Mohit Chattopadhyay

Mohit Chattopadhyaya (also spelled Mohit Chattopadhyay) (1 June 1934 – 12 April 2012) was a Bengali Indian playwright, screenwriter, dramatist and poet. He was a leading figure in modern Indian drama. Mohit Chottopadhya died on 12 April 2012. He had been suffering from cancer.

Mohit Chattopadhyaya was born in the town of Barisal, now in Bangladesh. He left Bangladesh and immigrated to Calcutta (Kolkata) with his family at the age of thirteen. An avid reader, he started writing as a young boy. In Kolkata, he was a frequent visitor of Chaitanya Library, near his home at Bidon Street. In the library he stumbled upon Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, his first contact with an absurd play. He finished his Matriculation examination in 1950 and joined City College, Kolkata. While studying in City College he became close to culturally like-minded people, who became prominent poets, authors, artists in their later lives. He became close friend with Sunil Gongopadhyay, Shibshmbhu Pal, Soumitra Chatterjee, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Shakti Chattopadhay. He earned his Masters in Bengali Literature as a private candidate from University of Calcutta. His career in academia began as a lecturer at Jangipur College, Murshidabad and later as a Reader of Bengali Literature at City College.

Mohit Chattopadhyaya started his literary career as a poet and later shifted to writing plays. He started writing prose poetry along with his friends, and had little interest in rhyming. At first his poetry was published in various magazines and shortly it was published in book format as his anthology of poems.

Subsequently he stopped writing poems and devoted entirely to writing plays. From the very beginning he avoided writing realistic plays and wrote esoteric often highly political plays. Though he refused to be labelled as an Absurdist playwright, claiming his plays do not conform to the Philosophy of "The Theatre of the Absurd" but frequently he is referred as an exponent of Indian Absurd Drama. The cryptic nature of his plays encouraged critics to call his plays "Kimitibadi" (Kim+Iti) in Bengali, which in English meant, "What is it?”

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