Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker Theatres of Independence Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 Studies Theatre Hist & Culture 2005

Theatres of Independence
Studies in Theatre History and Culture

edited by Thomas Postlewait
Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947
#
Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker
university of iowa press, iowa city
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress Copyright 2005 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by Neil West, BN Typographics West No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava, 1955. Theatres of independence: drama, theory, and urban performance in India since 1947 / by Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker. p. cm.(Studies in theatre history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-87745-961-4 (cloth) 1. TheaterIndiaHistory20th century. 2. Theater and societyIndiaHistory20th century. 3. Indic drama20th centuryHistory and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. pn2884.d49 2005 792.095409045dc22 2005043936 05 06 07 08 09 c 5 4 3 2 1
For Vinay, Aneesha, and Sachin

Part of the world persists distinct from what we say, but part will stay only if we keep talking: only speech can re-create the gardens of the world.
contents
acknowledgments ix authors note xv abbreviations xix 1. Postcolonial Frames and the Subject of Modern Indian Theatre 1
part i
The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence 2 . The Formation of a New National Canon 3. Authorship, Textuality, and Multilingualism 4. Production and Reception: Directors, Audiences, and the Mass Media 85 5. Orientalism, Cultural Nationalism, and the Erasure of the Present 127 21 54
part ii
Genres in Context: Theory, Play, and Performance 6. Myth, Ambivalence, and Evil 165
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Genres in Context
7. The Ironic History of the Nation 8. Realism and the Edicce of Home
218 268
9. Alternative Stages: Antirealism, Gender, and Contemporary Folk Theatre 310 10. Intertexts and Countertexts 352
appendixes
1. The Program of the Nehru Shatabdi Natya Samaroh (Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival), New Delhi, 317 September 1989 391 2. Major Indian Playwrights and Plays, 19502004 392 3. Major Indian Theatre Directors, 19502004 397 4. Key Productions of Some Major Post-Independence Plays 399 5. Productions, Mainly in Hindi, by Three Contemporary Directors 403 6. Productions by Ten Contemporary Directors and Theatre Groups 407 7. Modern Urban Transmissions of the Mahabharata: The Principal Genres 418 8. The Euro-American Intertexts of Post-Independence Drama and Theatre 420 9. Prose Narratives on the Stage 434
10. Brecht Intertexts in Post-Independence Indian Theatre 436 notes 439 bibliography 449 index 463
acknowledgments
The idea for this book took shape in 1996 and 1997, following a period during which my postdoctoral work in Restoration and early eighteenthcentury British theatre made way rather unexpectedly for several projects in contemporary Indian and postcolonial theatre. I would crst like to thank the colleagues whose invitations to speak and write about the new drama in India led to what was, in retrospect, a necessary and inevitable expansion of critical horizons: C. M. Naim and Loren Kruger at the University of Chicago, Franklin Southworth at the University of Pennsylvania, and Ann Wilson at the University of Guelph. The panel on Diaspora and Theatre arranged by the Division on Drama at the 1996 MLA convention crst led me to think extensively about Indian-language theatre in relation to modern Western drama, postcolonial studies, and diasporic cultural forms. For the opportunity to participate in that forum, I am grateful to Sandra Richards and Joseph Roach. Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies in 1998 allowed me to spend four crucial months in India during the initial stages of the study and to grasp fully the scope of the work I had begun. This book would not have been possible without the assistance of these institutions. I owe additional thanks to C. M. Naim, Ann Wilson, and Joan Erdman for writing in support of my proposals. Sabbatical leave at the University of Oklahoma in fall 1999, and summer research awards from the University of Wisconsin Madison Graduate School in 2002 and 2003, enabled me to continue and conclude the project.
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Acknowledgments
Scholars and writers of my generation from India have typically had to invent, and often reinvent, themselves and their subjects in the American academy. In the case of this study, I am indebted most of all to four scholars who were not teachers and mentors in a formal sense, but who were nevertheless a vital part of my intellectual education. From Meenakshi and Sujit Mukherjee, A. K. Ramanujan, and my husband, Vinay Dharwadker, I have learned how to deal with the Indianness as well as the literariness of Indian literatures, and how to put my training in the Anglo-American canon to use in the reading of Indian texts. With specicc reference to post-independence Indian drama, theatre, and performance, I want to thank Rustom Bharucha for the discriminating criticism that, over two decades, has brought seriousness and complexity to a bedgling celd. My larger debt in this book is to the makers of contemporary theatre in Indiathe playwrights, directors, actors, technical artists, and managers whose stunning collective achievement makes the decciencies of theory, history, and criticism all the more bafbing. I had to approach a large number of these practitioners directly for information about their work that was not available elsewhere and for conversations that could cll in the large gaps left by printed materials in the languages I could actually read. Among the long-term rewards of this contact are the friendships I have developed with Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Satish Alekar, and G. P. Deshpande, acknowledged now with gratitude and a,ection. I have not yet had the opportunity to meet K. N. Panikkar, K. V. Subbanna, Akshara K. V., Shyamanand Jalan, and Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry personally, but their willingness to mail documents overseas and communicate via cyberspace has saved me from many errors and omissions. There are three friends in Delhi I wish to thank in particular. Rajinder Nath has responded patiently to every call for help I have sent his way by phone and e-mail over the past few years; I appreciate his personal generosity as much as I admire his single-minded devotion as a director to new plays in the Indian languages. Abhijit Chatterjee has always made the Sangeet Natak Akademi a helpful and hospitable place for me, and his surprise gift in the mail several years ago gave me the equivalent of the one true sentence for this book that a critic needs almost as much as a novelist. My visits to the home of Anita Rakesh (inseparable in my mind from tea and birthday cake) have o,ered rare glimpses into the life of a writer who seems as active and alive today as he was at the time of his death in 1972. The many volumes of Mohan Rakeshs posthumous publications that Anitaji passed on to me have enriched my work, and
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her permission to translate his three major plays into English has given me a future project that will be the perfect complement to this one. The most enjoyable and stimulating aspects of my 1998 celdwork in India were the meetings and conversations with theatre professionals in di,erent parts of the country. I would like to acknowledge the following individuals: in Delhi, Ebrahim Alkazi, G. P. Deshpande, Rajinder Nath, Faisal Alkazi, Amal Allana, Nissar Allana, Habib Tanvir, Arvind Gaur, Anamika Haksar, Joy Michael, Sunita Paul, Manjula Padmanabhan, Prayag Shukla, K. S. Rajendran, Vivan Sundaram, Panna Bharat Ram, Chandrashekhar Kambar, Girish Karnad, and Mahesh Dattani (the last three visited Delhi during my stay); in Nagpur, Mahesh Elkunchwar; in Bombay, Vijay Tendulkar, Jayadev Hattangady, Rohini Hattangady, Waman Kendre, Alyque Padamsee, Jabbar Patel, Cyrus Mistry, and Arun Kakde; and in Pune, Satish Alekar, P. L. Deshpande, Rajiv Naik, Chandrakant Kulkarni, Shrirang Godpole, and the management of Theatre Academy. Kirti Jain and Anuradha Kapur arranged my institutional aliation with the National School of Drama (New Delhi) during this period. In more recent years, I have also had helpful exchanges with Sudhanva Deshpande and Santuana Nigam in Delhi, and I have communicated with Pratibha Agrawal, Usha Ganguli, and Rustom Bharucha in Calcutta. For ongoing help with bibliographic and archival materials, I am grateful to the sta, of the National School of Drama Library, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Library, the photography, video, and publications departments at the Sangeet Natak Akademi, and the National Centre for the Performing Arts Library in Bombay. Anil Shrivastava at NSD and Jayaprakash Bengere at the Akademi were particularly helpful in making rare library materials available to me. A special thanks also to K. T. Verghese and T. R. Bakshi for ongoing help at NSD, and to Madhuchhanda Ghosh at the Natya Shodh Sansthan, Calcutta, for her labor and patience in checking the appendixes in this book for accuracy. In the United States, I have been exceptionally fortunate in earning the goodwill of several colleagues whose work in theatre studies I admire very much. The enthusiasm Joseph Roach, Una Chaudhuri, and Loren Kruger expressed for this book at various stages of its evolution was critical in convincing me that I was dealing with a viable project, despite the methodological unconventionality of a two-part structure that considers both drama and theatre. I am especially grateful to Joe for his ongoing interest in my work in both contemporary and early modern theatre, for his advice and feedback on various parts of this book, and for his canny suggestion that I o,er the manuscript to Thomas Postlewait,
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Acknowledgments
series editor of the Iowa Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Tom was refreshingly undaunted by the peculiarities of a multilingual nonWestern theatre tradition and has been everything an author could wish for in an editormeticulous, insightful, generous, and crm. As authors say, the faults of the book are mine alone, but Toms painstaking criticism accounts for many of the strengths of the cnal version. The support of Holly Carver, director of the University of Iowa Press, and her bexibility with deadlines created ideal conditions for the completion of the project. Carolyn Browns superior skills as copyeditor and Charlotte Wrights professionalism as managing editor made the transition from manuscript to print smooth as well as pleasurable. I would also like to acknowledge the following colleagues for their friendship over the years and their varying involvement with this book: Vincent Leitch, Kathleen Welch, Joanna Rapf, George Economou, and Larry Frank at the University of Oklahoma, who for a time were the few bright presences in a bleak institutional landscape; and James Moy, Sally Banes, Michael Vanden Heuvel, and Robert Skloot at the University of Wisconsin, who restored my faith in university life. At both these institutions, I have had substantial help from the library sta,: my thanks to the interlibrary loan department at Bizzell Library in Norman, which ranked me as one of its best customers, and to Larry Ashmun and Mary Rader, the Southeast Asia and South Asia librarians at Memorial Library in Madison. A portion of chapter 7 appeared in PMLA under the title Historical Fictions and Postcolonial Representation: Reading Girish Karnads Tughlaq (110.1 [1995]: 4358); a portion of chapter 8 appeared in Theatre Journal as Diaspora, Nation, and the Failure of Home: Two Contemporary Indian Plays (50.1 [1998]: 7194); and a portion of chapter 10 appeared in Modern Drama as John Gay, Bertolt Brecht, and Postcolonial Antinationalisms (38.1 [1995]: 421). I am grateful to the journals for permission to reprint this material. For permission to quote from the printed but unpublished Proceedings of the 1956 Drama Seminar, I thank the Sangeet Natak Akademi; for permission to quote from her poem Listening (from Eden, 1992), I also thank my friend Emily Grosholz. It is a special pleasure, cnally, to acknowledge my family. To my parents, Sarla and Deoki Nandan Bhargava, I am grateful for a selbess love that has accepted my absence from India as a condition of contemporary professional life. My four-month adventure with them in Delhi at the beginning of this book, and their six-week adventure in Madison at its conclusion, will be special memories for all of us. In Delhi, I have always been able to count on my aunts, Urmila and Kamla Bhargava, and their
Acknowledgments
xiii
families for warmth and hospitality during my many work-related trips. Thanks especially to my cousin Anant for his willingness to go anywhere and do anything that needs to be done. My scholarly interest in India is o,set by the very di,erent commitments of my younger brother, Dr. Anurag Bhargava: he and his colleagues at the Jana Swasthya Sahyog are extending the boundaries of community medicine in the Chhattisgarh region on a scale that is a source of pride and inspiration to me, even as it magnices by comparison the insularity of academic work. I want to thank Yogesh Jain and Bishwaroop Chatterjee in particular for their skill as physicians and their love of literature. Here in America, my immediate family has created a rich environment of words, pictures, and sounds that e,ectively counterbalances the wear and tear of daily life. As always, Vinay has left his unmistakable mark on this book: in addition to advice and conversations over several years, he has helped me with the translation of Marathi materials, read two drafts of the manuscript with care, and drawn the maps of India and Maharashtra. To my children, Aneesha and Sachin, I owe more than everything. Their love, understanding, and pride sustain me every day, and their many talents keep me waiting for the next big surprise. Fittingly, the words with which I have chosen to dedicate this book to my family come from Emilyphilosopher, poet, and mother extraordinary.
authors note
It is not possible to date Indian plays of the post-independence period consistently on the exclusive basis of either publication or crst performance. Because of the unpredictable conditions that prevail in a largely noncommercial theatre culture, publication in the original Indian language of composition usually precedes the performance of a play, sometimes by several years. Dharamvir Bharatis Andha yug (Blind Epoch, Hindi) was broadcast as a radio play in 1954 and published later the same year, but it only made its crst appearance on stage in 1962 under Satyadev Dubeys direction for Theatre Unit in Bombay. Mohan Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din (A Day in Early Autumn, Hindi) was crst produced in Calcutta in 1960, two years after its appearance in print in Delhi. Occasionally, the crst production of a play takes place not in the original language but in translation: Girish Karnads Kannada play, Hayavadana (HorseHead, 1971), had its crst three productions in Hindi in 1972 and its crst Kannada production in 1973. In addition, both publication and performance data about contemporary Indian plays are incomplete and unreliable for several reasons. The online catalogue of the Library of Congress (WorldCat), the leading bibliographic resource for scholars, contains incomplete listings, even for major contemporary Indian-language playwrights such as Vijay Tendulkar, Badal Sircar, Mohit Chattopadhyay, K. N. Panikkar, G. P. Deshpande, Mahesh Elkunchwar, and Satish Alekar. Often the publication information relates not to the original text but to a Hindi or English translation, published separately or as part of a collection or anthology. Anything akin to systematic theatre documentation in India
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Authors Note
is limited to a handful of metropolitan and provincial institutions, such as the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the National School of Drama, and the Natarang Pratishthhan in Delhi; the Natya Shodh Sansthan in Calcutta; the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Bombay; the Ninasam Theatre Institute in Heggodu; and Bhasabharathi in Trivandrum. Individually, even such major theatre groups as Theatre Academy in Pune, Theatre Unit in Bombay, and the Shri Ram Centre Repertory Company in Delhi are unable to provide complete records of their activities. Despite these diculties it is crucial to date contemporary Indian plays with precision, not only for reasons of scholarly accuracy but because the moment of crst appearance has had great relevance for the meaning and inbuence of many individual works, and the chronological order in which major works appear in multiple languages is an important aspect of the formation of a new national canon. I have therefore dated plays according to the year in which they make their crst signiccant entry into the cultural spherethrough completion in manuscript, publication, or performance. In most instances this is the date of crst publication in the original language of composition, but where warranted by internal and/or external evidence, I have made exceptions to this practice. I have made every e,ort to report dates correctly, but the absence of information in some cases, and contradictory evidence in printed sources in others, sometimes make accuracy indeterminable. Throughout the book, therefore, dates that are uncertain or conjectural appear within square brackets. I have provided English translations of the Indian-language play titles in appendix 2 (which lists the work of major post-independence playwrights) and within each chapter, at the beginning of an extensive discussion of a given play. However, to preserve the integrity of the Indian-language materials, I have used the original rather than translated titles in my discussion. I have also not provided a translation when the reference to a play is brief, and, except in appendix 7, I have not translated the numerous play titles mentioned in the various appendixes. For most of the plays mentioned or discussed in the book, readers can turn to appendix 2 for convenient cross-references to play titles in translation. During the 1990s, a number of Indian metropolises and smaller cities ocially changed their names in order to counteract British colonial orthography and history. Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, Calcutta became Kolkata, Baroda became Vadodara, and Trivandrum became Thiruvananthapuram. In charting the venues of postindependence Indian theatre (map 1) and in designating the locations of
Authors Note
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major theatre groups (appendixes 5 and 6), I have speciced both the old and new names for cities. However, in my discussion throughout the book I have retained the old names, both because they are more familiar to readers outside India and because they are intimately connected with specicc phases in the history of modern theatre. For instance, it would be anachronistic to state that modern urban commercial theatre crst emerged in Mumbai and Kolkata in the mid nineteenth century. In the case of another prominent city in Maharashtra, the change from Poona to Pune took place in the early 1980s and formalized the name by which the city was most commonly known, especially in theatrical contexts. Hence, in this instance I have used the new name. The nations capital presents a di,erent issue of nomenclature. Delhi is the older name for the city as well as the ocial name for the contemporary urban complex as a whole; New Delhi is the modern extension that the British inaugurated as their new imperial capital in 1911, and that now includes, as an ever-expanding geographical and administrative unit, much of the Delhi metropolitan area. I have used the name Delhi when I refer to the city as a theatrical venue because the activities of playwrights, directors, and theatre groups based in various parts of the city encompass the metropolitan area in its entirety. However, I have used New Delhi to designate the location of specicc institutions, such as the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the National School of Drama, and the Shri Ram Centre for the Performing Arts, because such a designation is more precise. Unless otherwise speciced, the English translations of all original primary and secondary materials from Hindi and Marathi are mine.
abbreviations
Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal Contemporary Indian Theatre: Interviews with Playwrights and Directors CPT Vijay Tendulkar: Collected Plays in Translation IPTA Indian Peoples Theatre Association MM Dharamvir Bharati, Manava mulya aur sahitya (Human Values and Literature) NCPA National Centre for the Performing Arts, Bombay Ninasam Nilakanteshwara Natya Seva Sangha, Heggodu (Karnataka) NSD National School of Drama, New Delhi Proceedings Proceedings of the 1956 Drama Seminar, Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi SN Mohan Rakesh ke sampurna natak (The Complete Plays of Mohan Rakesh) SRC Shri Ram Centre for the Performing Arts, New Delhi TP Girish Karnad: Three Plays
BB CIT
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chapter 1
#
Postcolonial Frames and the Subject of Modern Indian Theatre
Since the middle of the twentieth century, the formal end of European colonialism in various parts of the globe has created unusually powerful historical instances of the linkage between political chronology and literary periodization. For numerous former colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, the achievement of political autonomy and modern nationhood has signaled a symbolic break from the experience of colonial subjection and the beginning of a new revisionary phase in literary and cultural production, regardless of the actual continuities and disjunctions between the past and the present in specicc locations. These political and aesthetic reorientations have in turn generated new theoretical frameworks capable of explaining and interpreting the emergent cultural forms. In virtually every evolving national literary tradition, such terms as new, modern, contemporary, and post-independence denote a range of chronological and qualitative shifts, while such terms as Europhone, Commonwealth, and most recently, postcolonial, attempt to establish commonalities across the geographical, historical, and cultural di,erences separating the former colonies and dominions. These new taxonomies are peculiarly vulnerable to critique: the idea of a Commonwealth literature shaped by the shared legacies of British colonialism and the English language was remarkably inbuential from the 1950s to the 1970s but is no longer tenable, while the global condition of postcolonialism has been debated endlessly since the 1980s. Despite the disagreements over terminology, however, the new national and postcolonial literatures and postcolonial drama/theatre have emerged
1
Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre
in the past decade as important areas of inquiry, ready for assimilation into the Euro-American academy. Indian theatre of the post-independence period (beginning in 1947) remains largely outside these theoretical and critical constructs and continues to appear on the margins of contemporary world theatre, whether we approach plays as printed texts, performance events, entertainment media, or objects of scholarly study. The reasons for this obscurity lie in the linguistic plurality of Indian theatrical practice, the diculties that attend any rigorous historicization of Indian theatre, and the intensely problematic relation of such concepts as modernity, contemporaneity, and postcoloniality to drama, theatre, and performance in present-day India. Since the early 1950s, new forms of literary drama and experimental performance have appeared on an unprecedented scale in more than a dozen Indian languages, mainly in metropolitan and urban locations. To a signiccant extent, the historical origins of this evolving tradition of texts and performance practices lie in the genres, discourses, and institutions of theatrical modernity that emerged under European inbuence in such colonial cities as Calcutta and Bombay during the second half of the nineteenth century. But to an equally signiccant degree, practitioners of the new drama have forged a reactive cultural identity for themselves by disclaiming colonial practices and by seeking to reclaim classical and other precolonial Indian traditions of performance as the only viable media of e,ective decolonization. In addition to the daunting plurality of its languages, locations, and representational conventions, contemporary Indian theatre appears to be an arena in which historical boundaries have become radically permeable, and more than two millennia of texts and performance practices have assumed a simultaneous existence without composing a simultaneous order. The object of this study is to decne Indian theatre of the postindependence period as a historically demarcated, linguistically and generically diverse celd of postcolonial practice. I argue that the apparent collapse of historical categories is itself a postcolonial symptom that must be thoroughly historicized: the theatre of the past cfty years is not a seamless extension of either colonial or precolonial traditions but a product of new theoretical, textual, material, institutional, and cultural conditions created by the experience of political independence, cultural autonomy, and new nationhood. My purpose is not to o,er a history or survey of this theatre but to make it visible internationally as a multidimensional critical object through specicc theoretical and interpretive procedures. Part 1 of the study, consisting of four chapters, is concerned
with decning the new dramatic canon that emerged in India after 1947, the textual and performative conditions and contexts of its development, and the complex historical-ideological reasons for its critical marginality. Part 2, consisting of cve chapters, traces the formation of some signiccant postcolonial dramatic genres from the resources of myth, history, folk narrative, sociopolitical experience, and the intertextual connections among Indian, European, and Anglo-American drama. My method throughout is to treat drama (the aggregation of texts) and theatre (institutionalized performance) in post-independence India as strategically interrelated and interdependent activities: the styles of authorship, production, reception, and criticism discussed in part 1 generate, and are in turn sustained by, the genres, texts, performances, and celds of meaning considered in part 2. Such an approach is obviously an unconventional fusion of drama and theatre history, performance contexts, theoretical analysis, and literary interpretation. But these multiple emphases are necessary for bringing fully into focus a major contemporary national tradition that exemplices the dynamic relation between theatre and culture in colonial and postcolonial contexts but remains marginal within theatre studies and postcolonial studies. The two hundredyear history of modern urban theatre in India o,ers a remarkably extensive view of the interpenetration of two major systems of theatrical representationIndian and European, classical-traditional and modern, antirealistic and realistic, provincial and metropolitan. As it was crst institutionalized in the colonial metropolis, modern Indian theatre appeared to epitomize the conditions of colonial dominance: it borrowed its organizational structures, textual features, and performance conventions from Europe (especially England), superseded traditional and popular indigenous performance genres, and found its core audience among the growing English-educated Indian middle class. But in practice the new form was absorbed quickly into the material, social, and ideological structures of a complex and literate culture with longstanding theatrical traditions in many indigenous languages. The inbuence of Western textual models produced a body of new literary drama and dramatic theory in several Indian languages, led to large-scale translations and adaptations of European as well as Indian canonical plays, and generated the crst nationalist arguments about the cultural importance of a national theatre in India. Concurrently, the investment of entrepreneurial capital in urban proscenium theatres and touring companies, especially by Bombays wealthy Parsi community, created the crst nationally visible popular theatre that reached not only cities and provincial
towns but some rural areas as well. After 1870, moreover, urban theatre assumed a pivotal political role and intervened actively in colonial contests of power (Solomon, 323), leading to the Dramatic Performances Control Act in 1876 and widespread suppression and censorship by the British colonial government in the following cve decades. As Nandi Bhatia has argued, in reproducing and acting out the histories of colonial exploitation and domination, modern Indian drama became an invigorating arena for the interplay of anti-colonial struggles and change (3). The forms and institutions of performance were therefore borrowed, but the content of colonial theatre became deeply embedded in Indian myth, history, literature, society, and politics. These recognizably modern institutions, conventions, and practices have continued from the colonial period (the 1850s to the 1940s) into postcolonial times (the late 1940s onward), but in conjunction with a polemic that thoroughly problematizes the relation between cultural modernity and contemporaneity on the one hand, and the aesthetics and politics of representation on the other. For nearly six decades, Indian playwrights, directors, performers, cultural theorists, and critics have debated and rearticulated the concepts of indigenous and alien, intrinsic and extrinsic practices in playwriting and performance. The basic opposition is between those who reject the legacy of colonial structures entirely and advocate the revival of precolonial traditions of performance and those who want a reinvigorated and syncretistic modernity, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Despite the apparent conformism of the modernists and the radicalism of the nativists, however, the celd of post-independence urban theatre is in all important respects a historically unprecedented formation in India. For the crst time since the classical period of Sanskrit drama (ca. a.d. 4001000), Indian theatrical practice is framed by fully developed, competing, even polarized theories of dramatic representation and reception, and participates equally in the cultures of (print) textuality and performance. It also o,ers a marked contrast to colonial theatre in virtually every important area of dramatic activityauthorship, canon formation, the circulation of plays, production, reception, performer training, patronage, and the forms of institutionalmaterial organization. Many of these activities are mediated by a new cultural bureaucracy that sustains theatre at the national, regional, and local levels, and extends special state patronage to traditional modes of performance. Furthermore, in a traditional culture that is also a rapidly developing nation, drama and theatre compete with older forms of religious, secular, and folk performance in the countryside, and also with
the contemporary mass-cultural and popular media of clm, television, and video that have a massive audience in urban and semiurban areas. The multiple points of entry of drama into print culture (through original composition as well as translation), the varieties of authorial and directorial practice, the bureaucratic mediations of the nation-state, the urban/rural split within audiences, and the competition between various genres of performance or media of representation are among the features that make contemporary Indian theatre at once singular in relation to its own past and comparable to other forms of postcolonial practice. The failure of international scholarship and criticism to deal with the formation of this complex new body of work on the subcontinentwith respect to both its colonial origins and its position in contemporary world theatreis not the result of critical neglect but, ironically, of misplaced critical emphases. There is no scarcity of Indian, European, and Anglo-American criticism on the subject of Indian theatre, but the ahistorical, fragmentary, or neo-orientalist methods of most approaches have prevented any systematic recognition of post-independence theatre as a historically self-contained or signiccant subject. In Indian criticism, the plurality of theatre languages, the perceived continuity of Indian drama and performance since the classical Sanskrit period, and the ideological imperatives of decolonization have functioned in various ways to obscure the transformative e,ects of the event of political independence on the culture of theatre. Comprehensive descriptive accounts of Indian drama, for instance, regard theatre from classical times to the present as a continuous tradition distinguished by its antiquity and rich diversity, and inevitably reduce the post-independence period to an unformed, often unsatisfactory postscript. Som Benegals A Panorama of Theatre in India (1967), Adya Rangacharyas The Indian Theatre (1971), and Nemichandra Jains Indian Theatre: Tradition, Continuity, and Change (1992) are prominent examples of this method. In contrast, most indigenous histories of theatre limit themselves to a single language and therefore focus on the continuities between past and present in the theatre of that language rather than on postcolonial disjunctions and the translingual commonalities that mark post-independence theatre in aggregate. Studies such as Perspectives on Indian Drama in English, edited by M. K. Naik and Shankar Mokashi-Punekar (1977), Kironmoy Rahas Bengali Theatre (1978; 2d ed., 1993), and Anand Patils Western Inbuence on Marathi Drama (1993) belong to this category. In another important conceptual variation, Indian critics construct modern Indian drama as the simple sum of theatre in fourteen or more
languages and do not distinguish clearly between the colonial and postcolonial periods unless there is a specicc need for chronological delimitation. Arguably the most reductive form of contemporary theatre criticism in India, this approach informs such otherwise diverse publications as the Ministry of Information volume on Indian Drama (1956; rev. ed., 1981), the PEN volume on Drama in Modern India (1961), and Indian Drama (1974), a collection of essays edited by H. H. Anniah Gowda. Rustom Bharuchas Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater of Bengal (1983), Eugne van Ervens The Playful Revolution (1992), and Jacob Srampickals Voice to the Voiceless: The Power of Peoples Theatre in India (1995) are more sophisticated analyses of revolutionary and protest theatre, but concerned again with specicc forms. The second volume of Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts in the Last Twenty-Five Years (edited by Ananda Lal, 1995) deals with theatre and o,ers the chronological focus indicated in its title, but it still employs individual languages as the primary bases of discussion and hence obscures the all-important transregional connections. No existing work of interpretive criticism o,ers a coherent account of theory, polemic, and practice in postcolonial Indian theatre that is commensurate with this theatres generic, linguistic, and ideological diversity. There are other, more radical forms of ideological erasure. The traditionalist Indian critique of Westernized modernity has called for a rejection of the alien theatrical forms that crst developed during the colonial period in urban locations and survived the end of colonialism. Developed most consistently by such scholar-administrators as Suresh Awasthi, Nemichandra Jain, and Kapila Vatsyayan rather than by actual practitioners, this traditionalist position dismisses as un-Indian the complex body of new social-realist, existentialist, absurdist, Brechtian, and broadly left-wing political drama that constitutes contemporary urban theatre in India. That most of this drama is written not in English but in half a dozen dominant Indian languages merely compounds the irony. Specicc ideological variants of theatre history, moreover, privilege the classical Sanskrit tradition in theatre as the source of aesthetic and cultural continuities that contain the present. In this view, the period of British colonialism was an unfortunate aberration, and classical Sanskrit aesthetics once again validates the authenticity and unity of Indian cultural forms in the present. The cumulative e,ect of these fragmented and cultural-nationalist perspectives is that most Indian theorists and critics of drama have hardly begun to come to terms with the aggregation of plays and performance events that contemporary theatre practitioners already recognize as an unparalleled body of work.
Western scholarship and commentary on Indian theatre have had the e,ect of marginalizing modern and contemporary practices even more conclusively than Indian criticism. The publication of Sir William Joness translation of Kalidasas Abhijnana Shakuntalam (Shakuntala and the Ring of Recollection) in 1789, with the preface that announced his discovery of Sanskrit to the West, began the tradition of orientalist philological scholarship that equated Indian theatre with the ancient, exquisite, and culturally central national theatre of the Hindus. Sylvain Lvis claim around 1892 that the Sanskrit theatre is the Indian theatre par excellence (3) and A. B. Keiths 1924 description of Sanskrit drama as the highest product of Indian poetry . . . summing up in itself the cnal conception of literary art achieved by the very self-conscious creators of Indian literature (276) marked important later stages in a process that transformed the drama of antiquity into high cultural capital in a subject society that was only too eager for such legitimation by the colonizer. In the postwar period, the continuing inbuence of orientalist epistemology has secured unusual privileges for classical and premodern Indian traditions of performance not only among Indologists in various area-studies disciplines in the West but also among Euro-American avant-garde theatre theorists and practitioners. Postwar Euro-American approaches to Indian theatre have been dominated by anthropological and intercultural perspectives, evident in such works as Richard Schechners Performative Circumstances from the Avant Garde to Ramlila (1983) and Between Theater and Anthropology (1985), Peter Brooks Mahabharata (1987), and Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savareses Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology (1991). This remarkable concentration of interest in India is marked by a radical disengagement from modern cultural forms and narratives. Barbas theatre anthropology considers the extra daily perfection of the body in classical Indian dance forms, such as odissi and kuchipudi, while Schechner and Brook take up the two traditional Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Other signiccant works on Indian theatrical modes have come from American scholars outside modern literary studies, such as Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa (1984) in new translations edited by the Sanskritist Barbara Stoller Miller; The Miracle Plays of Mathura (1972) by Norvin Hein and At Play with Krishna: Pilgrimage Dramas from Brindavan (1981) by John Stratton Hawley, both historians of religion; and Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theater of North India (1992) by the area-studies philologist Kathryn Hansen. The principal collaborative work of Western theatre scholarship Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance (1990) by Farley Richmond, Darius
Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilliseeks to communicate the complexities of the performative celd that constitutes the panorama of Indian theatre, and hence employs the terms theatre and performance interchangeably. While its opening and closing sections deal with classical and modern theatre respectively, the intervening sections abandon chronology for a synchronic description of the vast spectrum of performance genres in Indiathe ritual, devotional, folk-popular, and balletic forms that rebect the countrys linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity (8). Another inbuential resource, The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, edited by James R. Brandon (1993), reduces Indian theatre simply to an alphabetical catalogue of such forms, erasing two centuries of modern urban production altogether. Ralph Yarrows Indian Theatre (2001) is the crst Western e,ort to draw modern and contemporary Indian theatre extensively into discussions of such established critical categories as text, performance, and theory, but a dominant impulse in the study (appropriately) is to account for the postwar Western preoccupation with Indian theatre. Notwithstanding Yarrows imaginative synthesis of intercultural and critical perspectives, the great bulk of Euro-American criticism and commentary is still concerned with relating theatricality and performance in India to the social and spiritual life of a given community; it ignores urban theatre that cannot be assimilated to other social and religious forms, that depends on printed texts carefully scripted as drama, and that exists as a modern material and cultural institution in its own right. At the present moment in literary and cultural theory, postcolonial studies could be expected to o,er a corrective to the neo-orientalist Indology and theatrical interculturalism that make modern Indian theatre invisible, because postcolonial discourses foreground the critique of orientalism and concern themselves with cultural margins. Postcolonial studies, however, swerve away from the subject of theatre in at least three important respects. Postcolonial criticism is predisposed toward the discursive and the textual, whereas theatre is performative. Postcolonial literature is dominated by diasporic print genres that valorize the condition of migrancy, whereas theatrical performance is necessarily localized and rooted in specicc places. Postcolonial criticism is most receptive to Westernized modernity and Europhone writing, whereas theatre is far more dependent on indigenous languages and precolonial performance traditions wherever they are available. Postcolonial scholarship therefore fails to o,er an adequately theorized methodology for dealing with multilingual postcolonial writing, the activity of extensive
translation, and the varying relation between colonial and indigenous languages. When postcolonial critics do deal with drama and theatre, they tend to employ analytic categories that misrepresent, marginalize, or exclude Indian theatre altogether. The problems of deterministic decnitions, language, and genre are evident in three recent studies that attempt to deal with the marginalization of theatre within postcolonial studies in an international frame. In Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (1996), Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins argue that the marginalization of drama suggests a considerable gap in post-colonial studies because dramatic and performance theories, particularly those developed in conjunction with Brechtian, feminist, and cultural studies criticism, have much to o,er post-colonial debates about language, interpellation, subject-formation, representation, and forms of resistance (89). This critical intervention is a timely reminder of the extent to which postcolonial theory and criticism privilege the genres of cction (particularly anglophone cction), noncction, and poetry over drama and theatre. But Gilbert and Tompkinss study practices its own strategies of exclusion. First, the authors decne postcolonialism as not a naive teleological sequence which supersedes colonialism, . . . [but] an engagement with and contestation of colonialisms discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies. . . . Post-colonial plays, novels, verse, and clms then become textual/cultural expressions of resistance to colonisation (2). By implication, texts that are not primarily expressions of such resistance are not postcolonial. Second, while the authors acknowledge that English is not the only language of post-colonial writing . . . [and] the incorporation of a variety of tongues is vital to post-colonial literatures, English is the base language of most of the texts discussed in their book (45). Third, Gilbert and Tompkins largely bypass Indian theatre because its history/practice is too complex for inclusion in a broadly comparative analysis and the varieties of drama, dance, languages and cultures that have inbuenced Indian theatre are too vast to consider in a text other than one devoted to just India (7). This exclusion is especially regrettable because their analytic categories would have the same application and explanatory power for Indian theatre as for the other national theatres they consider. Two later collections edited by Gilbert, (Post) Colonial Stages: Creative and Critical Views on Drama, Theatre, and Performance (1999) and Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology (2001), create more nuanced views of the celd by including material on or from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore in addition to Australia, Canada, Africa, and the Caribbean. But her
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collaborative study is the crst sustained work of criticism that relates postcolonialism to theatre, and its methodological emphases are likely to exert their inbuence for some time to come. Brian Crow and Chris Bancelds Introduction to Postcolonial Theatre (also 1996) is bolder in placing such Indian-language playwrights as Badal Sircar and Girish Karnad, who write in Bengali and Kannada, respectively, alongside such playwrights as August Wilson and Athol Fugard, as well as such anglophone postcolonial authors as Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Jack Davis. Yet the authors decnition of postcolonialism is no broader than that of Gilbert and Tompkins. The condition common to all the dramatists considered here, they argue, is that of cultural subjection or subordination. . . . Central to their experience of lifeand thus to their artis the knowledge that their people and culture have not been permitted a natural historical development, but have been disrupted and dominated by others (xii). Notwithstanding its legitimacy, such a decnition misrepresents the work of Sircar and Karnad, who are middle-class, Western-educated playwrights shaped by the modernist and postmodern traditions of existentialist, absurdist, environmental, and historical-mythic theatre. Their work is so clearly concerned with the precolonial past and the postcolonial present rather than the experience of colonialism that, in discussing them, Banceld himself circumvents the issue of cultural subordination and tacitly acknowledges the limits of his decnition. The most exclusive language-based perspective appears in Bruce Kings Post-Colonial English Drama (1992), a collection of essays that places predominantly white anglophone settler colonies, such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, beside non-Western postcolonial cultures with longstanding traditions of writing and performance in indigenous languages, without adequately acknowledging either the postcolonial politics of language or the di,erence between monolingual and multilingual traditions. King comments in his introduction that Indian drama in English has been much slower to develop than theatre in Hindi and the regional languages (8), but this leaves unaddressed the peculiarities of a multivocal theatrical tradition in which the status of English varies according to its role in the process of composition. Karen Smith begins her essay on Indian drama in Kings collection by alluding to the frequency with which Indian critics dismiss original drama in English as a lost cause. Where India is concerned, Kings narrow decnition of English drama excludes from consideration the most signiccant Indian dramatic texts, directorial initiatives, and theatrical innovations of the past
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forty years. In other words, while postcolonial studies is in a unique position to extend canons, invent new critical methodologies, and inscribe new literary histories, its privileging of Europhone and diasporic textual production subjects a celd like postcolonial Indian theatre to a triple marginalizationby genre, by ideology, and by language. These problems in existing Indian, Western, and postcolonial approaches indicate some important new directions that critics need to explore. First, Indian theatre demands a decnition of postcolonialism that does not depend on monolithic categories (such as resistance to colonization or the experience of domination) but recognizes the full complexity of the extended encounter between India and the West and the resulting spectrum of syncretistic cultural forms. In other words, the methods by which postcolonial drama resists imperialism and its e,ects (Gilbert and Tompkins, 1) represent only a part, not the whole, of the postcolonial project on the Indian stage. Since independence, theatre practitioners in India have both embraced and rejected the colonial inheritance in terms of form, language, ideology, and conventions of representation. Despite the emphasis on anticolonial critique, their work remains deeply connected to modern and postmodern Western practices, especially to specicc forms of social-realist, existentialist, absurdist, and Brechtian political theatre. Through translation, adaptation, and intercultural appropriation, contemporary Indian theatre also maintains an extensive intertextuality with classical and modern European and Anglo-American drama. This multifaceted engagement with the West coexists with a complicated relation to the classical, postclassical, and colonial Indian past, both as a cultural possession and an object of knowledge. Indian playwrights deal with this multivalent cultural legacy by adjudicating between the conbicting claims of tradition and modernity, Indianness and Westernization, but their use of two major forms of retrospective narrativemyth and historyalso questions received views of the past and the ways of knowing it. For certain social groups in India, moreover, the colonial experience was one of privilege rather than subordination. Some recent drama is postcolonial in that it records the end, in independent India, of the privileged status that particular social groups and communities had acquired under colonialism. A broader perspective also reveals that the vast majority of contemporary plays are not concerned with colonialism at all but with the intersecting structures of home, family, and nation in the urban society of the present or with the concgurations of gender and desire in the reimagined folk cultures of an unspeciced past. Much of
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the oppositional energy in contemporary theatre, in any case, is not directed against the colonial experience but against the oppressive structures of nation, patriarchy, caste, class, and tradition. These are all aspects of the postcoloniality of Indian theatre, and they need to cnd proper critical recognition if the subject of postcolonial theatre is to acquire greater scholarly breadth and depth. Second, theatre criticism has to develop strategies to deal with a multilingual rather than monolingual celd in which the colonial language, English, is secondary to the indigenous languages, and some indigenous languages are theatrically more signiccant than others. The anglocentric emphasis that Gilbert and her collaborators bring to postcolonial theatre studies is really one more symptom of the continuing Eurocentrism of postcolonial studies per se as it attempts to decne the subjects and mediums of postcolonial writing. In The Empire Writes Back (1989), a seminal critical text in the celd, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griths, and Helen Tin recognize that in India, where the bulk of literature is written in indigenous Indian languages, the relationship between writing in those languages and the much less extensive writing in english [sic] has made the decolonizing project of reverting to precolonial languages a powerful element in post-colonial self-assertion (30). Yet they also argue that postcolonial literature is always written out of the tension between the abrogation of the received English which speaks from the centre, and the act of appropriation which brings it under the inbuence of a vernacular tongue, the complex of speech habits which characterize the local language, or even the evolving and distinguishing local [E]nglish of a monolingual society trying to establish its links with place (39; my emphasis). In short, The Empire Writes Back is concerned primarily with the relationship of the periphery to the metropolitan center through the medium of English, and foregrounds those forms of textuality that are oppositional and counterdiscursive. Other scholars, such as Linda Hutcheon, Vijay Mishra, Bob Hodge, and Aijaz Ahmad, acknowledge the existence and signiccance of non-Europhone writing in principle, but this recognition has yet to be translated into substantial work that can compete with metropolitan criticism on terms of equality and displace global English as the dominant rubric for discussions of the postcolonial. In such a context, the multilingualism of Indian theatre and the relatively subsidiary position of English pose a notable challenge to the Eurocentric model, in which the empire writes back in the language of the colonizer, although in a subversive and appropriative form of that language. Indian playwrights engage with a plurality of languages through original
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composition and translation, and their primary concern has been not to write back to the West but to use all available resources for the creation of a theatre that is adequate to their own complex historical and cultural positioning. Third, critics should recognize that the event of political independence marks the beginning of a highly self-conscious, self-rebexive period in Indian theatre during which most practitioners are engaged in creating a new theatre for the new nation, whether they locate the sources of novelty in the precolonial past or in the postcolonial present. The careful self-positioning of playwrights and directors crst takes place in relation to their immediate linguistic traditions, but, given the multiplicity of theatre languages, the context of their work also includes signiccant theatre events in other languages as well as the presence of an extensive, multilingual contemporary dramatic canon. These issues have come in for extensive discussion in various forms of theatre theory, workshop criticism, and cultural commentary produced by authors, directors, and performers in post-independence India. The playwrights Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad, Habib Tanvir, Utpal Dutt, G. P. Deshpande, and Mahesh Elkunchwar are important theorists of their own and others practice, as are the directors Shombhu Mitra, Ebrahim Alkazi, K. N. Panikkar, B. V. Karanth, Vijaya Mehta, Satyadev Dubey, Usha Ganguli, and Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry. The most striking aspect of this commentary is the practitioners close involvement with broader contemporaneous developments: in India, the activity of theatre has fostered a powerful sense of community among contemporaries. Self-rebexive authorial comment and the reciprocal dialogue among practitioners have thus emerged as valuable critical resources, and they should become an intrinsic part of the methodology for dealing with Indian theatre as a subject. The two parts of this book, therefore, focus on those features of post-independence Indian theatre that have shaped it as a multilingual, postcolonial national tradition. The opening chapter in part 1 juxtaposes three momentsthe inception of a theatre association in 1943, an allIndia conference in 1956, and a multilingual drama festival in 1989that mark di,erent stages in the evolution of the idea of a national theatre and the concomitant formation of a new national canon during this period. A vital aspect of this process is that, in relation to a new and diverse celd like post-independence theatre, the idea of a canon implies not strategies of exclusion, prescription, and cultural control but rather the emergence of mechanisms by which specicc plays and productions
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become highly visible over a relatively short period of time and acquire the status of major works. Discursively, the events from 1943, 1956, and 1989 o,er some heuristic criteria by which we may identify the signiccant playwrights and directors of the period since independence and move to a discussion of the constitutive features of the new theatrical celd. Chapter 3 focuses on emergent conceptions of the playwright and the dramatic text by considering di,erent models of dramatic authorship, the role of the playwright as theorist, the projection of drama as social text, and the place of translation within a multilingual theatre practice. Chapter 4 shifts attention from authorship and textuality to performance by taking up the production and reception of plays in the post-independence period. It deals with the range of major contemporary directing styles, the constitution of theatre audiences in di,erent venues, and theatres relation to the mass-cultural and popular media. Chapter 5 concludes part 1 with a discussion of the emergence of the classicist view of Indian theatre in nineteenth-century orientalist discourse and the inbuence of this discourse on both cultural-nationalist critiques of Westernized modernity in India and the anthropological-intercultural approaches of the West in recent decades. The common project of these post-independence or postwar discourses, I argue, is to subject the celd of modern, contemporary, or postcolonial Indian theatre, as constructed in the preceding chapters, to ideological erasure. Part 2 of the book, consisting of cve chapters, then deals with the formation of some signiccant postcolonial dramatic genres from a range of theoretical and aesthetic positions, and with the actualization of these genres in plays that have generally succeeded in print as well as performance. Chapters 6 and 7 present interrelated arguments about postindependence works that employ two complementary kinds of narratives about the pastmyth and historyas ironic analogues for the present and hence continue in the theatre the dialectic of heroic and satiric discourses that have shaped European and Indian constructions of India since at least the late eighteenth century. Chapter 6 focuses on myth as the basis of drama and discusses three works that use various episodes in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata as allegories of the emergent Indian nationDharamvir Bharatis Andha yug (Blind Epoch, 1954), K. N. Panikkars Urubhangam (The Shattered Thigh, 1987), and Ratan Thiyams Chakravyuha (Battle Formation, 1984). Chapter 7 shifts the focus from myth to history, the hegemonic discourse par excellence of poststructuralist and postcolonial theory, and considers historical cctions that serve as alternative sources of historical knowledge for audiences ideologically
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resistant to the dominant narratives of ocial and/or institutionalized history. The plays I discuss in this chapterMohan Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din (A Day in Early Autumn, 1958), Girish Karnads Tughlaq (1964), and Badal Sircars Baki itihas (The Rest of History, 1965)use cgures from classical and medieval history to construct ironic counter-histories for contemporary Indian audiences or represent history itself as an intolerable burden thrust on the late twentieth-century urban individual. In chapter 8, I consider the genre of social realism that counterpoints the mythic-historical texts of the previous two chapters. Plays in this loosely decned genre are decantly realistic in form, and set in the contemporary urban or semiurban present; their subjects are home, family, and the ravages of contemporary life, especially in its professional and technological forms. The representation of the family in such works as Vijay Tendulkars Kanyadaan (The Gift of a Daughter, 1983), Mahesh Elkunchwars W ada chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion, 1985), and Cyrus Mistrys Doongaji House (1978) carries emotional and sociopolitical meanings very similar to those associated with the bourgeois domestic sphere in Western drama. But in the postcolonial Indian context, the edicce of home also becomes a cgure for the nation as an endangered, unsustainable construct. Chapter 9 then deals with plays based on folk narratives that are generically and thematically opposed to urban domestic drama: they have a rural setting, foreground ritual and community, incorporate music and dance, and follow antirealist performance conventions, including a rejection of the proscenium stage. In terms of form, plays such as Karnads Hayavadana (Horse Head, 1971), Chandrashekhar Kambars Jokumaraswami (1972), and Habib Tanvirs Charandas chor (Charandas the Thief, 1974) exemplify the neotraditionalist movement in post-independence Indian theatre, although they are written mainly by urban playwrights for urban audiences. Paradoxically, the qualities of antirealism and antimodernity allow these plays to place women at the center, represent the Indian village as a realm of ambivalent freedom and fulclment, and o,er a serious if not decisive challenge to patriarchy. Finally, chapter 10 deals with the intertexts or countertexts that employ various methods of cultural translation to recreate canonical Western and Indian texts in the modern Indian languages. Postcolonial theory has decned this method as canonical counter-discourse and designated it as a paradigmatic postcolonial practice that dismantles the hegemonic colonial text by a process of substitution and reconstructs it as the subaltern postcolonial text. Through a discussion of the various uses of translation, transculturation, and intertextuality in Indian theatre, I argue for a more
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nuanced application of this inbuential critical position to contemporary plays. With Bertolt Brecht and postcolonial versions of The Threepenny Opera as points of reference, I also show how P. L. Deshpandes Teen paishacha tamasha (The Three-Paisa Entertainment, 1978) engages with the formal and ideological properties of its intertexts to construct a sociopolitical critique of the postcolonial metropolis at a specicc historical moment. As the foregoing description indicates, the relations of drama to theatre, and of text to performance in the two halves of this study need further elaboration. In part 1 my approach is primarily historical: Chapters 25 are concerned with the conditions of writing, production, and reception for post-independence urban plays in India; the mechanisms through which they acquire national visibility and signiccance; and the inherited methodological problems that cause contemporary Indian theatre to remain obscure in theatre theory and criticism. The plays considered in part 2 are products of these conditions, and, almost without exception, major stage vehicles that have maintained a continuous presence in urban production at not only a regional but a national level since their crst appearance. The emphasis in chapters 610, however, is on the coincidence of literary, cultural, and theatrical e,ectthe concurrence of generic, thematic, contextual, and performative qualities through which these plays have acquired their current prominence in Indian theatre and culture. The reasoning behind this approach is that methodology is not context-independent. Exclusively literary readings of drama, theatrical concentrations on performance, or institutional histories of theatre are appropriate in contexts in which dramas literary, theatrical, and institutional modes of existence have equal and adequate recognition. But in post-independence India, where theatre history, theatre documentation, performance analysis, and literary interpretation are all in various stages of underdevelopment, an integrated discussion of theory, text, performance, and reception uncovers the many levels at which drama and theatre work and gives some major plays new visibility beyond national borders. It establishes the extent to which contemporary Indian drama participates in modern, postmodern, and postcolonial discourses on the nation and the nation-state, myth and history, class and gender, home and family, and center and periphery, while also attending to the performance practices that have successfully communicated this thematic density to national audiences over cve decades. The signiccant culture of theatre in contemporary India is an amalgam of these elements: recovering the literary does not marginalize the
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theatricaland vice versaand both together account for the resonance of the plays in performance. It is worth reemphasizing in conclusion that by post-independence theatre I mean principally urban literary drama and experimental performance, associated with dramatic authorship, publication, and translation at one level, and with institutionalized amateur, professional, and state-supported productions at another. Such a decnition runs contrary to the critique of textuality and literariness in postwar Euro-American theatre and performance theories, but in the Indian context it o,ers a much-needed corrective because it directs attention toward the forms of theatre that have su,ered the most serious critical neglect. First, it separates contemporary urban drama and theatre from the range of classical, traditional, religious, folk, intermediary, and popular genres of performance that have ancient and premodern historical origins but exist synchronously in the present. Second, it distinguishes the subject of this study from various forms of modern theatre that exist primarily outside institutional frameworks, notably feminist performance, street theatre, and protest theatre. This separation is not based on judgments of legitimacy and value but on the recognition that text-based theatre represents a series of transactions between author, work, performance, and audience that are qualitatively di,erent from those involved in activist political theatre. In the perspective I have adopted here, establishing the basic conditions and kinds of urban literary theatre and performance in presentday India is a task qualitatively di,erent from, and no less urgent than, the analysis of performance as ritual or as an unscripted political act. A similar caution is appropriate regarding the principle of coverage that I have employed in this study and the representative status of the works discussed in it. The multilingual nature of Indian theatre imposes obvious limitations on the scope of any individual work of criticism. As a scholar of this theatre, I deal with Hindi, Marathi, and English sources in the original, and with other materials in Hindi or English translation. In part 1 of this book, which decnes the formative processes, theories, and practices of the post-independence period, I refer to the work of nationally recognized practitioners in every major theatrical language and region in India. The plays I discuss in part 2 were also written originally in Hindi, Sanskrit, Manipuri, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, English, and Chhattisgarhi. However, these plays were chosen not on the basis of some uniform notion of typicality or signiccance but because they were major works compatible with the concerns of a given chapter and of particular interest to me. I have made no conscious e,ort either to privilege
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some languages over others, orat the other extremeto distribute my readings equitably over all the signiccant theatrical languages. The idea of equal and adequate representation would be appropriate to a history or a survey of the post-independence period, but, as already emphasized, those are not my objectives. Critical studies of Indian theatre invariably acknowledge that a single or complete view of the subject is impossible, regardless of genre and period emphases: I regret especially that for reasons of space I could not pay closer attention to some major political and absurdist forms. Rustom Bharuchas Rehearsals of Revolution has dealt substantially with the political theatre of Utpal Dutt and Badal Sircar. Such playwrights as G. P. Deshpande, Satish Alekar, Mohit Chattopadhyay, Indira Parthasarathy, Tooppil Bhaasi, and Mahesh Dattani await interpretation commensurate with the quality of their worka challenge that Indian theatre studies would do well to take up in the not too distant future.
