Girish Chandra Ghosh

Girish Chandra Ghosh is a Bengali actor, director, and writer born on 28th February 1844 in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India (now Kolkata). Nilkamal Ghosh and Raimani were his parents. He received his early education at Oriental Seminary and Hare School in the city but did not complete his education. He got married to Promodini Devi, the daughter of Nabin Chandra Deb. He did an apprenticeship in bookkeeping in a British company as his first job. Around that time, he got associated with a personality called Ishwar Chandra Gupta, a well-known poet and journalist who became his Major inspiration to write songs and plays. Girish was a keen reader of classic English literature, which led him to be part of the Asiatic Society, where he acquainted himself with the Itihaasas – Ramayana, Mahabharata, and the Puranas.

At 36, he became a playwright and wrote around 80 plays, dramas, satires, and musicals and also penned short stories, essays, novels, poems, and songs on Puranic Stories, Ramayana, Mahabharata, socio-political, historical, religious and patriotic subjects and was also a prominent actor in the Bag Bazar Amateur Theatre. Girish staged his first play Agamani at The Great National Theatre, the first Bengali professional theatre company, in 1872. He also worked with other theatres like the Emerald, Classic, Kohinoor, and Minerva, which he joined as a director in 1908. He was a devotee of lord Sri Ramakrishna.

Some of the dramas written by him include Abhimanyuvadh (1881), Sitar Vanavas (1881), Sitaharan (1882), Pandaver Ajvatavas (1882), Prafulla (1889), Maukulamanjari (1892), Jana (1894), Abu Hussain (1896), Validan (1904), Sirajuddaula (1905), Meer Kasem (1906), Chhatrapati Shivaji Click to look into! >> Read More... (1907), Shankaracharya (1910) Kalapahad, Haranidhi, and Vilvamangal Thakur. He translated Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1893) into Bangla and dramatized Bankim Chandra’s novels Mrnalini, Visvrksa, and Durgeshnandini.