Chromatic resistance: The autonomous artist in Binodini’s Crimson Rainclouds
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Dr Elangbam Hemanta Singh
M. K. Binodini’s Crimson Rainclouds (Asangba Nongjabi), first published in Manipuri in 1967 and later translated into English by L. Somi Roy in 2012 for THEMA, occupies a significant place in Manipuri literature. The play addresses, with notable seriousness, a precarious relationship marked by tension between artistic freedom, social hierarchy, and a deeper metaphysical desire for an unmediated experience of reality. Structured in five acts, the play was first staged on 20 February 1966 at Rupmahal Theatre by the Roop Raag group. The production was directed by Aribam Syam Sharma, with music composed by N. Pahari. The principal roles were performed by Rabindra Sharma as Gautam, Yengkhom Roma as Indu, and Medhabati as Keinatombi.
This review seeks to examine Crimson Rainclouds through selected theoretical perspectives, drawing in particular on the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Rancière, Henri Lefebvre, and Raymond Williams. Read through these frameworks, the play reveals a sustained tension between the artist’s inner world and the pressures of an externally regulated social order, often described as an “administered world”. Gautam, the central figure of the play, emerges as a figure of the autonomous artist, defined by his resistance to the “principle of exchange” that underpins bourgeois society. His refusal to submit to this principle becomes the ethical and aesthetic core of the drama, foregrounding the costs and contradictions of artistic autonomy within a stratified social reality.
Gautam’s refusal to attend a job interview at an art school, despite the entreaties of his friend Indu, illustrates Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “literary field as the economic world reversed”. In this field, proper artistic value is often negatively correlated with temporal or financial success; the “winners” are those who appear to lose in the material realm to preserve their “disinterestedness”. Gautam’s room, described as “cluttered” with only a “mat” and “unfinished canvas,” (21) signifies his rejection of economic capital in favour of symbolic capital. When Indu questions his happiness in such poverty, Gautam invokes the ghosts of Van Gogh and Mozart, thereby situating himself within a specific “historical tradition” of the poète maudit who finds “salvation in the hereafter” of artistic immortality.
Furthermore, the encounter with the Middle-Aged Man who wishes to have a photograph copied with an added “beauty spot” (27) provides a satirical critique of what Bourdieu terms “bourgeois art”. This consumer views art as a service to be “haggled” over, demanding a “likeness” (27) that is simultaneously “better looking” (28). Gautam’s retort—that no one will know if there is “a resemblance” in “two hundred years”(29)—reflects the “aesthetic distancing” required to transform a mere product into a “work of art” that transcends its “commodity character”.
The central motif of the “crimson rainclouds” (58), functions as a Bakhtinian “chronotope,” where spatial and temporal indicators are fused into a concrete, artistic whole. For Gautam, these clouds represent a “moment of becoming at a standstill,” a suspended history that links his childhood “familiarity” with Indu to his current “solitary” search for an ideal. This memory is not merely a “nostalgic” retreat but a “representational space” that challenges the “abstract space” of the city.
Jacques Rancière’s theory of the “distribution of the sensible” provides a framework for understanding the political dimension of Gautam’s art. The “equality of all subject matter” in Gautam’s work—where he claims that “everything is a subject” and that a “slipper” or a “bouquet of flowers” can be as significant as a “face”—breaks the hierarchies of the “representative regime”. Gautam’s “invasion” of the canvas with “purple—the colour that scares people,” (21) is an act of “poetic disincorporation,” interrupting the consensual police order that dictates what is “visible” and “audible” within the community.
In Bakhtin’s analysis of the “serio-comical” genres, the figure of the “crank” or “fool” serves to “expose the disparity between his surface and his center”. Gautam adopts this mask of “deliberate stupidity” to navigate a world he cannot take seriously. His refusal to understand the “interview hurdle” (24) or the necessity of a “beauty spot” (27) is a “polemical failure to understand” the stupid conventions of a “petrified reality”. By “not talking straight,” Gautam maintains a “dialogic relationship” with the social world, “eavesdropping” on its secrets while remaining an “outsider”.