pa r t i
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The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence
chapter 2
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The Formation of a New National Canon
Theatre and Nation The urban theatre that has emerged in India since independence in 1947 has no parallel in the earlier cultural formations of the subcontinent, and, like the literature (cction, poetry, and noncction) produced over the same period, it constitutes a new national tradition. This conjunction between the nation and its cultural forms, intrinsic to modern Euro-American models of nationhood and literature, appears with proportional rapidity as well as intensity under the conditions of colonialism and postcolonialism. As the desired end of anticolonial nationalist movements and the primary basis for membership in a modern political order, the nation is an ineluctable referent in postcolonial cultural expression an idea and a political construct that invests aesthetic forms with their immediate spatiotemporal identity. Bruce King rightly describes postcolonial nations as the new centres of consciousness in late twentiethcentury literature, in which writing has been shaped in important ways by the politics of nationalism as well as the themes of the long period of cultural assertion and opposition that was part of the context of political independence (New National, 7). In India a modern literary history grounded in the nation also coexists with uniquely complex, intersecting premodern and prenational histories of literary culture that cannot simply be subsumed by the teleology of nationhood, but which nevertheless crucially reinforce the idea of India as an integral cultural space. As Sheldon Pollock has argued, the literatures of South Asia are unrivaled
21
22
in the resources they o,er for understanding the development of expressive language and imagination over time and in relation to larger orders of culture, society, and polity (2). In this perspective, the literary culture of the ever-emergent and now realized postcolonial nation represents only a very thin slice of a long historical experience whose careful preservation in texts makes this region of the world so special (Pollock, 32).1 However, the problems of relating such concepts as nation, history, and culture to Indian drama, theatre, and performance are evident in the frequency with which critics either dismiss the notions of Indian theatre and a contemporary national tradition as inherently unsustainable concepts or decne them on the basis of conceptual frameworks that are unsustainable in turn. The criterion invoked most persistently to demonstrate the impossibility of decnitions is that of singleness: there is supposedly no Indian theatre because there is no single theatrical concept in India, and no single linguistic entity that all Indians can understand (Gargi, 229; Lal, Meaning, 28). At the other conceptual extreme, critics invoke a quality of essential Indianness to decne Indian theatre as a continuous and diverse tradition with a history spanning three millennia, a vital civilizational role, and very distinctive aesthetic and theoretical characteristics. Thus, the playwright Adya Rangacharya asserts the ineluctable presence of something we can call Indianness (Rangacharya, Indian Theatre, 12); the scholar-critic Nemichandra Jain o,ers, without irony, a very brief glimpse of the fascinatingly rich and varied journey of Indian theatre through thirty centuries if not more ( Jain, Indian Theatre, 10); and the theatre historians M. L. Varadpande and Sunl Subhedar suggest that the phenomenon peculiar to Indian art . . . is an amazing continuity of its traditions through [the] ages. Even in its most mature and sophisticated manifestations the links with the early sources and subsequent stages of evolution are rebected transparently (Critique of Indian Theatre, v). The incompatibility as well as inconclusiveness of these positions acquires yet another dimension in Rustom Bharuchas comment that perhaps, the problem is not whether the Indian theatre is suciently Indian but whether it is true to the complex dynamics of a post-colonial society, where the very construction of India is being questioned at diverse levels (House, 41). In still other frameworks, Indian theatre disappears completely under the weight of linguistic heterogeneity. In one multilingual approach, the terms Indian theatre and modern Indian theatre remain operative but denote the sum of theatres in the major Indian languages, framed by the classical
23
Sanskrit period at one end and post-independence developments at the other. The second multilingual approach omits even the classical and contemporary frames, presenting Indian theatre simply as the aggregate of theatres in about sixteen modern languages. Finally, in the vast majority of modern Indian works of theatre history, theory, and criticism that are concerned with theatre only in individual languages, there is no engagement with anything resembling Indian theatre; indeed, there is no awareness that such a subject exists at all. Similar problems characterize the attempts to create a national framework for modern Indian theatre. The dominant nineteenth-century European modelin which theatre becomes an expression of nationalist ideology and progressive democratization, acquiring its national features through association with a national language, a metropolitan venue, and a carefully selected repertoirecannot be translated into Indian conditions for several reasons. First, the irreducible plurality of Indian theatrical forms in terms of language, location, genre, class, and modes of reception precludes the selection of any one kind of theatre as representative of the nation. The diverse theatrical forms enact the diversity of the nation itself, and essentialist notions of Indianness or exclusive decnitions of the theatre-nation connection can succeed only in imposing a spurious homogeneity. Second, any culturally relevant conception of the nation in India has to establish a plausible relation between the national and the regional and between individual and national identity. The Marathi playwright, scholar, and critic G. P. Deshpande o,ers provocative assessments of both issues by arguing that the term regional is a misnomer in the Indian context; the tradition of each linguistic region is really a national tradition, because you cannot belong to the whole of India without belonging to a specicc part of India (History, Politics, 9495).
When we speak of national theatre we do so with almost no knowledge of the various Indian theatres. Part of the reason for this ignorance could very well be the attitude or tendency to treat these concrete theatre traditions as regional or pradeshika against an abstraction of national or Indian theatre. It must be emphasized that this polarity is neither realistic nor useful in terms of our theatres. . . . It is essential for our self-understanding that the unity of Indian cultural expression is achieved through the plurality of linguistic (in this case theatrical) expressions. For that reason the terminology of regional is misleading when it comes to cultural production. Each mode is uniquely important; each mode is uniquely Indian. In that
24
The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence sense there is no regional theatre in India. There are several, equally valid and legitimate Indian theatres. (History, Politics, 95)
Deshpande adds that the alarming decline in the culture of regional languages has placed the national theatre in jeopardy: a national theatre is not possible because the provincial theatre has become impossible, and the regeneration of provincial theatre is a precondition for the emergence of a national theatre (National Theatre 7). The nationality of Indian theatre, therefore, is not an a priori quality that precedes the acts of writing and interpretation or a product of self-conscious authorial e,ort; rather, it is the cumulative e,ect of theoretical, generic, and thematic emphases. As Deshpande asserts, It is not my business to discover my identity, it is my business to discover my theatre. . . . My business is to decne theatre, not to decne national theatre (National Theatre, 6). Despite these critical diculties, it is possible to maintain that the urban theatre of the post-independence period is both an Indian and a national tradition: the challenge is to discover those modes of Indianness and nation-ality that are descriptive and constructive rather than prescriptive and coercive. Indian theatre is qualitatively di,erent from, and inherently more complex than, most contemporary (and largely monolingual) national traditions, but the conceptual problems it poses ought not to fallaciously imply the impossibility of critical formulations altogether. The idea of the multiple literatures of India or Indian literaturescrst developed by scholars in the 1970s and reformulated brilliantly by Pollock and others three decades later as the reconstruction of literary cultures in historyo,ers a paradigm of plurality that is certainly applicable to theatre, though with appropriate attention to the particularities of a composite and performative art. Conversely, there is no reason that Indian theatre should conform to the patterns of predominantly monolingual Western traditions or be judged by their standards. In post-independence India, the quest is not so much for a national theatre as for a signiccant theatre in and of the nation, linked intranationally by complex commonalities and mutual self-di,erentiations. As Bharucha suggests, to overcome the creative and critical impasse in which theatre currently cnds itself, what needs to be invented is a renewed imaginary of the Indian theatre, not as a metaphysical essence but as a network of interactive possibilities (House, 38). It is conceptually important, therefore, to establish the postindependence urban theatrical canon as a determinable aggregation
25
of texts and performances, mediated by a range of aesthetic choices, institutions, and reception contexts. The issues of canon formation in modern Indian theatre can in turn be approached by way of three interlinked but antithetical historical movements. The crst consisted in the increasingly powerful identiccation of theatre with nation during the period from the 1870s to the 1940s, initially in regional expressions of nationalist and anticolonial sentiment in Bengali and Marathi theatre, and later in the national purview (real or imagined) of such organizations as the Indian Peoples Theatre Association, the Indian National Theatre, and the Bharatiya Natya Sangh (Indian Theatre Guild). The second movement, orchestrated largely by the nation-state and a bedgling cultural bureaucracy in the 1950s, weakened the radical positions of the 1940s and developed a revisionary view of theatres sociocultural role in the now-independent nation. Although this discourse was synchronous with the appearance of the crst important dramatic works of the 1950s, it remained largely disjunct from them and instead articulated many of the theoretical, ideological, and polemical positions that continue to inform debates in Indian theatre half a century later. The third movement coincided with the explosion in theatre activity (in terms of both playwriting and production) that gave shape to the post-independence tradition between about 1950 and 1980, largely outside the ambit of the radical positions of the 1940s and the revisionary discourses of the 1950s. These successive phases can, in turn, be represented metonymically by three loosely related events: the formation of the Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA) in May 1943; the deliberations of the crst Drama Seminar organized by the newly constituted Sangeet Natak Akademi (the National Academy of the Performing Arts) in April 1956; and the two-week Nehru Shatabdi Natya Samaroh (Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival), also organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, in September 1989. Launched in 194243 at the height of the Bengal famine and the Allied involvement in World War II, the IPTA was at once the crst national-level theatre movement in India, and, as the cultural front (at least initially) of the Communist Party of India, an organization linked to antifascist and anti-imperialist movements on a worldwide scale. Its international models were the Paris-based International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture against Fascism, the Little Theatre groups in Britain, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Theater Project in the United States, and the Moscow Art Theatre; in India it paralleled the Progressive Writers Association, a national organization of novelists and poets launched in 1936. The IPTA
26
posed the crst concerted challenge to the cheap commercial glamour, pseudo-aesthetic posturing, and sobstu, of the contemporary theater (Bharucha, Rehearsals, 40), and developed the crst serious program for revitalizing the stage and the traditional arts as important vehicles for the peoples struggle for political, cultural, and economic justice. With the Central Cultural Troupe based in Bombay and regional units in Bengal, Assam, Malabar, Andhra Pradesh, the United Provinces, Punjab, and Delhi, the IPTA produced the crst repertoire of important new plays meant for noncommercial mass audiences and achieved national success with several of them. During the golden decade of 194252, the organization attracted virtually every serious Indian practitioner of theatre, clm, dance, and music, including Bijon Bhattacharya, Shombhu Mitra, Utpal Dutt, Balraj Sahni, Dina Gandhi (Pathak), Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Prithviraj Kapoor, Habib Tanvir, Sheila Bhatia, Ravi Shankar, and Sachin Shankar. After independence, however, the IPTA declined rapidly because of a number of internal and external problems and was formally dissolved as a national organization in the late 1950s. With the IPTA already in its twilight phase, the professed objective of the cve-day Drama Seminar held by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in New Delhi in April 1956 was to assess the present and anticipate the future shape of Indian drama because, at this juncture in the process of our national reawakening, practitioners and policymakers saw theatre as one of the most important arts for remoulding our society, and for achieving such values as may help to keep it in some state of equilibrium (Proceedings, 351). In the task of cultural reconstruction, theatre could be invested with such value because it was both a vital link to an ancient indigenous tradition and a form of representation uniquely capable of embodying contemporary national life. In keeping with the pronounced symbolism of the event, the seminar was inaugurated by the countrys vice president, the philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan; directed by the Bengali playwright and director Sachin Sengupta; and supervised by the chair of the Akademi, the jurist and playwright manqu P. V. Rajamannar. Its forty invited participants, labeled the best in the celd, included playwrights, directors, stage and screen actors, theatre critics, writers, and literary scholars. The thirty-four presentations, circulated among the participants in advance and discussed intensively during the seminar, rebected the irreducible multiplicity of languages, forms, and issues that could attach themselves to any synchronic consideration of Indian theatre. Papers and discussions at the seminar covered theatre traditions in the fourteen major modern Indian languages (excluding
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English) and the classical language, Sanskrit; professional theatre in West Bengal and Maharashtra, the two most active sites of Westernized urban theatre in India since the mid-nineteenth century; amateur theatre all over the country; folk theatre in two major languages, Hindi and Gujarati; the plays of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore; childrens theatre and operatic theatre; actor training, theatre architecture, and play production; and the relation between Indian and world theatre. The complete proceedings of the seminar, totaling 528 pages, were printed in galley form shortly afterward, and the full text was published in the Akademis quarterly journal, Sangeet Natak, in 2004 (vol. 38, nos. 24) but the volume never appeared in its totality as an ocial Akademi publication. Thirty-three years later, in September 1989 the Sangeet Natak Akademi organized a two-week festival of contemporary theatre to commemorate the birth centenary of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehruthe crst prime minister of independent India (194764), a legendary theatre enthusiast and, as the architect of modern India, a ctting symbol for the celebration of modernity and contemporaneity in theatre. In cfteen consecutive performances beginning on 3 September 1989, the Nehru Shatabdi Natya Samaroh presented the work of twenty-six contemporary practitioners: cfteen directors, four of whom were also authors of the plays they presented, and eleven other playwrights, including the Sanskrit dramatist Bhasa (ca. a.d. 275335), in revival. During the two weeks of performances, the Sangeet Natak Akademi arranged for informal discussions among the participants, which were recorded but not transcribed. As a companion project to the festival, the Akademi also published Contemporary Indian Theatre: Interviews with Playwrights and Directors, consisting of interviews with nineteen festival participants and critical essays on the remaining seven, who were either no longer living or unavailable for personal comment. This volume remains the crst and only substantial collection of its kind to appear in the post-independence period. Spread over forty-cve years, these three discrete events demarcate a segment of time during which the historicity of post-independence drama and theatre becomes fully manifest. The evolution of cultural forms is a continuous process, without determinable beginnings and ends, so any cxity we may impose on specicc moments has at best a heuristic function. The IPTA was, in any case, a movement rather than a cnite event. But there is an inherent and intentional self-consciousness about all three occasions that invites symbolic interpretation. The IPTA o,ers the crst serious critique of colonial commercial practices and a radical redecnition of theatre in relation to the people; the 1956 seminar revisits both
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colonial theatre and the IPTA and attempts to anticipate a theatre that has not yet come into existence; the 1989 festival, in contrast, re-presents a theatre that has already achieved a degree of canonicity. Between these poles, it is possible to chart the formation of the new national canon. Admittedly, in any chronological framework Indian theatre connotes such a multiplicity of theoretical positions, genres, languages, and locations that description constantly runs the risk of collapsing into meaningless generalization or impossible detail. But if we focus on the formative and distinctive features that separate post-independence theatre from earlier and other forms of performance, those features can be inferred symptomatically from the kinds of evaluation and revaluation evident in the three events under discussion. In the following analysis, the founding of the IPTA therefore marks the moment when the rejection of colonial commercial forms was translated into actual nationwide theatrical practice. The 1956 seminar is a report on the condition of theatre a decade after independence and a programmatic commentary on the relation between the past and the future in Indian drama. The 1989 festival serves as a blueprint of the emergent dramatic canon: the particular view it o,ers of linguistic, formal, generic, thematic, and aesthetic elements in a selection of important plays leads, by extrapolation, to the crst inclusive view of the notable urban playwrights, directors, and theatre groups of the 19502004 period. 1943: The Inception of a National Theatre Movement In Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), Partha Chatterjee describes the characteristic form of nationalist thought at its moment of departure in the writings of Bankim Chandra Chatterji (183894) as the encounter of a patriotic consciousness with the framework of knowledge imposed upon it by colonialism. It leads inevitably to an elitism of the intelligentsia, rooted in the vision of a radical regeneration of national culture (79). Such elitism, however, could hardly resolve the central problem of nationalist politics in a large agrarian country under colonial rule. . . . The problem . . . lay precisely in the insurmountable diculty of reconciling the modes of thought characteristic of a peasant consciousness with the rationalist forms of an enlightened nationalist politics (81). In a suggestive discussion of the e,ects of this contradiction on nineteenth-century Bengali theatre, Sudipto Chatterjee points out that the success of Dinbandhu Mitras play Nil-darpan (1859) initially created an interest in social protest plays about the oppression of
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agricultural labor and the countryside. But after the colonial government introduced formal censorship through the Dramatic Performances Control Act of 1876, Bengali theatre turned away from the topicality and speciccity of political issues and invested its energies in the performance of an imagined national identity that was rooted in orientalist thinking but that could supposedly challenge imperialism itself.
[T]his pseudo-reclamation of national power was enacted largely by and for an elite stage, not to claim independence from colonial rule, not really to vivify national pride either (although that was the project under which it was often presented). Its real function was to assuage the battered ego of a privilegentsia trying hard to construct an identity while accommodating the ignominy of being understrapped colonial subjects. The operation thus inevitably rested on elision on one side, and fabrication on the other. (Chatterjee, Nation Staged, 22)
In the late-colonial political sphere, Gandhian thought represented the moment of maneuver that transformed nineteenth-century orientalist constructions of the nation into modes of action that could mobilize both agrarian and urban populations in the interests of a mass political movement. In the cultural sphere, the founding of the IPTA in 1943 represented a similar moment of maneuver, aligned not with Gandhian political principles but with the ideology of cultural movements on the Left that were accommodated systematically to Indian contexts for the crst time. The radical nature of the IPTAs nationalism appears most starkly in its unqualiced rejection of nineteenth-century theatre and the culture that sustained it. In a speech delivered at the organizations inaugural conference in May 1943, Hiren Mukherjee describes the urban drama of the previous half-century as having fallen to some of the lowest depths of degeneration because of its dependence on inane middle-class conventionality or its escape into bad history and senseless mythology (Pradhan 1: 134, 136). The crst IPTA Bulletin of July 1943 expands this criticism to include all nineteenth-century cultural expression: In this ever-changing world the artists and writers of the last century failed signally to maintain the growth of our culture and its living quality by its continuous adaptation, transformation and development for expressing the signiccant facts, aspirations and struggles of our people (125). The secondhand modernity of so-called realist plays, the yearning for love in romantic drama, and the frequent recourse to a distant and
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legendary past or mysticism and . . . obscurantist irrationalism were all nineteenth-century habits that were irrelevant to the people (Pradhan 1: 124). Replacing the older categories of viewer, reader, and audience with this new collectivity, the IPTA activists argue that twentiethcentury events have compelled many sensitive writers and artists to realize in varying degrees that art and literature can have a future only if they become the authentic expressions and inspirations of the peoples struggles for freedom and culture (Pradhan 1: 127). According to Malini Bhattacharya, the IPTA was trying to respond to two basic aesthetic and political demands: to develop experimental forms outside the naturalistic concnes of commercial theatre and to present real contemporary struggles against fascism, imperialism, and economic exploitation (Bengal, 8). In theory, the organization was committed to realizing these goals by drawing on Indias rich cultural heritage and traditional arts. From an ideological standpoint, it found that traditional, folk, and popular forms of theatre and performance had several self-evident advantages. They were culturally indigenous, antirealistic or nonrealistic in terms of presentational style, and rural or semirural in terms of primary locationin short, antithetical in every respect to the derivative, articcial, bourgeois urban forms that the IPTA intended to displace. The recommendations of the drama commission made during the seventh IPTA conference categorically (and hyperbolically) asserted the IPTAs commitment to a national perspective: The IPTA in its dramatic works, while always keen to imbibe healthy inbuences from abroad, must strive to see that its work is rooted in the national tradition. All cosmopolitan tendencies, which have no relevance to our living conditions and social struggles, must be opposed. We shall strive to develop the specicc culture of our various nationalities (Pradhan 2: 162). In practice, however, the new plays that became an important part of the IPTAs dramatic repertoire over a decade employed a wide range of forms and had varied audiences. Nandi Bhatia notes that keeping a theory of social realism as [their] central concern which forged an interpretive relationship with the audience, the IPTA organizers constantly experimented with an amalgamation of theatre forms, both indigenous and Western (219). The movements crst and most enduring success, Bijon Bhattacharyas Nabanna (The New Harvest, Bengali, 1944), was a naturalistic play with an anti-imperialist message that was crst produced by Shombhu Mitra on a revolving stage in Calcutta but then went on an extensive tour of both rural and urban areas in North India. Between 1942 and 1952, social realism in fact emerged as the dominant mode of
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the peoples theatre, encompassing numerous full-length, comparatively lowbrow vehicles that could be performed on a proscenium stage or in a variety of outdoor urban spaces, as well as in small towns and villages. The most successful plays of this kind included Ali Sardar Jafris Yeh kis ka khoon hai (Whose Blood Is This, 1942), Khwaja Ahmad Abbass Zubeida (1944) and Main kaun hoon? (Who Am I?, 1947), and Prithviraj Kapoors Deewar (The Wall, 1945) and Pathhan (The Frontiersman, 1947). The critique of class ideology emerged most clearly in plays aimed at peasants and urban industrial workers, such as Tooppil Bhaasis Ningalenne communistaki (You Made Me a Communist, Malayalam, 1952) and T. K. Sharmalkars Dhani (Land, 1942), both of which addressed the problem of landlordism; and Sharmalkars Dada (Brother, Hindi, 1942), which dealt with the exploitation of millworkers. Juxtaposed against these forms were topical plays with urgent political messages: Benoy Roys Main bhookha hoon (I Am Hungry, Hindi, 1943) and Ritwik Ghataks Dalil (Argument, 1952), which dealt, respectively, with the Bengal famine and the problem of refugees after Partition, received large outdoor performances, while Panu Pals Chargesheet (1949), which protested the imprisonment of Communist Party leaders in 194849, was written overnight as a streetcorner play. Among plays with an international focus, antifascist vehicles, such as Sergei Tretyakovs Roar China (1926, performed by the IPTA in 1942), Four Comrades (1942), and Hitler parajayam (The Defeat of Hitler, Telugu, 1944), complemented modern Western plays in translation, such as Shombhu Mitras experimental adaptation of Henrik Ibsens Enemy of the People (194952) and Mulk Raj Anands version of Cli,ord Odetss Waiting for Lefty (1953). In addition, as independence approached, the Central Cultural Troupe of the IPTA mounted nationalistic pageants such as Spirit of India (1944) and India Immortal (1945), modifying the medium of theatre through dance and enforcing a patriotic message. Despite their ideological priority, indigenous popular and folk forms such as jatra, tamasha, and burrakatha (very successful in Bengal, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, respectively) represented only one strain in the eclectic array of realist, propagandist, topical, and spectacular Indian and Western forms that made up the IPTAs populist repertoire. In my analysis, which focuses on the post-1950 period, this repertoire is signiccant not so much in itself as for what it accomplishes symbolically for theatre in India. The signiccant tradition of postcolonial Indian drama begins with Nabannaas written by Bhattacharya in 1943, and as directed by Shombhu Mitra in 1944 (cg. 1). In a comment from 2002 that resonates widely with practitioners of political drama, street theatre,
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and protest theatre in India, Sudhanva Deshpande acknowledges that the radical legacy of IPTAits emphasis on theatre for the people; its e,orts to revitalize wherever possible the traditional arts; its e,orts to build a peoples theatre movement under the political guidance, at least initially, of the (then undivided) Communist Partythis radical legacy continues to inspire street theatre of the Left today (83). Most importantly, by placing theatre at the center of a national awakening, the IPTA resituated it in the national imaginary in a way that has been enabling for all subsequent practitioners, however detached they may be from the organizations objectives. The concrete e,ort expended in the actual writing and production of plays on a large scale appears all the more signiccant when juxtaposed against the vague generalizations that dominate some contemporaneous discussions of the idea of a national theatre, especially in two works that seem to have been written with the specicc purpose of eliding the IPTA movementBaldoon Dhingras A National Theatre for India (1944) and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyays Towards a National Theatre (1945). Kamaladevis self-positioning arises from her role as an important formulator of cultural policy who was brieby associated with the IPTA but became the founding president of two rival organizationsthe Indian National Theatre (founded in 1946) and the Bharatiya Natya Sangh (Indian Theatre Guild, founded in 1949). It is a strange as well as a tragic fact, she comments in 1945, that the general national awakening in India resulting, amongst other things, in a tremendous revival in cne arts and various aesthetical pursuits, should have so completely bypassed the drama and the stage (6). Furthermore, in her view the bankruptcy of the Indian theatre bears down on one with even greater poignancy when it appears alongside American, French, German, Japanese, or Chinese theatre (8). The IPTA appears beetingly at the very end of the monograph as the cultural front of a political faction that has done much to stimulate, encourage and foster cultural work all over the country, but which ultimately concrms that art when it functions as the propaganda arm of political ideologies becomes constrained and limited (55). Indeed, Kamaladevi urges those IPTA activists who do not owe allegiance to any particular political ideology to wrench it from its present circumscribed moorings and set it aboat like a vessel on the free seas (55). Dhingra considers theatre invisible to such an extent in 1940s India that he asks, Why talk about a theatre . . . when there are no plays? (31). Neither commentator mentions the theatrical triumph of 194445: the pathbreaking national reception of Nabanna.
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Methodologically, both Kamaladevi and Dhingra approach theatre through universalist and idealist decnitions of art as an autonomous but socially vital activity that can have meaning and inbuence only when it is vitally linked to the normal currents of the social life of the period and is able to assume a clearly decned collective function (Kamaladevi, 3). The category of the aesthetic, however, remains primary: in the process of self-decnition that accompanies new nationhood, national consciousness stimulates cultural forms, but cultural forms in turn confer national dignity and freedom, for aesthetics is the magic wand that transforms dross into cne metal (13). Dhingra similarly describes art as an expression of fundamental human needs and drama as the greatest collective enterprise that projects and interprets our common humanity, in part by pursuing beauty and the imagination rather than problematic social issues (1). In such a scheme, according to Kamaladevi, such concepts as proletarian art introduce a sectarian virus and destroy the precious possession of an entire community, for we must realize the fundamental fact that art is the appeal to the instinct of communion, the indivisible unity of mankind (3).
Fig. 1. Famine and the peasants despair in 1944. Scene from Bijon Bhattacharyas Nabanna, directed by Kumar Roy for Bohurupee (Calcutta), Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival, New Delhi, 1989. Courtesy of Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi.
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Translated on the eve of independence into a program for theatre, these universalist and homogenizing arguments produce a series of imperatives predicated on theatres vital role as a source of spiritual nourishment and cultural enlightenment. Both Chattopadhyay and Dhingra want cultural activity in general, and theatre in particular, to be recognized as national priorities (like food and education), and they equate a national theatre with the nationwide implementation of a program that would include the construction of theatres, training in the various theatre arts, and the development of a new repertory. Chattopadhyay wants the initiative for these activities to come from the national government, with municipalities and local bodies also taking a leading role in the process. Dhingra prefers the private liberality of self-e,acing philanthropists who would readily patronize theatre once they were made aware of its national value (37). Both commentators want theatre to be an unostentatious, noncommercial activity, and both therefore attack clm as the corrupting mass-cultural medium that theatre must counteract. They also identify the lives and problems of ordinary people, especially the rural poor, as the subjects of theatrical representation. Both want the national theatre to be formally diverse, although Kamaladevi rejects traditional Indian genres as outdated models and considers realism a mode incompatible with the Indian genius. Finally, both commentators want theatre to embrace multiple languages. As Dhingra states, all tongues and epochs are to be deliberately intermingled, gathered together round one rallying point, the National Theatre. There is something allembracing in its meaning. For the theatre can be national only when the spirit of each language is brought out to the full, when each is raised to its full stature and there is one purpose behind all endeavour (44). Beyond the utopian visions of patronage and a series of generalized imperatives, however, neither critic shows any concrete understanding of the sociology, economics, and politics of Indian theatre in the midtwentieth century or of theatre as an unprogrammed art. The contrast between the activities of the IPTA in the 1940s and the commentaries of Kamaladevi and Dhingra is, simply, that between practice and theorybetween a precise historical positioning in relation to colonialism, fascism, and immediate socioeconomic and political problems (such as the devastating Bengal famine of 194243) and a sentimental universalism that lacks a concrete understanding of the historical moment. While the IPTA regarded the still-colonized nation as an embattled political and social space, Kamaladevi envisions the nation as a classless community whose collective identity is self-evident and
35
unproblematic. In her conception, the people, whose aspirations the national theatre must fulcll, encompass all of the nations citizens uniformly. The IPTA categorically rejected colonialism and colonial theatre, but Kamaladevi counsels tolerance toward the past, refers approvingly to the tradition of nineteenth-century plays with politico-social themes, and has specicc praise for such stalwarts of late-colonial commercial theatre as Girish Chandra Ghosh, D. L. Roy, and Sisir Kumar Bhaduri. The IPTA was thus clearly in the vanguard of e,orts in the 1940s to think about theatre in serious national terms; there are intrinsic as well as extrinsic reasons for its rapid decline after 1947 and for the widespread attitudes of negativity and ambivalence toward its achievements. Although it was launched as the cultural front of the Communist Party in 1943, the organization attracted large numbers of writers and intellectuals who saw it not as an expanding mass organization but as the only national-level forum for progressive art. In many respects, then, the IPTA proved to be not a peoples theatre but an urban-elite e,ort to bring art to the people (Pradhan 1: xiv). This urban and middle-class orientation also complicated the relation of its aesthetic to its political objectives. While some IPTA activists gave priority to the message over the medium, Mitras production of Nabanna demonstrated the political force of an artistically complex representation. By diverting interest from low-cost productions and nonurban audiences, the success of Nabanna reinforced what Malini Bhattacharya calls the theoretical preconception that politicization and formal experimentation in art are opposed to each other. The development of this preconception within [the] IPTA was one of the manifestations of the theoretical crisis it came to face (Bengal, 16). In the IPTA annual report for 1946, the general secretary Anil de Silva acknowledges that, despite a spate of new plays in several languages,
we have failed . . . to have a real comprehensive grasp of the new possibilities in our Indian drama. We have made but a slight contribution to the future of that drama. We have made no e,ort to seriously study our past classical Sanskrit drama and our folk forms of drama, so that our writers and producers could experiment in a synthesis of these two forms with modern stage technique and lighting. We shall have to make a serious study of these subjects; we shall have to compel our writers to help us to experiment in the drama and so evolve a new drama; one that will be essentially Indian, bringing forth real creative talent that will base itself on both tradition and technique. (Annual Report, 5)
36
As an admission of failure, this statement may be adequate; as the program for a new theatre, it is conceptually confused and superccial. De Silva wants to envision a new Indian theatre, a National Art but cannot summon more than a formulaic understanding of the materials and modes of theatre. Just as signiccant as the internal theoretical and artistic failures of the IPTA were the problems of Communist politics in the late 1940s and 1950s, and the incompatibility of the IPTAs political program with the cultural policies of Nehruvian (primarily Fabian) socialist democracy. Bhattacharya argues that the Communist Party lost the momentum it had gathered between 1942 and 1946, as the countdown toward independence altered the terms of the nationalist movement. In 1947, the party
found itself in a state of ideological and organizational crisis. A radically new situationwhere the common imperialist enemy had left the scene and the recently empowered bourgeois leadership engaged itself in crushing the various mass upsurges and the inbuence of the Communists found the latter unprepared. The vanguard position which organizations like [the] IPTA had achieved over a broad congregation of intellectuals and artists during the earlier period was being lost in this critical situation, and the problems of growth which it had been facing even in 194546 became paralyzing after 1947. (Bhattacharya, Preliminary Sketch, 16)
Both the Communist Party and its cultural front became revisionist in the 1950s, inclined toward cooperation with the new national government and toward individualistic rather than collective action. The national government, however, attacked IPTA programs and activists from 1948 onward, imposed censorship, withheld the patronage of its cultural institutions, and crippled the IPTA cnancially by continuing to levy the entertainment tax on a nonproct organization. At a time of nation-building in the life of the newly independent nation, Nandi Bhatia notes, all cultural productions that appeared to be subversive or political were obliterated from state controlled university curricula and various government funded cultural organizations (218). The aesthetics of New Criticism and modernism superseded the progressive writing of the period between the late 1930s and the early 1950s. The golden decade of the IPTA therefore transformed Indian theatre, but in retrospect it appears to be more a radical interregnum between colonial and postcolonial events than a preview of the theory, practice, and politics of the post-independence period.
