01/11/2025
The Indian stage mourns the loss of a towering figure with the passing of master mime artist and theatre practitioner Ranen Chakraborty. He mastered the gift of crafting narratives in silence—shaping gestures, breath, stillness, and movement into stories that touched hearts with quiet resonance. As the founder of the Kolkata-based mime collective Mimic, he devoted his life not merely to performance, but equally to pedagogy—drawing young aspirants close, nurturing in them discipline and inner clarity.
For him, mime was never the absence of speech, but a language of its own. He believed deeply that silence, held with intention, speaks more truthfully than many words. He was also one of the key forces who carried mime beyond traditional performing spaces, bringing it into the open.
As a mentor and educator, he shaped countless students across theatre spaces and institutions, guiding them toward understanding how the body can become narrative, emotion, and character all at once. He taught that the stage is not merely a place of expression, but a space of presence—where one learns to listen, not just speak.
His passing leaves a profound stillness—one that carries both grief and tribute. Yet within that silence remains his legacy: the memory of a man who understood the eloquence of movement, who communicated without uttering a syllable. The poetry he created through silence will continue to live in our hearts.