Indu, by contrast, represents the “hegemonic” demand for “routinization” and “incorporation”. Her desire for Gautam to be “securely tied down” (25) in a job reflects the “police” aspect of society that seeks to assign every individual to a “defined” position. Gautam’s metaphor of the “Royal Steed” (25)—fed with the “greenest of grass” (25) but ultimately “trapped” (25)—is a stark indictment of the “administered” life that kills the “mimetic impulse”.
The play’s transition from Gautam’s room to the “empty garden” (38) at noon highlights the Lefebvrian “antagonism between nature and culture”. As Raymond Williams suggests, “nature poetry” and the “rural community” often become “residual” cultural elements in the face of “urban industrial capitalism”. Gautam’s walk to the “Cheirao Hill” (39) and his interaction with the “bird sitting on the branch” (39) represent a longing for “natural beauty” as an “allegory of the beyond”.
Keinatombi, the betel nut vendor, serves as the “emergent” or “folkloric” counterpoint to Indu’s bourgeois “convention”. She is a “lotus blooming among the river flotsam,” (44) and also “lotus of gold blooming in a weed-choked lake” (45) embodying a “structure of feeling” that is “actually being lived” rather than merely “conceived”. Her “unreasoning love” for Gautam, which “transports it beyond all prices,” mirrors the “art for art’s sake” of love. When Gautam sketches her, he is not merely “copying from life” but creating a “novelistic image” that “transmutes everything into literary beauty”.
The climax of the play, the separation of Gautam and Indu, underscores Adorno’s assertion that “radical art today is synonymous with dark art”. Gautam’s “impassivity” and “aloofness” when Indu proposes him of her arranged marriage is not signs of indifference but of a “painful lucidity”. He accepts his role as a “gladiator” who “entertains the public with his death throes,” realising that his “creativity” is rooted in his “inability to face reality”.
This “losing game” is, in fact, the only way to “survive reality at its most extreme and grim”. By refusing to hold Indu down, Gautam participates in a “cycle of guilt and atonement” that transposes his “suffering” into the “truth content” of his art. The final scene of the play, Gautam “quickly walks ahead” (62) of Keinatombi toward the “land where the paddies of emerald meet the azure skies... Where the young tree saplings sprout in tight clusters. The land where land-orchids bloom to cover the hillsides...that display of crimson rainclouds” (61), signifies a “new orientation in the world”. He escapes the “ossified” genres of his past to enter a “zone of direct contact with developing reality”.
Conclusion
In Crimson Rainclouds, M.K. Binodini constructs a complex “force field” where the “tension” between the “individual” and “society” is never fully resolved but rather “materialised” in the formal structure of the work. Gautam’s journey represents an “active struggle for new consciousness” through a radical “refusal of the status quo”. The play’s “enigmaticalness” resides in its “fracturedness,” and its ability to “enunciate its meaninglessness” while simultaneously “promising happiness” through the “imaging power of art”. Ultimately, the “crimson rainclouds” function as a “utopic figure,” a “cipher of despair” that nevertheless contains a “grain of affirmation” for the “indestructible power of man” in his search for “absolute freedom” (25).
From a contemporary perspective, the play’s exploration of “contested space” and the “distribution of the sensible” remain deeply resonant within a Manipuri society currently defined by ethnic rifts and political “turmoil”. In an age of “incomprehensible horror” and “radically darkened objectivity,” art in Manipur functions as a “consciousness of plight,” speaking for the “accumulated, speechless pain” of a people whose “suffering remains mute” in formal “administered” knowledge. The “residual” idyllic spaces and “natural beauty” Gautam yearns for are increasingly besieged by the “abstract space” of modern “centralisation” and the “violence of power” that characterises the contemporary state. Gautam’s adoption of the “fool’s” mask and his “polemical failure to understand” stupid conventions provides a “legitimate abuse of power” that allows for a “radical critique of everyday life” amidst social “fragmentation”. Furthermore, the “chronotope of the road” and the “itinerary” of Gautam’s search for mirror the modern Manipuri condition of “linguistic homelessness” and the quest for a “reappropriated” social space. Binodini’s work is thus not merely a historical artifact but an “emergent” structure of feeling that continues to “testify to the unreconciled” antagonisms of a society struggling to “overstep its own limits”. Ultimately, the play serves as a “memento” of the “anticultural character” of true art, reminding the Manipuri subject that “freedom from the principle of possession” is a necessary precondition for a “reconciled condition”.