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1956: The Clean Slate of Theatre With the reoriented cultural politics of the crst decade of independence as a backdrop, the Sangeet Natak Akademis 1956 drama seminar marks a symbolic end to the theatre movement of the 1940s, as well as the universalist abstractions and utopian aspirations of such commentators as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Baldoon Dhingra. It recognized the need not only to dissociate theatre from a specicc political program but also to rethink it comprehensively in relation to the remote and proximate past. A cnite event rather than a movement, the seminar therefore represents a revisionary moment of transition from pre- to post-independence theoretical and polemical positions. With its meticulously detailed agenda, it is also the crst sustained exercise in historical self-positioningan early postcolonial rebection on the singular problematic of a multilingual theatrical tradition that had classical and premodern as well as colonial antecedents, the emergent modernity of which was synchronous with colonialism. The object of the commentaries and exchanges at the seminar was to relate this complex legacy in theatre to the aesthetic, social, and political needs of the new nation and to develop a program for the future Indian drama that would separate what the participants viewed as authentic, intrinsic, and hence desirable lines of development from those that they considered spurious, extrinsic, and undesirable. Such attempts at cultural legislation in the cause of nation building belong to a di,erent discursive register than the manifestoes of the IPTA, but in retrospect it would be reductive to dismiss the proceedings of 1956 as largely superbuous, state-sanctioned, cultural-nationalist discourse. Because of their very self-consciousness about the role of cultural forms in postcolonial contexts, the discussants managed to establish the boundaries of much subsequent polemic about theatre, and they foresaw many of the formative features of the postindependence canon without being able to anticipate either its scale or its quality. This prescience is all the more remarkable because only three of the participantsAdya Rangacharya, Shombhu Mitra, and Ebrahim Alkaziwent on to outstanding post-independence careers in theatre, and only a few others, such as Mama Warerkar, C. C. Mehta, Dina Gandhi, Nemichandra Jain, Adi Marzban, Suresh Awasthi, and J. C. Mathur, are recognizable now as having contributed in signiccant measure to subsequent theatre theory, practice, or scholarship. The seminars boldest space-clearing gesture is a systematic repudiation of the forms, conventions, and institutions of Westernized modernity
38
that had initiated modern urban theatre in colonial India. Its critique of colonial theatre encompasses the three major formations of the 1850 1950 period: the establishment of commercial proscenium theatres, especially in the colonial metropolises of Calcutta and Bombay; the development of Parsi theatre as a popular national institution, through both resident urban and touring companies; and the radical politicization of theatre in the decade of independence by the Indian Peoples Theatre Association. Some of the seminars most vocal and inbuential spokesmensuch as the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, the actor Balraj Sahni, and the writer-critic Prabhakar Machweargue that colonial and latecolonial theatre institutions are no longer usable and anticipate a future theatre radically unrelated to its colonial past. Sengupta comments in his opening address that the Akademi chair, P. V. Rajamannar, wanted to know what the future Indian drama should be like, and . . . asked the Akademi to cnd it for him, and in a vivid revisionist image, Anand describes contemporary theatre practitioners as infants with clean slates in [their] hands, free to inscribe the imagined future of their choice (Proceedings, 12; unless otherwise noted, all parenthetical citations in this section are to this source). The attack on colonial theatre forms follows mainly from the perception that they were imperialist impositions, destructive of the indigenous aesthetic and performance traditions that had prevailed for more than a millennium. Nothing symbolizes this process of displacement more powerfully than the conventions of Western naturalism and their spatial embodiment, the urban proscenium stage. The most important problem of the modern era in the theatre, Anand comments, is the basic contradiction between the symbolism of the Indian heritage in drama, with its poetic realism, and the naturalism of the Western theatre which percolated into India, devoid of its own organic sensibility, poetry and mechanical perfection (338). The arguments for the rejection of naturalism are therefore multiple and interrelated. From the mid-nineteenth century onward urban proscenium theatres created cxed and enclosed theatre spaces, in radical opposition to the mobile, open-air performance venues of Indian traditional and folk theatre. The system of commercial ticket sales made theatre subservient to popular taste and destroyed older systems of patronage involving religious or landed elites and their institutions. The naturalistic conventions of the proscenium stage were fundamentally opposed to the pervasive antirealism of indigenous forms (classical, traditional, folk, and popular) and imposed an alien aesthetic on the urban audience. Indeed, Anand dismisses naturalism as a thoughtless
39
borrowing from the West, while H. V. Gupte argues that modern Indian drama developed haphazardly because of its distance from traditional Indian aesthetics. Further, the strict separation of performers from spectators destroyed the actor-audience unity that precolonial theatre had emphasized through the cgure of the sutradhar, a character who manages the various strands of a performance, mediates actively between play, actor, and spectator, and addresses the audience directly. Locating theatres in the cities also created a division between urban and rural audiences that contradicted the social interbows within a predominantly agrarian culture. In discussing the relation between traditional and new drama, Balraj Sahni describes the wedge between town and country as an imperialist move on the part of the colonial government, calculated to disempower rural populations and devalue their aesthetic forms (367). Tracing the development of modern Urdu drama, M. Mujeeb usefully sums up the view of modernity and modernization as extrinsic processes forced on a passive culture: Europeanisation had the support of political authority, of economic power, of scienticc achievement. The result of its conbict with [Indian] tradition was not a synthesis of ideas and beliefs, not organic change, but forced compromise, tacit acceptance of facts. No new or dynamic philosophy of life emerged from it; expression of ideas was often induced, but it would be a mistake, perhaps, to regard it as genuine self-expression (325). The multidirectional attack on Parsi theatre at the seminar follows from the belief, widely held by the 1950s, that commercialism and the proct motive are fundamentally incompatible with the art of theatre. As the late nineteenth-century Indian equivalent of Victorian spectacular theatre, the Parsi stage was an elaborate, highly proctable private enterprise based on a historically new relation between theatre, popular culture, and the sociology and demographics of the colonial city. Kathryn Hansen notes that between 1853 and 1931 Bombay developed a lively theatrical culture grounded in the overlapping practices of the Parsi, Gujarati, and Marathi theatres; these theatres participated in a commercial entertainment economy characterized by corporate ownership of theatrical companies, which arose in tandem with the citys rapid population growth and prosperity (Making Women Visible, 129). As the work of Hansen and others now suggests, Parsi theatre was an important site for the performance of gender and nation in colonial India, but the early postcolonial perspective of the 1956 seminar only underscores the failure of this institution to create an enduring theatre culture and its inability to survive the onslaught of cinema in the 1930s. According to
40
the arguments of the participants, Parsi theatre impeded the association between literary drama and the popular stage in two ways. First, the association of drama with the performance of theatrical companies was a deterrent to serious playwriting and production, even when the value of drama had been realised by the educator and the reformer (326). Second, serious colonial-era dramatists, such as Bharatendu Harishchandra, Rabindranath Tagore, and Jaishankar Prasad, became largely closet playwrights because of their distaste for commercial theatre. The result, as several speakers complained during the seminar, was a critical shortage of reputable playwrights and good actable plays after independence. In their view the situation had worsened in the 1950s because of the large-scale diversion of literary talent into cinema. The theatre scholar J. C. Mathur acknowledges that the mass-cultural medium of clm uprooted Parsi theatre but reasserts that the rift between the professional stage and the literary drama is delaying the reappearance of a powerful theatre that can successfully compete with clm (134). Equally problematic is the separation of folk drama from both the commercial and literary spheres, leading Mulk Raj Anand to conclude that there is not an important or signiccant modern Indian tradition of the city which could be fused in an organic manner with our indigenous . . . drama or the European contemporary theatre (344). Only Narain Kale argues optimistically that the death of the Parsi commercial superstructure might actually allow the true spirit of the theatre to assert itself in regions, such as Bombay, that were already rich in theatrical tradition. The 1956 seminar thus takes up such issues of colonial provenance as naturalist representation and low-brow commercialism and projects them as imposed imperialist practices; its virtual erasure of the IPTA as a subject exposes the internal conbicts within Indian theatre and the occlusions of ocial cultural discourse. This project of suppression is particularly ironic in view of the strong connections several participants had with various branches of the IPTA. Sachin Sengupta (director of the seminar) was the all-India treasurer of the association and president of the Bengal branch in 1956, and several participants, including Shombhu Mitra, Balraj Sahni, Dina Gandhi, and Mulk Raj Anand were current or former members. Indeed, Sahni and Gandhi had spent several months in prison during the Indian governments anticommunist o,ensive of 195051. Commenting on the problems of amateur theatre in India, Machwe acknowledges that such organizations as the IPTA brought playwrights out of the ivory tower and gave drama a populist
41
base by reviving some forms of folk drama, but he argues (like Kamaladevi) that the quality of their productions remained amateurish and the pressures of party loyalty and propaganda reduced Art to a handmaid of politics (429). Anand had produced Odetss Waiting for Lefty for the Bombay branch of the IPTA in 1953, but at the seminar he describes the organization as incapable of dealing seriously with Indian theatre forms, their relation to European theatre techniques, and their relevance to a new Indian theatre. In a defense of the IPTA based on many years of association, Sengupta responds that the organization did have links with the Communist Party at its inception in 1943 but no longer has any party aliation. It does not use any party funds. It is a free organisation composed of progressive artists and writers of diverse political beliefs (438). Indeed, he blames the IPTAs decline on its non-party role and advocates a return to the older ideology because loyalty to a party is no o,ence . . . [i]n a democratic country where parties have distinctive roles to devise diverse patterns of society, in order to test which is the best for its people (438). Another strong supporter of the association, Balraj Sahni, praises it for its healthy outlook, regards its genuinely democratic and inspiring e,ort as the reason for a growing dramatic consciousness in towns and villages, and claims to have learned fundamental lessons of the drama in its fold (360, 368). Dina Gandhi insists that her work with the IPTA led to her own career-making discovery of folk forms. However, in the absence of even one focused presentation, the debate over the IPTA at the seminar is neither systematic nor substantial. Statist discourse about Indianness, tradition, and a national theatre in the mid-1950s clearly cannot acknowledge the transformative e,ects of leftoriented activist theatre, and the jaded criticism during the seminar merely foreshadows the formal dissolution of the IPTA as a national organization in 1957. Having dismissed the naturalist, spectacular, and populist political forms that together constituted modern Indian theatre until independence, the participants then turn to the task of debating what shape we want to give our future drama and theatre (441). Their proposals focus on questions of language, audience, institutional organization, and above all, form. Anand, himself one of the crst major practitioners of IndianEnglish cction, predicts that the theatre will . . . have to speak the languages of India if it is to become real, and even though the experimental theatre may go on playing in the English language, we will have to mould our spoken tongue to our purpose (344). Ramesh Chandra regards the di,erences of class, education, location, and circumstance among Indian
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audiences as decisive; he argues that the theatre of the future would have to follow two parallel lines of development, one to satisfy the demand[s] of the sophisticated citizens of the cities and the other to fulcll the needs of the workers in the celds and the factories (352). Instead of trying to bridge the gap between the two constituencies, he pragmatically acknowledges the permanence of the separation in an urbanizing, developing society but does not specify what kinds of theatre would be appropriate for the respective audiences. The issue of dramatic form produces a range of responses within a crmly nationalist, anti-Western framework. Narain Kale takes one representative position when he argues that the new national theatre must make the maximum use of indigenous material from our national heritage, and its foundations must be crmly laid in our national traditions. It must be a theatre of a free and independent people freely expressing its culture and aspirations (403). The seminars formal recommendations also isolate folk theatre as the genre most in need of preservation, promotion, and study on the grounds that the regeneration of the Indian theatre can only be possible by revitalising the traditional folk forms so as to narrow the gulf between the dramatic forms that have developed during the last hundred years and the survivals from the past (31). Anands assessment of usable and unusable elements in both the Western and Indian traditions is more nuanced, though perhaps a little overstated:
[W]e cannot follow the Western system of founding a chain of grandiose closed theatres in India, in blind imitation of the West and merely mount plays in those theatres according to the commercial techniques already discarded by the most advanced experts in Europe. . . . [W]e have to create a synthesis between the central facts of our tradition, with the crafts of acting and technique of those in the West who also wish to bring this important element back into their theatre and to achieve the unity between the actors and audience. (347) When we speak of our precious heritage, when we declare that the imagination is the centre of Indian tradition, we dont ask anybody to go back to the past that is past, but to found our present theatres in the light of the experience of our ancients. . . . The European theatre . . . matured, passing through highly organised e,orts and gave us brilliant plays, glories of nations. . . . [W]e must accept the traditional as well as the re-oriented theatre and evolve a new National Theatre. (35253)
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In relation to dramatic form, the key term for a future theatre is therefore synthesisthe middle ground between mere revivalism and imitative Westernization, which would reconcile precolonial traditions with the sociocultural formations of a modern nation-state. The cnal notable area of discussion at the seminar involves the respective claims of professional and amateur theatre and underscores the unusual meanings that these terms had already acquired in Indian theatre discourse. Because of its association with urban proscenium theatres and the Parsi stage, by the 1950s the term professional had come to denote not just commercial or full-time activity but a theatre that was nonserious, superccial, inartistic, or merely popular, and hence not worth preserving. The counterterm amateur referred occasionally to lightweight college and community productions, but it mainly denoted aesthetic and thematic seriousness, artistic boldness, and long-term commitment to the art. The term was, in fact, a misnomer for a type of theatre organization that had appeared immediately after independence in some major Indian cities and had already begun to alter the aesthetics and economics of performance. As exempliced in Shombhu Mitras group Bohurupee in Calcutta (founded in 1949) and Ebrahim Alkazis Theatre Group in Bombay (founded in 1951), this new kind of amateur theatre was an artistically serious but nonprofessional organization managed by a prominent director and/or actor. It mounted major productions for paying customers but could not operate with any predictable regularity because it lacked stable internal or external sources of support. Exploiting this well-established opposition, discussants at the 1956 seminar strongly enforce the idea that serious noncommercial rather than professional theatre should shape the future of Indian drama. Shombhu Mitra asserts in his discussion of the problems of amateur theatre that the nationwide theatre renaissance since the 1943 inception of the IPTA is the work of a select set of performers who are crazy about the theatre and somehow manage to balance the pressures of earning a livelihood with the irresistible desire to stage good plays (418). Ebrahim Alkazi, founder of two amateur theatre groups in Bombay and future director of the National School of Drama in New Delhi, warns that to commercialize Indian theatre would be to kill it. Mulk Raj Anand insists that the staginess and theatricality which entered our commercial theatre under the inbuence of the falsely histrionic Western commercial theatres, will have to go (349) and predicts that the chief impetus for most theatrical movements in our country will come from amateur[s] and near-professionals (348). Inder Dass acknowledges that amateur
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theatre has assumed disproportionate importance in India because of the peculiar circumstances in which our country is situated, [but] . . . on its encouragement and promotion lies the future hope for the establishment of a national theatre and dramatic renaissance (423). There are a few dissenting voices that urge that theatre cannot be a part-time occupation, but Narain Kale gives the support for committed amateurism a neat turn of phrase when he argues that, unlike the professional theatre of the past, India now needs to develop the profession of theatre. Beyond this polemic that debates the (un)suitability of colonial theatre forms to postcolonial practice, the concerns of the seminar are legal, procedural, and practical. Its formal recommendations, recorded in the report of the Sangeet Natak Akademi for 195358, urge the Indian government to repeal immediately the colonial instrument of censorship, the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876, to exempt theatre from the entertainment tax, to establish a central institute for comprehensive training in theatre, and to allocate funds at the national level in the second cveyear plan to construct new theatres and assist struggling professional and amateur companies. The proposals for the Akademi itself include a publishing program of books, bulletins, and translations of well-known stageable plays; regular training camps and theatre festivals; and regional and national competitions involving minimal ocial supervision. In addition to folk theatre, childrens theatre and theatre-in-education are identiced as the areas most in need of development. In the course of the cve decades since the seminar, these proposals have met with uneven success. The Dramatic Performances Act is still in e,ect at the beginning of the twenty-crst century. Some states, including what were then Bombay (now Maharashtra), Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Madras (now Tamil Nadu), Mysore (now Karnataka), Manipur, and Orissa repealed the entertainment tax on theatre in 1958, but other states rejected the request for a general exemption. The central institute for comprehensive training in theatre did come into existence in April 1959 as the National School of Drama and Asian Theatre Institute, and the Sangeet Natak Akademi has followed a consistent program of publication, preservation, and patronage, especially in relation to the traditional theatre arts. But funds for new theatres, amateur companies, and theatre education have not materialized on the scale imagined in the crst decade of independence. The validity of the seminars anticolonial polemic can cnally be assessed only in relation to the celd of post-independence theatre as it has actually developed over half a centurythe subject of the remainder of this
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chapter, and, more elaborately, the next two chapters. But in at least three respects the discourse of 1956 possessed a clarity that now seems both irretrievable and unduplicable. The seminar introduced the binaries that have become ideologically decnitive of postcolonial debates on theatre: Indian/Western, indigenous/alien, traditional/modern, rural/urban, folk/ sophisticated, and amateur/professional. It rose above linguistic and regional boundaries and managed to address vital issues in national terms not only (or even especially) in relation to the institution of a national theatre but also in relation to the aesthetic and material processes that had a,ected the culture of the nation as a whole during the colonial period and that would have to be reconsidered on the same comprehensive scale in the present. Finally, as the metaphor of the clean slate indicates, the most vocal observers of the 1950s viewed the future Indian drama as both historically unprecedented and disjunct from the past, whereas the absence of such a clear-cut demarcation is precisely the overriding problem in Indian theatre criticism at the beginning of the twenty-crst century. 1989: Prospect and Retrospect In their brief introduction to Contemporary Indian Theatre (1989), the Sangeet Natak Akademis companion volume to the Nehru Festival, Girish Karnad (Kannada playwright and Akademi chair) and Rajinder Paul (editor of the theatre magazine Enact and Akademi vice-chair) describe the festival as a retrospective of modern Indian theatre on an unusually large scale and, in that respect, an experiment without precedent (7). The implication is that, in contrast to the tabula rasa of 1956, in 1989 contemporary Indian theatre can be invested with a substantial and representable past. Acknowledging that theatre, unlike clm, is not a frozen article that can be unpacked for display, its content una,ected, in a di,erent situation and that it therefore challenges the very idea of a retrospective, the organizers avoid sweeping claims about the canonicity, representativeness, and inclusiveness of their selection (among the invitees who were unable to participate for various reasons were Sheila Bhatia, Shanta Gandhi, Shombhu Mitra, Ebrahim Alkazi, and Badal Sircar). The festivals aim, instead, is to present
for todays audience, . . . some of the more signiccant plays written in the last cve decades, interpreted by some of our most gifted directors. We believe the attempt worth making if only to see how these stalwarts, still
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The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence active in theatre, would re-evaluate their own earlier creations. Would they in their more mature years cnd new meanings in the texts they had in many cases discovered and helped to establish as classics? Will a director attempt an approximation of his earlier interpretation or will he approach the play as though it were an altogether new text? Will the plays, some of which survive only as texts for academic study, stimulate todays viewers as they did their original audiences? (7)
These are remarkable questions to pose about plays that, with the exception of Bhasas Urubhangam (Sanskrit, ca. early fourth century), were written between 1943 (Bijon Bhattacharyas Nabanna) and 1985 (Mahesh Elkunchwars W ada chirebandi). Presented through the juxtaposition of earlier/later and old/new texts and meanings, the processes of canon formation appear both accelerated and compressed in this account. Within three decades, there has evidently appeared in post-independence theatre a classic order of dramatic texts that corresponds to a similar order of interpretations-in-performance, and most of the original creators of those texts and interpretations are still available to undertake unusual exercises in reenactment, revision, and self-rebection. Some contemporary plays with signiccant performance histories also seem already to have lapsed into a predominantly textual mode of existence, so that their revival on stage carries the force of a theatrical rehabilitation. In my construction of the celd of post-independence theatre, therefore, the program of the Nehru Festival (see appendix 1) performs a triple function. As a retrospective of post-independence theatre, it signals the emergence of a body of plays whose canonicity is virtually coincident with their crst publication and major production(s). As a selection of such classics, it provides a microcosmic view of some key features of the post-independence canon. As a selection based on a particular notion of signiccancethe recognition of a play as a valuable text and performance vehicleit o,ers criteria which can be extended to other works for a heuristic description of the larger domain of post-independence urban theatre. In what ways does the signiccant selection of 1989 relate to the activist theatre of the 1940s and the directives of the 1956 drama seminar? The inclusion of Nabanna in the Nehru Festival program is an acknowledgement not only of the plays status as an anti-imperialist classic written out of the experience of famine and war but also of the movement for which it became the bagsta, production. More ironically, the IPTA appears subliminally at both ends of the program, in the work
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of playwright-directors who were associated with the organization at formative stages in their respective careers. Shombhu Mitra, Utpal Dutt, and Habib Tanvir were the three earliest practitioners to form longlasting theatre groups after their departure from the IPTA, and their unquestionable signiccance to the post-independence tradition vindicates both that connection and its dissolution in the interests of artistic autonomy. The possible correspondences between the 1989 festival program and the discussions during the 1956 seminar point to the ambivalent relation between prescriptions about the future shape of Indian drama and the unpredictability of actual theatrical practice. The conspicuous multilingualism of the Nehru Festival program embodies, as Mulk Raj Anand had foreseen, an Indian theatre speaking in the languages of India. The cfteen performances in 1989 cover the classical language, Sanskrit, and seven major modern Indian languages: Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Hindi, Gujarati, Manipuri, and Urdu. There are four performances in Indias majority language, Hindi, three each in Bengali and Marathi, two in Kannada, and one each in the four other languages. But this apparent linguistic balance is the result of some maneuvering. Two of the plays performed in HindiMohit Chattopadhyays Guinea Pig (cg. 2) and Adya Rangacharyas Suno Janmejaya (Listen, Janmejaya)were written originally in Bengali and Kannada, respectively. If every play had been staged in the language of its original composition, Bengali would lead the tally with four performances, Marathi and Kannada would have three each, while Hindi would be reduced to two. The program would then rebect more accurately the theatrical dominance in actual practice of Bengali, Marathi, and Kannada over other major languages, especially Hindia historically determined relation that deviates markedly from the demographic status of Hindi as the national language and the others as regional languages. One sign of the negative e,ects of this contest between languages: the foremost Bengali playwright, Badal Sircar, did not agree to have his play Ebong Indrajit (And Indrajit, most commonly known as Evam Indrajit) performed in Hindi and therefore did not participate in the event. The program also suggests the centrality of language to the politics of inclusion and exclusion in Indian theatre: Sanskrit enters the map of contemporary theatre because of K. N. Panikkars landmark revivals of Bhasas plays, but English, which is a language of both original composition and translation in contemporary Indian theatre, has no representation on the festival program in either role.
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In terms of form and content, the cfteen plays are suggestively heterogeneous. Bhasas Urubhangam (The Shattered Thigh, Sanskrit), Bharatis Andha yug (Blind Epoch, Hindi), and Thiyams Chakravyuha (Battle Formation, Manipuri) are based on the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. Kambars Jokumaraswami (Kannada), Karnads Hayavadana (Horse Head, Kannada), Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal (Constable Ghashiram, Marathi), and Tanvirs Agra bazar (Urdu) draw on premodern folk or historical narratives, and employ indigenous, antirealistic styles of presentation incorporating music and dance. Bhattacharyas Nabanna (Bengali), Dutts Kallol (Ocean Song, Bengali), Chattopadhyays Guinea Pig (Bengali), and Deshpandes Uddhwasta dharmashala (The Ruined Sanctuary, Marathi) are political plays with contemporary settings, cast variously in the expressionist, realist, and allegorical modes. Rangacharyas Suno Janmejaya is an existentialist parable about the new nation that invokes a major character from the Mahabharata in its title. The three remaining
Fig. 2. The blood royal. Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Shailendra Goel in Guinea Pig, the Hindi production of Mohit Chattopadhyays Rajrakto, directed by Rajinder Nath for Abhiyan (New Delhi), Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival, New Delhi, 1989. Courtesy of Rajinder Nath.
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playsRakeshs Adhe adhure (The Uncnished, Hindi), Ryes Kumarni agashi (Kumars Terrace, Gujarati), and Elkunchwars W ada chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion, Marathi)are social realist texts focusing on the collapse of home and family within the urban middle class or the rural landowning classes. Such a formal and thematic range suggests that among contemporary Indian playwrights the engagement with myth, history, folklore, tradition, and indigenous performance genres is equal to, but not signiccantly greater than, the absorption in contemporary sociopolitical experience. To take the argument a step further, the heterogeneity of contemporary practice stands in ironic relation to the vehement 1956 critique of naturalism, the proscenium stage, and radical political theatre. While some major post-independence practitioners have created an inventive and syncretic theatre from the resources of Indian traditional, folk, and intermediary forms, others have continued to follow Western models of historical, social realist, allegorical, absurdist, and political theatre as being best suited to their objectives. In this respect, the variety evident in the Nehru Festival performances reproduces quite accurately the divergences within the larger domains of post-independence theatre theory and practice. The listing of playwrights, directors, and theatre groups in appendix 1 allows for several other inferences. The most conspicuous feature of this list is the imbalance of genderwith the solitary exception of the Marathi director-actress Vijaya Mehta, all the practitioners are male. This apparent absence of a single major woman playwright in contemporary India, despite the presence of several successful women directors and a rapidly expanding sphere of feminist performance, suggests an unusual relation between gender, authorship, textuality, and performance. The selection criteria for a retrospective of signiccant contemporary plays do not appear to allow the inclusion of a woman playwright; furthermore, this is a continuation rather than reversal of pre-independence trends. Another visible pattern is the fusion of theatrical roles: many Indian practitioners combine the activities of playwriting, translation, and directing in much the same way as leading cgures in other postcolonial locations have donefor example, Wole Soyinka and Femi Osocsan in Nigeria, Derek Walcott and Errol Hill in the Caribbean, Efua Sutherland in Ghana, and Mustapha Matura in England. In post-independence India, the careers of Utpal Dutt, K. N. Panikkar, Ratan Thiyam, and Habib Tanvir embody the crucial, often lifelong association between a playwright/actor/director and a theatre group that is integral to his/her diverse practice. The other directors on the Nehru Festival program are not playwrights (though
50
some, like Kumar Roy, Shyamanand Jalan, Shreeram Lagoo, and Vijaya Mehta, are celebrated actors), but they stand in the same singularly inbuential relation to their respective theatre groups as the author-directors mentioned earlier. Furthermore, with the possible exception of Dutts Peoples Little Theatre and Tanvirs Naya Theatre, none of these groups can be described as professional or commercial. In a remarkable congruence with the dominant arguments of 1956 in this regard, the Nehru Festival bears out the centrality of serious noncommercial theatre groups to the future Indian drama. The locations of the participating theatre groups, however, point to the failure of a related goal. Nine of the cfteen groups featured in 1989 belong to the metropolitan areas of Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi; four represent smaller cities such as Pune, Mysore, Gwalior, and Trivandrum; and only two are connected with more remote locationsHeggodu in the southern state of Karnataka (in the case of Chandrashekhar Kambar) and Imphal in the northeastern state of Manipur (in the case of Ratan Thiyam). In fact, only the Heggodu group, Ninasam, can be described as having a rural base (although it also has extensive metropolitan patronage), and only Tanvirs Naya Theatre actually employs nonurban performers from the tribal Chhattisgarh area (formerly a part of Madhya Pradesh, but now an independent state). Notwithstanding the experiments with traditional and folk forms to bridge the gap between urban and rural audiences, the 1989 festival demonstrates that, contrary to the expectations of the 1956 seminar, contemporary Indian theatre has emerged as a predominantly metropolitan and urban enterprise. The Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival therefore o,ers a crosssectional view of a multilingual, formally diverse, geographically dispersed, and largely noncommercial celd in which major new plays rapidly acquire the status of contemporary classics through major interpretationsin-performance, and the roles of playwright and director are often fused in a single person. Because no existing work of criticism, Indian or Western, has so far made the multilingual production of contemporary Indian playwrights and directors visible as a critical object, the selection of 1989 can be expanded into a heuristic but comprehensive description of the celd. By employing the dual criteria of the textual signiccance and the theatrical visibility of plays, I categorize the authors, texts, and institutions constitutive of post-independence drama and theatre in appendixes 2 and 3. Appendix 2, dealing with major playwrights of the 19502004 period, excludes two of the Nehru Festival authors (Adya Rangacharya and Madhu Rye) and adds three others (Badal Sircar, Satish Alekar, and
51
Mahesh Dattani), for a total of cfteen authors and a selection of about seventy plays. Appendix 3, dealing with directors and theatre groups over the same time span, excludes Kumar Roy, B. M. Shah, Pravin Joshi, and Chandrashekhar Kambar (as director), and includes Shombhu Mitra, Ebrahim Alkazi, Badal Sircar, Arvind Deshpande, Alyque Padamsee, Usha Ganguli, Mahesh Dattani, and Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry. The juxtaposition in this chapter of the populist movement of the 1940s, the prospective and prescriptive drama seminar of 1956, and the retrospective and canonizing Nehru Festival of 1989the last two events organized by Indias National Academy of the Performing Artsreveals a gap between idea and actuality that was inevitable in a theatrical culture so decisively disrupted by the movement from colonialism to postcolonialism, not to mention the arrival of a new mass-cultural medium, the talking cinema. The activists of 1943 and the discussants of 1956 could not have anticipated theatres multiple and intersecting lines of development over the next few decades, and even the self-rebexive practitioners showcased in 1989 were unable to identify and theorize them adequately. The data about playwrights and directors in appendixes 2 and 3 provide a more detailed real map of urban Indian drama and theatre since 1950, raising the key questions that the rest of this book must address. With reference to playwrights, the chronology of works in appendix 2 o,ers a synoptic view that reveals great variations in the output of individual authors. The starkest contrast is between Dharamvir Bharati, who produced only one full-length play in his career, or Mohan Rakesh, who produced three plays, and a playwright like Vijay Tendulkar, who has produced thirty-one. What are the modes of authorship and reception through which each of these playwrights has achieved the status of a contemporary classic? How do playwrights exert their inbuence as theorists, authors, and theatre professionals, especially when they combine the roles of author and director, as is the case with the majority of playwrights listed in appendix 2? Another important area of inquiry involves the relationship between drama, theatre, and the culture of print. Not all the works listed in this appendix either wereor were meant to be published. The di,erential relations to the media of print and performance are a major aspect of the existence of plays and performance texts, and the connection is especially important in the case of a playwright like Badal Sircar, who moves deliberately from literary drama to performance-oriented theatre in the course of his career. With regard to both playwrights and directors, perhaps the most important relations are those between location, language, and theatre
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practice. Some directorsfor instance, Shombhu Mitra, Arvind Deshpande, and K. V. Subbannamaintain strong connections with a single city or region, theatre group, and language; others, such as Ebrahim Alkazi, Habib Tanvir, and B. V. Karanth, are geographically mobile, maintain multiple associations, and work in several languages. The institutional aliations (and consequent patronage) of Alkazi, Karanth, and Vijaya Mehta also distinguish them from largely self-supporting professionals, like Satyadev Dubey and Jabbar Patela di,erence that is crucial in a situation where the absence of commercialized production makes the survival and transregional mobility of theatre disproportionately dependent on various forms of state, private, and corporate sponsorship. A directors connection to place and institution becomes even more complicated when the language of his/her theatre is not the majority language of a city or region. Thus the Hindi theatre of Dubey and the English theatre of Alyque Padamsee is practiced in Bombay alongside theatres in the two majority languages, Marathi and Gujarati, while Usha Ganguli produces Hindi theatre in the Bengali-majority area of Calcutta. Among nondirecting playwrights, similar di,erences of positioning appear between, say, Girish Karnad, who has been based mainly in Bangalore and writes in Kannada, and G. P. Deshpande, who has strong ties with Delhi in the north as well as Satara and Pune in Maharashtra but writes his plays and criticism in Marathi. All these practitioners are, in addition, cgures of national prominence. The mechanisms by which playwrights and directors from one region and language become available to Indian audiences elsewhere are central to the workings of a multilingual tradition and o,er concrete rather than abstract evidence of the existence of a national theatre. The issues extrapolated so far from the data in appendixes 2 and 3 are specicc to theatre, involving the composition, circulation, and production of plays. Other constituent features of the post-independence celd involve the broader material and sociocultural contexts in which plays are received. The development of serious urban theatre largely outside the commercial fold foregrounds the problem of a limited and relatively untrained audience fragmented by region and language. While the audience for theatre in India is small everywhere, metropolitan areas like Bombay and Calcutta possess a di,erent culture of spectatorship from even a capital city like Delhi with its interventionist cultural bureaucracy, and these areas in turn di,er from comparatively smaller cities, such as Bangalore, Madras, Pune, and Bhopal, and isolated locations, such as Imphal and Heggodu. Furthermore, in all these venues urban theatre
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competes with popular and mass-cultural media (clm, radio, television, video, and music) for which the aggregate audience in India is among the largest in the world, and whose economies of consumption are therefore materially di,erent from those of theatre. The decnition of postindependence Indian theatre as a historically demarcated celd depends, then, on the critical elaboration of these constitutive modes of writing, staging, circulation, and reception, undertaken in the next two chapters.
chapter 3
#
Authorship, Textuality, and Multilingualism
The theatre that has come into existence since independence in India is a postcolonial cultural formation shaped by historically new conditions of writing, performance, and reception. The decisive di,erence between this celd and earlier types of urban production is not the exclusion of alien inbuences but the self-conscious redecnition of theatre as a formally complex and socially signiccant art. The belated but pervasive accommodation of the aesthetic and political paradigms of modernity and modernism has brought about some of the decnitive post-independence transformations: of the playwright into a literary author as well as a theorist of drama, of drama into a serious literary form in print as well as performance, and of the theatre director into the principal arbitrator and poetician of a syncretic performance culture. The new standards of artistry apply to drama and performance across the spectrum of genres, modes, languages, locations, and sociopolitical intentions that constitute the heterogeneous celd of contemporary Indian theatre. The criterion of seriousness also undergirds the other systemic features of the celd: the development of theatre groups as well as institutions of training and patronage; the mechanisms of translation and intertextual appropriation; the formation of audiences; and the careful self-positioning of theatre professionals in relation to popular and mass-cultural media. Although contemporary Indian practitioners thus hold wide-ranging and often antithetical positions on literary, theatrical, institutional, ideological, and contextual issues, they have become participants in a common enterprise through an unprecedented commitment to the artistic and a,ective power of drama and theatre.
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55
Authorship, Theatre Theory, and the Textuality of Drama

There is a great dearth of good dramatists in our country. shombhu mitra Very few dramatists have combined in their works both the qualities of literary excellence and popular appeal. prabhakar machwe
The fundamental di,erence between pre- and post-independence Indian theatre lies not in the disappearance of Western-oriented drama after 1950 but in the multidimensional assimilation of drama to literature and of literary drama to performance. As an institution of modern print culture, literary authorship emerged in the modern Indian languages during the nineteenth century, but throughout the colonial period authors who practiced the print genres concerned with private experience and serious public discoursepoetry, short and long cction, noncctional prose, social commentary, cultural philosophy, and nationalist political theorywere clearly distinguished from those who practiced the performative, public, and commercial medium of theatre. Drama and theatre remained peripheral to the emergence in the early nineteenth century of what Vinay Dharwadker calls the crst fully formed print culture to appear outside Europe and North America . . . a multilateral, crosscultural, and interdisciplinary enterprise, in which Europeans and Indians worked independently and together in response to the new set of intellectual, social, and economic requirements that the medium of print had imposed on writing and cultural production (Print Culture, 112). Between about 1870 and 1930, original Indian-language plays by such major and prolicc playwrights as Girish Chandra Ghosh, Dinbandhu Mitra, Kshirode Prasad Vidyabinode, D. L. Roy, K. P. Khadilkar, G. B. Deval, Ram Ganesh Gadkari, Agha Hasan Amanat, Sisir Kumar Bhaduri, Narayan Prasad Betab, and Agha Hashra Kashmiri had their primary existence on the stage, not in print. Correspondingly, the playwrights primary persona was not that of author but impresario: Girish Chandra Ghosh and Sisir Kumar Bhaduri were actor-managers in the British tradition of David Garrick and Henry Irving, while Amanat, Betab, and Kashmiri were playwright-directors attached to specicc Parsi theatre companies. Colonial theatre was also intrinsically inhospitable to languagecentered literary drama because of its heavy reliance on the nonverbal
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semiotics of dance, music, and spectacle. Narain Kales complaint during the 1956 drama seminar underscores both the popularity of that theatre experience and the distaste it aroused in proponents of serious drama after independence. Kale observes that in the colonial professional theatre plays were selected not for their literary merit, social signiccance or aesthetic values but for the opportunities they a,orded for scenic display. . . . The policy behind their choice was not of providing to the audience what they ought to get but what they would easily relish and readily pay for (Proceedings, 402). Hence, performance maintained its primacy in colonial theatre, even though the text of this theatre engaged seriously with the Indian and Western canons, mainly through translations and adaptations of Kalidasa and William Shakespeare; with Indian myth, history, and folklore; and with the imperatives of social change in a traditional, patriarchal, caste-bound Hindu society. In the popular commercial theatre, the text of the play as text became important only in the event of censorship, as in the instances of Dinbandhu Mitras Nil-darpan (1861), the antigovernment plays that precipitated the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876, or D. L. Roys Siraj-ud-daula (1905) and Khadilkars Kichaka vadha (1910).1 At the other extreme from this pervasive culture of commercial performance, such poet-playwrights as Bharatendu Harishchandra, Rabindranath Tagore, and Jaishankar Prasad theorized the need for a culturally vital modern Indian theatre and became the principal practitioners of literary drama in the colonial period. They could not, however, sustain a successful culture of texts in public performance because of their overall estrangement from the commercial stage. In the scanty criticism that Harishchandra and Prasad o,er on the subject of drama, theatre, and performance, their predilection for classical Indian traditions of poetics and literary drama (especially the Natyashastra and the works of Kalidasa) is as evident as their antitheatrical disapproval of contemporary trends. In a short treatise titled Natak (Drama, 1883), Harishchandra follows the classical Indian categorization of drama as drishya kavya (visual poetry) and decnes the genre as that which makes manifest the voice of the poet in harmony with the meanings and emotions he feels deeply in his heart (749). Viewed in this perspective, the drama of the Parsis and the spectacles of the Maharashtrians may seem poetic, but being devoid of true poetry they are in fact regarded as corrupt [essentially undramatic] forms (750). Nearly cfty years later, in an essay titled Rangamanch (The Stage, 1936), Jaishankar Prasad describes the Parsi stage as a horrifying
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site in which scenes and situations proliferate without reference to a central principle of unity. He also describes the idea that plays should be written for the stage as a serious misconception about the theatre: the real e,ort should in fact be to provide a stage for drama (414). In a post-independence assessment of the Hindi stage, the playwright Mohan Rakesh sums up the repercussions of Prasads vision: Such was the e,ect of the recned but simple language, thematic gravity, and literary perfection of Prasadjis plays that the very consciousness of the relationship between drama and the stage disappeared [from discourse about the theatre] (Sahitya, 8889). Similarly, Vasudha Dalmia Luderitz notes that in both theory and practice Harishchandra recognized the theatres role as a classically derived yet public and national institution that could accommodate contemporary polemic, but despite his e,orts dramatic representation . . . in the Hindi region . . . remained largely concned to the printed page (Luderitz, 188). The case of Rabindranath Tagore, Indias crst and only Nobel laureate in literature, is more complicated. Celebrated internationally as the poet-sage, he wrote more than sixty plays between 1881 and 1938, staged most of them at his family estate in Jorasanko (Calcutta) or the school he founded at Shantiniketan, and acted or recited various roles in them himself until well into the 1930s. In an admirable overview of Tagore as a dramatist and theatre personality, Ananda Lal singles out the premiere of Tagores crst play, V almiki-pratibha, in February 1881, the production of Phalguni in January 1916, and the production of the well-known Dakghar in October 1917 (all at Jorasanko) as notable events in modern Bengali theatre, despite their private nature. As Lal points out, Tagore generally avoided contact with the Bengali professional stage because it really had nothing to o,er him; its dependence on commercial success precluded any attempts at experimentation, and Tagore justicably had no wish to compromise his dramatic principles (Tagore, 38). During the 1920s, with Tagore as collaborator, two of his comedies did have successful commercial productions in Calcutta at the Star Theatre and Sisir Kumar Bhaduris Cornwallis Theatre, respectively. But several other productions failed in the same venues because their subjects were too serious for the audience, and on the whole Tagores plays admittedly . . . never quite established themselves in the repertoire of Bengali professional theatre (9). Tagores unparalleled literary reputation, prolicc playwriting, and deep personal investment (material as well as artistic) in the staging of his work thus created an extraordinary situation: plays that some critics would consider
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the founding works of modern Indian theatre were showcased for nearly six decades in various venues but remained largely outside the sphere of public performance. Even this paradox, however, does not fully explain why, in his essay on The Theatre (1903), Tagore categorically dismisses not only the scenic and spectacular stage as a ct thing for the market place, not for the place of honour at a royal pageant but also the idea that performance is an intrinsic aspect of drama.
