health had deteriorated considerably, and he could barely hear. We had already discussed the lighting design among ourselves. He took the script home with him. The next day, when he returned, he asked Soumik, who was handling the set, to cut three mountain shapes out of a mount board.

The first attempt didn't satisfy him. His hands trembled by then, yet he quietly sketched the forms himself. Following his drawing exactly, we placed the lights as he instructed. When everything came together, it was astonishing. One mountain appeared to stand far away, another seemed much closer. An extraordinary interplay of light and shadow emerged, transforming the entire atmosphere of the production. For him, set and lighting were never separate—they were integral to one another.

He used to say, "When people experience a performance, they don't separate what they see from what they hear. Perception happens as a whole, and it expands into something much deeper at the level of emotion." What he had done was deceptively simple. There was a white backdrop. In front of it he placed those small mountain cut-outs, and behind them he arranged multiple light sources in such a way that the illusion of an entire mountain landscape came into being. Then he said, "I had read this story when I was young, though I no longer remembered it clearly. Last night I went home and read it again. Then I realised—this is Trikut Hill."

That's why I believe that whether we are talking about lighting or any other aspect of theatre, every creative idea ultimately begins at the level of literature. I have experienced this repeatedly in my own work as well. Great writers never need to explain everything explicitly. Yet when we read them later, they quietly plant those thoughts inside our minds. One of the most valuable lessons I learnt from Sir—and later from many others—was this:

If there is an emotion in a play that cannot be fully expressed through language, performance or set design, and if lighting also fails to capture that emotion, then the lighting has not truly done its job. Sir used to say that this is the real point of departure. That was the defining quality of his lighting. His light was always intensely dramatic.

Whenever people speak about Tapas Sen's work, they often mention how he created the sensation of a train moving across the stage, or how he evoked the feeling of flowing water. Those achievements have been discussed extensively. But what I most want to say about his work is something else. The extraordinary gift he possessed was his ability to deepen the emotional mood of a scene. That, to me, was truly remarkable. Science can explain light and colour in physical terms. But that explanation belongs only to science. Beyond that, light and colour have an emotional life of their own. Think of the light of late afternoon, or the pale, fading light of a winter evening. Each kind of light carries a distinct psychological resonance within us. Tapas Sen could grasp that instinctively. As an artist, he could translate those intangible emotional experiences into light with complete ease. Very few people possess that ability.

There is still much more to say about the art of lighting. The rest will appear in our next issue.