The writer is with Manipur College, Imphal
M. K. Binodini’s Crimson Rainclouds (Asangba Nongjabi), first published in Manipuri in 1967 and later translated into English by L. Somi Roy in 2012 for THEMA, occupies a significant place in Manipuri literature. The play addresses, with notable seriousness, a precarious relationship marked by tension between artistic freedom, social hierarchy, and a deeper metaphysical desire for an unmediated experience of reality. Structured in five acts, the play was first staged on 20 February 1966 at Rupmahal Theatre by the Roop Raag group. The production was directed by Aribam Syam Sharma, with music composed by N. Pahari. The principal roles were performed by Rabindra Sharma as Gautam, Yengkhom Roma as Indu, and Medhabati as Keinatombi.
This review seeks to examine Crimson Rainclouds through selected theoretical perspectives, drawing in particular on the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Rancière, Henri Lefebvre, and Raymond Williams. Read through these frameworks, the play reveals a sustained tension between the artist’s inner world and the pressures of an externally regulated social order, often described as an “administered world”. Gautam, the central figure of the play, emerges as a figure of the autonomous artist, defined by his resistance to the “principle of exchange” that underpins bourgeois society. His refusal to submit to this principle becomes the ethical and aesthetic core of the drama, foregrounding the costs and contradictions of artistic autonomy within a stratified social reality.
Gautam’s refusal to attend a job interview at an art school, despite the entreaties of his friend Indu, illustrates Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “literary field as the economic world reversed”. In this field, proper artistic value is often negatively correlated with temporal or financial success; the “winners” are those who appear to lose in the material realm to preserve their “disinterestedness”. Gautam’s room, described as “cluttered” with only a “mat” and “unfinished canvas,” (21) signifies his rejection of economic capital in favour of symbolic capital. When Indu questions his happiness in such poverty, Gautam invokes the ghosts of Van Gogh and Mozart, thereby situating himself within a specific “historical tradition” of the poète maudit who finds “salvation in the hereafter” of artistic immortality.
Furthermore, the encounter with the Middle-Aged Man who wishes to have a photograph copied with an added “beauty spot” (27) provides a satirical critique of what Bourdieu terms “bourgeois art”. This consumer views art as a service to be “haggled” over, demanding a “likeness” (27) that is simultaneously “better looking” (28). Gautam’s retort—that no one will know if there is “a resemblance” in “two hundred years”(29)—reflects the “aesthetic distancing” required to transform a mere product into a “work of art” that transcends its “commodity character”.
The central motif of the “crimson rainclouds” (58), functions as a Bakhtinian “chronotope,” where spatial and temporal indicators are fused into a concrete, artistic whole. For Gautam, these clouds represent a “moment of becoming at a standstill,” a suspended history that links his childhood “familiarity” with Indu to his current “solitary” search for an ideal. This memory is not merely a “nostalgic” retreat but a “representational space” that challenges the “abstract space” of the city.
Jacques Rancière’s theory of the “distribution of the sensible” provides a framework for understanding the political dimension of Gautam’s art. The “equality of all subject matter” in Gautam’s work—where he claims that “everything is a subject” and that a “slipper” or a “bouquet of flowers” can be as significant as a “face”—breaks the hierarchies of the “representative regime”. Gautam’s “invasion” of the canvas with “purple—the colour that scares people,” (21) is an act of “poetic disincorporation,” interrupting the consensual police order that dictates what is “visible” and “audible” within the community.
In Bakhtin’s analysis of the “serio-comical” genres, the figure of the “crank” or “fool” serves to “expose the disparity between his surface and his center”. Gautam adopts this mask of “deliberate stupidity” to navigate a world he cannot take seriously. His refusal to understand the “interview hurdle” (24) or the necessity of a “beauty spot” (27) is a “polemical failure to understand” the stupid conventions of a “petrified reality”. By “not talking straight,” Gautam maintains a “dialogic relationship” with the social world, “eavesdropping” on its secrets while remaining an “outsider”.
Indu, by contrast, represents the “hegemonic” demand for “routinization” and “incorporation”. Her desire for Gautam to be “securely tied down” (25) in a job reflects the “police” aspect of society that seeks to assign every individual to a “defined” position. Gautam’s metaphor of the “Royal Steed” (25)—fed with the “greenest of grass” (25) but ultimately “trapped” (25)—is a stark indictment of the “administered” life that kills the “mimetic impulse”.