[I]t is true that poetry performed is somewhat less self-sustaining than poetry merely heard. It is written in such sort that it may fulcl its purpose only with outside assistance. That it awaits performance is a fact it must accept. However, we do not admit this to be true. Just as a loyal wife desires none but her husband, so does good poetry wait for no one but the sensitive reader. . . . An uxorious husband is an object of derision; so is a play which compromises itself in the interest of performance. A play-text should say to itself, If someone acts me, well and good; if not, its actings lossit makes no di,erence to me. (Tagore, 95)
Tagores validation of the play-as-artistic text is identical to the positions of Harishchandra and Prasad; what is odd in the light of his own experience is the identiccation of drama as poetry and the dismissal of viewers in favor of readers. Notwithstanding Tagores active dramatic career, colonial Indian theatre (like nineteenth-century British commercial theatre) thus appears to have been an environment in which plays and playwrights could meaningfully inhabit the domain either of print or of performance, but not both: the multimedia spectacles on stage lacked literary value, and most plays of literary value remained unperformed or unperformable. Fittingly, all three of these colonial-era playwrights have been produced with distinction in the post-independence period by directors whose art is self-consciously noncommercial and who have sought to communicate both the literary artistry and the stageability of the plays.2 Post-independence playwrights are therefore historically the crst group of modern dramatic authors in India who belong simultaneously to the economies of print and performance, and whose work is serious as well as successful in both modes. The speciccally literary aspects of this integration consist of new models of authorship and textuality that allow the conception of drama as a private textual act, dissociable in principlethough not in practicefrom production, performance,
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and the institutional constraints of theatre. Literariness also confers legitimacy and currency on plays as printed texts and makes the play-astext available for analysis, commentary, and interpretation outside the boundaries of performance. The artistic imperative applies with equal force to urban theatre practitioners who pursue a range of performancerather than word-oriented forms: their work di,ers in degree, not in kind, from that of the literary playwrights. In each case the measure of signiccance is a sustained body of work, on the page and/or on the stage, that signices productivity, quality, and a manifest commitment to the art of theatre. The dramatic author in this inclusive sense is now also largely synonymous with the theorist and critic: the theoretical and polemical arguments o,ered by playwrights in a variety of rhetorical genres constitute the principal source texts for discussions of form, language, style, purpose, inbuence, and reception in contemporary Indian theatre, leading to full-bedged (though antithetical) conceptions of the role of representations in cultural and national life. These processes appear in some respects to be at odds with signiccant postwar developments in Euro-American theatre because Indian playwrights have moved to install and valorize the text even as the West has developed what Michael Vanden Heuvel calls an aversion to textuality and a consequent interest in the deconstructive resources of performance (45). The ostensible primacy of authorship and textuality, however, is qualiced by at least two factors, neither of which necessarily brings Indian practice closer to Western models. First, as the preceding paragraph suggests, many contemporary practitioners (along with policymakers and cultural critics) give priority to performance over text, not only because the former is associated with freedom rather than cxity, but also because texts are supposedly alien, extrinsic, and articcial in the Indian cultural context, while performance is indigenous, intrinsic, and natural. In present-day India the antitextualist critique of the illusion of rational control and power over meaning is therefore overshadowed by a reductive cultural politics of us versus them, and the extensive celd of urban performance remains largely outside the postmodern fold in terms of ideology, form, and content. Second, the reconception of drama as literature does not entail any dissociation of Indian playwrights from the material and public medium of theatre. Even the most wordy contemporary plays rapidly accumulate a dense semiotics of stage representation, and signiccant performance histories in turn reinforce the plays canonicity as texts. In fact, the interdependence of drama and theatre goes much further: the text-performance opposition itself becomes
60
unsustainable in a situation in which the activity of authorship has to be charted along a continuum connecting the textual and performative poles. Paradigms of Authorship The crst post-independence model of dramatic authorship is decned by such cgures as Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Girish Karnad, Mohit Chattopadhyay, G. P. Deshpande, and Mahesh Elkunchwar, who approach playwriting primarily as a verbal art and a mode of self-expression potentially connected to, but also independent of, theatrical praxis. These playwrights are closest to the model of serious literary authorship decned by such nineteenth- and early twentieth-century precursors as Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Tagore, Prasad, and Premchand, although the actual fashioning of their literary selves depends on a complex range of local, regional, national, and international inbuences relating to the available traditions of realist, modernist, and political writing. Without exception, the playwrights in this group stress the unpredictability, intimacy, and integrity of the process of writing and insist on separating it from the collective bustle of performance. In a characteristically romantic metaphor, Bharati compares the creative self to an eternally self-renewing river, the bow of which cannot be arrested or explained (CIT, 90). His monumental crst play, Andha yug (Blind Epoch, 1954) was written, according to his own recollection, in a ct of creative madness that left him struggling to discover the objective correlatives of a fearfully negative, inert mood in the characters of the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata: No, there is no legitimate god anywhere. No systematic law that could make out right from wrong. Only massive anarchy, a meaningless chaos. Were free to decide, to endure, su,ocate, and die. There is no hope, no light, no future (CIT, 93). Andha yug has been a dominant contemporary stage vehicle since Satyadev Dubeys landmark 1962 production for Bombays Theatre Unit, but for Bharati the decisive event in relation to the play was his intensely personal crisis at the time of composition, not the extraordinary theatrical and critical response that followed later. The rights of authorship perhaps cnd their most assertive spokesman in Mohan Rakesh, who decnes writing as a natural expression of his responses to life and considers the diculty of maintaining ones selfhood as a writer the central problem of a literary existence (Sahitya, 40, 9). In drama, according to Rakesh, the author is represented by a textpublished or unpublishedthat was created in the privacy of his study, expresses his individual temperament, and exists apart from the
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staging process. Performance must preserve the sanctity of this text and assign the living author an integral role: to erase the playwright and regard the director as the sole orchestrator of the theatrical event is to create an artistic void in theatre. Rakesh acknowledges, however, that the theatre of words cannot only be the theatre of the wordsmith and hence calls for the equal collaboration of author, director, and performers (Sahitya, 74). Less anxious about dramas dual modes of existence, Elkunchwar good-naturedly accepts the descriptions of him as a traditionalist, a tediously wordy playwright, and a litterateur in the theatre, . . . not a theatre worker (CIT, 165); he notes, however, that despite the rise of the theatre director as an independent entity, as someone interpreting the play in performance, our directors still seem to require strongly literary plays (CIT, 163). His own early career was an extended literary struggle with my medium, my language, cnding myself. I did all kinds of plays . . . and in each case I tried to cnd a language that would suit the mode. This is just an aspect of self-education of a sort, a search for something (CIT, 164). Whatever he writes also has to possess literary strength because I want my works to exist even if they are not staged. They should be available and they should be read as literature. And the contents should be accessible to all (Elkunchwar, Playwright, 78). Even a political playwright like G. P. Deshpande, creator of the play of ideas in Marathi (and in Indian theatre at large), insists that postcolonial Indian theatre has to be a language theatre, and the supremacy of the word in this art form could perhaps help to arrest the precipitous decline of Indian languages. It is profoundly disturbing to him that in our country the text is being denied, the word is being denied (National Theatre, 7). For the majority of playwrights in this group, the creation of a strong literary persona also depends on an active engagement with a variety of print genres. Rakesh began his literary career as a short-story writer and literary editor; his extraordinary success as a playwright parallels the transformative inbuence of his short cction on modern Indian prose narratives at large. Bharati was a poet, novelist, and essayist, and for three decades (196089) an enormously inbuential editor of the leading masscirculation Hindi literary weekly, Dharmayug. Chattopadhyay crst established himself as a poet in Calcutta in the late 1950s and began writing plays around 1963. G. P. Deshpande describes himself as an unsuccessful novelist who became a playwright (CIT, 103); he is also one of Indias leading academic scholars of modern China. Outside the theatre Karnad is a prize-winning actor, screenplay writer, and director for clm
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and television in Kannada, Hindi, and, English. But as literary authors both he and Elkunchwar limit themselves exclusively to drama, and, as the 1999 recipient of the Jnanapith Award, Indias highest literary prize, he has concrmed his position as a major contemporary Indian writer, regardless of genrea distinction he shares with Bharati and Rakesh. All these playwrights engage with the processes of performance and production exclusively in connection with their own work and yet have participated in some of the most productive author-director relationships of the last four decades: Rakesh with Shyamanand Jalan, Om Shivpuri, and Rajinder Nath; Karnad with B. V. Karanth; Elkunchwar with Vijaya Mehta; and G. P. Deshpande with Shreeram Lagoo. The second model of authorship encompasses such cgures as Vijay Tendulkar, Satish Alekar, and Chandrashekhar Kambar, who maintain equally strong literary identities but collaborate actively with specicc theatre groups as resident playwrights, directors, and actors. Tendulkars early plays, for instance, were written and performed in close collaboration with Vijaya Mehta and the Rangayan group of Bombay, while in 1971 he became a founder-member of the Awishkar group, along with the well-known Marathi acting duo, Arvind and Sulabha Deshpande. Several of Tendulkars plays received their crst major productions at Awishkar, and in 1992 the group mounted the largest revival of the playwrights worktwenty plays with an equal number of directorsas part of its cfth annual Arvind Deshpande Memorial Theatre Festival. In addition, Tendulkar has been the leading screenplay writer in Indias Middle Cinema movement since the early 1970s, as well as the author of television scripts for cctional serials and political talk shows. Alekar is a biochemist by training who has acted in and directed his own plays for Punes Theatre Academy since the early 1970s. He retired early from his scienticc profession to become director of the Performing Arts Centre (Lalit Kala Kendra) at Pune University, where he now teaches playwriting and criticism and supervises several annual productions. Kambar is a poet, novelist, and stage and screen actor who has directed plays (his own and others) for various theatre groups in Bangalore and for Ninasam in Heggodu. He has also held executive positions at various cultural institutions, including the National School of Drama in New Delhi. Because of their active engagement with the media of theatre, clm, and television, these playwrights possess di,erent artistic procles from the authors of the crst group, but the literary self continues to be dominant. I am crst a writer and then a playwright, Vijay Tendulkar insists in a 1997 lecture provocatively titled The Play Is the Thing; I love to
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indulge in the physical process of writing. I enjoy this process even when there is nothing to be said (Play, 2, 1). At the same time he feels emphatically that a play is an integral part of a performing art and not literature. Unless you learn the techniques of enactmentand there are several and internalize them fully, you will not be able to write a good playable play with a content of its own (Play, 18). Tendulkar regards the ideal playwright as a rebellious genius capable of arousing an interest in things hitherto thought of as not worthy of artistic attention (Natak, 13), and, while he himself believes in writing for an audience, the audience in turn has to respect my independence, and be willing to use its imagination to accept subtlety and allusiveness . . . when watching a play (Natak, 23). Adopting a less stridently modernist stance, Kambar invokes a culture of orality in which all literature is a species of poetry and asserts that there is no essential di,erence between poetry and drama, except that poetry is meant to be heard and drama is meant to be seen. By his own account the experience underlying most of his plays is the memory of a lost paradisethe village of Shivapurawhich formed the subject of his crst long narrative poem, Helatena kela (CIT, 22). Common to both these models of authorship (and also applicable to some authors in the third paradigm) is the conception of the play as an autonomous text that does not preclude but also does not require success in performance. In practice, such plays as Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din and Karnads Tughlaq have sterling performance records; in principle, they are seminal works that will continue to maintain a powerful presence in dramatic contexts regardless of their fortunes in the theatre. There are three stages in the constitution of drama as print literature: prompt publication in the original language of composition, which makes a play available to its most likely readers as well as an audience larger than that of theatregoers; critical recognition, which brings it much wider attention than performance-related commentary; and institutionalization within the academy, which absorbs it into the pedagogy of literature. (The publication of plays in translation, discussed in the next section, repeats the same processes in other languages.) The strength of the literary and print cultures that already existed in the major theatrical languages at the time of independence made serious literary authorship a desirable as well as reachable goal for the crst generation of post-independence playwrights, and their example was decnitive for later authors. The patronage of specicc publishing houses and literary periodicals has thus signiccantly shaped the careers of such playwrights as Bharati, Rakesh, Tendulkar, Elkunchwar, Karnad, Kambar, and Sircar in such languages as
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Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, and Bengali. While receiving the most extensive critical attention in their respective languages, all these playwrights have also entered the national critical and journalistic media and classrooms around the country. The cnal model of authorship involves playwrights who take on the full gamut of theatrical roles. Utpal Dutt, Badal Sircar, Habib Tanvir, K. N. Panikkar, Ratan Thiyam, and Mahesh Dattani are authors, actors, directors, and founder-managers of their own experimental theatre groups. This polydexterity allows a degree of autonomy, self-suciency, and performative control that leads to the identiccation of each of these practitioners with a specicc style of theatre. For instance, from the late 1940s until his death in 1993, Utpal Dutt was the leading Indian practitioner of left-wing political theatre. His Little Theatre Group and Peoples Little Theatre covered a wide range of political forms, from elaborately scenic proscenium productions to street theatre, poster plays, and agitprop. The dominant political thematic of Dutts work was a transhistorical interest in the theory and practice of rebellion and revolution, but as manager of the Minerva Theatre in Calcutta (195970) he developed a singular repertoire of spectacular multimedia productions that urged the spectator to fall in love with the experience of theatre itself. Mahesh Dattani, the most successful contemporary playwright in English, combines essentially text-centered literary playwriting with extensive work in the theatre as actor, dramaturg, and director. His own distinctive brand of realistic, cynical, and quasi-melodramatic urban tragicomedy provided him with several leading roles on the stage, and provided his Bangalore-based group, Playpen, with well-received original productions throughout the 1990s, while his recent published work has signaled a stronger interest in gay theatre and avant-garde performance. The more radical e,ects of the multilinear intersection between authorship and performance, however, are visible in the emergence of a range of nonrealistic, nonproscenium theatres employing indigenous modes of representation. Tanvir, Panikkar, and Thiyam are Indias most successful director-authors who have developed the performance traditions of specicc regions and assimilated folk, tribal, classical, traditional, ritualistic, and martial forms into varieties of total theatre. Since the 1960s, Habib Tanvirs Naya Theatre, one of only three serious professional theatre companies in Delhi, has developed more than a dozen major productions around folk narratives and tribal performers from the Chhattisgarh area in central India, which achieved statehood in 1999. Instead of the contrived authenticity of urban performers experimenting
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with nonurban performance genres, Tanvirs theatre has maintained a singular identity between narrative, performer, and performance style, providing an inbuential example of how the urban and the rural may interpenetrate. (Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry is the only other wellknown director whose theatre group combines urban actors with naqqals, the traditional female impersonators of Punjab.) Panikkar is best known for his revivals of the Mahabharata plays of Bhasa, the Sanskrit playwright whom scholars place between the second and fourth centuries. Panikkars Trivandrum-based group Sopanam has drawn on classical Sanskrit aesthetics, the classical form of kudiyattam, which has survived in Kerala for two millennia, regional music and martial arts traditions, and the narratives of folklore and legend to develop a distinctive repertory of old and new plays. Ratan Thiyams work testices to the unique survival of Brahmanical Hinduism and Hindu epic traditions in the remote northeastern state of Manipur, and his theatrical style draws heavily on thang-ta, the tribal martial arts form of Manipur. All three directors have developed antirealistic, stylized, indigenous musical forms that enhance the theatricality of their productions and confer a more open, provisional status on the play-as-text. Like the texts of literary drama, their plays also appear in the print medium, in the original languages of composition as well as in translation, but the plays real impact as total theatre becomes manifest only in fully orchestrated stage representations. Sircars career, in contrast, exemplices a gradual transition from the textual to the performative. His early existentialist plays, especially Evam Indrajit (And Indrajit, 1962), Baki itihas (The Rest of History, 1965), Tringsha shatabdi (Thirtieth Century, 1966), and Shesh nei (Theres No End, 1969), created the crst anxious protagonists in modern Indian theatre overcome by the burden of history and the emasculating e,ects of middle-class urban life (cg. 3). During the 1960s, Sircar became interested in developing a minimalist theatre that could provide an alternative to urban realist drama as well as rural folk forms and attract audiences in both locations. His conception of this Third Theatre in India was strongly mediated by Jerzy Grotowskis poor theatre and Richard Schechners environmental theatre, both of which he encountered while traveling in Europe and North America on a Nehru Fellowship. Since the early 1970s, these avant-garde inbuences have led Sircar to develop largely nonverbal, body-centered vehicles for nonproscenium indoor performance, outdoor urban environments, such as large parks and open grounds, and extensive tours in rural areas. His theatre is intimate, emotionally intense, detached from political dogma, opposed to the commodiccation
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of art, and committed to communicationbetween the performers and the spectators as well as within the members of each group. Sircar acknowledges even at a late stage in his career that the playwright has to deal with two art media simultaneouslyliterature and theatre, and that the publication of his performance texts has certainly reinforced his status as author. But like the plays of Tanvir, Panikkar, and Thiyam, these published texts bear the clear impress of the process of enactment and exert their real force only in performance (Changing Language, 15). The Playwright as Theorist The leading models of authorship and textuality identiced so far also correspond to the principal concgurations in post-independence theories of drama and theatre because in India there is little signiccant theoretical or speculative criticism of theatre by nonpractitioners. With the playwrights self-rebexive discourses at the center, for the crst time in the modern period Indian theatrical practice has evolved (after 1947) in conjunction with fully developed, competing theories regarding the
Fig. 3. The thirtieth century. Ashutosh Jha, Rekha Johri, and Sanjeev Johri in Teeswin sadi, a Hindi production of Badal Sircars Tringsha shatabdi, directed by Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan, New Delhi, 1998. Courtesy of Rajinder Nath.
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forms and functions of drama. There were two formative theoretical inbuences on Indian theatre during the colonial period: the Western canon, best represented by Shakespeare, and the national theatre of the Hindus, discovered by such orientalist philologists as William Jones, H. H. Wilson, and Sylvain Lvi, and theorized in the image of the modern European national theatres. The canonical core of this national theatre consisted of the classical Sanskrit plays of Kalidasa, Shudraka, Bhasa, and Bhavabhuti, and the ancient treatise on dramaturgy, Bharatas Natyashastra. Vasudha Dalmia Luderitz notes that for the nineteenthcentury Indian writer who had to constantly contend with a dominant, still very foreign culture . . . it was of vital importance to establish clearly identicable national characteristics [in literature], with a distinct historical tradition of their own (181). Because of the orientalist preoccupation with Sanskrit, classical Indian theory and practice became the privileged referents of indigenous discourse about theatre in the colonial period, and the crmly postulated relation between the national theatre of the Hindus and Shakespeare . . . [became] one of the major impulses in the creation of urban literary theatre in the nineteenth century (Luderitz, 183). This dual theoretical perspective led to translations and indigenized versions of Shakespeare, as well as translations of the Sanskrit classics into the modern Indian languages. The two principal forms of original drama in this period (ca. 18501940) consisted of plays based on narratives of the past (myth and history) and plays addressing contemporary social problems; the crst category increased in importance as Indian playwrights moved from cultural to political nationalism, and then to overt anticolonialism. But despite the nationalist o,ensive, colonial Indian theatre remained preeminently a celd of practice, not theory. Aside from some essays by Bharatendu Harishchandra, Tagore, and Prasad, critical discourse about theatre in this period remained secondary to performance or consisted of publicity materials and records of censorship. Since independence, the triple emphases of the colonial theoretical legacyWesternized modernity, cultural nationalism, and anticolonialismhave taken distinctly postcolonial forms and developed into fullbedged positions regarding theatres role in the culture of the new nation. Two sets of distinctions are pertinent to the playwrights function as theorist-critic, one relating to the nature of the critical act and the other to the object of criticism. Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Utpal Dutt, Badal Sircar, Vijay Tendulkar, and G. P. Deshpande are systematic critics who rebect to varying degrees on the state of writing, culture, and
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politics in national and international contexts, and who relate their own practice to general theories of literature and theatre as cultural forms. Bharatis Manava mulya aur sahitya (Human Values and Literature, 1960) and Rakeshs Sahitya aur sanskriti (Literature and Culture, 1975) are in essence ambitious commentaries on the late twentieth-century (Indian) writers role in the nation and the world. Sircars The Third Theatre (1978), Dutts Towards a Revolutionary Theatre (1982), Tendulkars Natak ani mi (The Theatre and I, 1997), and Deshpandes Nataki nibandha (Theatrical Essays, 1999) are exercises speciccally in theatre theory and criticism but are still concerned with general aesthetic and political principles as much as with the playwrights personal goals. In contrast, the criticism of Girish Karnad, Habib Tanvir, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Chandrashekhar Kambar, Satish Alekar, Mohit Chattopadhyay, K. N. Panikkar, Ratan Thiyam, and Mahesh Dattani is occasional in nature and concerned primarily with the playwrights own practice, although this circumstance does not impose inherent limitations in terms of quality, quantity, and range. The principal genres of such workshop criticism are occasional essays, journalistic comments, autobiographical rebections, interviews, addresses to the reader (introductions, prefaces, forewords, afterwords), and performance-specicc materials intended for an audience. These forms serve variously to explain important elements of practice, especially in the work of Tanvir, Panikkar, and Thiyam; to contextualize a given play or group of plays; to develop polemical arguments for or against specicc varieties of theatre; and to o,er rebexive commentary on specicc aspects of the playwrights career. Yet another important critical persona comes into play when the playwright assumes the role of editor. In the year 2000, Deshpande and Kambar published anthologies titled Modern Indian Drama and Modern Indian Plays, respectively, providing two very di,erent perspectives on their chosen celd. More recently, Mahesh Dattani has edited a collection titled City Plays (2004), which brings together works by Elkunchwar, Shanta Gokhale, and Manjula Padmanabhan in what city-oriented playwrights consider a theoretically signiccant genre. To sum up, most of the inbuential theoretical positions in post-independence drama (and many relevant critical perspectives) have emerged in these forms of systematic and occasional criticism, reinforcing at another level the importance of textual modes and the print medium to theatre. The discussion that follows outlines the principal theoretical arguments and areas of dissent among contemporary practitioners; the theories pertinent to specicc dramatic genres are analyzed in part 2 of this study.
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Since the 1960s, the strongest ideological disagreements over dramatic form have appeared between proponents and opponents of indigenousness and tradition, resulting in opposing conceptions of a national theatre. In the only important exception to the rule of the playwrightas-theorist, much of the support for the neotraditionalist position has come not from practitioners but scholars and members of the cultural bureaucracy, such as Nemichandra Jain, Kapila Vatsyayan, and Suresh Awasthi. These commentators reject the proscenium stageand what it implies in terms of location, architecture, audience relations, economics, and representational modesas alien impositions that lead not only to sterility but to an endless neocolonial dependence on the West. In their perspective, the vitality of contemporary theatre depends on a revival of the classical aesthetics codiced in the Sanskrit Natyashastra and on the religious, folk, and secular forms rooted in rural culture. Such playwrights as Tanvir, Panikkar, and Thiyam, who have experimented most rigorously with indigenous forms, cultivate a more nuanced view of Western inbuences and the international dimensions of contemporary theatrical practice. Perhaps the most interesting position in this polemic belongs to urban playwrights, such as Karnad and Kambar, who employ indigenous forms but disclaim any interest in cultural purity and authenticity. Since independence, the nation-state and its institutions (the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and others) have also intervened in this debate by patronizing traditional culture and promoting culturally authentic performances, both in India and abroad. The counterarguments to these positions of traditionalism, cultural nationalism, and populism have come from such playwrights as Tendulkar, Elkunchwar, and Dattani, who choose realist representations of contemporary urban social experience as the appropriate subject of drama and theatre. As theorists, they invoke the dominant legacy of realism and naturalism in modern Western theatre and the strong traditions of social realism in India from the nineteenth century to the present. For these playwrights, the origins of specicc dramatic forms and performance conventions are less important than their assimilation to particular historical experience. They distinguish between form, which may be borrowed, and content, which must satisfy the needs of its immediate audience. Furthermore, the realist playwrights assert that contemporary urban experience, with its emphasis on city, home, and family, is no less rooted, authentic, and Indian than the premodern material of indigenous performance. Conversely, they question the authenticity of traditional
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forms in a developing society, point to the collapse of rural life, regard essentialist decnitions of culture as signs of complicity with resurgent cultural and religious nationalisms, and in general insist on the historical and material positioning of the postcolonial subject. Despite the apparently contradictory nature of these appeals to indigenous tradition and Westernized modernity, neotraditionalism and realism lead alike to inventionboth theoretical positions in e,ect produce syncretic forms of theatre that had not existed before independence. There are at least two other signiccant theoretical positions in postindependence theatre that fall largely outside the zone of ideological conbicts over nation, tradition, and culture. The crst and most important category is that of left-oriented political theatre, which draws variously on George Bernard Shaw, Maxim Gorky, the Anti-Fascist Writers and Artists Union, the Progressive Writers Association, the Moscow Art Theatre, Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, Augusto Boal, and Dario Fo. As theorized by the two leading political playwrights, Utpal Dutt and G. P. Deshpande, this theatre rebects on the full range of modern political forms, including realistic representations of contemporary political experience, historical and mythic allegory, documentary theatre, fulllength street theatre, poster plays, and agitprop. The second category the existentialist-absurdist theatre practiced by the early Sircar, Mohit Chattopadhyay, C. T. Khanolkar, and Satish Alekaris inbuenced by Antonin Artaud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard. The avant-garde (rather than traditionalist) variation that Badal Sircar has named the Third Theatre also draws on Grotowski and Schechner, providing an alternative to both bourgeois urban realism and feudalistic rural forms. Echoing Walter Benjamins classic formulation of the relation between art and the modes of mechanical reproduction, Sircar also theorizes theatre in specicc contradistinction to clm and other mass-cultural forms. Collectively, these recent and competing theories of form, content, and presentation constitute a self-rebexive discursive celd that has no precedent in Indian theatre. Finally, the new modes of authorship and their alliance with theory have created a culture of serious and sustained dramatic writing that makes visible a diverse and complex thematic in postcolonial drama, enabling theatre to become an embodiment of the contemporary life of the nation. As P. V. Rajamannar had anticipated in 1956, this notion of contemporaneity includes not merely the present but everything in the past which has still a meaning and [an] inbuence (Proceedings, 4). In this nonlinear framework, the text of postcolonial drama and theatre
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is in signiccant measure an unwriting or rewriting of the Indian precursor text of the colonial period. If such colonial-era playwrights as D. L. Roy, Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar, and Jaishankar Prasad had turned to Indian myth, legend, and history to recover an ideal past that could counteract the e,ects of colonial subjection, such postcolonial playwrights as Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Vijay Tendulkar, and Girish Karnad have embraced similar narratives to reappraise and deidealize that past. The same antithetical impulses are evident in the playwrights relation to the Indian and Western canons: in the colonial period the practices of translation, adaptation, and intertextual appropriation were more or less constructive, whereas in the postcolonial period they are often deconstructive, though not necessarily counterdiscursive. This distinction between pre- and post-independence Indian playwrights suggests strongly that the textual contestation in postcolonial Indian drama does not follow the paradigm of postcolonialism elsewhere, in which texts composed after decolonization write back only or primarily to the colonizers metropolitan canon. To take up another area of overlap, the genre of realistic domestic drama originated in the mid-nineteenth century, but the social realism of Tendulkar, Elkunchwar, Rakesh, and Dattani has created radically modern perspectives on caste, class, sexuality, gender, family relationships, home, and nation. From one historical standpoint, the folk-based drama of Kambar, Tanvir, Panikkar, Thiyam, and Karnad is paradoxically the only new postcolonial genre, exemplifying the successful assimilation of indigenous materials and conventions to contemporary theatre. But if approached without preconceptions about cultural authenticity and tradition, textualized folk plays also appear fully entangled in the contemporary rural politics of land, caste, gender, and community. In other words, the thematics of post-independence dramatic genres (which I explore at length in part 2 of this study), reveal how contemporary plays draw on myth, history, folklore, sociopolitical experience, and the resources of earlier texts to rebect on culture, nation, gender, class, identity, experience, and modern citizenship in the postcolonial state. Approached in this way, the pre-text and text of drama appears as the cumulative expression of specicc theoretical positions, formal choices, and rhetorical objectives adopted by post-independence playwrights as authors and theorists of drama. But the multilingualism of this drama on a national scale transforms its post-text, in performance and print, in fundamental ways, and neither the theories of theatre nor the models of authorship and textuality can be understood without reference to these transformations.
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Multilingualism, Translation, and Circulation In a multilingual theatre tradition, such as that of India, dramatic texts and performances derive their crst and strongest level of support from the culture of the original language of composition. Because all the major languages except Hindi-Urdu and English are regional in terms of demographic concentration, a playwrights work exercises its greatest inbuence in the region in which its language is the primary medium of communication. In this respect the self-fashioning of the individual playwright depends to a signiccant extent on the state of the immediate linguistic-dramatic tradition to which he or she belongs. Because of the conditions under which modern Indian theatre developed during the nineteenth century, there are considerable disparities in the status of various Indian languages as contemporary theatrical media. The most active theatrical cultures emerged in the colonial cities of Calcutta and Bombay because of the regular presence of European touring companies and the establishment of locally owned commercial theatres. In Madras, the third major colonial city located on the southeastern coast, theatre activity was less widespread, but still more extensive than in other southern cities. Because of its geographical proximity to Madras and the inbuence of Parsi and Marathi theatre, commercial as well as amateur theatre movements also emerged in the state of Mysore (now Karnataka). In comparison, the politically central, predominantly Hindi-speaking regions of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh saw very little theatre activity other than touring Parsi companies, while in the rest of the country modern urban theatre was largely nonexistent until independence. Because of these historical circumstances, contemporary theatre languages belong to a four-tier hierarchy. The crst tier consists of Bengali and Marathi, the majority languages of the Calcutta and Bombay regions, respectively. A modern urban theatre has existed in these languages since the mid-nineteenth century; they have a complex history of anticolonial resistance, especially between 1872 and 1910; and between them they have produced an extraordinary group of post-independence playwrights, including Vijay Tendulkar, Utpal Dutt, Badal Sircar, C. T. Khanolkar, P. L. Deshpande, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Mohit Chattopadhyay, G. P. Deshpande, and Satish Alekar. Both Bombay and Calcutta have a number of nationally recognized amateur theatre groups (the usual avenues of performance for serious playwrights), supportive audiences, and active cultures of multilingual performance. A mature playwright in Bengali or Marathi has the advantage of being able to decne himself or herself
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in relation to a long-standing theatrical tradition as well as a vital community of authors, performers, and viewers in the present. The second tier consists of such languages as Hindi, Kannada, Gujarati, Tamil, and Malayalam, which began their development as modern dramatic media a little later than Bengali and Marathi during the colonial period but now possess comparable traditions. Original theatre in these languages appears in such metropolitan and urban centers as Delhi, Jaipur, Lucknow, Bangalore, Mysore, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Madras, and Trivandrum; the practitioners include such major cgures as Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Adya Rangacharya, Girish Karnad, Chandrashekhar Kambar, Madhu Rye, Indira Parthasarathy, Tooppil Bhaasi, and K. N. Panikkar. The third tier consists of such languages as English, Punjabi, Urdu, Manipuri, and Telugu, which have some important individual playwrights, such as Mahesh Dattani, Gurcharan Das, Ratan Thiyam, Heisnam Kanhailal, and Lokendra Arambam, but not continuous usable traditions as in Marathi or Bengali. Finally, such languages as Kashmiri, Sindhi, Oriya, and Assamese have a predominantly regional rather than national presence in theatre, and in such languages as Bihari and Marwari there is no signiccant modern or contemporary urban theatre tradition at all. The status of the language of original composition thus exercises an immediate as well as long-term inbuence on all aspects of theatre. (For a systematic grouping of the locations and languages of theatre, see map 1 and the accompanying caption.) Interlingual Translation, the Regional, and the National A multilingual tradition geared to a national perspective, however, is also necessarily concerned with translingual commonalities and networks. The methodology of comparisons between European or Euro-American national literatures is not an e,ective model in this situation because in India the connections are interregional and intranational, not international. The theoretical model of an Indian literature produced in multiple languages is more pertinent to theorizing about Indian drama because it focuses on those commonalities of historical circumstance, form, inbuence, and experience that interconnect various regional languages to each other and to the two transregional languages, Hindi and English. In contrast with print genres, such as poetry and cction, however, drama and theatre o,er radical variations on the idea of a national tradition because individual plays can become both texts and performance vehicles in multiple languages through interlingual translation. Indeed, the activity of translation undergirds the very formation of a modern print and performance culture in India because the decisive nineteenth-century
Map 1. Principal locations of modern theatre in post-independence India. Languages of theatrical activity are given by city; the three tiers indicate an approximate order of importance, and the cities within each tier are listed alphabetically. Tier 1: Bombay (Mumbai): Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, English; Calcutta (Kolkata): Bengali, Hindi, English; Delhi: Hindi, Punjabi, English, Urdu. Tier 2: Bangalore: Kannada, English; Bhopal: Hindi, Chhattisgarhi; Chandigarh: Punjabi, Hindi; Heggodu: Kannada; Imphal: Manipuri; Madras (Chennai): Tamil, English; Pune: Marathi; Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram): Malayalam. Tier 3: Ahmadabad: Gujarati; Baroda (Vadodara): Gujarati; Gwalior: Hindi; Hyderabad: Telugu, English; Jaipur: Hindi; Lucknow: Hindi; Mysore: Kannada; Nagpur: Marathi; Patna: Hindi.
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cultural encounter between India and the West depended heavily on the carrying across of works from one language to another: from European languages (especially English) to the modern Indian languages; from Indian languages (especially Sanskrit) to the European languages; from Sanskrit to the modern Indian languages; and from one modern Indian language to another (across a spectrum of about twenty important languages). Where drama was concerned, this multidirectional trac highlighted the twin canonical cgures of Shakespeare and Kalidasa, and placed the innumerable modern versions of their works at the core of a national theatre in the colonized nation. By the late nineteenth century, the texts for performance in urban Indian theatre included plays in English, European plays in English translation, English and European plays in Indianlanguage translation, adapted and indigenized versions of Western plays, translations of Sanskrit plays into the modern Indian languages, and new Indian-language plays, performed both in the original language of composition and in translation. In the post-independence context, however, the translation of new plays into multiple Indian languages is signiccant in ways that are qualitatively di,erent from the translation of older Indian works (even those from the colonial period) and of foreign plays from all languages, cultures, and periods. The last cve decades have demonstrated that in Indian theatre the prompt recognition of new plays as contemporary classics does not depend so much on publication or performance in the original language of composition as on the rapidity with which the plays are performed and (secondarily) published in other languages. Such proliferation keeps a play in constant circulation among readers and viewers, creating the layers of textual meaning and stage interpretation that become the measure of its signiccance. This method of dissemination also generatesand has already generateda body of nationally circulating texts and performance vehicles that o,ers more convincing evidence of the existence of a national theatre than any other institutional, linguistic, or bureaucratic conception. Such translingual circulation has been created and sustained by a variety of mechanisms in the postindependence period. There was no specicc discussion of the role or importance of interlingual translation in Indian theatre at the 1956 drama seminar, but the seminars formal recommendations to the Sangeet Natak Akademi suggested that there should be a special programme of translations of wellknown and stageable plays of the di,erent languages of India into the regional languages enumerated in the Constitution, and that these plays
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should be made available at moderate prices (Sangeet Natak Akademi Report, 32). This program of translations did not materialize, perhaps because it involved sixteen or more languages. But the nationwide theatre movement of the 1960s, which began the crst major transregional initiatives, gave high priority to the translation of important new plays and succeeded in forging strong connections between the Indian languages within a few years of the event orchestrated by the Akademi. The movement brought leading playwrights and directors from di,erent languages together through workshops, fellowships, roundtable discussions, and collaborative productions. One of its important e,ects was to lead playwrights to translate their own and each others work, so that major new plays could reach a larger audience of spectators and readers. Girish Karnad translated Badal Sircars classic Evam Indrajit into English, and Vijay Tendulkar translated Karnads Tughlaq and Sircars Evam Indrajit into Marathi. Since 1972, Karnad has also translated all his own major plays, except Yayati, for publication in English, diversifying his objectives as a translator and demonstrating the importance of making drama-astext potentially available to national and international audiences. In addition to the playwrights, a number of serious translators have rendered almost the entire outputs of certain playwrights into one of the two transregional languages, Hindi or English. In the celd of Hindi translations, the work of Pratibha Agrawal and Santvana Nigam with Bengali, and of Vasant Dev with Marathi is especially notable. Agrawal has rendered the major plays of Badal Sircar, including Evam Indrajit, Pagla ghoda, Sara rattir (as Sari raat), and Ballabhpurer rupkatha (as Ballabhpur ki rupkatha). Nigam has focused on the work of Utpal Dutt, Titu meer, Tota (as Kartoos), and Kallol; Mohit Chattopadhyaya, Rajrakto (as Guinea Pig), Alibaba, Nona jal (as Khara pani ), and Mr. Right; Debashish Majumdar, Tamrapatra (as Amitakshar), Ishavasyam idam sarvam (as Havai maharaj ), Asamapta, Swapna santani, and Ranga mati (as Lal mati ); and Manoj Mitra, Sajano bagan (as Bagiya Banchharam ki ), Galpo hekim saheb (as Kissa hakim saheb ka), and Bhalo basha (as Saiyyan beiman). She has also translated Girish Karnads Naga-mandala and Chandrashekhar Kambars Mahamai, but by working from English translations, not the Kannada originals. Other translators of plays from Bengali into Hindi include Nemichandra Jain, who has Bijon Bhattacharyas Nabanna and Sircars Baki itihas to his credit, and Rati Bartholomew and Ramgopal Bajaj, who translated Sircars Shesh nei (as Ant nahin). From Marathi, Vasant Dev has translated Vijay Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal, Pahije jatiche (as Jaat hi poochho sadhu ki ), Gidhade (as Giddha), Anji,
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Baby, Kanyadaan, Mitrachi goshthha (as Meeta ki kahani), and Kamala; Mahesh Elkunchwars Sultan, Holi, Arakta kshan, Pratibimb, Atmakatha, and Wada chirebandi (as Virasat); G. P. Deshpandes Uddhwasta dharmashala and Andhar yatra; Satish Alekars Mahanirvan and Begum Barve; and Vasant Kanetkars Prema tujha rang kasa (as Dhai akhar prem ka). There are also other less prolicc translators from Marathi. Sarojini Varma has translated Tendulkars Shantata! court chalu ahe (as Khamosh! adalat zari hai ), Ashi pakhare yeti (as Panchhi aise ate hain), Dambadveepcha muqabala, and Sakharam binder, and C. T. Khanolkars Kaal tujhe namaskar. Kusum Kumar has rendered Jaywant Dalvis Sandhya chhaya and Kanetkars Himalayachi saoli (as Himalaya ki chhaya). Kamlakar Sontakke has translated Khanolkars Ek shunya Bajirao, and Jyoti Subhash has done G. P. Deshpandes Raaste. From Gujarati, Jyoti Vyass translation of Madhu Ryes Koipan ek phoolnu nam bolo to (as Kisi ek phool ka nam lo) has had wide circulation, as has Pratibha Agrawals translation of Ryes Kumarni agashi (as Kumar ki chhat). B. R. Narayan occupies the same key position in the translation of Kannada plays into Hindi as Agrawal and Nigam in Bengali and Dev in Marathi. Narayans work includes the major plays of Adya Rangacharya and Chandrashekhar Kambar, as well as Karnads Yayati. With some exceptions, all of these translations have appeared as individual publications in Hindi, therefore reaching classrooms as well as interested readers. While I have focused on the example of Hindi as the target language, on a smaller scale this process of interlingual circulation in performance and print is replicated within every active theatrical language in India. The translation of contemporary plays into English has gradually acquired momentum since the 1970s because of several special initiatives. As an editor at Oxford University Press, Madras, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Girish Karnad initiated a program of play publication under the presss Three Crowns imprint. This list includes Karnads own Tughlaq, Hayavadana, and Naga-mandala (crst published separately and then collected into a single volume titled Three Plays in 1994); Sircars Evam Indrajit (1974); Five Plays (1992) and later Collected Plays in Translation (2003) by Vijay Tendulkar; and the collection Three Modern Indian Plays (1989), which contains Sircars Indrajit, Tendulkars Shantata! and Karnads Tughlaq. From 1967 to 1983, the bimonthly English-language theatre magazine Enact, edited by Rajinder Paul from New Delhi, regularly published original English plays and plays in English translation. During its seventeen-year tenure the magazine created a substantial body of plays in English, including the crst available English translations of Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, Utpal Dutt, C. T. Khanolkar, Mahesh
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Elkunchwar, and Satish Alekar. In 1983, the Seagull Foundation for the Arts in Calcutta, publishers of the Seagull Theatre Quarterly, launched an ambitious program of contemporary Indian plays in English translation. Over two decades, nearly thirty volumes, including individual plays as well as anthologies, have appeared under the Seagull imprint, amounting already to the largest single archive of contemporary works in translation. The list includes multiple works by established playwrights such as Sircar, Dutt, Elkunchwar, Deshpande, Kambar, Alekar, and Panikkar, as well as the crst available English versions of such performance-centered works as Thiyams Chakravyuha and Tanvirs Charandas chor. This initiative has brought a second group of signiccant translators to the foreSamik Bandyopadhyay from Bengali and Manipuri; Shanta Gokhale, Arundhati Deosthale, and Ashish Rajadhyaksha from Marathi; Rajiv Taranath and P. R. Sharma from Kannada; Anjum Katyal from Hindi and Bengali; and Paul Matthew and Phillip B. Zarrilli from Malayalam. The National School of Drama has also begun recently to publish contemporary plays in new English translations, with works by Rakesh, Bharati, and Kambar already included among available titles. Translation and Performance Like the priority of performance over text in contemporary forms of intertextuality (discussed in chapter 10), the performative dimension of translation in drama has priority over the textual dimension. The postindependence canon has come into existence because a handful of directors made a conscious commitment in the 1960s to concentrate their resources on the production of important new Indian plays and commissioned translations speciccally for the purpose of performance from theatre enthusiasts, associates, and even partners. Rajinder Nath, for instance, decided at the very beginning of his career that he would direct only original Indian plays from various languages and exclude translations or adaptations of foreign plays altogether. Given our situation where we have to build a modern Indian theatre, he noted, it is very important that we keep searching for original Indian scripts and keep investing our meagre resources in our own playwrights. Without such a movement, there would not be this pool of 20 to 30 wholly admirable plays which we can now use as resource material (CIT, 33). Similarly, Satyadev Dubey regards his obsession with original plays as the reason for his continued engagement with theatre: Besides cnding in them a lot of things [I have] wanted to say without having to take the trouble of writing them, [I have] had a sense of continuous contemporariness
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which makes me feel that I am not alienated from society, at least the society which believes in theatre (CIT, 1001). The performance of drama in translation follows three distinct trajectories. Such directors as Shombhu Mitra, Arvind Deshpande, Vijaya Mehta, and Ratan Thiyam, who work in theatrically strong regional languages, concentrate on productions of new plays written originally in their language and combine these with strategic productions of outstanding plays in translation. This explains the importance of Deshpandes Marathi production of Girish Karnads Tughlaq for Awishkar in 1971; the Bengali production of Karnads Yayati by Mitras group, Bohurupee, in 1988; the Marathi production of Karnads Hayavadana by Mehtas Rangayan; and the Manipuri productions of Bharatis Andha yug and Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din by Thiyams Chorus Repertory Theatre. In contrast, such directors as Satyadev Dubey, Shayamanand Jalan, and Rajinder Nath, who work primarily in the national language (Hindi), concentrate on plays in translation from the other Indian languages into that medium and intersperse them with strategic productions of plays written originally in it. Based respectively in the key metropolitan locations of Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi, these three directors have produced a geographically triangulated, interconnected cluster of performances in a single language that is unmatched in contemporary Indian theatre. The middle ground between these poles is occupied by directors who are bilingual or multilingual. Ebrahim Alkazi has worked with Hindi, Urdu, and English; Dubey with Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati; Vijaya Mehta with Marathi, Hindi, and Sanskrit; B. V. Karanth with Hindi and Kannada; and K. N. Panikkar with Malayalam and Sanskrit. Their multilingual reach enables such directors not only to work in several dramatic traditions simultaneously but also to produce important multiple versions of the same play. Thus, Mehta has directed major productions of Karnads Hayavadana in Marathi and German and of Elkunchwars W ada chirebandi in Marathi and Hindi; Dubey has directed Elkunchwars Raktapushpa in both Marathi and Hindi; and Karanth has directed Karnads Hayavadana in both Kannada and Hindi. The role of these dissimilar but complementary relations between director, location, and language in establishing the contemporary theatrical celd is evident in the following tabulations. Appendix 4 records key productions in multiple languages of the most frequently performed post-independence plays. This list is not exhaustivemost of these plays have in fact been performed in every major Indian language as well as some European languages, and most have been published in at least
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two or more languages in addition to the original; but the focus on directors of national standing establishes the signiccant tradition of stage interpretation for these works. Appendix 5 isolates the productions of those same plays and some others by Dubey, Jalan, and Nath in Hindi. Between these two processesthe progressive dispersal of a single dramatic work over multiple languages (sometimes by the same director) and the gathering of multiple works within a single link language the post-independence canon of plays and playwrights becomes fully visible. The foregoing discussion establishes interlingual and interregional circulation as an intrinsic condition of the existence of contemporary plays. Two specicc examples will suggest the intensity of this process over shorter periods of time. The crst example is W ada chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion, 1985) by Mahesh Elkunchwar, the wordy Marathi playwright who has invited controversy and criticism for his assaults on Indian middle-class morality, ethics, psychology, and social consciousness.3 As already suggested, such concepts as performance history, reception history, major production, and critical success are relative terms in a situation where the recognition of a play as a signiccant text and performance vehicle depends on high-quality noncommercial productions rather than on market conditions and critical assessments of the Western kind. But within these limitations, W ada chirebandi has the attributes of a major work. Between 1985 and 1989, for instance, the play was performed in three languages and published in two. The original Marathi production by Kalavaibhav in Bombay (May 1985) was directed by Vijaya Mehta, who also played the lead female role. The same cast recorded a shorter version of the play in Hindi for Bombay television under the title Haveli buland thi (The Mansion Was Invincible). The Hindi production of the play at the National School of Drama, New Delhi (December 1985), was directed by Satyadev Dubey. In February 1989, a Bengali adaptation of the play by Subrata Nandy was staged under Sohag Sens direction in Calcutta, and Vijaya Mehta directed the play again for the Nehru Centenary Festival in September 1989. The Marathi text of the play was published in 1987 in Pune, and the English translation in Calcutta in 1989. In the early 1990s Elkunchwar expanded the play into a trilogy titled Yuganta (The End of an Age), which was produced by Awishkar in 1994, published in Marathi in 1997, and in English translation in 2004. Wada chirebandi has also been translated into French and German, crst as an individual play and later as part of the Yuganta trilogy. For twenty years, therefore, the play and its epigones have been almost constantly in
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view, epitomizing the instant canonicity that signals the arrival of a major new work in Indian theatre. The example of Ajit Dalvis Gandhi viruddha Gandhi (Gandhi against Gandhi, Marathi, 1996) shows how this process of circulation is accelerated even further in the case of a commercially produced and controversial work. Dalvi based his play about the destructive anti-oedipal relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and his eldest son, Harilal, on an original Gujarati version by Dinkar Joshi that had not been particularly successful in performance. The Marathi play was produced and directed by Chandrakant Kulkarni, one of the younger theatre professionals in Maharashtra who is attempting to bridge the gap between serious and commercially successful theatre. The success of this production prompted Kulkarni to direct a Hindi version concurrently, while Feroze Khan, another Bombay-based commercial director, mounted an English production titled Mahatma against Gandhi. During 199798, Marathi and Gujarati versions of the play toured the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, respectively, while the Hindi and English productions went on a successful national (and, in 199899, international) tour. The English version, in particular, attracted major corporate sponsorship because of its medium and because Naseeruddin Shah, one of Indias leading stage and art cinema actors, played the role of Gandhi. While individual ticket prices for high quality Indian-language productions usually range from Rs. 50 to Rs. 100, tickets for the English production peaked at Rs. 500. Such inbation certainly underscores the elite appeal of English and the mediation of the theatrical by the cinematic, but it also suggests that translation and circulation are conditions intrinsic to the existence of contemporary Indian plays, regardless of their serious or popular character. The Languages of Translation The close linkage of translation to publication and performance has fostered a vital multilingual theatrical culture in post-independence India; it has also modiced the hierarchy of theatrical languages. While Bengali, Marathi, and Kannada continue to be dominant at the level of original composition, Hindi and English have emerged as the two most important target languages of translation. There is, however, an important distinction between these two transregional languages. Hindi is clearly the more important medium of translation for purposes of performance and audience appeal, while English is more important for purposes of publication. The role of Hindi as a link language at the performative level is fully established;4 English has not yet begun to perform that role and
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has greater potential at the textual level, in the medium of print. This is consistent with the generally paradoxical position of English in relation to modern Indian cultural forms. As the original language of cction and poetry, it has been increasingly dominant since the 1960s and now commands an international readership; as the language of performance, it remains subordinate to such regional languages as Marathi, Bengali, and Kannada. Within drama, English has so far proved to be more important as the lingua franca for the translation of Indian-language plays than as the language of original composition. English-language drama in India continues to be described as one of the twin Cinderellas of Indian writing in English and, more unsparingly, as a lost cause and a form of writing that ought to be dead if it is not already so (Naik, 180). Although drama in English has been written since the 1870s by Indians, including such authors as Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Manmohan Ghose during the colonial period, its tradition consists mainly of obscure texts for reading, not performance. In the post-independence period, despite the output of such authors as Nissim Ezekiel, Gieve Patel, Gurcharan Das, Partap Sharma, Asif Currimbhoy, and, most recently, Mahesh Dattani, Englishlanguage drama has not acquired a strong theatrical base or textual currency. Even major plays remain isolated events, instead of merging into a usable tradition. The pattern of the last three decades, therefore, has been that a major play in a language other than English soon acquires a national, and sometimes an international, audience through translation, especially into English; plays written originally in English, however, remain on the periphery of contemporary Indian theatre and are rarely translated into the indigenous languages of the subcontinent. This dual paradox suggests that in Indian writing the naturalization of English has been e,ective when the radical of presentationwhich decnes the conditions established between the [author] and his publicis the printed word, but not when the radical of presentation is the spoken or enacted word (Frye, 247). In this respect Indian drama and theatre are very similar to Indian clm, television, video, and music. India has the largest clm industry in the world, but virtually no original Englishlanguage cinema; one of the largest television audiences in the world, but little original English-language programming besides news, news programs, and documentaries; and a gigantic popular music industry, but little original English-language music. In all these categoriestheatre, clm, television, and musicthere is a sizeable urban audience for Western imports in English because India is as open as other developing nations to the imperialist penetration and dissemination of canonical
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and popular Western (predominantly anglophone) cultural forms. But for the creation of original performance vehicles for the stage or screen, the preferred media are the indigenous languages, especially those which have had strong performance traditions since the precolonial period. The reason for this preference is the idea that a language corresponds to a structure of experience in the world: theatre has the quality of lived experience when its language is the natural language of the characters it represents. Mimetic representation is then mediated only by theatrical convention, not by the additional refractions of language. As Girish Karnad comments ironically in a 1993 interview, writing in English about characters who are presumably speaking in an Indian language for audiences for whom English is a second language is not a situation conducive to great drama (Performance, 365). Such translation is forced, limiting, and alienating. That is why the translation of a play from one Indian language into another is usually a translation of contexts as well: Subrata Nandys Bengali adaptation of W ada chirebandi is set in rural Bengal, not in the Maharashtra of Elkunchwars original text. The plays of Mahesh Dattani are perhaps the crst to challenge e,ectively the assumption that Indian drama written in English represents a disjunction between language and sensibility, material and medium. Dattani does not see his choice of English as arbitrary, as a postcolonial gesture, or as an example of the empire writing backa phrase that he incidentally describes as politically incorrect (11). English is simply the language in which he can best express what he wants to say (9). Dattanis work may signal a new phase in the naturalization of English as a theatre medium in India, redressing some of the inequalities outlined in this chapter. But for the present the di,erential status of Hindi and English as theatrical languages is likely to persist. Beyond these particularities, multilingualism and circulation in their post-independence forms have had a profound e,ect on dramatic authorship, theatre theory, and the textual life of drama. Playwrights who conceive of themselves as literary authors write with the anticipation that the original text of a play will soon enter the multilingual economy of translation, performance, and publication. Vijay Tendulkar, G. P. Deshpande, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Satish Alekar, Chandrashekhar Kambar, and Mohit Chattopadhyay are among the authors who have collaborated actively with translators to make their plays available in other languages (especially Hindi and English) for performance as well as publication (again, especially in Hindi and English). As translators of the work of other contemporary playwrights, Tendulkar and Karnad stand apart in
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their understanding of the importance of transregional routes in theatre; by rendering his major plays into English, Karnad has applied that understanding to his own work. All these playwrights construct authorship and authority as activities that must extend across languages to sustain a national theatre movement in a multilingual society. Similarly, playwrights who function actively as theorists and critics of Indian drama do not limit themselves to their native linguistic-dramatic traditions but aim explicitly at creating a nationally viable body of theory and critical thought. They construct a framework for contemporary Indian drama and theatre in which regional theatrical traditions interact with each other and are available for use beyond the borders of their languages and provinces. Signiccantly, although such playwrights as Karnad, Tendulkar, Elkunchwar, Kambar, and Deshpande write their plays exclusively in their respective regional languages, much of their criticism appears directly in English. Thus, for both authors and audiences, the total e,ect of active multilingualism and circulation is to create at least four distinct levels for the dissemination and reception of contemporary Indian playsthe local, the regional, the national, and the international. Marked by a complex interrelation of languages, Indian theatre is now an interconnected celd with well-established channels of publication and performance. The chasm between serious and commercial theatre has so far ensured that these channels are not numerous, but this limitation is also an advantage because it makes contemporary theatre more manageable as a theoretical and interpretive object. Having considered the various overlaps between text and performance in the present discussion, in the next chapter I turn more exclusively to aspects of production and reception that reinforce as well as modify the interconnectedness of contemporary theatrethe unusual role of the director, the constitution of audiences, and the relationship of theatre to modern mass media.
