Gerasim Lebedev is a fascinating character. He was born in Russia at the time of Catherine the Great in the mid-18th century, the son of an ordinary clergyman. As a teenager, his family moved to the Russian capital of St. Petersburg, where Lebedev taught himself to read and play the violin.
He was able to get a position as a musician at the Russian Embassy, and started travelling all over Europe for performances. One day in 1785, during one of his visits to Europe, he went ‘missing’. He suddenly surfaced, having joined an English military band that was sailing to India. Lebedev spent a few years in Madras, when he realised that the military life was not for him either, and set off for Calcutta. In Calcutta, Lebedev found his niche.
He soon made friends with native Bengalis. He entered a teaching swap with one of them, teaching the man the violin, and in return learning Bengali, a smattering of Sanskrit as well as ancient Indian mythology, astronomy and mathematics.
Works of fusion
He became fascinated with Indian culture, and started to write his own fusion music, blending Indian tunes with Western musical instruments. Some of these arias are still available to us today. In his spare time, the Russian musician translated plays.
Adding Indianness
Unlike the frantic activity that was going on by the Orientalists of translating Indian works to European languages, he went the other way, and translated two English comedies into Bengali, transplanting the location from Europe to India and giving the characters Indian names!
He then had a burning desire to see his lays performed. This was no mean ambition, for no European style Indian theatre had yet been performed in India. The English would put on their English plays with English actors, in their small English theatres for their largely English audiences. For the general public, it was still completely unknown.
Runaway success
Gerasim Lebedev set about putting up a European style theatre to seat a whopping 400 people. For the first time, he hired local Bengali actors (another shocker, he also hired women actors!) to perform. The performances were a runaway success. Lebedev was very sympathetic to native Indians and especially to Hinduism. This put him in sharp conflict with the European wisdom of the day.
Conflict with the British
The British expatriates in Calcutta also weren’t happy about the thundering success of the Russian adventurer, and soon forced the closure of the theatre and hounded him out of the country in 1797. With just a few hundred rupees in his pocket, he somehow managed to get to London. Here, Lebedev published one of the first Indian grammars.
He finally returned home to Russia after 25 years away, where he set up the first printing house in Europe to use Bengali and Devanagari scripts, financed by none other than the Tsar of Russia himself.
Gerasim Lebedev pioneered early Bengali theatre, and later Bengali playwrights began to blend Western and Eastern styles of theatre in their writings. In fact, this new type of Indian theatre would go one to become a platform for social change, reform and even budding Indian nationalism and patriotism.
Lebedev’s book of India
Lebedev wrote a book, “An Impartial Review of the East Indian Brahminical System of Sacred Rites and Customs.” The book is a fascinating read. Like many other Europeans of the day, Lebedev tried to draw parallels between Christianity and Hinduism. Thu the Goddess Durga became the Virgin Mary, and Krishna, Jesus! He also painted an image of Durga, with her many arms coming out from her elbows instead of her shoulders, and the musical instrument held by her was a violin.
Picture Credit : Google