The play’s transition from Gautam’s room to the “empty garden” (38) at noon highlights the Lefebvrian “antagonism between nature and culture”. As Raymond Williams suggests, “nature poetry” and the “rural community” often become “residual” cultural elements in the face of “urban industrial capitalism”. Gautam’s walk to the “Cheirao Hill” (39) and his interaction with the “bird sitting on the branch” (39) represent a longing for “natural beauty” as an “allegory of the beyond”.
Keinatombi, the betel nut vendor, serves as the “emergent” or “folkloric” counterpoint to Indu’s bourgeois “convention”. She is a “lotus blooming among the river flotsam,” (44) and also “lotus of gold blooming in a weed-choked lake” (45) embodying a “structure of feeling” that is “actually being lived” rather than merely “conceived”. Her “unreasoning love” for Gautam, which “transports it beyond all prices,” mirrors the “art for art’s sake” of love. When Gautam sketches her, he is not merely “copying from life” but creating a “novelistic image” that “transmutes everything into literary beauty”.
The climax of the play, the separation of Gautam and Indu, underscores Adorno’s assertion that “radical art today is synonymous with dark art”. Gautam’s “impassivity” and “aloofness” when Indu proposes him of her arranged marriage is not signs of indifference but of a “painful lucidity”. He accepts his role as a “gladiator” who “entertains the public with his death throes,” realising that his “creativity” is rooted in his “inability to face reality”.
This “losing game” is, in fact, the only way to “survive reality at its most extreme and grim”. By refusing to hold Indu down, Gautam participates in a “cycle of guilt and atonement” that transposes his “suffering” into the “truth content” of his art. The final scene of the play, Gautam “quickly walks ahead” (62) of Keinatombi toward the “land where the paddies of emerald meet the azure skies... Where the young tree saplings sprout in tight clusters. The land where land-orchids bloom to cover the hillsides...that display of crimson rainclouds” (61), signifies a “new orientation in the world”. He escapes the “ossified” genres of his past to enter a “zone of direct contact with developing reality”.
Conclusion
In Crimson Rainclouds, M.K. Binodini constructs a complex “force field” where the “tension” between the “individual” and “society” is never fully resolved but rather “materialised” in the formal structure of the work. Gautam’s journey represents an “active struggle for new consciousness” through a radical “refusal of the status quo”. The play’s “enigmaticalness” resides in its “fracturedness,” and its ability to “enunciate its meaninglessness” while simultaneously “promising happiness” through the “imaging power of art”. Ultimately, the “crimson rainclouds” function as a “utopic figure,” a “cipher of despair” that nevertheless contains a “grain of affirmation” for the “indestructible power of man” in his search for “absolute freedom” (25).
From a contemporary perspective, the play’s exploration of “contested space” and the “distribution of the sensible” remain deeply resonant within a Manipuri society currently defined by ethnic rifts and political “turmoil”. In an age of “incomprehensible horror” and “radically darkened objectivity,” art in Manipur functions as a “consciousness of plight,” speaking for the “accumulated, speechless pain” of a people whose “suffering remains mute” in formal “administered” knowledge. The “residual” idyllic spaces and “natural beauty” Gautam yearns for are increasingly besieged by the “abstract space” of modern “centralisation” and the “violence of power” that characterises the contemporary state. Gautam’s adoption of the “fool’s” mask and his “polemical failure to understand” stupid conventions provides a “legitimate abuse of power” that allows for a “radical critique of everyday life” amidst social “fragmentation”. Furthermore, the “chronotope of the road” and the “itinerary” of Gautam’s search for mirror the modern Manipuri condition of “linguistic homelessness” and the quest for a “reappropriated” social space. Binodini’s work is thus not merely a historical artifact but an “emergent” structure of feeling that continues to “testify to the unreconciled” antagonisms of a society struggling to “overstep its own limits”. Ultimately, the play serves as a “memento” of the “anticultural character” of true art, reminding the Manipuri subject that “freedom from the principle of possession” is a necessary precondition for a “reconciled condition”.
The writer is with Manipur College, Imphal