chapter 4
#
Production and Reception

Directors, Audiences, and the Mass Media
Indian Directors in Twentieth- Century Contexts Euro-American theatre history and criticism invariably describe the rise of the director as a development that is surprisingly recent in relation to the long history of the stage but that has exerted a decisive inbuence on the formation of a complex modern theatre. In the midnineteenth century, such cgures as Saxe-Meiningen and Charles Kean began the search for virtuosic theatrical form which culminated at the turn of the century in the preeminence of a single craftsman who integrated play, actor, movement and decor into an organic theatrical image (Cole and Chinoy, vii). The directors pursuit of uniced artistic e,ects on the stage necessarily modiced the control that playwrights and actors had previously exercised over production, and, as ONeill enumerates, the directors craft gradually appropriated the functions of critic, analyst, interpreter, historian, designer, actor, coach, manager, audience, and administrator (R. H. ONeill, 2). Grounded in the idea of the director as artist, twentieth-century theatre now appears to demarcate three main roles for the director: as interpreter of classic and contemporary literary drama (Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Yemilyevich Meyerhold, Harley Granville-Barker, Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator, Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan, Peter Hall, Lloyd Richards); as avant-garde theorist and inventor of texts-for-performance (Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, Richard Schechner, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Ariane Mnouchkine, Augusto Boal); and
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as interpreter of his/her own texts for the theatre (Bertolt Brecht, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Athol Fugard, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Caryl Churchill). In modern Indian theatre the redecnition of the directors role has followed broadly the same course, but at an even more accelerated pace. In colonial commercial theatre the cgure of the director was largely indistinguishable from that of playwright, lead actor, and manager. Girish Chandra Ghosh, the dominant cgure in late nineteenth-century Bengali theatre, wrote, directed, and performed in his own plays while also managing prominent playhouses, such as the National and the Minerva in Calcutta. His younger contemporary, the actor-manager Sisir Kumar Bhaduri, habitually edited and rearranged dramatic texts for the stage, sometimes annoying the author but improving the product substantially from the viewpoint of presentation (see Raha, 11011). In the Parsi theatre, such resident playwrights as Agha Hashra Kashmiri and Narayan Prasad Betab were also producers who trained the actors in dialogue delivery and movement, visualized sets and stage e,ects, incorporated music into the dramatic narrative, and oversaw the performance in its entirety. During the 1940s, this fundamentally commercial model of directorial activity was dislodged in three ways. With the arrival of sound clms, cinema replaced Parsi theatre as the popular medium of commercial entertainment and hence altered the tenor of theatrical production. The founding of the Progressive Writers Association in 1936 and the Indian Peoples Theatre Association in 1943 gave Indian cultural discourse an international political perspective, which crst aroused serious interest in the idea of a national theatre, in the Group Theatre movement, and in such seminal cgures as Stanislavsky, Joan Littlewood, Jean-Louis Barrault, and, above all, Brecht. The IPTAs commitment to an anti-imperialist, antifascist, nationwide theatre movement also produced the crst powerful critique of commercialism in theatre and cinema and invested theatrical representations with a sociopolitical instrumentality they had not possessed earlier. As a result of these initiatives, colonial-era directing styles had been decisively dislodged, and the careers of several serious-minded directorsnotably Shombhu Mitra, Utpal Dutt, Ebrahim Alkazi, and Habib Tanvirhad already acquired substantial shape before the crst major post-independence playwrights emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mitra was a protege of Sisir Kumar Bhaduri, but his stint in the Calcutta commercial theatres had been brief and unsatisfactory (193942). In 1943 44 he gave the IPTA its crst, and perhaps only, national-level success the production of Bijon Bhattacharyas Nabannabut his concern with
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technique and theatrical virtuosity was incompatible with a mass movement that focused on the message rather than the medium. Mitras formal association with the IPTA lasted only a year; in 1949 he founded Bohurupee, the crst important noncommercial theatre group of the post-independence period, and was its principal director, actor, and manager for three decades. Dutt had an equally brief encounter with the IPTA (195051) after several years with Geo,rey Kendalls touring Shakespeareana company in the late 1940s, but in his case the e,ects of the contact with urban theatre activists and mass audiences were transformative. After leaving the IPTA he reorganized the Little Theatre Group, which had been performing plays in English for a middle- and upper-class audience in Calcutta, to focus on Bengali-language plays for the working classes, and, beginning in 1959, he directed a succession of his own plays for the group (cg. 4). Alkazi returned to Bombay from Londons Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1950, claiming to have learned principally what I should not do in theater . . . [and] that work in the theater is largely a matter of selfeducation (Alkazi, 290). As a founder-member of Theatre Group (195054) and Theatre Unit (195462), he collaboratively instituted comprehensive programs of education and training in the art and discipline of theatre, for both practitioners and audiences, and reinforced the idea of noncommercial production as the basis of theatre practice. In 1954, at the request of the national government, he prepared the blueprint for a National School of Drama in New Delhi and in 1962 began an enormously inbuential cfteen-year stint as the schools director. Following a long association with the IPTA (194554), Tanvirs very crst major production, Agra bazar (1954), was in conception a nonproscenium vehicle concerned with the resources of oral poetry and the life of ordinary people in the streets. Attendance at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the mid-1950s, a theatre trip through Europe in 1956, and the experience of watching Brechts plays at the Berliner Ensemble within a few weeks of the German playwrights death convinced him that the future of Indian theatre lay in indigenous performance forms and determined the experimental direction of both his companiesHindustani Theatre (195859), and Naya Theatre (1959). Thus, within a few years of independence, a typically heterogeneous group of directors had set the standards of artistry and sociopolitical engagement against which a revisionary postcolonial practice would be measured in the following decades. More generally, the IPTA movements aesthetic-political reorientation of drama combined with a range of other inbuences to institute a conception of
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serious theatre work that has incrementally consolidated the directors roles as theorist, poetician, educator, and innovator on the stage. The outstanding feature of theatre production and direction in postindependence India is the multiplicity of potential choices that contemporary practitioners actualize in di,erent ways to fashion their distinctive practices. A summary view of the variables in directing work suggests the unusually broad range of artistic and practical choices. Directors may limit themselves exclusively to that one role or engage variously with the activities of playwriting, acting, and theatre management. They may work in one major location and language or move between several locations and languages. They may rely chieby on audience support and private patronage or pursue important institutional aliations and the patronage of the state. They may work exclusively in the medium of theatre or expand into one or more media of mechanical reproduction. The same diversity appears in the relation of Indian directors to periods, genres, and cultural systems. Both individually and collectively, their repertoires range over texts that are classical, premodern, modern, and contemporary; realistic and antirealistic; conventional and experimental; and Indian, Western, and non-Western. This chapter is concerned, therefore, with
Fig. 4. The naval mutiny of 1946. Utpal Dutt (far left) in Kallol, written and directed by himself for the Peoples Little Theatre (Calcutta), Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival, New Delhi, 1989. Courtesy of Sangeet Natak Akademi.
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the multiple circumstances that have led to a redecnition of the directors mission in Indian theatre since independence and the new conditions under which this professional practices his or her public art. Playwrights, Directors, and Playwright-Directors The crst areas of theatre a,ected signiccantly by the directors new role are the crucial formations discussed in chapter 3the emergence of the playwright-as-author and the play-as-literary-text, both in the original language of composition and in translation. The most complex expression of the new balance of power is perhaps the relationship between literary playwrights who do not direct their own work and directors of literary drama who do not create their own texts for performance that is, between nondirecting authors and nonwriting directors. In this group, it is only the rare playwright (such as Dharamvir Bharati) who is temperamentally detached from the stage life of his work and the rare director (such as Rajinder Nath) who believes that the form of any theatre anywhere is primarily determined by the playwright (Avik Ghosh, Rajinder Nath). More often, authors and directors in post-independence India are engaged in an ongoing adjudication of their respective (and often incompatible) conceptions of how a given play should work in the theatre. Mohan Rakesh considered the excessive emphasis on the directors role detrimental to the integrity of drama-in-performance, but in 1966, at the invitation of Shyamanand Jalan, he became involved in an intensive three-week process of collaboration over the Calcutta production of his second play, Lahron ke rajhans. The plays third act was rewritten several times, completed two days before opening night, and revised yet again before publication in late 1966. A di,erent kind of artistic exchange appears in the work of Mahesh Elkunchwar, who persistently describes himself as a writer rather than a stage-worker (rangakarmi ). Elkunchwar accepts the autonomy of the director in principle and acknowledges Vijaya Mehtas great and very healthy inbuence on his theatrical career, but he defends his craft against her objections of wordiness and over-writing: Writing was always a very personal kind of exercise for me, in the sense that I always wanted to talk to myself or somebody. And words were something very precious to me. . . . In my art you are not supposed to use a lot of words, I guess, and I did. But then I always said I could strike a very good balance between stagecraft and writing (Elkunchwar, Playwright, 7). As a literary playwright far more deeply involved with the daily life of the theatre than either Rakesh or Elkunchwar, Vijay Tendulkar takes a stronger stand on both issues: he
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insists, on the one hand, that a writer who wishes to write for the theater must crst learn his theater by participating fully in the production process; he also warns, on the other hand, that a talented director who is himself too lazy to write may treat the playwrights work merely as a script or raw material . . . for his creative talents (as in clms) and alter the sense of the play to suit his creative and intellectual needs (Play, 27). Counterpointing this model of theatre as a more or less productive collaboration between two equally serious artists is the fusion of the roles of author, director, and performer within a single practitioner, which gives the playwright maximum control over the theatrical process but in practice tends to emphasize the directing function. Literary playwrights, such as Utpal Dutt and Mahesh Dattani, who direct and act in their own plays, seem to achieve a relatively equable balance between word and action. Dattani came to playwriting from acting and directing experiences that had stressed group work, and, like Tendulkar, he underscores the importance of practical experience in the theatre because you realize that youre not writing to be read. . . . That the actors are going to take your script and theyre going to do other things with it (Dattani, Page and Stage, 21). However, in the work of such playwright-directors asTanvir, Chandrashekhar Kambar, K. N. Panikkar, and Ratan Thiyam, who propagate an alternative urban theatre outside the conventions of Westernized modernity, performance takes precedence over text, and the directing function dominates over the authorial function. As the contemporary author-director-actor with perhaps the most intricate theatre craft, Thiyam o,ers a revealing gloss on his twin obligations in a characteristically colloquial voice:
It is not necessary, even if Im writing my own plays, that whatever I imagine as a playwright will come about when I direct it. Because while directing I may feel the urge to do something else. . . . The moment I become the director, the playwright in me goes away. . . . A directors thinking is very di,erent from a playwrights thinking. Otherwise you have no freedom, you would be overshadowed. . . . All those things are the job of a playwrighthow the argument is evolved, how the argument is taken forward, characterization. But the duty of the director, I feel, is to enhance the meaning of the spoken word. (Chakravyuha, xii)
In varying degrees, all these positions modify literary concepts of dramatic authorship and textuality and concrm the e,ects of a redetermination of the playwright-director relation: if revisions of the authorial
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role in the post-independence period have complicated the play-as-text, revisions of the directors role have complicated texts-in-performance and the relation of text to performance even more radically. Directors at the Centre: Commerce, Patronage, and the Urban Culture of Performance In addition to the renegotiation of authorship, there are several other cultural and ideological factors that foreground the directors work in contemporary Indian theatre in comparison with, and often at the expense of, the playwrights work. First, the decisive disengagement of serious theatre work from the commercial superstructure has created an environment in which the signiccance of theatre is curiously overdetermined. Despite the modest scale, localized nature, and unpredictable calendar of much urban theatre, directors are regarded as autonomous, selfregulating functionaries who translate their vision onto the stage as and when they can, but whose ideas of theatre are important in and of themselves, irrespective of specicc plays and performances. Badal Sircar, for instance, has been an established cgure as a playwright, director, and theatre theorist since the 1960s, but his telegraphic account of the crst abortive launch of his theatre group in January 1968 demonstrates why in India it is necessary to separate the signiccance of theatre work from the issue of continuous success. In Voyages in the Theatre, Sircar writes of a new theatre group called Satabdi born the year before, attempting to start in a big way. Beginning of a new voyage. First a comedy, and then a programme of two short plays. Reasonably favourable response, and cnancial disaster. Problems in the group. End of Satabdi and end of theatre so far as I was concerned. End of that voyage (Voyages, 4). Related to the ubiquitous problem of material resources rather than geography, this uncertainty of survivaland the consequent irregularity of productioncharacterizes the work of Om Shivpuris Dishantar in Delhi as much as Jabbar Patels Theatre Academy in Pune or Neelam Mansingh Chowdhrys The Company in Chandigarh. But the scarcity of resources does not deterministically preclude pioneering theatre, and vice versa: in Bombay, Vijaya Mehtas Rangayan group practically launched experimental theatre during the 1960s with productions of Eugne Ionescos Chairs, C. T. Khanolkars absurdist Ek shoonya Bajirao, and the early plays of Vijay Tendulkar; ironically, Mehtas reluctance to accept corporate sponsorship was one of the factors that prompted the departure of Tendulkar as well as Arvind and Sulabha Deshpande from the group and the founding of Awishkar in 1971.
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Furthermore, in a largely noncommercial performance culture for serious theatre, the role of central state-sponsored institutions such as the National School of Drama (NSD) and the Sangeet Natak Akademi, and cultural organizations such as the Shri Ram Centre for the Performing Arts (New Delhi), the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) and Prithvi Theatres (both in Bombay), and Kalamandir (Calcutta) has been mainly to support the work of directors, not playwrights. In addition to Alkazi, the NSD and its repertory company have been major forums for the work of B. V. Karanth, Prasanna, Bansi Kaul, Mohan Maharshi, M. K. Raina, Bhanu Bharati, D. R. Ankur, and Tripurari Sharma. Rajinder Nath was director of the Shri Ram Centre during the 1970s and helped to launch the annual theatre festivals that brought together work by new and established directors between 1977 and 1983. Both he and Ranjit Kapoor have done extensive work for the Centres repertory company and its nine-month acting course. In a 1970 interview, director Satyadev Dubey argued that the most important role the upcoming NCPA could perform was that of impresario, providing help to deserving organizations and instituting healthy competition between theatre groups (Paul, Satyadev Dubey). Both at the Centre and at Prithvi Theatres in Bombay, providing state-of-the-art rehearsal and performance space to noncommercial directors has been a high priority. The NCPA also instituted a theatre development cell that was managed by the NSDtrained director Waman Kendre, and the Centres recent administrators have included the playwright P. L. Deshpande and the director-actress Vijaya Mehta. Perhaps the most ambitious program of sponsorship was the Sangeet Natak Akademis ten-year Scheme of Assistance to Young Theatre Workers, aimed at directors whose work assimilated indigenous performance genres. Between 1984 and 1994, the Akademi organized workshops, discussions, and annual festivals (both regional and national) to stimulate new experiments in theatre and showcase the work of its fellows. In a celd of limited resources, directors have therefore clearly received the most visible forms of sponsorship. The second reason for the directors prominence is related to the crst: in the absence of commercial modes of organization, if most state and private cultural organizations have extended their patronage mainly to directors, the directors in turn have o,ered vital support to playwrights. Since the late 1950s, a number of important partnerships between playwrights and directors have launched or consolidated a given authors career and have created a national reputation for the director, with the patronal dimension of these alliances separating them from
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the playwright-director rivalries mentioned earlier. The collaborations between Bijon Bhattacharya and Shombhu Mitra in the productions of Jabanbandi and Nabanna in 194344 were the crst pre-independence instances of the importance of this relation. Mitra was also the crst to give visibility to Badal Sircar with productions of Baki itihas in 1967 and Pagla ghoda in 1971. Jalan was the crst director to produce Rakeshs critically acclaimed crst play, Ashadh ka ek dina, in 1960, and he completed the sequence with Lahron ke rajhans (1966) and Adhe adhure (1970 and 1983), becoming one of Rakeshs most important interpreters for the stage. Similarly, Bharatis Andha yug, the crst notable post-independence play in any Indian language, acquired its reputation as a monumental stage vehicle through Satyadev Dubeys pioneering production of 1962 and Alkazis NSD Repertory Company productions of 1964, 1967, and 1974. Dubey, Alkazi, and Karanth have also given Girish Karnads plays, especially Tughlaq and Hayavadana, their most inbuential productions in Hindi and Kannada. Vijaya Mehta brought Vijay Tendulkars early work to the stage in the mid-1950s; Arvind Deshpande took up Tendulkars mature fulllength plays of the 1960s; and in 1973 Jabbar Patel founded Theatre Academy in Pune solely to counteract censorship and continue performances of Tendulkars corrosive musical satire, Ghashiram kotwal (which had run to more than one thousand performances by 2001). The same pattern of decnitive collaboration appears in the relationships between Shreeram Lagoo and G. P. Deshpande in Uddhwasta dharmashala, Usha Ganguli and Mahasweta Devi in Rudali, and Alyque Padamsee and Mahesh Dattani in Tara, to name only one representative play by each playwright. Third, the coexistence of modern dramatic forms with a complicated legacy of classical, traditional, and folk performance genres in contemporary Indian theatre has meant that the staging of text-based literary drama, in which the playwright and the process of writing have priority over the director and the process of performance, is regarded as only one among a complicated range of performance choices. Consequently, the director is viewed as a virtuoso manipulator of a wide variety of dramatic texts, conventional and unconventional. The ideological emphasis on authenticity and Indianness (among theatre workers, cultural critics, and policymakers) heightens the interest in innovation and places a premium on the work of directors who develop texts for performance on the basis of indigenous forms, moving beyond social realism, proscenium staging, the well-made play, and the theatre of ideas. (The assumption underlying the SNAs Scheme of Assistance to Young Theatre Workers, for instance, was that directors who experimented with indigenous forms
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were more creative, innovative, and important than conventional dramatic authors, and so more deserving of state patronage.) Hence, there is a fundamental di,erence in present-day theatre between those urban directors who work principally in realist, absurdist, allegorical-political, and metatheatrical modes, and those (also primarily urban) directors who practice various forms of nonrealistic, nonproscenium, mobile, stylized, musical theatre grounded in indigenous styles of presentation. The crst category encompasses the work of Shombhu Mitra, Ebrahim Alkazi, Utpal Dutt, Arvind Deshpande, Vijaya Mehta, Shyamanand Jalan, Satyadev Dubey, Rajinder Nath, Shreeram Lagoo, Alyque Padamsee, Jabbar Patel, Usha Ganguli, and Mahesh Dattani. The second category is dominated by playwright-directors such as Habib Tanvir, K. N. Panikkar, Chandrashekhar Kambar, and Ratan Thiyam, but it also includes, with qualiccations, such cgures as B. V. Karanth, Badal Sircar (whose theatre is environmental rather than traditionalist), K. V. Subbanna, and Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry. Regardless of range or method, however, each of the directors mentioned above is a nationally known cgure associated with a specicc kind of fully theorized theatre, because the artistic and cultural economies of the post-independence period demand a practice that is both signiccant and distinctive. Finally, contemporary directors are the ones who have created the complex performance culture of the present, in which Indian plays (classical, premodern, modern, and contemporary) in multiple Indian languages coexist with world drama, again in multiple Indian languages. It is mainly directors, not authors, who encourage the rapid translation of important new plays in order to create a diverse and pan-Indian repertory. There is thus an almost exact correspondence between the triangulated Hindi productions of Shyamanand Jalan, Satyadev Dubey, and Rajinder Nath recorded in appendix 5, and the translation work of Pratibha Agrawal and Santvana Nigam from Bengali into Hindi, and of Vasant Dev from Marathi into Hindi. The directors aggressive advancement of certain forms of intertextuality and transculturation (discussed fully in chapter 10) has also created a range of contemporary intertexts that exist primarily for and in performance: they have no predictable connection with an original, no identicable second author, and no text cxed by print. In terms of individual emphases, there are at least three distinct practices in evidence among contemporary directors. With a few exceptions, the theatre work of such playwight-directors as Tanvir, Dutt, Sircar, Panikkar, Kambar, Thiyam, and Dattani focuses primarily on their own original writing for the theatre rather than on other Indian plays or
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Western imports. In the second category are such directors as Mitra, Alkazi, Karanth, Mehta, and Chowdhry, who are committed to Indian plays from various periods as well as to theatre in a transcultural, international context. Mitra established Tagore, Bhattacharya, and Sircar in the contemporary repertory, and also diversiced into Sophocles, Ibsen, and Brecht. Mehta has accomplished the same for Tendulkar, Karnad, and Elkunchwar, but has also undertaken radically experimental versions of Kalidasa and Brecht. Karanth was the most inbuential interpreter of Bharatendu Harishchandra, Karnad, and Kambar, but also produced singular versions of Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Akutagawa Ryonosuke. Perhaps the most inclusive practice in this respect belongs to Alkazi, who has handled Bharati, Karnad, Rakesh, Balwant Gargi, and Vasant Kanetkar, on the one hand, and Euripides, Shakespeare, Molire, Georg Bchner, August Strindberg, Federico Garca Lorca, Jean Anouilh, Samuel Beckett, and John Osborne, on the other. The third category of directors represents opposing relations to Indian and foreign drama. As Indias premier director of English-language theatre, the Bombay-based Alyque Padamsee has maintained a predominantly Western repertoire but has also staged important original English plays by Partap Sharma and Mahesh Dattani, as well as the work of Karnad in translation. In contrast, Ranjit Kapoor in Delhi has chosen to direct mostly Western plays in translation, a practice he defends on artistic grounds. In the directors note to Ek musacr be-asbab (NSD Repertory Company, 1991), the Hindustani version of Anouilhs Traveller without Luggage, he argues that as far as the script is concerned I have certain conditions of my own which may be justiced too. I believe that no literature is enriched unless it is introduced to the best literature of other languages. Knowledge and experience cannot be contained in boundaries. At the other extreme from this position is the practice of such directors as Dubey (Bombay), Nath (Delhi), Jalan (Calcutta), Arvind Deshpande (Bombay), Jabbar Patel (Pune and Bombay), and Usha Ganguli (Calcutta), whose overwhelming commitment is to Indian plays, especially contemporary Indian plays, both in the original languages and in translation. Among them, these twenty or so directors of the post-independence period cover the full range of classical, premodern, and modern conventions of representation, both Indian and Western, and demonstrate the essential di,erence between Indian and Western performance contexts. The characteristic function of directors in the West is to direct plays in established genres, written in a single language within a relatively homogeneous culture; none of their Indian counterparts can adhere to that
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model. In the work of Indian directors, languages, histories, and cultures coexist: realism competes with antirealism, the proscenium with environmental theatre, word-centered drama with nonverbal theatre languages, Sophocles with Tendulkar. As determined by the work of the most inbuential directors (recorded in appendix 6), contemporary performance practices are therefore cosmopolitan and versatile, universalizing the local even as they localize the universal. In the next section I use the data in appendix 6 very selectively to highlight two powerful models of directing work that in qualitative terms represent the polarities of contemporary practice as well as the best that is achievable by their respective exponents. The crst shows a holistic approach to theatre as art, craft, discipline, and public/social institution, as evidenced in the metropolitan practices of Alkazi and the deliberately provincial practices of Subbanna. The second involves an intense focus on the development of new performance idioms or theatre languages, in the aesthetic theory and practice of such experimental directors as Panikkar, Thiyam, and Karanth. The Polarities of Theatre Work The Metropolis versus the Village: Alkazi and Subbanna At crst glance, Ebrahim Alkazi and K. V. Subbanna seem to represent opposite extremes in contemporary Indian theatre practice. Alkazi received part of his training abroad, spent his theatrical career in Bombay and Delhi, and for cfteen years headed the National School of Drama, Indias premier state-supported institution of theatre education and training. Subbannas lifelong association has been with the villages and district towns of the southern state of Karnataka, where he is labeled a cultural impresario of the rural regions. Attending college in the city of Mysore in the early 1950s constituted his longest period of residence in a large urban area. Ninasam (an acronym for Nilakanteshwara Natya Seva Sangh), the theatre institution he cofounded in 1949, is located in the hamlet of Heggodu, about 10 kilometers from the town of Sagar and 350 kilometers from the state capital of Bangalore. Throughout his directing career, Alkazi worked with Indias two transregional languages English during the 1950s in Bombay, and Hindi, which he promoted vigorously as a major theatre language, during the 1960s and 1970s in Delhi. Subbanna works exclusively in Kannada, which has about thirty-cve million speakers in the crst decade of the twenty-crst century but constitutes the majority language only within the borders of Karnataka. During
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his high-procle and controversial tenure at the NSD from 1962 to 1977, Alkazi maintained a strong national presence and an active program of collaboration with international (especially European) directors. Although Subbanna has been active in Ninasam since 1956, he gained substantial national and international attention only in 1991, when he won the prestigious pan-Asian Ramon Magsaysay Award for creative communication in the arts. His organization is supported by its own activities and grantsin-aid from the state and national governments; to date, two Ford Foundation grants for clm and theatre outreach (198385 and 1986) have been the only signiccant sources of additional funding. Despite these di,erences of background, training, and institutional aliation, Alkazi and Subbanna are comparable national cgures, placed on a footing of equality by the pioneering quality of their work as directors, their organizational energy, and the ambitious contexts in which they place theatre. Alkazis distinctive contribution to the post-independence celd is a comprehensive approach to the art and discipline of theatre, which he undertook to translate into institutional practices. The theatre education course he instituted at the Theatre Group in the 1950s consisted of thirty-cve lectures covering all aspects of the theater, dramatic literature, and the cne arts, politics, sociology, and economics because he believed in the inter-relationship among the arts and in theatres connections to its world (Alkazi, 291). As director of the National School of Drama, Alkazi established a three-year academic curriculum that became a model for theatre training in India, combining a broad-based theoretical and practical education in world drama and performance with specialization in a chosen celd. Again, the pedagogic principle underlying the program was that theatre could not be taught, learned, or practiced without a knowledge of its signiccant traditionsIndian, Western, and nonWestern, as well as classical, modern, and contemporary. In 1964 Alkazi founded the National School of Drama Repertory Company and over the next thirteen years directed eighteen of its forty-eight productions (the most by a single director), including landmark versions of Dharamvir Bharatis Andha yug (1967 and 1974), Girish Karnads Tughlaq (1974), and Balwant Gargis Sultan Razia (1972). In an international perspective, even more novel and ambitious were his Hindi and Urdu productions of a succession of canonical Western plays, from Euripides Trojan Women (1966) to Becketts W aiting for Godot (1967), Bchners Dantons Death (1973), and Molires School for Wives (1976), as well as Shakespeares King Lear (1964) and Othello (1969). At the Repertory, Alkazi therefore concentrated on assimilating Western playwrights to a major Indian language,
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while the companys other active directors, especially Mohan Maharshi, Om Shivpuri, Shanta Gandhi, and Bhanu Bharati, balanced the o,erings with classical and new Indian plays. Over the same period the Repertory established a national schedule of touring productions in addition to its local season and became the only continuously active professional theatre company of its kind in Delhia role it continues to fulcll today. Alkazis work as a director and administrator from the 1950s to the 1970s was also inseparable from his e,orts to create and sustain audiences. During his management of Theatre Group and Theatre Unit in Bombay (195062), audience development was a priority because in his view the real test of theatre lay in the artists ability to communicate with audiences and the audiences receptivity to the presentation (Alkazi, 293, 295). Over a decade, the two groups gradually built up an audience of something like 3,000 persons who we could be reasonably sure would see any kind of play regardless of style, character, or quality (294). After he moved to Delhi in 1962, Alkazis strategy of audience development came to involve the resources and prestige of his new institution, the NSD. His distaste for commercialism and the vulgarity of corporate sponsorship meant that most of his developmental e,orts were sponsored by the cultural bureaucracy. To dislodge the foreign High Commission performance culture in English that he felt had reduced Delhi to a cultural desert, Alkazi concentrated on building an audience among the Hindi-speaking middle-class population, which was a very important factor in Delhi society (Alkazi, 295). To expand the venues for theatre in a severely restricted environment, he also oversaw the construction of the permanent open-air Meghdoot Theatre on the grounds of the Sangeet Natak Akademi and improvised other open theatres in some of Delhis most famous archeological and historical monumentsthe Old Fort, Ferozeshah Kotla, and Talkatora Gardens. Alkazis productions of Tughlaq, Andha Yug, and King Lear in the latter venues combined quality, accessibility, and historical importance in a way that became a turning point in the experience of spectatorship in Delhi. The scale of NSD productions has never been as grand after Alkazis departure in 1977, and the audience has dwindled from the core of cve or six thousand viewers, but attendance habits have remained stable enough to make the Repertory Company a viable professional enterprise. The activities of Subbanna and his associates at Ninasam parallel every one of Alkazis initiatives, but in the vastly di,erent contexts of rural communities in Karnataka, and with Kannada as the medium of communication. Beginning as the attempt of a small rural community
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to redecne its identity in and relate itself meaningfully to the larger world outside, the organization (despite its remote location) has dedicated itself to making accessible to its society the best of world art, literature, culture, and knowledge (Ninasam Ensemble, 1). From the early 1950s to the late 1970s, activities at Ninasam mainly centered on Subbannas productions of plays by key contemporary Indian playwrights, such as Chandrashekhar Kambar and Vijay Tendulkar, and a clm society (the Ninasam Chitrasamaj), which was founded in 1973. In 1983, Subbanna undertook one of his most ambitious projectsan adaptation of Chinua Achebes novel Things Fall Apart for performance by members of the Siddhi tribe, descendants of African slaves who inhabit small forest settlements in North Kanara. The production followed the inception of the Ninasam Theatre Institute, which was established in 1980 to provide formal theatre education and training to students who could take their activities to all parts of the state, with the eventual aim of setting up a meaningful mass discourse (Ninasam Prospectus, 9). The one-year diploma in theatre arts at the institute was consciously modeled on the three-year course of instruction at NSD. All six parts of the syllabus theatre concepts, history of drama, history of theatre, acting, stagecraft, and theatre practiceo,er historical coverage of Indian and Western materials, with attention to Kannada traditions wherever appropriate. By linking the theatre training to the specicc cultural contexts of Karnataka, and by emphasizing the needs of theatre workers in the rural regions, the Institute has also kept the practical aspects of training in view. The Ninasam organization expanded further in 1985, when Tirugata was launched as an itinerant repertory company to counteract the limitations of both professional and noncommercial serious theatre in the state. Like its NSD equivalent, Tirugata works within an institutional framework, and serves as a professional laboratory for members and alumni of the Theatre Institute. The language of all productions is Kannada, and the four-month annual touring schedule is both uniform and rigorous. Since 1985, Tirugata has taken three major plays from the Indian and Western traditions and one childrens play annually to multiple venues in Karnataka, totalling 68 plays, 2,330 shows, and an audience of 1,546,725 by 2001 (these cgures are meticulously recorded in the organizations publications). Unlike the state support extended to the NSD, Tirugata productions are supported largely by box-oce receipts in rural and semirural areas. While Alkazi focused on directing at the NSD Repertory, Subbanna has taken the lead in translating or adapting a range of plays (fourteen in all) for Tirugata, ceding directing opportunities to
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other institute associates, such as C. R. Jambe, Akshara K. V., and Ekbal Ahmad, as well as celebrated guest directors such as B. V. Karanth, K. N. Panikkar, and Fritz Bennewitz (cg. 5). Major Western plays are again dominant in Subbannas outputhis versions of Shakespeares Timon of Athens (1993), Gogols The Inspector General (1983 and 1989), and Brechts The Threepenny Opera (1986) and The Good Woman of Setzuan (1989) accomplish for Kannada as the language of performance what Alkazis indigenized productions of Western classics had achieved for Hindi. While exercising a shaping inbuence on the Tirugata repertory, Subbanna has thus been a literary resource and versatile facilitator rather than a dominant functionary, in keeping with the Ninasam credo of democracy and decentralization. The organizations approach to audience is summed up in Subbannas dictum that theatre cannot survive without a communityso long as you are in touch with the needs of a community, your theatre will live; if not, it will atrophy and die (Bharucha, House, 43). All aspects of theatre theory, training, and practice at Ninasam are adapted to the needs of its rural and semirural audiences, giving credibility to the claim that the
Fig. 5. The king and the poet-mystic in twelfth-century Kalyan. Achchut Kumar H. K. as Kallappa, Siddaraj Kalyankar as Bijjala, Lakshmi Kabberali as Gangambika, and Nataraj Honnavalli as Basavanna in Girish Karnads Tal-danda, directed by C. R. Jambe, Ninasam Tirugata, Heggodu, 1992. Courtesy of Girish Karnad.
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organization has developed into the authentic voice of a people engaged in exploring an alternative model of modern civilization (Ninasam Ensemble, 1). The productions of the Theatre Institute in Heggodu are staged at the Shivarama Karanth Rangmandir, a 600-seat auditorium that is among the best-equipped such facilities in rural Karnataka. With reference to audiences elsewhere, the touring Ninasam Tirugata productions have achieved complete geographical penetration of the state, recording performances in 213 di,erent locations over seventeen years. The two-year Ford Foundation project (titled Ninasam Janaspandana) was an extensive audience outreach e,ort that took plays, theatre training, clms, and clm appreciation courses on the road so that even remote villages could participate in the experiences available at Heggodu. Subbanna used the funds from a follow-up Ford Foundation grant to set up six rural theatre banks with the equipment needed to stage plays locally. From the beginning, Subbanna has also been committed to clm as the crucial medium of cultural education in rural areas. The Ninasam Chitrasamaj, the only rural clm society in India, manages a regular program of screenings, discussions, and festivals. Its annual clm appreciation course was renamed the Culture Course in 198990 and expanded to include theatre, music, literature, and the visual arts. Strikingly reminiscent of Alkazis lecture courses at Theatre Group in the 1950s, it is administered by the noted Kannada writer U. R. Ananthamurthy and attended by about one hundred delegates in October every year. The similarities in the artistic, cultural, institutional, and social positioning of theatre by Alkazi and Subbanna carry lessons that are vital in India. Modernity, cosmopolitanism, and professionalism are not metropolitan preserves but qualities achievable in unlikely locations when artists and intellectuals establish a suciently complex connection between theatre and the world. The activities of Ninasam indicate neither a traditionalist nor an exoticized view of the village, but progressively involve rural inhabitants in a mature cultural exchange on an international scale. The education of the rural communities also takes place through cultural forms rather than mass political actiona signiccant shift in relation to the ideological thrust of the IPTA program in the 1940s. In addition, a vitally modern regional language like Kannada clearly has the resources to serve as a medium for the best in world culture, and it maintains a stronger rapport with its audiences than a pan-Indian language like Hindi. In all these respects Ninasam appears to stand in a microcosmic relation to the urban theatre world of Bombay and Delhi. But in another perspective, the relations between the metropolis and the village seem to reverse
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themselves. In a 1973 interview Alkazi lamented the lack of a sense of community among urban theatre practitioners after twenty-cve years of activity, and also the absence of any professional standard . . . [or] criteria by which works are judged, not only by critics but by theatre workers at large (Alkazi, 315). Ninasam, in contrast, has decned professionalism and professionalization as its most important goals, in the areas of teaching, theatre training, production, audience education, and outreach. Although unique, the organization thus alters, by virtue of what it undertakes and accomplishes, the conventional balance of power between the village and the city. If we had to choose a culture centre in India today, Rustom Bharucha comments, it would not, to my mind, be found in any of the major institutions in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, or Bhopal, which continue to be isolated from the needs of our people. Rather, I would locate this centre in the village of Heggodu, where one cnds alternatives not only for the Indian theatre but for the mobilization and growth of our culture at large (Theatre and World, 284). The New Theatre Languages of Panikkar, Thiyam, and Karanth Commenting on the problems of dramatizing postcoloniality that such African and Caribbean playwrights as Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott face, Tejumola Olaniyan notes that discussions of postcolonial issues in drama usually open with the vexed question of the possibility or otherwise of an indigenous, culturally matrixed theatrical language, which involves not only the verbal medium of the drama, but also its nonverbal constitutive forms and techniques and their source traditions (Dramatizing, 486). In India the metaphor of language, with its accompanying cgures of an alphabet, a grammar, syntactic structures, and semantic codes, has become a commonplace in the elaboration of an antirealist, antimodern, non-Western, body-centered (rather than word-centered) theatre aesthetic rooted in indigenous performance traditions. The principal theorists of this aesthetic are either playwright-directors, such as Tanvir, Panikkar, Kambar, and Thiyam, who synthesize more or less well-known source materials (mythic events, oral or written narratives, folktales, and earlier plays) into highly individualized and distinctive performance texts of their own; or those, such as Karanth and Chowdhry, who take established works (plays by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Jean Racine, and Lorca, for instance) and accommodate them to the cultural matrices of an Indian language as well as indigenous styles of presentation. I have discussed the cultural, ideological, and (inter)textual dimensions of these methods elsewhere in this study; here, from the viewpoint of directing,
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it is important to focus on the key theoretical concepts that constitute a new poetics of performance. Based in the coastal city of Trivandrum in the southern state of Kerala, K. N. Panikkar is Indias premier director of the classic Sanskrit plays of Bhasa, Kalidasa, and Mahendra Vikram Varman, as well as the author of original Malayalam plays developed in a workshop setting with his group Sopanam. His presentation style is inbuenced in part by the studied, stylized antirealism of Sanskrit theatre, which distances performer and spectator alike from spontaneous overbows of powerful emotion. But to an equally important extent he draws on the regional musical, dance, ritual, and martial art forms particular to Kerala (sopana sangeetam, mohini attam, theyyam, padayani, and kalaripayattu, among others) to create a modern theatrical idiom that is compatible with the cultural heritage of the region and the nation. Panikkar thus brings a distinctively late twentieth-century sensibility to bear on a range of postclassical, traditional regional forms, serving as a non-exploitative bridge between the past and the present, between the rich indigenous traditions, and the modern urban world (Zarrilli, viii). Three concepts are especially pertinent to a discussion of his methodhis interest in a universal language of theatre, his classically derived decnition of theatre as visual poetry (drishya kavya), and his understanding of the theatrical text as an occasion for nontextual staging. For Panikkar, the universality of theatre inheres in its capacity for nonverbal communication. The body of the actor creates the alphabet of this signifying system, and bodily movements constitute the language of expression (CIT, 62). The concept of visual poetry (borrowed from classical Sanskrit genre theory and distinct from Aristotles concept of spectacle or opsis in the Poetics) implies a strong sense of structure, rhythm, and measured movement, as well as the integration of elements such as lighting, set design, costume, and makeup into the nonverbal supratext. Theatre as visual poetry is a heightened, dynamic, and carefully controlled sensory experience, just as the theatre of verbal poetry is a heightened emotional experience (cg. 6). The idea of buid rather than cxed texts allows for the collaborative development of original scripts in rehearsal, but it is equally applicable to the revivals of Sanskrit plays because Panikkar introduces extensive nontextual staging elements into the supposedly cxed Sanskrit text and sometimes inserts extrinsic material to make the core text aesthetically e,ective. Such inventiveness, Phillip B. Zarrilli suggests, has enabled Panikkar to move away from Sanskrit drama as a tired spoken form and to demonstrate its rich
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theatrical potential. The nontextual elements in Panikkars theatre derive from the nonverbal expressivity of dance, the rhythm and melodic vocality of music, the iteration of ritual, and the aggressive but controlled physicality of martial art forms. He has sought these qualities in the cultural traditions of his own region, but this turn toward indigenous resources is not a going back; rather, it is a movement forward that has support from behind, from our own tradition (CIT, 62). The important distinctions in Panikkars dramaturgy are therefore between the basic-written text and the acting-action text, narration and action, the written version of a text and its extended stage interpretation or the plot- or character-based structure of a play and its performing structure. The thematic richness of a performance depends not on an intricate plot but the strong communication of textual meaning as action, particularly through the resources of music and dance. Panikkars ideal of dramatic representation in this respect is the kudiyattam actor who undertakes a night-long elaboration of a single mythic episode before an enraptured audience. He recognizes that the written classic represents a special instance in this performance process because of its well-known prior text, but as his production notes for Kalidasas
Fig. 6. The ascetic and the courtesan. Scene from Mahendra Vikram Varmans Bhagavadajjukam, tranlated by K. V. Subbanna, directed by K. N. Panikkar, Ninasam Tirugata, 2000. Courtesy of Akshara K. V.
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Shakuntalam argue, a classic . . . gives us sucient scope to reconceive and reconstruct it in the modern Indian theatre[;] in fact such great works gain the status of classic perhaps mainly due to their viability for such reconstruction for all times (Panikkar, Production, 1). The poetics and practice of Ratan Thiyam overlap with Panikkars to some extent because he has a similar interest in combining classical Indian dramaturgy with regional and folk musical, dance, and martial arts traditions, and has presented some of the same Sanskrit plays by Bhasa in revival. Thiyams work as a director, however, is a unique fusion of the aesthetic and the political. Such plays as Karnabharam (1979), Imphal Imphal (1982), Chakravyuha (1984), and Uttar priyadarshi (1999) are deeply immersed in the problem of violence and the embattled post-independence politics of Thiyams native northeastern state of Manipur. But the omnipresent inbuence of indigenous narratives and regional performing traditions on his theatre embeds the political and philosophical content of his plays in antirealistic, performer-centered forms of varying complexity that rebexively draw attention to the aesthetics of presentation. The stagecraft that communicates his ideas is the most ambitious, exacting, and innovative contemporary Indian expression of the concepts of visual poetry and nontextual staging in the theatre. Like Panikkar, Thiyam is committed to nonverbal signs in performance because the word cannot travel properly and reach the inner ear; productions that are too wordoriented fail to communicate (Interview, 2). In comparison, the body is all-important: It is imperative to make the body intelligent, so that when the brain begins to think the body should be able to display the thought. The vibrations of thought should emerge through body movements, postures and gestures orchestrated and translated into action (Chakravyuha, xlii). Todd Hammes describes the rhythms of Thiyams theatre as the result of a fully integrated aesthetic of movement, sound, light, poetics, and color, [rebecting] both regional and intra-national concerns and practices. Epic in scope, Thiyams works rely on an intensive and physically demanding performance technique, developed speciccally for his company (2). All the members of his Chorus Repertory Theatre (founded in 1976) receive rigorous physical and vocal training in martial arts, dance, and musical forms, as well as technical training in stagecraft and design. Highly symbolic props, elegant costumes, and dramatic lighting e,ects are other important elements in Thiyams carefully choreographed, visually spectacular theatre. Thiyam regards the cultural resources of the Manipur region as critical to his composite art because elements of theatre are more available
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[here] than in many other states, and the traditional art forms can be utilized in theatre as a source of inspiration, as direct elements and nondirect elements (Thiyam, Audience, 64). The members of Thiyams company, however, are not traditional performers but city dwellers who want to study theatre as an art form both physically and intellectually, because Thiyams object is to design a training program for contemporary theatre and communicate with contemporary audiences (Chakravyuha, xxiv). In comparison with Panikkar, therefore, Thiyams relationship to tradition is more deeply mediated by postmodernist experimentation, and his view of theatre as eventually an autonomous and syncretic art: I dont really know what [my theater] should be called. . . . What I call my method has no manifesto. . . . I dont utilize any particular form. Whatever I create on stage is not a tradition. The fact is that after breaking the mold of a traditional form, I utilize [it] according to the suitability of a particular situation (Interview, 2). Thiyam thus adapts inherited elements to the needs of a specicc work through a process of invention or fabrication that contrasts clearly with the relatively consistent traditionalist aesthetic of Panikkars plays. As a third systematic theorist of nonverbal theatre languages, B. V. Karanth (19282002) presents interesting parallels and contrasts to Panikkar and Thiyam because his theatrecraft is less intricate and intense than theirs but has greater range, both in the choice of texts and directing styles. Beginning as an apprentice with the Gubbi Veeranna touring professional company in Karnataka, Karanth received extensive training in theatre and music at Banaras Hindu University. He served as director of the National School of Drama (197781) and the Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal (198286), before returning to Karnataka as a freelance director. Instead of maintaining a prolonged association with a single theatre group in a single region, among contemporary directors Karanth worked with the largest number of theatre groups, in locations as varied as Banaras, Delhi, Heggodu, Bhopal, Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Chandigarh, and in languages as diverse as Kannada, Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Telugu, and English. His productions encompassed classical, modern, and contemporary Indian drama, and Western and non-Western classics from all periods, representing in aggregate the richest body of directing work among his contemporaries (see appendix 6). He was also the leading composer of stage music in his generation, a passionate and prolicc director of childrens plays, and, like Alkazi, a theatre administrator at two key institutions. Karanths conception of theatre work derives from his experience and
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training in Indian aesthetics, folk forms, classical music, choreography, and cross-cultural performance. The important distinction he makes is between literary drama, which does not translate into any speciccally theatrical action, and theatrical genres like folk drama, which work by means of movement, gesture, rhythm, sound, and visual poetry. What I mean by theatricality is in fact the theatre language which is not a verbal language, he clarices (CIT, 86). In the Yakshagana folk style of Karnataka, for instance, death can be signiced by a particular dance or even a change in lighting. Such conventions denote several codes which can be found only on the stage (87), and the analogy with language points to their systemic nature as well as their communicative power. Karanth argues that modern urban amateur (that is, noncommercial) drama forgot to create such a language because it was preoccupied with social issues and revolution, and the conventions of cinematic realism that succeeded it were entirely inadequate for aesthetic representation. In the revisionary practice of the post-independence director, however, a given theatre language may be intrinsic to a play, or it may be superadded for particular e,ects in performance. Thus, Karanths 1973 Kannada production of Karnads Hayavadana (which he considered his most successful work) followed some yakshagana conventions because the playwright had already encoded them in the text, but his 1979 Hindi version of Shakespeares Macbeth in the yakshagana style (using a major new poetic translation by Raghuvir Sahay) employed conventions that were alien both to the Elizabethan original and to the Indian language of performance. Despite its deliberateness, this method has been enormously inbuential because it addresses the vital issue of the relevance of traditional Indian forms to contemporary theatre at the levels of both theory and practice. Panikkar and Thiyams original texts for performance are natural expressions of an aesthetic grounded in tradition, but, in principle, Karanths synthetic method in Macbeth also o,ers a theoretical explanation for Tanvirs Chhattisgarhi version of Shudrakas Sanskrit classic Mrichhakatika (1958); Thiyams Manipuri version of Antigone (1986); Neelam Mansingh Chowdhrys Yerma (1991), which uses the cross-dressing male naqqals of Punjab to recreate Lorcas tragedy in Punjabi; and Usha Gangulis Rudali (1993), which adapts Mahasweta Devis Bengali story about a caste of professional female mourners in rural Rajasthan. Despite their preexisting texts, all these plays are preeminently directors vehicles, though not all directors are preoccupied to the same extent as Karanth with nonverbal communication. As the leading theorist of such theatre work (and a director who did not write major works for the stage),
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Karanth is unique in straddling the divide between modernity and tradition, while sharing important attributes with each of the model cgures discussed in this section: he was an urban artist and educator, like Alkazi; a social visionary, like Subbanna; and a poetician of nonverbal representation, like Panikkar or Thiyam. Theatre Audiences To turn from the issues of text and performance to the issue of reception in contemporary Indian theatre is to confront an anomaly: the massive authorial, directorial, and institutional e,orts to (re)invent theatre as art are directed at an audience that is minuscule in relation to urban populations in India, fragmented by region and language, and asymmetrical in terms of size across di,erent regions because of historical, linguistic, socioeconomic, and cultural factors. The metropolises of Calcutta and Bombay, where modern theatre crst appeared and established itself in both commercial and noncommercial forms, have had more or less continuous traditions of theatrical performance and spectatorship from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Since the 1950s, the e,orts of specicc theatre groups, professional companies, and institutions have created active theatre cultures in a few other cities, such as Delhi, Pune, Madras, Bangalore, Trivandrum, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Imphal, Lucknow, and Baroda. Because of the connection between regional geography and language in India, audiences in all these locations tend to be attached to specicc majority languagesBengali in Calcutta, Marathi and Gujarati in Bombay, Hindi and Punjabi in Delhi, and so on. In the vast majority of urban locations, however, there is no modern theatre other than amateur productions and occasional performances by visiting groups, and in rural areas (with notable exceptions, such as Karnataka and Bengal) there is scarcely any contact with modern theatre forms at all, although there is a continuing connection with folk genres and increasing penetration by the full range of popular and mass-cultural media. Adya Rangacharyas 1968 comment, that except in half-a-dozen cities in India there is no such thing as an audience for the amateur [i.e., serious] theatre, continues to be largely, and regrettably, true nearly forty years later (Professional Theatre, 52). The ambivalent axiom that the audience for contemporary theatre is overwhelmingly urban, if not metropolitan, is coupled with a strong theoretical and critical presumption that it is homogeneous in composition. The typical Indian theatregoer is perceived as middle-class, educated
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(though not always professionally trained or employed), relatively unseasoned in the culture of theatre, and more or less receptive to an eclectic range of modern theatre forms. In India as in the West, this spectator has extensive contact with the mass media of radio, clm, television, and video, and the genre of popular music; but in contrast with the Western viewer, the urban Indian spectator is unaccustomed to theatre as a competitive commercial form and unacquainted with the institutional spectrum that runs from school and community productions to theatre in the round, professional regional theatre, avant-garde performance, and mainstream and experimental theatre in the metropolis. Given the colossal presence of the popular clm industry and the absence of a comparable tradition of theatregoing, the Indian viewer is more likely to invest in the price of a luxury ticket at the cinema (Rs. 65100 at 2004 prices) than go to a new play (for Rs. 3080); or he or she may be forced by economic factors (the cumulative cost of tickets, transportation, childcare, etc.) to forego the theatre experience entirely and settle for the cheaper in-home media of television and video. Correspondingly, for those who bring plays to the stage, the development of serious theatre largely outside the marketplace has meant the absence of any necessary correlation between theatrical production and a body of paying consumers. Even major theatre groups do not have an unqualiced hold on their patrons: Badal Sircar recalls Shombhu Mitras Bohurupee cghting a lone battle through the [1950s], building an audience slowly. The force of the Calcutta theatre-goers dwindled . . . most of them being won over gradually by clms (Third Theatre, 10). In contrast, such state-supported cultural institutions as the SNA (New Delhi), the NSD (New Delhi), the Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal (Bhopal), and the NCPA (Bombay) have fostered a subsidized theatre culture in which a select audience has access to prestigious productions at little or no cost. Although this creates a discriminating and loyal coterie of viewers, it disengages spectatorship from the material realities of production. The stark conceptual separation of serious from commercial theatre also means that in the few urban locations where both forms do exist, their respective audiences are perceived as mutually exclusive, even if they overlap signiccantly in practice. These conditions have determined the terms in which contemporary Indian playwrights and directors have approached the problem of creating, augmenting, and sustaining audiences. Like post-independence drama itself, the issue of audience is characterized not by a steady progression from decciency to plenitude but by erratic patterns of activity and stasis, success and failure, conventionality and innovation. As a
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populist left-wing organization that included certain forms of music and dance in its strategic decnition of theatre, the IPTA succeeded for a decade (during the 1940s) in mobilizing mass audiences throughout the country, with some open-air performances drawing almost ten thousand spectators (see Bharucha, Rehearsals, 42). But the movements most energetic years preceded independence, and by the early 1950s it was no longer regarded as either a theoretical or practical model for mainstream urban drama. Perhaps in reaction against the IPTAs mass activism, the drama seminar of 1956 (discussed in chapter 2) did not focus on the audience at all as a subject for specicc discussion. Its participants addressed every major aspect of how the future Indian drama would materialize, but, aside from recognizing the urban-rural split, they shied away from any analysis of audience development and training. With the activities of the IPTA and contemporary forms of street and protest theatre as models, some theatre practitioners have again linked the question of audience to the need for an organized theatre movement that would allow theatre to reach more than a small section of the masses (Ganguli, Rudali, 16). But most of the successful post-independence e,orts at audience development have been bourgeois rather than populist in their objectives, and local or regional rather than national in scope, whether they are aimed at middle-class viewers in specicc urban locations or at semiurban and rural viewers. Among the various positions that actively relate theatre to its potential and actual audiences, two approaches are notableone centered on the dramatic author and text, the other on the experience of viewers in the theatre. The Literary Contract: If You Stage It, They Will Come In a 1970 interview published in Enact, Rajinder Nath acknowledged the urgent need for a larger audience in urban theatre but argued that the means of such expansion did not lie in the pursuit of folk theatre as a movement or . . . a mass medium or in the resolve to take theatre to the masses (Avik Ghosh, Rajinder Nath). In his view, a large segment of the Delhi audience capable of supporting sophisticated theatre had remained untapped because of the awkwardly short run of individual plays, poor publicity, and such practical problems as transportation. But he also noted changesfor instance, the increase in box oce receipts on the day of a given performanceand saw the unusual success of Dishantars 1969 production of Rakeshs Adhe adhure as the sign of a new trend in spectatorship. In Naths opinion, the theatre audience had decnitely increased, though it needs more initiation and he suggested
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that if this kind of concerted activity goes on, then automatically one day a proper number of theatregoers will be guaranteed for every show (Rajinder Nath). Naths remarks articulate the essential premise underlying the performance of literary drama in the post-independence period in India: that the conjunction of a strong dramatic text, an accomplished director, and gifted performers from an established theatre group or institution constitutes an artistic event that generates its own audience, obviating the need for aggressive intervention by the presenters. Many of the classic aliations in contemporary Indian theatre have in fact consisted of such partnershipsfor instance, between Mitra, Tagore, and the Bohurupee group in Calcutta; Bharati, Dubey, and Theatre Unit in Bombay; or Rakesh, Shivpuri, and Dishantar in Delhi. The implied audience of each such creative exchange is in principle an ideal assembly of viewers who possess the taste, sophistication, and intelligence to participate in the cultural experience. But in practice, the commitment of predominantly middle-class urban viewers to the work of specicc theatre groups, directors, and performers is also the most important single factor in the emergence of a small but steady audience for serious drama. The geographical and organizational stability of major theatre groupsmost are founded and managed by the same individual for two or more decadespromotes such loyalty, which is both a condition and an e,ect of anticommercialism.1 As Alkazis comment about the steady support for Theatre Group and Theatre Unit suggests, once audiences have developed a bond with specicc practitioners, they are willing to accept a wide range of theatrical experiences as a condition of the association. Thus, in a typical thirty-year span, the Awishkar group in Bombay has o,ered its viewers major work by such older playwrights as Tendulkar, Rakesh, Sircar, Khanolkar, Elkunchwar, Karnad, Kambar, and Majumdar, and such younger playwrights as Achyut Vaze, Rajiv Naik, and Makarand Sathe, as well as Euripides, Luigi Pirandello, Lorca, Tennessee Williams, Franz Xaver Kroetz, and Fo in translation. The annual national-level theatre festivals organized by the groups Nandikar in Calcutta and Prithvi Theatre in Bombay also indicate the high degree of audience interest in the activities of specicc organizations. This element has also made it possible for Delhi-based director Arvind Gaur to claim that his group, Asmita, survives exclusively on the basis of audience support. The partnership of author, director, theatre group, performers, and implied ideal viewer decnes one major paradigm of spectatorshipbut because this is not an aggressive program of audience expansion, its scale
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remains limited and conceptually independent of the realities of production. Most landmark productions in India have exceptionally short runs: Vijaya Mehtas ambitious and experimental Marathi version of Brechts The Good Woman of Setzuan closed after cve performances in 1972, while Alkazis Tughlaq at the Old Fort in Delhi ran for a few weeks in the spring of 1974. One of the performances of Harold Pinters The Caretaker, undertaken as an independent venture by Dubey, had to be canceled because it had no audience at allyet the event was not seen as detracting from the importance of either Pinter or Dubey. While on tour, such classics as Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal and Habib Tanvirs Charandas chor are routinely scheduledeven in a metropolis like Delhi for sold out single performances in auditoriums that seat barely cve to six hundred people. Conversely, when an important new play succeeds in the theatre (again, under the specialized conditions of noncommercial production), the credit goes primarily to the textfor Nath, Alkazi, and Dubey, the full houses for Adhe adhure in Delhi and the cfty-six performances in Bombay (all in 1969) concrmed the power of the play, and its ability to generate almost overnight an ampliced audience for serious drama. Interestingly, as the key cgure in a literary contract that places spectators in an important but not central position, the dramatic author in this scheme is more or less withdrawn from the audience, conceptually even more than literally. As a paradigmatic example of the playwright-asself-expressive author, theorist, and critic, Rakesh did not o,er any signiccant commentary on reception, either of drama in general or of his plays in particular. For him, the excitement of the collaboration with Jalan on Lahron ke rajhans lay primarily in the textual transformations of the play and their interpretation by performers, not in their presumed e,ects on the audience. Similarly, Mahesh Elkunchwars early plays were written in isolation from the mainstream of Marathi theatre, without any expectation of performancethey caught Vijaya Mehtas attention when they appeared in the leading Marathi literary magazine, Satyakatha. Although he has rebected extensively on the craft of playwriting, Elkunchwar rarely refers to his viewers and continues to profess indi,erence toward a large audience. A less reclusive author, Girish Karnad describes an untrained audience as the major problem confronting Indian theatre but also approaches the contemporary Indian audience (composed of readers and viewers) as a homogeneous entity to which various collective responses can be ascribed. He notes, for instance, that the tradition of mythological and historical plays has great potential in India because
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the element of myth and history is common to most audiences. . . . Part of the e,ect [of a historical play] comes from the fact that the audience already has a set of responses to the particular situation I am dealing with (Paul, Girish Karnad; my emphasis). This anticipated uniformity glosses over the substantially di,erent responses to a play like Tughlaq among Hindu and Muslim, northern and southern, urban and semiurban viewers. Vijay Tendulkar is perhaps the only literary playwright who has decned his art in relation to his public because he views theatre as essentially a spectator-driven form. Every playwright, he argues, has cxed before him an image of his viewer. . . . If the viewer is not kept in sight, playwriting is not possible at all (Natak, 23). Tendulkars mission from the beginning, however, has been to challenge the complacency of a middle-class urban Marathi audience whose desire for brisk, light, and mindless entertainment he blames for the ascent of the medium of clm and the decline of serious drama. His concern with the audience, therefore, is inseparable from a blunt declaration of independence.
I am not ready to surrender the freedom of choosing my subjects to my audience, nor am I ready to accept the restriction of writing plays according to the audiences whims. Its not just that I want a viewerit is only for him that I write my plays. But this viewer has to be someone who respects my freedom to choose the subject of my drama, possesses a lively imagination, and savors artistic allusion, subtlety and naturalness instead of wellspoken inanities and showy plot-twists while watching a play. The viewer doesnt have to be an intellectual. If he can simply be as alert, thoughtful, and open-minded in the theatre as his own o,spring, thatll be enough! Is this an illegitimate expectation? (Natak, 23)
Such combativeness toward the audience is atypical among literary playwrights, and the performance history of Tendulkars plays bears out the paradoxical relationship. Three of his playsGidhade, Sakharam binder, and Ghashiram kotwalencountered hostility or outright censorship in the early 1970s because of their ostensible obscenity, iconoclasm, and violence. But with more than one thousand shows over thirty years in India and abroad, Ghashiram is also the most frequently performed postindependence play; others, such as Kamala (1981) and Kanyadaan (1983), are among the most controversial. Although Tendulkars approach to the audience may be qualitatively di,erent from that of his counterparts, ultimately his drama does not disturb or dislodge the literary contract but only enlivens it with debate and polemic.
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Beyond Author and Text: The Audience is Our First Concern The idea of drama-in-performance as a literary and artistic contract between its various makers has been instrumental in securing a place for serious theatre among urban Indian audiences since the mid-1950s. But over the same period other directors and playwright-directors have also pursued an aggressively audience-oriented theatre in accord with their respective (and distinct) political, social, and aesthetic programs, all of which seek to transcend the urban, middle-class orientation of contemporary theatre and to counteract the urban-rural split. In roughly chronological order, the principal of such approaches would include the left-wing political theatre of Utpal Dutt; the egalitarian Third Theatre of Badal Sircar; the folk-based drama of Habib Tanvir; the initiatives of Sircar, Tanvir, and Subbanna with rural audiences; and, most recently, the ideologically dissimilar but woman-centered stage vehicles of Usha Ganguli and Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, which seek to expand the audience for urban theatre radically by reconcguring the elements of performance. As Indias leading Marxist playwright after independence, Utpal Dutt believed that revolutionary theatre is essentially peoples theatre, which means that it must be played before the masses. The audience is our crst concern; matters of form and content come second (Dutt, Theatre as Weapon, 225). Accepting Brechts description of spectators as coauthors of the drama but rejecting the orthodoxies of epic theatre as impracticable in India, Dutt embraced the widest variety of venues (and forms) to reach the revolutionary masses: the urban proscenium stage, the city streets, theatre in the round, and large public spaces in the metropolis, the provincial town, and the hinterland. As impresario at the Minerva Theatre he also developed, in collaboration with the celebrated set designer Tapas Sen, a style of theatre that heightened the political message through spectacular light, sound, and visual e,ects, and urged the audience to savor the very theatricality of theatre. Dutts post-1969 turn toward jatra, the highly popular intermediary theatre of Bengal, signaled yet another experiment in politicizing a form that was already recognized as a potent peoples theatre. Giving even greater priority to the ordinary viewer, but positioning himself crmly outside the Marxist frame, Badal Sircar theorized and developed his Third Theatre as a multifaceted program during the early 1970s, in the same city as Dutt but in opposition to Dutts populism. First, Sircars anganmanch (courtyard theatre) places the audience within and around the performance space,
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on groups of benches rather than individual seats, so that the spectators are not separated either from the performers or from each other. Second, performance spaces (proscenium and nonproscenium) do not serve as the basis of a separation between urban and rural theatre: Sircars plays are performed indoors and outdoors, in cities, towns, and villages. Third, Sircars theatre does not depend on capital or o,er itself as a commodity. He eliminates the buyer-seller relationship in a theatre that is poor by virtue of being reduced to essentials, but also in being inexpensive or free for anyone interested in the experience. Fourth, Sircar relies on movement and gesture rather than a verbal text to quicken the viewers imagination, using the performers body instead of language as the vital expressive element in theatre. Although antithetical in their politics, by focusing on the audience and choosing unconventional venues Dutt and Sircar thus accomplished a revolution in urban theatregoing in Calcutta that other metropolitan locations have not been able to match. Among contemporary practitioners, Tanvir uses the rural/urban binary to make the strongest ideological arguments about theatrical forms as well as audiences. He insists that the audience for serious theatre in a city like Delhi may be larger than before, but it will not realize its potential or embrace provocative plays because of the lethargy of the people . . . [who] would much rather see a Hindi clm than go to a serious play (Avik Ghosh, Habib Tanvir). For Tanvir the real theatre of the people exists in the village, and has to be brought to the educated, because the educated lack the culture which the masses of the villages possess so richly though theyre illiterate. . . . After all we are trying to bridge this gap in terms of development in industry, agriculture. In terms of culture also we have to come to grips with what are the roots [sic] and not always remain in the urban vacuum which has been created in the last few decades. (Paul, Habib Tanvir). But if rural forms must reach the city, urban drama must also return to the hinterland to complete the transformation of the drama-audience relation in both locations. Hence, Tanvirs Naya Theatre, which consists of tribal performers as well as some urban actors, has audiences in cities, towns, villages, and tribal areas. In contrast, K. V. Subbannas answer to the same rural/urban split is to base theatre squarely in the village and then to condition performers and audiences in such a way that theatre becomes a form of cultural and political education for constituencies that are generally ignored in the commerce of modernity. In juxtaposition with the varying approaches to audience maintained by these older male directors, a di,erent dynamic has emerged in the
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work of two successful female directors of the post-1980 period, Usha Ganguli in Calcutta and Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry in Chandigarh. An actress and activist as well as a director, Ganguli formed her group Rangakarmee in Calcutta in 1976 with the fundamental objectives of promoting a socially conscious and responsible theatre movement, producing those dramas which, irrespective of political views, would be useful to society; presenting such socially responsible dramas among the common people in metropolitan [situations] to reach a wider audience so that Hindi theatre could become mass-based (Ganguli, Rudali, 13). Like Shyamanand Jalan, she was committed to serious Hindi theatre in Bengali-speaking Calcutta, but, unlike him, she took on the challenge of working outside corporate sponsorship and upper-class patronage and reached out to an audience of schoolteachers, students, clerks, and housewives. The early work by her group followed established practice by o,ering Hindi versions of important new Indian plays, such as Ratnakar Matkaris Lok-katha (1987) and Elkunchwars Holi (1989), and Hindi adaptations of Western works, such as Arnold Weskers Roots (as Parichay, 1978) and Ibsens A Dolls House (as Gudia ghar, 1981). It was during the 1990s, however, that Ganguli found her niche as a director and actress through three kinds of productionsambitious stage versions of cctional works by established Indian authors, notably Rudali (1993) and Mukti (1999) by the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi; activist plays on topical sociopolitical issues developed specially for her group, such as Beti aayee (1996) and Shobha-yatra (2001); and highly political indigenized versions of Western classics, such as Brechts Mother Courage (as Himmat mai, 1998). The connections between author, text, director, and performer in these productions are far more eclectic and unconventional compared to the literary partnerships discussed earlier, but they have secured audiences for Ganguli on an entirely new scale. According to Jalan, Hindi theatre used to be restricted to a small, Hindi-speaking population [in Calcutta]. Ushas group has been able to cut across language and community barriers (L. Ghosh, Iron Lady, 2). At the levels of both process and product, Gangulis breakthrough e,ort was the collaboration with Mahasweta Devi on Rudali, the play in which she created the leading role of the professional mourner Sanichari, and which had completed more than 150 performances between 1993 and 2004. In 1996, a weekend performance of Beti aayee, a play about the mistreatment of female children, had an audience of two thousand people. In 1999, Ganguli deviated from her own practice and produced her second collaborative piece with
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Mahasweta Devi (Mukti ) not in Hindi but in Bengali, again scoring a success with more than 120 performances. What these cgures record is a new phenomenon in metropolitan India at the turn of the new century: the emergence of a substantial audience for a thinking theatre that takes on issues of exploitation, oppression, and corruption in the sociopolitical realms, and becomes materially self-sustaining even though it is not geared primarily to the box oce. (In this context, the survival of Rangakarmee for nearly thirty years in Calcutta is considered a remarkable event in itself.) As the central cgure in the movement Ganguli has earned the titles of angry woman and iron lady, as well as a reputation for fashionable slogan mongering, but her engagement with feminist causes and also with broader issues of citizenship in the nation-state and the world presents a major alternative to the literary contract. In Chandigarh, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry has adopted some of the same methods to establish a new kind of theatre in Punjabi (the majority language of the region) that makes a spectacular departure from the literary norm and concerns itself primarily with the intensity of the audiences experience in the theatre. Basically my premise, Chowdhry comments, was to take the worlds classicsregionalize the national and nationalize the regionalbecause I feel that you cannot be truly contemporary unless you know your own roots (Unpeeling, 21). Her texts have ranged from Karnads 1988 play, Naga-mandala, to the life of the ancient Sanskrit poet Bhartrihari (Raja Bhartrihari, 1997), and such classics as Lorcas Yerma (cg. 7), Racines Phaedra (as Fida, 1997), and Jean Giraudouxs The Madwoman of Chaillot (as Shahar mere di pagal aurat, 1995). Like Ganguli, she develops performance scripts from cctional materials, but her sources tend to be non-Indian. Laura Esquivels Like Water for Chocolate and Isabel Allendes Aphrodite contributed to Kitchen katha (The Saga of the Kitchen, 1999), which explored the age-old bond between woman and food and gave Indian audiences their crst experience of the cooking and communal consumption of food during a performance. The South African author Moira Crosbie Lovells short story Supermarket Soliloquy is the basis of Chowdhrys latest work, Sibbo in Supermarket (2003), in which saleable commodities on the market shelves evoke memories of a lost homeland in the protagonist but also secure an existence in the present. Chowdhrys theatre has been shaped by three key collaborations. The Sikh poet Surjit Patar has rendered her Indian as well as non-Indian originals into Punjabi and continues to do so. The music for her major early productions was composed by Karanth, her teacher and mentor at the
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National School of Drama and later at Bharat Bhavan. Most of the productions by her group, The Company, also combine urban performers with members of the traditional Punjabi community of female impersonators, the naqqals. In Chowdhrys fusion theatre, urban and rural, classic and folk, Indian and foreign, and straight and queer elements thus meet on the robust common ground of the Punjabi language in a frenzy of music and dance that just grabs the audience, . . . and then before you know it, its over (Chowdhry, Unpeeling, 19). Smita Narula points out that, in opposition to the current focus on realism, naturalism, and the experimental in Indian theatre, there is an obvious theatricality to her productions which are, eventually, joyous celebrations of existence. Her work is lyrical, earthy, yet mystically mythical (32). Chowdhry herself explains the riotous physicality of a work like Yerma as an e,ort to create an idiom which [is] rooted in our own cultural traditions and aspirations in terms of our body language, in terms of our emotional charges (Faulkner). She also regards it as a major accomplishment that we have built up a tremendous audience. We have performed all over PunjabJullundhur, Amritsar, Patiala. In Chandigarh theres a
Fig. 7. Fusion theatre: Lorca in Punjabi. Scene from Neelam Mansingh Chowdhrys production of Federico Garca Lorcas Yerma, The Company, Chandigarh, 1991. Courtesy of Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry.
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stampedeits uncontrollable (Unpeeling, 19). Her command of foreign audiences is just as extraordinary: The Madwoman of Chaillot has been featured at both the London International Theatre Festival (LIFT) and the Festival dAvignon (1995); Kitchen katha at international festivals in Singapore, Japan, Germany, and Dubai (20013), and, most recently, Yerma at the LIFT (2003). Some important conclusions about the reception of contemporary Indian theatre follow from this discussion. With literary playwrights rarely engaging with issues of spectatorship, the primary investment in audience development has come from such directors as Subbanna, Ganguli, and Chowdhry, or such directing authors as Dutt, Tanvir, and Sircar. Educated middle-class urban viewers may still constitute the typical modern Indian theatre audience, but a number of practitioners have advanced theoretical positions, polemical arguments, and practical initiatives to expand viewership across the boundaries of class, region, and language. These developments, moreover, are important both in themselves and for the results they achieve. The success of female directors in creating new modes of performance and appealing to new communities of spectators has diversiced a hitherto male-dominated celd, and the resulting focus on female experience by women practitioners modices the almost monopolistic control that male playwrights and directors have exercised over the representation of women on the Indian stage. In another direction, the close connections between specicc forms of playwriting, production, and reception concrm the peculiarities of postindependence theatre as a system. However small, fragmented, and untrained they may be, Indian audiences have participated in the post-1950 theatre movement and witnessed the establishment of a new national canonwithout metamorphosing into paying consumers of the kind that would support serious theatre under marketplace conditions or bridge the enormous material gap between theatre and clm. The Work of Theatre in the Age of Mechanical Dissemination Commenting speciccally on the relation of theatre to clm in his 1936 essay, Walter Benjamin notes that there is no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the clm, founded in, mechanical reproduction (22930). The stage actor delivers a continuous, integrated performance before a live audience; the screen actor performs intermittently before machines that record
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fragments for later reassembly into an integrated work. In the medium of clm, for the crst time in history man has to operate with his whole living person, yet foregoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it (Illuminations, 229). After a century of cinema and the successive inventions of other mass-cultural and electronic media (gramophone, radio, audiotape, television, video, and the Internet), Benjamins formulation of the essential unreproducibility of theatre remains intact in the West. The massive scale of modern dramatic writing and performance, the rigor of theatre history, theory, and criticism, and the viability of theatre as a public and material institution collectively reinforce an autonomy that theatre could command on theoretical grounds alone, despite its absorption into such media as clm, television, and video. Benjamins theoretical formulations establish the basic relation of theatre to the mechanical media, but in India the issues of audience and material survival have created qualitatively di,erent conditions of coexistence and competition between the two: in terms of content, methods of representation, and resources, the clm medium has often advanced directly at the expense of theatre. The crst full-scale confrontation of theatre with clm in the 1930s resulted in the virtual extinction of Parsi commercial theatre because the entrepreneurial energy that had made it the dominant representational form of the early twentieth century was substantially redirected toward cinema. During the silent era a large number of successful Parsi plays (especially those produced by J. F. Madan, the successful owner of Calcuttas Corinthian Theatre) had been turned into equally popular clms, but the arrival of the talkies in 1931 irrevocably reversed this relation.2 Theatre succumbed rapidly because it could not compete with the new medium in the areas of realism and spectacle, its two mainstays. For half a century the modern urban theatre had provided a variety of artistsactors, musicians, singers, technicianswith their principal form of livelihood, but
the cinema with its standardised production, higher payment, wider publicity arrangements and cheap tickets opened new avenues of income and expenditure before the audience of cities and district towns. . . . Actors leaned towards the screen to escape the developing crisis of the stage, and the attendant cnancial insecurity. Literary men went over hoping to earn more by writing scenarios than the plays had brought. Producers found it more lucrative to switch over to clm shooting and run old plays in the theatre than to take up new plays and train actors for them. The public
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crowded the cinemas. . . . It was cheaper too (even now theatre tickets carry a prohibitive price for most people). And so the stage was engulfed in a crisis of long duration. (Pradhan 2: 354)
The transition was especially swift because theatre buildings in urban areas were converted into cinema houses, and stage technicians were absorbed by clm production companies. (The key cgure in this shift was J. F. Madan, who had become interested in clm as early as 1918 and by the 1930s had a network of more than 170 theatres and cinema houses.) Indeed, the perception that clm could do everything theatre could do and more, and by recording theatrical performances make them available to audiences anywhere at any time, led to predictions that clm would soon entirely supplant theatre (Bahadur, 19). On a smaller scale, a similar evacuation from theatre to clm took place during the 1940s and 1950s, despite the critique of commercialized entertainment by members of the IPTA. The association had both drama and clm squads, and prominent members, such as Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, were primarily clmmakers; however, other members, such as Habib Tanvir, Shombhu Mitra, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Prithviraj Kapoor, Dina Gandhi, A. K. Hangal, and Balraj Sahni, were active in both mediums. With the decline of the IPTA after independence and the dissolution of its Central Cultural Squad in 1957, most of these writers and actors moved permanently to clm: the two notable exceptions were Mitra and Tanvir, who had already launched independent theatrical careers in Calcutta and Delhi, respectively. A great deal of literary talent went into the clm world, Alkazi comments with reference to this period, because it was the world which could a,ord to pay (Alkazi, 317). This second phase of the assimilation of theatre by clm was in part responsible for the image of the clean slate of theatre at the drama seminar of 1956, and J. C. Mathur was prescient in predicting that theatre would be able to compete with clm only when (and if ) literary drama became the vehicle of the professional stage. The development of post-independence theatre as largely a noncommercial urban enterprise, therefore, has placed it in a particularly disadvantageous relation to the popular and mass media. The core urban audience for serious theatre is a tiny fraction of the total audience for clm and television, but even this audience divides its leisure and resources between theatre and other media, while nonurban audiences have much greater access to various mechanical forms of entertainment than to modern theatre in any form. The phenomenon of clmed theatrelong
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an intrinsic part of the existence of drama in the Westis limited in India to occasional television productions or telecasts. Aside from Mahasweta Devis Rudali and Hajar churashir ma, which went from the stage to the large screen in the 1990s, Thiyams Chakravyuha is the only play selectively available for commercial purchase on video. Given the enormous di,erences of revenue between theatre and the forms of mechanical reproduction, a large number of theatre practitioners have made the familiar compromise of making a living in clm and television in order to pursue the theatre of their choice. Among the major playwrights, Dutt was a leading character actor in Bengali and Hindi commercial cinema; Karnad is an award-winning actor, director, and screenplay writer for clm and television; Tendulkar was the most signiccant screenplay writer for the Middle Cinema movement in Hindi and Marathi between the 1970s and the 1990s, and a successful writer for television at the end of the century; and Kambar both directs and acts in Kannada clms. Shombhu Mitra, Vijaya Mehta, Arvind Deshpande, and Shreeram Lagoo are actor-directors who have managed major experimental theatre groups along with full-bedged acting careers in clm and television in one or more languages; on a lesser scale, the same is true of Shyamanand Jalan, Satyadev Dubey, B. V. Karanth, Alyque Padamsee, and Usha Ganguli. In addition, Dubey is a celebrated screenplay writer for Hindi cinema, and Jabbar Patel a successful director of feature clms and television clms in Marathi. The most interesting category is that of such actors as Om Shivpuri, Amrish Puri, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Raj Babbar, and Rohini Hattangady, who were trained for the stage at NSD, went on to major careers in commercial and art cinema, but continue to work selectively in theatre. Every aspect of theatre in contemporary India thus intersects multiply with cinema and other media of mechanical reproduction. The necessity of theorizing these aspects of competition and indirect dependence has prompted three main responses among theatre practitioners. The crst is an unequivocal critique of clm as a medium, both in itself and as an encroachment on theatre. Unconsciously echoing Benjamins comment that clm is the most powerful agent of the mass movements that have brought about a tremendous shattering of tradition, Inder Dass complains that the spell of cinema has disrupted ancient aesthetic traditions in India and destroyed the audience for theatre. As a playwright-director with a serious artistic investment in folk forms, Tanvir asserts that radio and television and cinema have nothing to do with the indigenous, genuine cultural traditions of this country, but their dissemination in the villages has already damaged the dramatic
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forms and contents of many folk theatres (Tanvir, Interviewed, 192). J. C. Mathur notes that the encounter between the performing arts and modern mass media has been least beneccial to drama; indeed, dramas characteristic synthesis of literary, poetic, mimetic, and expressive qualities could well become obsolete in the media world (9). Ashoke Viswanathan refers to the unqualiced brute strength of cinema, which has sapped the audiences ability to resist the tyranny of the gaze (100). In its bid to retain its fascistic hold on a largely characterless audience, he argues, clm is su,used with a musical and choreographic vulgarity, an obnoxiously tasteless prurience, that can only prove to be violently dangerous to theatre. The audience for todays commercial clm cannot (and will not) stray into any auditorium devoted to genuine theatre (100). The forms of contamination these critics attack, however, are inseparable from the processes of modernization and development and are an intrinsic part of the present conditions of survival for theatre. Other practitioners, therefore, also view mass-cultural media as detrimental to theatre but accept their pervasive presence in contemporary India and base an aggressive alternative program for theatre on the Benjaminian principle of essential di,erence. Benjamin had argued that any stage performance is qualitatively di,erent from its mechanical equivalents, even when both employ the same representational conventions (such as realism). In India, however, the principal argument is that cinema has made realism obsolete in theatre: theatre within the proscenium is closest to a talking picture and ought to abandon that aesthetic because it cannot possibly compete with the realism of clm. Badal Sircars Third Theatre, for instance, is based on the premise that theatre must abandon its futile mimicry of clm by rejecting the proscenium, the darkened auditorium, the separation of spectators from performers, and the proct motive. Unlike clm, the proscenium theatre does not have a large paying audience, cannot meet its costs through ticket sales, and cannot convincingly recreate reality; when it attempts to improve its marketability by poaching on cinema stars, the results are detrimental to its own artistic status. In a postmodern context none of these ideas is unique to Sircar, but his Third Theatre o,ers the most fully developed Indian conception of the dramatic medium as a live, induplicable mode of human communication that creates cctions but is not constrained by verisimilitude. Sircar also establishes a theoretical identity for theatre speciccally in contradistinction to clm (and other forms of mechanical reproduction) and seeks to eliminate the urban/rural dichotomy that divides audiences for the various media in a developing nation.
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Approaching the same relationship from another angle, J. C. Mathur acknowledges the loss of audience to the mass media as a real problem but views any exaggerated concern with technology in theatre as the symptom of a spurious identity crisis because the styles and devices of clm can never supplant the literary and communal properties of drama proper. Nor are radio and television plays and screenplays decnable as drama and theatre: It is not that they are inferior. It is that they are ancillary to a joint enterprise in which the technology of the medium is the central operational force (9). The essence of clm, television, and radio is technology; that of theatre, the live presence of an actor before an audience. Jalan goes so far as to assert that the blitzkrieg of stateowned mass media has had no siginiccant e,ect on Calcutta theatre because of a committed audience and directors whose principal medium is theatre, although sometimes everyone does seem to be preoccupied with television. The third response to the competition between media has been an e,ort to mobilize the resources of mass media for the benect of theatre. In the 1980s, the National School of Drama formally appealed to Doordarshan (the government-owned national television network) to recruit its alumni, prompting concerns that the school could become a training institution for the big and small screens rather than the stage. However, the quest for alternative media centers on television, which combines the bexibility of a medium of mechanical reproduction with the convenience of easy access within the home and hence o,ers the best opportunity of providing artistically complex entertainment to a mass audience. One of the strongest proponents of the use of television as a medium for drama is Kirti Jain, who left her position as a producer at Doordarshan in 1977 to join the faculty of the National School of Drama and was the shools director in the mid-1990s. Jain argues that clm and theatre have captive audiences in public spaces, whereas television creates a more informal viewing atmosphere within the home. This setting demands greater subtlety and realism, and the smaller screen requires appropriate modiccations of scale in production. But compared with the stage, television allows much greater freedom of representation in terms of narrative and visual elements and, if used appropriately, could deliver socially meaningful entertainment to a large receptive audience. For these reasons, Jain wants television not merely to rebroadcast plays written for the stage but to create its own repertoire by allocating resources speciccally for script development, production, and technical support.
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In practice, however, original drama for television in the form of the teleplay (as distinct from television serials) remains scarce on both national and regional networks and has been displaced by a new conception that paradoxically reverts to the ancient Aristotelian decnition of drama as the representation of human action. In a 1993 interview, Girish Karnad uses this decnition to establish a pragmatic connection between the media of theatre, clm, television, and video in contemporary India:
What is common to all of them is dramaI mean, human beings pretending to be someone else and acting out a story which is of interest to the viewers. And in that sense, we see much more drama around us today than ever before. This also means that more people are involved in the business of drama than ever before. When I was the Director of the Film and Television Institute, I closed down the acting course because the graduates were not getting any work: they were all trained to enter the clm industry which was dominated by a handful of stars, and new entrants were not welcome. The technicians were also insecure. Then came the soap operas and the television scene changed overnight. Not just actors, but editors, photographers, script-writers, directorseveryone found employment. I dont see why one should feel unhappy about that! (Performance, 363)
One measure of the extent to which such drama has displaced theatre is that Rohini Hattangady, the NSD graduate who played Mahatma Gandhis wife, Kasturba, in Richard Attenboroughs 1982 clm, had leading roles in three hour-long weekly television serials in 1998. This adulteration of drama and theatre could well become another item in the critique of popular culture, but, given the history of theatre and the modern media in India, it may be more realistic to anticipate that their relation will be one of competition and mutual exclusion rather than signiccant interchange.
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The analysis so far in this study has focused on the new conditions that have shaped every aspect of drama and theatre in the post-independence period and have established a contemporary canon of Indian plays and playwrights. Among these factors are authorship, textuality, and selfrebexive theory; the idea of drama as social text; interlingual translation and circulation; the role of the director; the aesthetic, visual, and gestic possibilities of performance, both in relation to texts and independent of them; the forms of state and private patronage and sponsorship; the
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formation of theatre audiences; and the relationship of theatre to the media of mechanical reproduction. These relations constitute a large, diverse, and complex celd that is comparable in every respect to the new national and postcolonial theatres in Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in Asia. Why, then, has it remained invisible and undecned in contemporary drama and theatre studies when there is no dearth of criticism on the subject of Indian theatre, and when theatre theory and criticism (particularly in the West) are methodologically equipped to deal with the complexities of a rich multilingual tradition? The answer lies in the unusual emphases, omissions, and overlaps in the modern tradition of criticism on Indian theatre. The fundamentally ahistorical and reductive perspectives of nineteenth-century Western orientalism have resurfaced in postwar Western commentary and scholarship, as well as in typically postcolonial forms of cultural nationalism in India, and their cumulative e,ect is to place the celd of post-independence theatre under ideological erasure. In the next chapter, I therefore focus on the extraordinary disjunction between the dominant national and international discourses on Indian theatre and the body of work made visible in the preceding three chapters of this study.
chapter 5
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Orientalism, Cultural Nationalism, and the Erasure of the Present
In the introduction to a collection of essays relating orientalism speciccally to postcolonial South Asia, Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer argue that the discursive formations of orientalism are inescapable in the Indian subcontinent and the study thereof, in large part because critiques of colonialism have not really led to a rebection on the evolution of knowledge that brings us into the postcolonial (or neocolonial) present (2). Made more poignant by the Saidian decnition of orientalism as a discourse of domination, the resulting postcolonial predicament has two facets: the crst is that the colonial period has given us both the evidence and the theories that select and connect them; and second, that decolonization does not entail immediate escape from colonial discourse (2). The cultural emphases and exclusions of colonial(ist) philology and commentary continue to inform postcolonial constructions of South Asian history, culture, and experience, not only among the former colonizers in the West but also among the formerly colonized in the subcontinent. While the late eighteenth-century European discovery of the Indian past resonates in twentieth-century Western Indology, a range of nativist positions in independent India reveal the inadvertent dependence of decolonizing impulses on nonnative forms of neocolonialism. Extended to cultural forms this epistemological impasse explains several aspects of the peculiar critical fortunes of Indian drama, theatre, and performance in the modern period. The orientalist tradition of philological scholarship and commentary inaugurated by Sir William Jones in
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1789 has shaped subsequent commentary on Indian theatre to an extraordinary extent, and its principal e,ect has been to subject the manifest modernity of Indian theatre to ideological erasure. Further, the process of erasure is just as evident in some inbuential post-independence Indian notions of a national theatre and the unity of Indian cultural forms as it is in postwar Western constructions of ancient, modern, and contemporary Indian theatre. The aggregation of neo-orientalist discourses thus consists of four interlinked strands: (1) the European philological tradition that discovered Indian theatre in the colonial period; (2) the decolonizing critique of Westernized modernity in India itself; (3) the postwar traditions of Western Indological and area studies scholarship in several disciplines; and (4) the theory and practice of interculturalism in the West, which has focused unprecedented attention on Indian performance traditions during the past two decades. Orientalist Constructions of Indian Theatre The body of orientalist commentary and criticism on Indian theatre occupies a distinctive position within the larger traditions of orientalist literary scholarship and consists of a handful of landmark works: Joness 1789 English translation of Kalidasas Sanskrit play, Abhijnana Shakuntalam (1789, commonly known in the West as Shakuntala), H. H. Wilsons Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus (2 vols., 1827), Sylvain Lvis The Theatre of India (2 vols., originally published in French in 1892), A. B. Keiths The Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory, and Practice (1924), and Sten Konows The Indian Drama (originally published in German ca. 1930). Max Mller described Joness translation as virtually the startingpoint of Sanskrit philology, a work that placed a beautiful specimen of dramatic art before enraptured Europeans and also drew the attention of the historian, the philologist, and the philosopher . . . to the fact that a complete literature had been preserved in India, which promised to open a new leaf in the ancient history of mankind, and deserved to become the object of serious study (12). Wilsons work, in contrast, was more an exercise in belles lettres than scholarship; in Sylvain Lvis prejudiced view, his sole ambition was to secure a place for the Indian drama in English literature through his complete translations of six major Sanskrit plays, summaries of twenty-three others, and a brief discussion of the dramatic system of the Hindus (Lvi, 2). After Wilson had made the dramatic texts available, the task of translation was taken over mainly by Indians who wanted to share in the revival of their own
Orientalism, Cultural Nationalism, and Erasure
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national theatre and perform the plays in the modern languages of the subcontinent. Against this backdrop, the works of Lvi, Keith, and Konow are part of an unfolding orientalist discourse on Indian dramatic theory, taxonomy, textuality, authorship, and performance in which each successive participant is aware of his precursors. Lvi structures his work in response to Jones and Wilson, Keith in response to Lvi and William Ridgeway, and Konow in response to Keith. Within this formation, the vital move that the nineteenth-century orientalists make is to identify Indian literature and Indian theatre almost exclusively with Sanskrit. The concepts of nation, national genius, national culture, history, tradition, and civilization involved in this synecdochic reduction are important to orientalists and Indian cultural nationalists alike; they enable the orientalists to remake India in the image of European national cultures, and the cultural nationalists to claim a legitimizing classical heritage. Vinay Dharwadker provides two further explanations for the primacy of Sanskrit. First, as a language Sanskrit provided (in Max Mllers phrase) irrefragable evidence of a common Indo-European heritage, the knowledge of which was indispensable to anyone who desires to study the history of that branch of mankind to which we ourselves belong (Mller, 3). To know the Indo-European mind, you had to know the Indo-European languages, and within half a century this relation had earned Sanskrit its proper place in the republic of learning, side by side with Greek and Latin (3). That this evidence counterbalanced colonialist denigrations of race and culture in India, and established a common descent and a legitimate relationship between Hindu, Greek, and Teuton, was a major part of its radical-romantic appeal for a philologist like Max Mller, who never visited India. Second, the decnition of philology as scienticc knowledge, learning, and scholarship mainly about the past, and the perceived superiority of classical and comparative over general philology, determined Sanskrit as the primary object of philological scholarship. The orientalists accommodated this scholarly selectiveness with what Dharwadker calls a disciplinary double standard: they employed a comprehensive humanistic decnition of literature as the total order of words when dealing with Sanskrit but used narrower romantic-expressivist, nationalist, and aesthetic criteria to exclude Indias postclassical and modern languages and literatures from consideration. Just as orientalist emphases privileged Sanskrit and its total order of words over other Indian languages and later literary periods, most orientalist scholars privileged Sanskrit drama over all the other genres of subcontinental literary antiquity. There were two major reasons for this:
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the literary excellence of the plays and the complex theories of form, expression, and aesthetic e,ect on which they were evidently based. The quality of the major plays, impressive in itself, was all the more impressive to the orientalists because it owed nothing to the West. European scholars concluded categorically that there was no evidence of Greek inbuence on the classical Sanskrit playwrights, although traces of the New Comedy of Menander were visible in certain comic character types. Similarly, the existence of the Natyashastra (ca. 2nd century), the longest, most comprehensive poetics of drama and performance in antiquity, underscored for the orientalists the status of drama as a complex and self-contained system in ancient India. All this is evident in the European excitement over the dramatic and poetic exquisiteness of Kalidasas Shakuntalam, which began with Joness English version in 1789, continued with rapid translations of the play into other major European languages, and created the most extensive history of orientalist performance in the West. This enthusiasm also appears to have set the tone for the Western reception of other classical Sanskrit playwrights, such as Bhasa, Shudraka, Vishakhadatta, and Bhavabhuti. H. H. Wilson, the crst translator who dealt with all these playwrights together, developed his preference for Sanskrit drama over other ancient Indian literary genres into a general critical principle: if we examine the reasons for studying an ancient dialect, he argued, there is no one species [of writing] which will be found to embrace so many purposes as the dramatic (1). Drama evokes the texture of everyday life through dialogue, balances art with nature, draws on history and religion, and represents the manners and feelings of people. Wherever, therefore, there exists a dramatic literature, it must be preeminently entitled to the attention of the philosopher as well as the philologist, of the man of general literary taste as well as the professional scholar (1). A century later, A. B. Keith described Sanskrit drama as the highest product of Indian poetry, and as summing up in itself the cnal conception of literary art achieved by the very self-conscious creators of Indian literature (276). The most forthright explanation for the synecdochic substitution of Indian drama with Sanskrit drama appears in the introduction to Lvis The Theatre of India. Lvi begins by acknowledging that both Wilson and Ernst Windish concne their study of Indian drama to plays written in Sanskrit and ignore the fact that besides the dramas addressed to an educated public and written in Sanskrit, the Indian theatre possessed also other dramas composed in popular languages and belonging to an ancient tradition (3).
Orientalism, Cultural Nationalism, and Erasure Thus the name of Indian theatre must embrace both the most humble dramatic productions and the masterpieces of the great poets. All scenic entertainments including life-tableaus and puppet-shows belong to the Indian theatre. However, we have, without hesitation, followed the example of our predecessors and reserved the term Indian theatre for the Sanskrit drama. No doubt, we could have adopted the category of Sanskrit theatre and, on many occasions, we have done so. Nevertheless we think that the Sanskrit theatre is the Indian theatre par excellence.1 (3; my emphasis)
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In keeping with the date of his work (1892), Lvis defense of this position is uncompromisingly aesthetic and individualist. Only the individual with a powerful intellect and superior instinct can create works of perennial value, and in this perspective the popular drama of India, outside the medium of Sanskrit, has no history, no originality, no identity, no longevity, and no universal presence. However tenuous the connection may be between Lvis cn de sicle romanticization of authorial identity and the phenomenon of authorship in ancient India, the playwrights in Sanskrit lend themselves to his criteria of judgment more easily than the lesser known, mostly anonymous poets and prose writers and are therefore in a better position to sustain the romantic Western conception of great literature as the unique expression of individual genius. In 1924 A. B. Keith titles his work a study of Sanskrit rather than Indian drama and explains his choice of material a little di,erently from Lvi, but the focus on Sanskrit and the criterion of greatness remains unchanged. To bring the subject matter within moderate compass, he states in his preface, I have concned it to the drama in Sanskrit or Prakrit, omitting any reference to vernacular dramas. . . . In tracing the development of the drama, I have laid stress only on the great writers and on dramatists who wrote before the end of the crst millennium (5). A few years later, Sten Konow reverts to the synonymity of Indian and Sanskrit in his The Indian Drama, citing a long line of scholarly works that deal exclusively or principally with the Sanskrit-and-Prakrit drama, and comments that the highly extensive dramatic literature in the Indian dialects, which is universally inbuenced by the Sanskrit drama, to a large extent, belongs to the history of the Indian dialect literatures (1). This is Lvis point also: Sanskrit, being universal, is Indian; the modern indigenous languages, being regional or local, are not. Indeed, in Konows uninformed estimation, the modern Indian vernaculars are not languages
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at all but only dialects. Only as recently as 1969 was this reductive logic challenged by Konows Indian translator, S. N. Ghoshal, who added the subtitle The Sanskrit Drama after the original title and argued in the translators preface that any discussion of Indian drama should include the Middle and New Indo-Aryan languages. Ghoshal explains that Konows thinking belonged to his own time, when, to the Europeans, Indian literature and culture meant Sanskrit, and Sanskrit was the only language of culture in India (iii), whereas, among Indians, nationalist and matriotic sentiment had aroused a new interest in indigenous traditions and hence in the modern mother tongues. In retrospect, however, Ghoshals corrective move merely underscores the irony that instead of identifying with the modern regional languages, Indian cultural nationalists have again reverted primarily to the Sanskrit classics. Orientalist theatre scholarship and criticism therefore provide the epistemological link between the three disparate postwar discourses considered in this chapter: a resurgent cultural nationalism in postcolonial India, Indological and area-studies scholarship in the Western academy, and theories of interculturalism in Western theatre. The Critique of Western Modernity in Post-Independence India In the Euro-American traditions, modernity is both a teleological principle of historical organization that separates the ancient and medieval from the post-Renaissance world and a name for qualities that distinguish objects from one another within a given historical period. More speciccally, literary modernity signices a deliberate disengagement from past and present conventions in favor of verbal, formal, intellectual, and philosophical attributes that are new for their time, whatever the time. Horace, John Dryden, George Eliot, and Sylvia Plath are all moderns in this sense, as are the late seventeenth-century proponents of libertinism in England, or the late twentieth-century practitioners of minimalism in the United States. In Indian literary history, however, the issue of modernity remains inseparable from that of the transformation of Indian cultural forms by Western inbuences under the inherently unequal conditions of colonial rule. The conventional historical argument is that Indian literary modernity was a consequence of the dissemination of the European literary canon on the subcontinent, the institutionalization of English literary studies in the mid-nineteenth century, the formation of modern print
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culture in the course of the nineteenth century, and the large-scale assimilation of modern Western literary formsnovelistic and short cction in the realist mode, historical drama, national(alist) epic, romantic and confessional lyric, essay, discursive and critical prose, and biography and autobiography, among others. Concurrently, the inbuence of Western dramatic texts, conventions of representation, and forms of commercial organization displaced indigenous traditions of performance and established theatre as a modern, urban, commercial institution for the crst time in the mid-nineteenth century. Given the ideological underpinnings of such a position, the colonial origin of Indian literary and cultural modernity has emerged as a key issue in the debates of the postindependence period (witness the 1956 drama seminar) because colonialism is seen as destroying the very essential and authentic civilizational qualities that the orientalists had constructed in the nineteenth century. The resulting polemic, however, treats the culture of print very di,erently from that of performance. Modernity, Print, and Performance In discussions of print genres, such as poetry, prose cction, essay, and autobiography, Indian theorists and critics after independence are preoccupied not with the question of European origins or the unmediated replication of European models but with the appropriation, indigenization, and assimilation of the borrowed forms within the major modern Indian languages. The modern literatures that emerge under Western inbuence in India are thus Indian literatures, not displaced or transposed versions of European literatures. In his comprehensive account of modern Indian literatures, Sisir Kumar Das places the encounter between Europe and India in perspective through a historical comparison: Probably with the exception of the Greco-Roman encounter (which enabled Greek and Latin literature to exist side by side forming an indivisible universe for the educated Roman), the modern Indian literary history provides a singular case of [the] co-existence of two literatures, one of them alien, English, and the other indigenous, the Indian literature (55). Vinay Dharwadker elaborates on the nature of this coexistence in terms that question poststructuralist arguments about the subaltern status of Indian discourses:
[T]he print culture that emerged on the subcontinent by the beginning of the nineteenth century was a hybrid, multicultural formation actively involving a large population of Indian investors, producers, distributors,
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and consumers. The ineluctable and uncontainable hybridity of this print culture, without precedent in the West or elsewhere, ensured that it did not and could not replicate in India the conditions, processes, and outcomes of the Enlightenment, print capitalism, or romantic nationalism of Europe. . . . The colonial subject formed at the intersection of writing, print, and education on the subcontinent therefore had to be and is signiccantly di,erent from the sovereign subject of Europe, and also possesses, to invoke Gayatri Spivaks metaphor but not her argument, the power to speak. (Print Culture, 114)
The earliest Indian subject position to appear in the medium of print was also that of resistance to colonial rule (119), and this resisting subject has been the agent of historical change, as well as the idealized protonationalist and nationalist protagonist of cction, poetry, and drama in virtually all the major modern Indian literatures (Print Culture, 120). In Dharwadkers analysis, what appears alongside resistance is also a position of self-possessed cultural ambidexterity, an equal or commensurate facility in two or more cultural systems concurrently (123); the ambitextrous subject belongs neither to a subaltern nor to a dominant culture but tries to maintain a critical distance so that he or she can act with equal e,ectiveness in both. The end of colonial rule alters the conditions of both appropriation and resistance, and post-independence writers in the Indian languages have approached the issue of Western inbuence with a conscious internationalism and cosmopolitanism. Adil Jussawalla, editor of the crst major post-independence anthology of new Indian writing (mainly in English translation), considers the issue of origins and inbuences more or less irrelevant to literary production:
It is true that certain literary forms like free verse and such literary concepts as realism, naturalism, and stream of consciousness originated in the West. So did the novel itself. But such forms and concepts have now spread all over the world, and it would only be fair to call their use in India parasitic if all international cross-inbuences and borrowings went by that name. A fairer way of judging a countrys literature is to see the way its writers use certain international forms, to try to appreciate the changes they make along or against their particular literary traditions, sometimes with the help of these forms, sometimes not, and, most important of all, to try to understand the e,ect of their writing on their people. (18)
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In the development of Indian literary modernity within the culture of print, therefore, the event of independence serves its anticipated function as a chronological and qualitative marker, but the perceived relation between the colonial and postcolonial periods in terms of forms, traditions, movements, and inbuences is primarily one of continuity, not disjunction. When Indian literary historians and critics discuss the major movements of the last centurynationalism, romanticism, progressivism, and modernismthey do not distinguish sharply between the pre- and post-independence periods. Furthermore, if post-independence authors reject their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century precursors, it is not because their precursors are modern (that is, culturally dependent on the West) but because they belong to earlier stages of literary development and are not modern enough. The major cction and poetry of the colonial period is romantic and naturalistic; that of the postcolonial period is modernist and postmodernistthe product of a more, not less, aggressive modernity. Indian cultural-nationalist arguments about drama, theatre, and performance after 1947 approach the issues of modernity and Western inbuence in a radically di,erent way, and the basis of the di,erence is the perceived relation of the colonial to the precolonial. The e,ect of modern print culture in India was not to destroy traditional literary forms and practices but to create a range of new poetic, cctional, noncctional, and discursive genres that had no identicable precursors in precolonial writing. In contrastso the traditionalists claimthe modern Westernized culture of realistic, secular, and commercial urban performance disrupted and displaced indigenous theatrical traditions that had developed continuously for nearly two millennia. The new Western aesthetic of production and representation forced a culture that possessed highly developed antirealistic forms of classical, devotional, ritual, and folk performance grounded in traditional (mainly rural) life to accommodate realism, the urban proscenium stage, and commercial theatre institutions. The religious, ritualistic, and devotional contexts of much traditional theatre atrophied, and the culture of patronage became obsolete, in both the cities and the countryside. By introducing literary drama, Westernized theatre on the subcontinent also led to a rejection of such popular forms as the jatra of Bengal, the bhavai of Gujarat, and the tamasha of Maharashtra as debased and corrupt. These are the reasons for which cultural nationalists attack theatrical modernity, and the attack has weight and urgency precisely because in drama there are major precolonial traditions to recover. Thus, while in the case of poetry and cction most
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post-independence critics object not to the borrowing of Western forms but only to their ine,ective imitation, in the case of drama traditionalist critics object to the act of borrowing as such. The focus of anticolonial critique with respect to print genres is language, but, with respect to performance genres, it is form. And while the post-independence rejection of writing in English has invoked the relation between culture, experience, and language, the rejection of Westernized modern performance in the indigenous languages has invoked the relation between culture, experience, and form.2 In one perspective, one may argue that the cultural-nationalist critique of westernized modernity is not unique to Indian theatre, but a universal postcolonial symptom that critics concerned with many new national literatures in the former European colonies have described variously as nativism, traditionalism, reactionary nationalism, or the conbict between . . . the traditional culture of the past and incorporation into a global modern culture. C. L. Innes notes that the literature produced as part of a cultural nationalist project is a literature produced in opposition to the narratives and representations which deny dignity and autonomy to those who have been colonized. But this opposition is addressed not just to the colonizing power, nor even primarily to it, but to the people of the emerging nation, and seeks to engage them in their own project of self-decnition (Innes, 120). In this process common to many postcolonies, modernization is synonymous with the promotion of the cultural values of the colonizer, and the development of so-called civilization, and its rejection is a precondition for recuperating a usable past (Griths, Post-Colonial Project, 166). Despite its resemblance to these other postcolonial discourses, however, the nationalist critique of modernity in Indian theatre rebects the particular history and politics of Indian cultural forms and has to be understood in relation to them. Repudiating the Modern: Three Arguments The repudiation of theatrical modernity by Indian cultural nationalists in the post-independence period rests on three principal arguments, all of them well represented in the polemic of the 1956 drama seminar: modern Westernized theatre was an alien imposition that did not and cannot bourish in India; the end of colonialism o,ers the best opportunity for correcting this aberration; and the renewal of Indian theatre depends on the revival of indigenous, culturally authentic traditions. In recent years, the crst position has appeared most forcefully in the work of such scholar-critics as Nemichandra Jain and Kapila Vatsyayan.
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Jain argues that Western practices disrupted an indigenous theatrical tradition that had been continuous for more than two millennia and that had evolved according to our own world-view, on the basis of one or the other aspect of our culture, and under compulsions of our own social and political conditions (63; my emphases). He also claims that during the Sanskrit phase theatre was almost the same for the entire country and maintained its unity across various language regions throughout the postclassical period (twelfth to seventeenth centuries). Western-style theatre was totally di,erent in all these aspects because it took shape in imitation of an alien theatre, fundamentally di,erent in its worldview and aesthetic approach (64). Under neutral cultural conditions it would have met with certain failure, but under the conditions of colonial dominance it found support among a growing English-educated middle class anxious to imitate and please the British. The educated Indian turned away from his own moorings, and traditional forms were relegated to sections of traditional society, rural or tribal, and to the socioeconomically deprived classes (Vatsyayan, 18485); the result was a fatal alienation between our rural and urban theatre . . . which gradually changed the very contours of our dramatic activity at all levels ( Jain, 61). For the antimodernists, therefore, the end of colonialism presents the moment of restitution, when the older natural theatrical traditions can resume their rightful place in national culture. This is not only necessary but inevitable because according to them the modern theatre of the colonial period created nothing of lasting value: it was a desert of imitation and opposed all the habits of representation and spectatorship that were most suited to Indian culture. Proponents of this view derive ideological strength from the crisis of realism in Western theatre that underlies such movements as expressionism, the theatre of the absurd, and Brechts epic theatre, because for them this crisis demonstrates the intrinsic superiority of the antirealist and anti-Aristotelian aesthetic of traditional Indian theatre over Western forms. Similarly, the focus on traditional forms and texts in the intercultural experiments of Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner, and Peter Brook have occasioned the argument that Indian practitioners cannot a,ord to ignore what even major Western theorists cnd revitalizing. Indeed, Kapila Vatsyayan suggests that post-independence Indian playwrights have rediscovered their roots chieby because of the inbuence of ancient Eastern forms on such Western practitioners as Artaud and Brecht, and those same forms have now begun to exercize a powerful inbuence on modern avant garde theatre, or mobile theatre, within India itself.
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With reference to contemporary practice, the various strands of this traditionalist argument converge into one dominant assertion: the formal, aesthetic, and representational principles of indigenous performance genres o,er the only possibility of an authentic alternative modernity in Indian theatre, and the playwrights and directors who have chosen to experiment with the traditional (precolonial) repertoire represent the most signiccant theatre work of the post-independence period. The essential elements of this argument are present in the polemic of Suresh Awasthi, former secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the most vocal proponent of the theatre of roots:
Most of the directors and playwrights doing Western-oriented imitative work thought of the traditional theatre as decadent and of no relevance to their own theatre work. Many were prophets of doom, thinking of these traditional forms as museum pieces. History has proved them wrong. The great cultural upsurge of the post-independence period has resulted in cultural decolonisation, and traditional arts have asserted their vitality and relevance. The new and most creative work in contemporary theatre is inspired and inbuenced by the rich and variegated traditional theatre. (Defence, ii)
Awasthi notes that in such regions as Kerala, Manipur, and Karnataka, very old theatre forms coexist with the work of such innovative contemporary directors as Panikkar, Thiyam, and Karanth, who have followed Shombhu Mitras lead in searching for their creative roots and mounting an e,ective anticolonial o,ensive. Their work liberates theatre from its colonial moorings and has created a new and indigenous idiom . . . which has restored traditional techniques and aesthetic values tempered with contemporary sensitivity (iiiiv). These qualities of the new traditional theatre, however, remain more a matter of assertion than demonstration because there is very little criticism explaining its aesthetic, semantic, social, and political intentions in the present. In a study that approaches drama as the gift of gods, Awasthi himself passes up the opportunity to discuss the new body of workor even specicc plays although he again describes the return to traditional forms as the most signiccant event in post-independence theatre. The playwright Habib Tanvir, one of the major practitioners of mobile theatre, is more circumspect in his overview of the post-independence celd, even though his critique of contemporary theatre, and his sense of what is most interesting in recent playwriting, have much in common with the positions of the traditionalist critics.
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The urban theatre of India only partially rebects the fundamental features of Indian culture. By and large, it remains imitative. It tries to ape the conventions of the western theatre. At its worst, it represents the pale copy of the most worn-out western theatre traditions. At its best, it rebects new western forms recently evolved through a rigorous process of experimentation. Nonetheless, there are producers and theatre groups in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and elsewhere that are engaged in original work of a very valuable nature. They are mostly involved in experiments with Indian folk theatre forms. Though in a country of vast cultural resources like India, their number is deplorably low, they have already managed to break new ground and lay the foundation of a genuine Indian theatre. (Indian Experiment, 6)
The specicc works Tanvir mentions in this connection are Karnads Hayavadana, which is based on a twelfth-century folktale from the Kathasaritasagara; the political jatra plays of Utpal Dutt and the tamasha plays of P. L. Deshpande, which employ the major intermediary forms of the Bengal and Maharashtra regions, respectively; and his own Agra bazar, which celebrates the life and work of the eighteenth-century Urdu poet Nazir Akbarabadi. Tanvir rightly credits the IPTA with the crst artistically serious experiments in folk theatre but recognizes that the trend has intensiced greatly since the 1960s; in a familiar move, he then repeats the claim that folk styles express true and authentic Indian forms. The negation of much contemporary urban Indian theatre is inherent in this antimodern stance: in the same measure that the traditional and the folk are invested with originality, creativity, authenticity, and Indianness, the forms of contemporary theatre that do not participate in the revivalist movement are reduced to inconsequence. The Countercritique of Traditionalism The motivations, positions, and e,ects of the cultural-nationalist critique of theatrical modernity in the post-independence period invite a rejoinder because the traditionalist position misrepresents the status of precolonial traditions, the nature of colonial Indian theatre, and the relation of both these to the present-day theatre. The desire for cultural autonomy and wholeness does not translate in any simple way into the possibility of inserting a pristine precolonial past into the postcolonial present. Gareth Griths describes constructions of pre-colonial society as at best mythic and at worst deliberative cctions of the new ruling
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elite because even the continuing cultures in the indigenous languages have been subject to profound modiccations and hybridizations in their ready and wholesale adoption of such forms of European literature as the novel and the short story, as well as in the fact that the markets and readerships of such literature overlap and inbuence each other (168). Invoking Wole Soyinka, Brian Crow and Chris Banceld comment that a return to roots is energizing not when it is an ideologically convenient mythology but when it is a strategy for rediscovering the intrinsic principles by which a society can transform itself in the present (11). Rustom Bharucha particularizes these arguments for Indian theatre when he suggests that the idea of tradition as a recoverable, unmediated cultural essence is a postcolonial invention, like the nation itself: Our tradition had already been mediated by the colonial machinery of the nineteenthcentury theatre, the conventions and stage tricks derived from the pantomimes and historical extravaganzas of the English Victorian stage, and the borrowed conventions were in turn thoroughly Indianized through music, song, color, pathos, melodrama, and histrionic delivery (Theatre and the World, 251). Just as Western inbuences are indigenized, indigenous performance traditions are hybridized in the colonial period. Bharucha also makes a point that reappears in theoretical defenses of modernity and realismthat performance traditions weaken naturally under adverse socioeconomic conditions, so that a deliberately recovered tradition is an ideological construct, not a living form. Indigenous and Western Forms: The Colonial Period The generalizations about the destruction of indigenous forms by alien ones therefore need careful scrutiny. How alive were traditional, folk, and popular forms of theatre when modern theatre practices emerged in the major colonial cities? To what extent did the two theatrical models compete directly with each other? And how alienated did the new theatre remain from Indian society and culture? Conversely, to what extent do post-independence experiments in folk and traditional theatre restore precolonial aesthetic and performance traditions? What normative force can they exercise in contemporary practice? First, most theatre historians agree that, after the decline of Sanskrit theatre around a.d. 1000 and the Muslim conquest of north India by the twelfth century, signiccant theatre activity resumed in the Indian languages only in the nineteenth century. Some classical theatre forms survived in the Tamil- and Malayalam-speaking areas of southern India, and religious forms, such as the ramlila and raslila, dominated the north.
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In such languages as Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, and Gujarati, a variety of folk and popular forms took shape during the postclassical period, and, according to Sisir Kumar Das, the vitality of these traditions actually weakened the Western impact in the beginning, delaying the Westernization of the Indian stage for some time. But in languages like Hindi, Punjabi, or Kashmiri, there was no notable theatre at all until the late nineteenth century, and therefore little for colonialism to displace. Second, the nineteenth-century critique of indigenous forms was not primarily a British but an Indian preoccupation. Nandi Bhatia points out that the British were equally contemptuous of the immorality of traditional Indian entertainments and the presumptuous crudity of Indianized versions of Shakespeare, and encouraged the polarization of theatre around the categories of low [Indian] and high [European] culture (14). Because indigenous theatre was alien and inaccessible, the British were also interested in developing alternative cultural spaces in the interests of better political control. But indigenous forms came under attack because of the self-critical thrust of social reform movements, the emergence of middle-class culture in the cities, and the commitment of such major authors as Bharatendu Harishchandra, D. L. Roy, and Rabindranath Tagore to the literary and cultural possibilities of the new aesthetic. As Kathryn Hansen notes, the emergence of urban drama under European inbuence did not completely supplant indigenous theatrical genres, but the reformist discourse that resulted from the colonial experience pushed the theatre to the margins of respectability (Grounds for Play, 235); eventually, the campaigns against popular culture dramatically diminished the number of practitioners, leading to their . . . exile from urban society (255). Third, Westernized theatre may have devalued indigenous forms in cultural and critical discourse, but the conditions of its existence were so radically di,erent from those of traditional theatre that there could hardly be any genuine rivalry between the two models. Nineteenthcentury urban theatre was, crst and foremost, a product of new forms of entrepreneurial capital, best symbolized by Calcuttas National Theatre, which began charging ticket prices when it opened in 1872, and the major Parsi theatre companies, which were based in metropolitan areas but also traveled throughout the country. The audience for this theatre came mainly from the urban (initially English-educated) middle class, though the traveling companies gradually acquired a larger popular base. New theatre architecture and the proscenium stage dictated new staging conventions, which involved the full range of modern theatre
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artsacting, costumes, sound, lighting, scenic and set design, and stage machinery. In contrast, indigenous forms had a rural or semiurban base, depended for patronage on the landed gentry or religious institutions, and needed minimal physical organization in terms of location and staging. In the nineteenth-century cultural context, modern urban theatre may have been considered superior to the older forms but was hardly a substitute for them. As Kathryn Hansen notes, in the specicc case of nautanki the urban stage is a largely middle-class phenomenon found in the major cities throughout India. . . . In contrast to the urban stage, the Nautanki theatre relies not on the patronage of a Westernized middle class or on its imported substratum of ideas and texts. Rather it is rooted in the peasant society of premodern India (Grounds for Play, 40). Furthermore, urban theatre succeeded not by colonialist cat but because it was a new form of representation with seemingly endless potential, like cinema a century later, and because it became, in certain locations, a viable commercial institution. The prestige of Western theatre alone might have sustained it for a time with a coterie, but no form of popular theatre could have survived if it did not satisfy a larger urban audience. Fourth, and perhaps most important, urban theatre may have been an alien form at its inception, but it went through the same rigorous process of indigenization and assimilation as the print genres of poetry, cction, and noncctional prose. Following the orientalist recovery of Sanskrit theatre between the 1790s and the 1830s, the dual theoretical frames of reference for the new theatre were the classical Indian and the modern Western dramatic canons. Far from erasing the Indian past, this theatre made the past available to the discourses of identity, selfhood, culture, and nation. Sudipto Chatterjee argues that the Englisheducated Indian, who had lost his native-ness through contact with the colonizer, had to invent a new identity for himself. This new identity, essentially a paradigm of hybridity, was fashioned out of the binary strains of Sanskritic revivalism and Westernization (Mise-en-(Colonial-) Scne, 23). In late nineteenth-century India, the commitment to Sanskrit texts was in no respect incompatible with the growing forms of Western inbuence. The genres of colonial Indian theatre rebect this hybridized duality perfectly. As noted earler, nineteenth-century performances ranged over plays in English, European plays in English translation, Indian-language versions of English and European plays, translations of Sanskrit plays into
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modern Indian languages, and original Indian-language plays that were Western in form but not in content. From the beginning, the material of the new Indian plays was also resolutely Indian, deriving from mythology, history, folklore, and the social texture of contemporary life. Later in the nineteenth century, as Hansen points out, Parsi theatre drew on Indian classics, new social dramas, and Western imports (especially popularized versions of Shakespeare), while urban elite theatre produced new scripts as well as translations from canonical Indian and foreign playwrights (Making Women Visible, 40). The print and performance cultures of modernity, therefore, share the same nativized hybridity, and the same hybrid subject appears in both. Not surprisingly, the two principal architects of the Bengal Renaissance, Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore, were playwrights as well as novelists and poets. Colonial Indian plays therefore exemplify one of the basic claims of postcolonial theatre criticism, that colonial cultures generate new theatrical forms by negotiating between indigenous performance modes and imported imperial culture (Gainor, xiv). Western inbuence is not an insoluble substance that remains unchanged by the alchemy of transplantation. So when Kapila Vatsyayan argues that after a century and a half the forms and institutions of Western theatre remain alien and unnatural, she has to suppress the fact that between 1870 and 1930 they spawned the crst and only national-level professional theatre in the country and merged during the 1930s with that quintessentially Indian mass mediumclm. In short, critics like Vatsyayan misrepresent the introduction of a new popular culture of performance (which waxes and wanes according to market conditions and taste) as a process of deliberate cultural suppression and destruction. There are two further aspects of colonial theatre that underscore its thorough assimilation into the matter of India. Chatterjee uses theatricality as a metaphor to analyze the multifarious workings of the sociocultural mise-en-scne of the Bengal Renaissance as the conjunction of a text composed of a newly discovered national identity, a process of catalysis/rehearsal involving intense social debate and change, and a performance consisting of the copious literary and dramatic output of Bengali authors. In this context, Bengali theatre performs a metonymic function and works like a play-within-a-play. It is both emblematic as well as a product of a larger mise-en-scne of the social order (Chatterjee, Mise-en-(Colonial-)Scne, 25). In a similar vein, Julie Stone Peters argues that those who imply that the history of theatre in the empires is the
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history of two sides at war are . . . mistaken (Peters, 201). These positions are the exact converse of the traditionalist argument and underscore that colonial theatre is something other than a record of hegemonic imposition on the part of the British and cultural self-betrayal on the part of Indian practitioners. Furthermore, once urban theatre took root as an institution, it was at least in intention increasingly, if inconsistently, a theatre of resistance rather than collusion. Recent theatre studies have sought to uncover the signiccance of this medium in the culture of empire by recognizing the strategic political and cultural force of theatrical production within a community or larger geographical region, and by focusing on the unique nexus of theatrical performance as a site for the representation of, but also the resistance to, imperialism (Gainor, xiii). Sudipto Chatterjees observationthat the nationalism of late nineteenth-century Bengali theatre rested on elision on one side, and fabrication on the other (Nation Staged, 22)suggests the compromising e,ects of orientalism on nationalist sentiment. But the furor over the English translation of Nil-darpan, the troubled stage history of the play in the 1870s, and the passage of the Dramatic Performances Control Act in 1876 are all recognizable signs of tension between the colonial state and theatre as an urban institution. In Nandi Bhatias view, it is possible to talk about the rise of nationalist drama after 1860 (vii); by 1876, Bhatia observes, theatre in India had indeed become an expression of the political struggle against colonial rule and a space for staging scathing critiques of the oppression and atrocities inbicted upon colonial subjects by colonial rulers on the indigo plantations and tea estates (1).3 Modern Indian drama had thus begun to function as an anticolonial medium at least a generation before the formation of the Indian National Congress ocially launched the nationalist movement in 1885. Indigenous and Western Forms: The Postcolonial Period The myth of modern urban theatre as an aesthetically alien, politically complicit, and culturally insigniccant form is therefore at variance with literary, theatrical, and political history. But the corresponding myth also needs demysticcation: that the return to tradition in the postindependence period reestablishes forms and conventions that colonialism had disrupted, and that this restoration is (or should be) the most signiccant event in contemporary theatre, both in itself and as the instrument of cultural decolonization. In fact, the new traditional theatre is a commodity for the same predominantly middle-class urban audience
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as other major forms of contemporary theatre. Its materials and conventions of representation are di,erent; its locations and modes of consumption are not. It is simply a new kind of urban theatrical experience mediated by large-scale state patronage and dependent on the institutions both of print and performance. It is not dicult to demonstrate the qualitative similarities between neotraditional theatre and the modern theatre it ostensibly opposes (this issue will reappear for substantial discussion in chapter 9). The folkbased and traditional performance styles of Tanvir, Kambar, Thiyam, and others have often taken performers out of their native rural environments into urban and sometimes international environments, but there is little evidence that the reverse is true: that these traditions have been revitalized in their original locations for their original audiences or that experimental urban productions have reached rural audiences on a signiccant scale. In other words, the new traditional theatre is not based on the traditional relations between author, performance conditions, and audience because those relations have ceased to exist in a postcolonial society undergoing rapid modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. New modes of agriculture have transformed the village as an economic unit, and the mass cultural forms of clm and television have eroded the link between rural life and rural art forms. In addition, contemporary plays employing traditional/folk techniques straddle the gap between orality and print. In their natural state folk, traditional, and intermediary forms have buid performance texts, but usually no published versions, whereas such recent folk-based plays as Karnads Hayavadana, Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal, Chandrashekhar Kambars Jokumaraswami, and Thiyams Chakravyuhawhich are among the iconic texts of contemporary traditionalist theatreare equally important as performance vehicles and as printed texts. The traditional forms were hybridized during the colonial period, and the cycle of hybridization completes itself in the postcolonial period when those forms are transplanted into urban theatre. The idea that this process of reviving indigenous forms for urban consumption neutralizes the colonial phase and establishes continuity with precolonial and premodern traditions is at best an ahistorical fantasy or an ideological illusion. The claims about restoring a lost past are fallacious for another reason: the urge to unlearn alien habits and relearn those intrinsic to ones own culture is a distinctly postcolonial urge. Classical and medieval forms acquire a new national cultural signiccance in India only when the modern nation becomes available as a referent. The postcolonial
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views of nation, culture, and tradition are possible only as a reaction to colonialism, because a national culture did not exist in its modern form in precolonial times. Hence, to argue that the return to tradition in post-independence theatre restores a continuity that colonialism disrupted is to be selectively historical: a stance that can only be produced by a specicc history is used to negate that very history. As Kwame Anthony Appiah points out, the bolekaja critics, who issued a combative call for a decolonization of African literature (Come down, lets cght), rely fundamentally on the very categories of Western thought they seek to exclude. The critics ostensible purpose is to wrestle the critical ethnocentrism of their Eurocentric opponents to the ground in the name of an Afrocentric particularism (Appiah, 57). Their complaint, however, is not with universalism at all . . . [but with] Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism. Thus, while the debate is couched in terms of the competing claims of particularism and universalism, the actual ideology of universalism is never interrogated, and indeed, is even tacitly accepted (58). Similarly, in India the nativist argument seeks to undo change because there is an older tradition to recover, yet that tradition is recuperated by the same institutions, and for the same audiences, that the argument rejects as alien. Furthermore, in a society that is caught inexorably in the processes of modernization, one cannot reject some forms of modernity while tacitly embracing others. To reject modernity in theatre as an unacceptable Western legacy, one would logically also have to reject modernity in other forms of social and cultural organization. Finally, the traditionalists weakest claim may be that of promoting the only intrinsic and authentic Indian theatre. For forty years, left-wing theatre workers and social-realist playwrights have asserted the Indianness and relevance of their own material. In his formative years Sircar regarded folk theatre, not modern theatre, as alien to his urban and middle-class sensibility. Since the 1980s, Elkunchwar and Dattani have been among the most vocal critics of the position that contemporary narratives of home, family, and urban sociopolitical experience are less Indian than twelfth-century folktales or eighteenth-century history. The critique of modernity in Indian theatre is therefore riddled with inconsistency, misrepresentation, and contradiction. Yet by creating a hierarchy of cultural forms and negating certain forms of theatre, this critique has e,ectively obscured the actualities of post-independence theatre. As the following sections demonstrate, the metropolitan traditions of Western theory and criticism have, paradoxically, produced the same results for largely the same reasons.
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Orientalism and Postwar Western Scholarship on Indian Theatre The Continuing Privilege of Sanskrit The legacy of orientalism has shaped Western scholarship on India in many di,erent ways in the postwar years. Perhaps the most general e,ect is the continuing primacy of philological methodology and the preference for classical antiquity over the premodern and modern periods. Vinay Dharwadker comments that it has taken more than three decades in a post-orientalist age of Indian and South Asian studies (with new transnational networks of political, economic, and cultural interests, postcolonial institutions and sources of funding, and newly immigrant and migrating scholars) to begin the process of dealing with the postclassical languages and literatures of India as inclusively as the orientalists had covered the ancient traditions centered around Sanskrit (Orientalism, 17071).4 Notwithstanding this shift, South Asia scholarship in the EuroAmerican academy continues to be dominated by the study of Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, and classical Tamil, and the decnition of literature in these languages continues to include religious and philosophical texts. The best-known Western Indologists of the postwar periodA. L. Basham, R. C. Zaehner, Louis Dumont, Jan Gonda, Wilhelm Halbfass, D. H. H. Ingalls, J. A. B. van Buitenen, Wendy Doniger, Barbara Stoller Miller, Robert Goldman, and Sheldon Pollockare, without exception, classically trained philologists and Sanskritists, although Basham, Dumont, and Halbfass also work extensively in later periods and a variety of disciplines. Unlike the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, however, when orientalist scholarship on classical Indian theatre formed an interconnected body of discourse, postwar philological criticism has largely ignored drama and theatre. Henry W. Wells is the only postwar European scholar who works mainly on classical drama, and Barbara Millers edition of three plays by Kalidasa, Theater of Memory (1984), is the only notable work of dramatic translation and commentary to appear recently in North America. In the specicc case of theatre, the most powerful orientalist legacy for the study of the postclassical period has been an overwhelming preference among twentieth-century scholars, critics, and theatre practitioners in the West for traditional rather than modern forms of textuality, representation, and performance. This preference stems directly from the dominant message of nineteenth-century orientalism: the period of antiquity is the touchstone of Indian civilization, but the culture lacks
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any genuine capacity for modernity because it does not possess true reason, true belief, or a sense of history. The stasis of Indian cultural forms in this view is an extension of the stasis of Indian society. Max Mller describes Hindu other-worldliness with such double-edged eloquence that he deserves to be quoted at length:
Greece and India are . . . the two opposite poles in the historical development of the Aryan man. To the Greek, existence is full of life and reality; to the Hindu it is a dream, an illusion. . . . No wonder that a nation like the Indian cared so little for history; no wonder that social and political virtues were little cultivated, and the ideas of the Useful and the Beautiful, scarcely known to them. (18) The Hindus were a nation of philosophers. Their struggles were the struggles of thought; their past, the problem of creation; their future, the problem of existence. The present alone, which is the real and living solution of the problems of the past and future, seems never to have attracted their thoughts or to have called out their energies. The shape which metaphysical ideas take amongst the di,erent classes of society, and at di,erent periods of civilization, naturally varies from coarse superstition to sublime spiritualism. But, taken as a whole, history supplies no second instance where the inward life of the soul has so completely absorbed all the practical faculties of a whole people, and, in fact, almost destroyed those qualities by which a nation gains its place in history. It might therefore justly be said that India has no place in the political history of the world. . . . [but] it certainly has a right to claim its place in the intellectual history of mankind. (3032)
The inbuence of such metaphysical judgments on aesthetic assessments is evident in the conclusions Sylvain Lvi moves toward in his study of Indian theatre. He sees the same principles at work in religion, society, politics, and art: the annihilation of all that is ephemeral. . . . The Indian Muse has dissociated the drama from real life and created an imaginary society on the model of Brahmanic society with no danger on the part of the audience to mistake it for reality. Hence, the spectator can abandon himself without fear to the enjoyment of emotions which he knows belong to another world (2: 12022). If Max Mller found the opposition between Greek and Indian religious philosophy crucial in explaining the singularity of Indian culture, Lvi cnds the same opposition pertinent to an explanation of dramatic forms: The Greek drama is
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the action itself. Whereas the nataka is the imitation of a condition, the Greek drama is the imitation of an action. . . . Aristotle and Bharata contradict each other in the same way as the Greek genius and the Indian genius. The Greek loves action, feverish action. . . . Indian religion and philosophy condemn and curse action, seed of error and bondage (126 27). Naturally, it follows that while the West was undergoing fundamental literary change, India remained faithful to the ancient precepts of Bharata (129). Yet even Lvi concedes that under the appearance of an eternal inertia, India is changing, and its theatre has moved away from the Sanskrit model of heroic comedy under the impact of changing circumstances (129, 131). Classical Sanskrit nataka remains for him the most beautiful achievement of the Indian dramatic Muse, but it is the form he envisions as changing under the weight of history to become the theatre of the future, both literary and popular (133). The Western Retreat from Indian Theatrical Modernity In the postwar period, the orientalists almost exclusive concern with classical theatre has given way to a broader interest among Western scholars in traditional, religious, ritualistic, folk, and popular-secular (or intermediary) theatrical forms and genres of performance. The substitution of the categories of drama and theatre by the category of performance has also made possible the absorption of theatre into the disciplines of anthropology, folklore, and the history of religions, which (as mentioned earlier) have produced the most substantial recent scholarship on Indian theatrical modes. However, while the spectrum of forms under scrutiny has become wider as a result of the new methodologies, the overall marginalization of modern cultural forms remains unchanged. Breckenridge and van der Veer describe the continuing e,ects of the orientalist anatomy of Indian culture as a sharp boundary between the traditional inside and the modern outside. This assumption leads to the attribution of authenticity to what is seen as traditional and of mimicry to any e,ort to adopt modern practices (Orientalism, 14). The irony of the identity between orientalist and cultural-nationalist positions in this respect is obvious, but where the Indian nationalists want to uproot an alien modernity that they see as deeply entrenched in India, the Western neoorientalists refuse to recognize the existence of such a modernity or to accommodate it within their theoretical and critical systems. While theatre is most familiar in the West as a modern, urban, literary form, Western scholars suspend that conception in the case of Indian theatre and erase the historicity of the colonial and postcolonial periods. As the
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following discussion shows, this neoorientalist petriccation of India is as prevalent in Western academic scholarship as in the theoretical and practice-oriented discourses of theatre anthropology and interculturalism. The opposition between intrinsic tradition and extrinsic modernity undergirds Kathryn Hansens Grounds for Play, an admirably detailed historical-critical study of the nautanki theatre of north India. To decne this form of multiple origins, she distinguishes it, on the one hand, from folk theatre, which evokes purely tribal or village participative activity, and, on the other hand, from the classical, elite, urban theatre derived from Sanskrit (37). Neither a village nor a city form, nautanki is an intermediary theatre because it occupies an intermediate level of complexity between village and urban forms and mediates between di,erent populations, regions, classes, and ways of life (43). While the emphasis in these decnitions is on cultural interbows, Hansen casts the distinctions between nautanki and Westernized urban Indian theatre in far more rigid terms. The urban stage is a constricted modern middle-class institution, and nautanki the product of a vibrant, premodern peasant culture: in general, theatres like Nautanki may be described as informal, open, and multivalent, in contrast with the bounded unilinear properties of the European-derived urban theatre (Traditional Media, 209). The distance between the two kinds of theatres is likely to lessen only because of the serious reappraisal of indigenous theatrical forms . . . in intellectual and artistic circles across India and the signiccant recent attempts to Indianize the urban stage and work out a synthesis with folk traditions, including Nautanki (Grounds for Play, 48, 40). In short, according to Hansen an indigenous form like nautanki has the power to a,ect Westernized urban theatre and make it more Indian, but in itself it somehow remains una,ected by historical processes political independence, modernization, urbanization, and the advent of popular and mass media, to name a few. Her remarks exemplify a preference among Western critics (especially area-studies scholars and interculturalists) for indigenous, unscripted, performance-oriented genres that leads inevitably to a dismissal of modern Indian literary drama. In many respects a single, regional, performance-oriented theatre is a simpler subject than the multiregional, multilingual, text- and performancebased celd of modern urban theatre. But in a study like Hansens Grounds for Play, the single regional form is set in as complex a historical and analytical context as possible, while the considerably more complex celd of modern urban theatre is reduced to a few convenient generalizations. When comparing indigenous with ostensibly alien modern theatre forms,
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critics also usually work with binaries that are inherently biased against the second term: native/foreign, indigenous/alien, open/closed, popular/ elite, buid/cxed, natural/articcial, and so on. These oppositions do not acknowledge that authorship, print, interlingual translation, circulation, and urban performance are culturally signiccant phenomena in their own right, and that the scale, quality, and complex hybridity of contemporary Indian urban theatre has rendered the issue of Westernness rather irrelevant. We need binaries that are descriptive rather than prescriptive and evaluative to cope with the multiplicity of theatrical practices that are contained by the same historical moment: regional/national, monolingual/multilingual, print/performance, written/oral, individual/collective, and specicc/general. No form of theatre in contemporary India can be isolated from larger cultural processes or from the overall dynamic of print culture and urban performance, which have undergone rapid transformation in the post-independence period. An approach like Hansens is valuable in explicating its chosen subject, but it misrepresents the larger context of contemporary performance, which is now too complicated to be summed up by generalizations about European-derived urban theatre. A very di,erent disciplinary focus appears in another example of areastudies methodology, a collection of essays titled Drama in Contemporary South Asia, edited by Lothar Lutze, which is based on presentations at a 1981 Interregional Seminar at Heidelberg University. Lutze comments in his foreword that drama was used at the seminar in the widest possible sense, to include Bharata as well as the Bombay clm, literary as well as non-literary drama, down to everyday street varieties, ritual and exorcistic performances etc.in short, drama was conceived as an all-pervading phenomenon of South Asian life (vi). The decning features of drama, in this sense, are the linguistic gestus of address, an attitude of imitation, and the concept of play both in the Hindu sense of lila (divine play) and in John Huizingas sense of the role of play in culture (vii). Lutze further distinguishes between drama as folk or group literature (which has no author, only interpreters) and drama as trivial or serious author literature, concluding that in the present cultural situation in South Asia folk literature fulclls familiar expectations, while author literature deviates from them (viii). This promiscuous plurality of conceptual grids, however, somehow fails to encompass the commonplace decnition of drama as text-based, commercialized urban theatre. Despite the references to literary drama and author literature, the individual essays deal with ritual theatre, village drama, folk theatre, and Bombay clm. Neither Lutzes
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foreword nor the essays in the volume mention a single major contemporary Indian play or playwright. The problem is not that Lutze decnes drama and play in a certain way and accordingly deals with certain kinds of traditional theatre and mass media but that he overlooks a major form of drama in contemporary South Asiapost-independence urban theatreas though it did not exist at all. Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance (1990) by Farley Richmond, Darius Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilli is the most substantial collaborative study of Indian theatre to be published in the West. The books purpose is to introduce the reader to the multiple dimensions of Indian theatre by presenting a representative sample of the major traditions and genres of performance and to give some sense of the complexities of the performative celd that constitutes the panorama of Indian theatre (xi). The scholars clarify at the outset that they use the terms theatre and performance interchangeably in the study because they deal with examples of performance that would not be described as theatre in the West (3). The opening and concluding sections of the book are chronological in conception, part 1 dealing with ancient theatre up to the sixth century a.d., and part 6 dealing with the modern theatre that originated in the nineteenth century and continues into the present. The four intervening parts, however, abandon chronology for a synchronic description of the vast spectrum of performance genres in Indiathe ritual, devotional, folk-popular, and balletic forms that rebect the countrys linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity (8). There are three problems with the procle of modern theatre that emerges in this study. First, although the book claims to bring the discussion of the modern period virtually up to the present day (13), there is again no systematic coverage of major authors, texts, and institutions of performance or of such crucial processes as those of interlingual translation and circulation. Second, the thematics of modern drama are simpliced to such an extent that they become inconsequential. Contemporary plays, we learn, deal with a multitude of themes that center on the family, social life in general, the plight of the individual in a modern mechanized society, and contemporary political and social events (402) and are designed to appeal to the joys and sorrows and problems and potentials of [a] small but inbuential segment of Indian society, the middle class (422). Third, the study seems oblivious to the momentous shift from colonialism to postcolonialism and the radical changes in theatre theory and practice of the past cve decades. For instance, the authors fail to acknowledge that the sphere of the modern has now been deliberately
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permeated by the classical, the religious, and the folk-popular, and that this permeation is one of the distinguishing features of post-independence theatre. The ancient history of Indian theatre and static descriptions of traditional forms (conceived as dehistoricized essences) pose no critical problems for the authors of this study. But their account of modern (and particularly post-independence) theatre as a derivative, urban, middle-class practice independent of history and tradition is reductive to the point of triviality. The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre (1993), an ancillary publication to The Cambridge Guide to Theatre (rev. ed., 1992), reprints the principal entries on the theatres of twenty Asian countries as well as shorter entries on specicc forms, genres, playwrights, directors, and so on. The entire section on India, by Farley Richmond, consists of a short descriptive history of ancient and modern theatre, cfty-two entries on regional folk genres, and eleven entries on individual theatre cgures that cover more than two thousand years of theatre history! Ananda Lal has pointed out that Richmonds faulty knowledge of Indian history, geography, languages, and sociocultural contexts led to numerous factual, typographical, and conceptual errors in the main Cambridge Guide entries; these have reappeared in the spin-o, volume because neither the text of the entries nor the bibliography has been corrected, revised, or updated. More damaging than the specicc errors and omissions, however, is the radical and reductive imbalance of the approach. The discussion of modern theatre is a discussion of events, processes, and forms of institutional organization rather than of texts, authors, reception (productions, performances, audiences), performers, and meanings, as it is routinely in the context of Western theatre. Despite its recent publication date, the Guide does not mention any major playwrights and directors of the modern period or distinguish between colonial and postcolonial practices. Three-fourths of the section on India is taken up with an alphabetical catalogue of genresstatic descriptions of more or less the same religious, folk, and popular forms that seem to constitute the celd of Indian theatre in the West. Understandably, Lal describes the compilation as an example of the shortcomings of intercultural scholarship, pointing out that this . . . focuses disproportionate attention on the otherness of Indian theatre by stressing traditional forms, the kind of art that attracts most Western researchers who come to India (Rasa, 25). As he points out, the misplaced emphases are more damaging now because the cultural stakes are much higher than they were before the 1960s, and the misrepresentations of Western discourse tend to be replicated and perpetuated on a larger scale. In particular, the
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postwar approaches of theatre anthropology and interculturalism have contributed signiccantly to the new visibility of Indian performance in the West, and they reveal the persistence of orientalist categories not in the discipline of criticism but in theatre theory and practice. Theatre Anthropology, Interculturalism, and the Common Country of Theatre In contrast with the marginality of Indian theatre in postwar area-studies scholarship, mainstream theatre criticism, and postcolonial studies, the avant-garde discourses of theatre anthropology and interculturalism seem at crst to be radically compensatory. Since the early 1960s, the theory, scholarship, and theatre practices of such major cgures as Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner, and Peter Brook have focused unusual attention on certain Indian theatre traditions, performance genres, and cultural narratives as the liberating antitheses of a regimented text-based theatre. In the Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, Barbas decnition of his subject as a new celd of study applied to the human being in an organized performance situation (v) draws conspicuously on the exacting physical discipline, ritual repetition, and defamiliarizing aesthetic power of such classical Indian dance forms as kathakali and odissi. Barba also uses Sanjukta Panigrahi, the legendary contemporary odissi dancer with whom he cofounded the International School of Theatre Anthropology, as a primary exemplar of the extra-daily use of the body that constitutes technique in his decnition, and demonstrates the identity of theatre and dance as performance situations (5). Grotowskis engagement with kathakali appears in his theorizing about the theatre of sources and the poor theatre; his self-mocking version of Kalidasas Shakuntalam in 1960 was the crst major postwar production to take on Artauds idea of oriental theatre as well as the oriental play par excellence. Schechner uses kathakali, along with the Japanese Noh, to demonstrate the systematic opposition between performer training in Asian and Euro-American theatres, respectivelyan opposition that explains the usefulness of non-Western theatres to the Western avant-garde. The Asian examples, Schechner observes, suggest a kind of training . . . more suited to the transmission of performance texts. And since experimental theater has become a theater of performance texts its leaders have naturally turned to methods of training used in traditional cultures (Performative Circumstances, 253). Elsewhere, he discusses the ramlila of Ramnagar, the most elaborate month-long reenactment of the Ramayana
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in north India, as environmental theatre on the grand scale and a vivid embodiment of the intersections between theatre and anthropology. Finally, Brooks Mahabharatathe nine-hour stage version and the sixhour clm versionrepresents a singular international and intercultural e,ort to enact before Western audiences the worlds longest poem, which also claims to be an encyclopedic history of mankind. Collectively, this body of work places Indian performance at the center of a postmodern theatre identity that is performer and performance oriented, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural. The Romance of Indian Tradition From the viewpoint of recent history and present theatrical practice in India, however, anthropological and intercultural approaches have functioned even more e,ectively as instruments of erasure than other contemporary Western discourses. In the world of performance, Bonnie Marranca observes, India exists largely in theoretical writings, or as a model for performance discipline. Its classical dance and musical forms are known and performed here, though not contemporary Indian drama (Thinking, 13). Interculturalists perpetuate the orientalist and neoorientalist preoccupation with classical aesthetics and traditional performance genres, but with the additional prestige and inbuence that attend a postmodern retheorizing of theatre. Unlike academic scholars, theatre anthropologists and interculturalists approach traditional forms with the pragmatic object of resolving their own crises of representation, but they deal with the forms mostly by reducing them to models of performance discipline, to borrow a phrase again from Marranca. Their disinterest in the modern and the contemporary in India neutralizes the historicity of the moment of contact and creates a timeless realm in which the forms are simply there, unrelated to other performative phenomena or media, waiting to be appropriated. The rationalization for this ahistorical consumption also lies in the conception of a country like India as a traditional culture, where the old inherited forms overshadow the products of modernity. As Richard Schechner puts it, even as India has become a modern secular state, or is in the process of becoming such on its own terms, the ritual aspects of its culture, especially in the villages and the villagelike neighborhoods of many cities, remain resilient, living, very active (Performative Circumstances, 210). For more than a decade now the critique of interculturalism and theatre anthropology has centered on the issues of cultural property, cultural inequality, and universality, and its terms need to be summarized
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brieby so that the somewhat di,erent emphases of my discussion may emerge clearly. As recent essays by Marranca, Gautam Dasgupta, Una Chaudhuri, Darryl Chin, and Rustom Bharucha suggest, theatre anthropology and interculturalism invite criticism on grounds of theory and ideology as well as performance practice, many of which are exempliced by Brooks Mahabharata. These scholars criticize the ideological positions and practices of theatre anthropology and interculturalism as forms of neoorientalism and neoimperialism; of Euro-American hegemony disguised as universality and benign cultural exchange; of a fetishizing, dehistoricized aestheticism; of a transculturalism that erases all cultural particularity; of cultural violation and inauthenticity; of an imputed sameness that erases essential di,erences; of a body-centered epistemology that merely reinforces the mind/body dualism; and of a persistent reduction of theory to the level of performance. In a systematic rejoinder to these objections, Julie Stone Peters argues that theatre is not obliged to reproduce cultural forms with accuracy or conform to established practices but has the freedom to create its own structures and meanings out of the matter of culture. The demand for authenticity in cultural borrowings, she suggests, is closely akin to the kind of purist cultural self-identity (representation of ones own group as cxed and uniform) that is bound up with nationalist ideologies, with an us-versusthem mentality, and with the kind of protective attitude toward cultural property that even Bharucha reveals when he writes that Brook should focus his attention on his own cultural artefacts, the epics of western civilization like the Iliad or the Odyssey (Peters, 208). The claims to universality in interculturalism, she continues, are based on cross-cultural samenesses that are the necessary converse of cultural di,erences: if we reject the possibility of identity, the idea of di,erence becomes meaningless. On the question of identity, however, Peters slips into a sentimental rhetoric that is possible only from a position of metropolitan privilege: Those who have not learned, in a world of migration, a world in which there are tens of millions of refugees, a world in which most nations are articcial constructs of the nineteenth centurythose who have not learned that cultural identities (like racial ones) are buid composites with multiple genealogies, will perpetuate for us all the sad history of racism and intercultural animosity that has been part of the human inheritance in the twentieth century (Peters, 210). This romanticization of intercultural exchange alters neither the material conditions of the non-Western cultures that fascinate theatre anthropologists and interculturalists nor the situation of racial and ethnic minorities in the
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West. Accepting intercultural performance on its own terms is not a likely remedy for the global problems of poverty and racism. Interculturalism as (Neo)Colonialism In large measure, then, the debate over theatre anthropology and interculturalism pivots around what the West can or cannot (or should or should not) do with the cultural forms of the non-Western world. Other perspectives emerge, however, if one acknowledges that the idea and process of cross-cultural contact are not postwar inventions but the essential conditions of colonialism; that the performance forms of interest to interculturalists are not the only, or even the most important, contemporary forms in the non-Western world; and that these forms have a signiccant history in the present. A critique of postmodern interculturalism from the specicc viewpoint of Indian theatre would assert that it erases not only the modern and contemporary but the contemporaneity of the traditional and both evades and suppresses the history of colonialism. One of the most astonishing moments of dismissal appears in Richard Schechners announcement of a modern theatre in Asia in his essay on the ramlila of Ramnagar:
First, know that in Asia there is a modern theater roughly equivalent to what goes on in Euro-America. Shingeki in Japan, the new theater in India, the modern theater in Indonesiaall the large Asian cities, at least, have theaters that perform a repertory mixing Ibsen with Rakesh, Miller with Kishida, and beyond to a world of experimental theater that although it has local peculiarities is fundamentally intercultural and postmodern. I mean the work, in Asia, of Sircar, Rendra, Ikranagara, Suzuki, Terayama, and many others. But outside of this world of modern and experimental performance, and much larger than it, is the world of traditional performance. (Between Theater, 239)
The breathtaking sweep of this comment presumes that Asian theatre is a meaningful category; that modernity implies the same qualities in India or Indonesia as it does in Euro-America; that it is useful to place Badal Sircar beside Tadashi Suzuki or Shuji Terayama; and that one should develop a predisposition toward the world of traditional performance because it is larger than the world of modern and experimental performance. In fact, modern theatre in the various Indian languages has closer links with the traditions in those languagestheatrical or otherwise and with the West, than with theatre anywhere else in Asia. It is also
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concerned to a very great extent precisely with the object of intercultural curiositythe traditional theatre. Lumping together Asian countries and their leading contemporary playwright-practitioners signals a disinterest and tokenism that asserts commonalities where they may not exist. For instance, China and Japan do not share Indias history of colonization by Europe (although they have their own histories of colonial engagement), and Indonesias colonial past is very di,erent from Indias. Finally, modern and traditional theatres in India are not necessarily in direct competition with each other, because they appear in di,erent locations and fulcll di,erent needs in their audience. Peter Brooks foreword to the published text of the Mahabharata reveals another observer who encounters only the traditional theatre of the East in India in the 1980s, while the country itself coincides exactly with his vision of an ancient, rich, incnitely various but unchanging culture.
We saw that for several thousand years India has lived in a climate of constant creativity. . . . The line between performance and ceremony is hard to draw, and we witnessed many events that took us close to Vedic times, or close to the energy that is uniquely Indian. Theyyems, Mudiattu, Yakshagana, Chaau, Jatraevery region has its form of drama and almost every formsung, mimed, narratedtouches or tells a part of the Mahabharata. Wherever we went, we met sages, scholars, villagers, pleased to cnd foreigners interested in their great epic and generously happy to share their understanding. (Carrire, xivxv)
Like Barba, Brook is fascinated by the meticulous systems of codiccation in classical Indian aesthetics and the perfection of bodily movement and gesture in traditional forms. There is no sign in his discourse that Indian performance encompasses anything other than the classical, devotional, and folk traditions: the ancient myths and forms are all that India still o,ers. Furthermore, all the focus on India in theatre anthropology and interculturalism has not aroused an iota of interest in modern Indian theatre or in the postcolonial context in which the present exchange takes place. Brooks representation of Indian performance is necessarily selective and partial, but for the Western spectator it is decisive because there is no other knowledge to place beside it. The West does not possess any other signiccant understanding of Indian theatre, nor does it seem interested in acquiring such understanding. Brooks account of his Indian odyssey is astonishing not because he chose to enact an
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ancient epic in his own way but because his vision of India remained uncontaminated by a grim and complicated present. If interculturalists thus disengage themselves from the historical present by creating a timelss realm of tradition, they also show no awareness of the role of the traditional either in the construction of theatrical modernity or in the postcolonial politics of culture and performance. As I suggested earlier, from its beginning modern theatre in the Indian languages relies heavily on the received narratives of myth, legend, history, and folklore, while folk theatre is the model for the Indian Peoples Theatre Association during the political 1940s. My discussion of the traditionalist, revivalist, and cultural-nationalist positions in contemporary theatrical discourse also indicates the aesthetic-cultural-political functions of traditional theatre in the present. One cannot use the forms without contending with the polemic that surrounds them in the period of decolonization or without knowing what they mean here and now. What is true of form is also true of content. Rustom Bharucha has complained that in the name of neutrality and universality, Brooks Mahabharata negates the non-Western context of its borrowing, refuses to engage with the problems of the text, and constructs something like a well-made play out of an encyclopedic poem that is not merely an epic but a cultural history of Hinduism and a source of daily knowledge (Theatre and the World, 9798). Referring to the same work, Gautam Dasgupta comments that such expressions of cultural give and take [should] not descend to banal generalities about the foreign culture, but seek to uncover its speciccities, in actual, and not merely perceived, links with its own society (77). But even these objections do not make the further point that the poems links with its own society include its extraordinary presence in the contemporary culture of nontraditional representation. Chapter 6 deals at length with a cluster of major post-independence plays in which various episodes from the Mahabharata serve as allegories for the emergent nation, turning this epic about the Brahmanical codes of dharma (law, duty) into an antinationalist epic about the violence and su,ering that mark the transition from the age of ambivalence to the age of evil. Interlinked with these major theatrical texts, such as Bharatis Andha yug (1955), Tanvirs Duryodhana (1979), and Thiyams Chakravyuha (1984), is the cfty-two part serialized version of the Mahabharata that played on state-owned national television in 1989 and coincided with the crst wave of the Hindu nationalist revival that has dominated national politics for cfteen years. When Brooks collaborator Jean-Claude Carrire observes that the Mahabharata is at the origin of thousands of beliefs,
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legends, thoughts, teachings and characters which even today are part of Indian life (vi), he does not add that the poem is very much a text in and for the present because it is being constantly rewritten. Perhaps Brook and his interpreters cannot be expected to know this text, but would it be possible to perform an intercultural version of Antigone in, say, England, without invoking its intertexts in Jean Cocteau, Anouilh, and George Steiner? Eliding Colonialism Beyond these specicc instances of dehistoricization, the suppression of colonialism in theatre anthropology and interculturalism takes place at two levelsin the assertion that the interest in intercultural contact is a postmodern event even when it involves formerly colonized cultures, and in the related assumption that East-West contact can occur in the present outside the contexts of orientalism and colonialism. Eugenio Barba argues that those who think in terms of ethnic, national, group, or even individual identity in theatre must also think of ones own theatre in a transcultural dimension, in the bow of a tradition of traditions. . . . It is through exchange, rather than isolation, that a culture can develop, that is, transform itself organically (Steps, 2021). All modern theatre in India, however, is necessarily transcultural: its history has been intertwined with that of Western theatre for two centuries in the all-important areas of theory, aesthetic form, institutional organization, economics, and translation, crst in colonial and now in postcolonial contexts. Indeed, the traditionalist position in Indian theatre discourse is a reaction against pervasive Western inbuencean expression of the sentiment that the West is already too much with us. Commentators like Barba appear unaware of this complicated prehistory and proceed as though theirs was the crst call to syncretic performance. Similarly, Barba invites performers in all cultures to meet within the common borders of their profession (Steps, 20), like philologists, architects, or doctors. But this international community cannot deal with reciprocal historical inbuences, transcultural intertextuality, the postcolonial interpenetration of East and West in theatre, or the historicity even of the performance traditions it embracesin short, with all those elements of theatre that lie outside the craft of the performer. One possible rejoinder to my reminder about colonialism could be that theatre anthropology and interculturalism are resolutely postcolonial: that in the Indian context, they replace the orientalist devaluation of postclassical cultural forms with attitudes of curiosity, fascination, and reverence, and assign those forms a vital role in a reconstructive postmodern
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theatrical practice. But as Bonnie Marranca notes astutely with reference to Brooks Mahabharata and Ariane Mnouchkines orientalized productions, that some of the most suggestive work comes out of the intersection of British (or French) culture and a former colony is in no small measure a decisive factor in the discussion of the problematic of interculturalism (Thinking, 13). For many, Brooks Mahabharata is a neocolonial work at the level of both process and product. In Theatre and the World (9496, 11820), Rustom Bharuchas wry account of the masters extended presence in India suggests that the inequality of power relations with Indian advisors, collaborators, and escorts remained intact, and the same inequality persists in the visits of Barba, Grotowski, and Schechner, although these Euro-American directors may seem to fall outside the neocolonial framework. Brooks commitment, moreover, was to cnd a way of bringing this material into our world and sharing these stories with an audience in the West (xiv). His international cast included only one major Indian performer (Mallika Sarabhai in the role of Draupadi), and the stage version of the play was not performed in India at all. Aside from its reductive, selective, and limited engagement with forms, interculturalism therefore remains an interlude in the postwar history of Euro-American theatre; it has had no corresponding e,ect on the trajectory of, say, post-independence Indian theatre. A theatre discourse that is ostensibly about India has not promoted any interest in the particulars of Indian modernity or explained contemporary Indian practice, either modern or traditional. This chapter has indicated the scale and complexity of the theoreticalcritical discourses about Indian theatre in which the new urban theatre of the post-independence period appears either as an absence or as a presence to be repudiated. The problem is not that Indian theatre is neglected by Indian and Western commentators but that the emphases of current commentary perpetuate only certain views of the subject. The second issue that needs reiteration is that there is no clear dividing line between external or extrinsic and internal or intrinsic, Western and Indian, foreign and native views of the subjectthe intrinsic is intertextual with the extrinsic, and both are ultimately contained by the totality of postcolonialism. After decning the celd of post-independence urban theatre in previous chapters and analyzing in this chapter why that celd remains obscure, in the remainder of this study I am concerned with some of the dominant thematic formations that allow us to designate and interpret major postcolonial dramatic genres in their theoretical, literary, and performative contexts.
pa r t i i
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Genres in Context
Theory, Play, and Performance
chapter 6
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Myth, Ambivalence, and Evil
Post-Independence Theatre and the Indian Past The crst signiccant thematic formation to appear in Indian theatre after independence consists of a succession of major plays that invoke the nations ancient, premodern, and precolonial past through the two principal modes of retrospective representationmyth and history. In this usage, the term myth designates cctional narratives involving divine and heroic human agents that belong to the formative stages of Indian culture in the ancient period, embody powerful qualities with which the culture has identiced itself over a period of time, and have maintained a more or less continuous presence in a range of cultural forms. History denotes the oral and written record of lives and eventsindividual and collective, specicc and generalwhose actuality is documented and empirically vericable. The inaugural work of this crst dramatic phase is Dharamvir Bharatis Andha yug (Blind Epoch, Hindi, 1954), a verse play which subjects the main story of the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, to acute compression as well as selective elaboration for its intense, self-consciously epochal view of the aftermath of the eighteen-day war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. Bharatis condensed epic is followed by two history plays by Mohan Rakesh, also set in antiquity, in which male protagonists suppress an instinctive sensuality and sacricce their soul mates to make the tragic choice of renunciation over love. The crst work, Ashadh ka ek din (A Day in Early Autumn, Hindi, 1958), places the historical cgure of
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the archcanonical Sanskrit poet and playwright, Kalidasa, within a largely invented action to create its ironic portrait of the artist as a young and then middle-aged man, caught between the provincial sources of his poetic inspiration and the ambiguous attractions of metropolitan patronage. The second play, Lahron ke rajhans (The Royal Swans on the Waves, Hindi, 1963) centers on the Buddhas younger brother, Nand, who loses interest in a life of married ease and princely luxury almost against his own will and sets out at the end to seek the eight-fold path of enlightenment. Rakeshs plays overlap chronologically with three plays in Kannada, one by Adya Rangacharya and two by Girish Karnad. Rangacharyas Kelu Janmejaya (Listen Janmejaya, 1960) is an allegory of nation building that invokes in its title the Pandava prince (Arjunas great-grandson) to whom the Mahabharata is narrated on the occasion of a ritual snake-sacricce. Karnads Yayati (1961) uses an early episode from the Mahabharata for its counter-oedipal narrative of a son, Puru, who temporarily accepts the curse of sudden old age pronounced by an angry sage against his weakwilled father, Yayati, but drives his bride Chitralekha to suicide in the ensuing crisis. Tughlaq (1964) deals with the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, the fourteenth-century Islamic sultan of Delhi whose e,orts to rule a majority Hindu population with humanity and justice ended in chaos and violence. Thus, for the crst active decade in Indian drama after independence, the major new playwrights seem concerned principally with establishing and debating the relation of the new nations present to its remote past through the narratives of both myth and history. After the early 1960s the celd of Indian theatre diversices considerably with the arrival of realist, existentialist, absurdist, and left-wing political modes in urban literary drama, and the development of syncretic, experimental, performer-centered theatre in urban as well as nonurban locations. The absorption in past narratives and practices, however, has not only continued but expanded over four decades into a multifaceted movement. In the second phase of this grouping, the line of literary plays that use history and myth as occasions for philosophical, moral, political, and cultural exploration runs from the early plays of Bharati, Rakesh, and Karnad to Vijay Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal (Marathi, 1973), a play set during the corrupt reign of the late eighteenth-century Peshva rulers of Pune; Karnads Tal-danda (Death by Beheading, Kannada, 1989), which deals with the destruction of a twelfth-century anticaste movement in Karnataka; G. P. Deshpandes Chanakya Vishnugupta (1988), whose title character is the celebrated chief councillor at the court of the late fourth-century Maurya emperor Chandragupta; and Karnads Agni mattu
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mal (The Fire and the Rain, Kannada, 1994), which again draws on the Mahabharata for the little-known story of a seven-year-long cre sacricce. Over the same period of time, the foremost contemporary theorists of theatre who conceive of performance as a physical discipline and a form of visual poetryK. N. Panikkar and Ratan Thiyamhave recast the Mahabharata plays of the classical Sanskrit playwright Bhasa to develop distinctive but overlapping epic performance sequences for their respective groups, Sopanam in Trivandrum (Kerala) and the Chorus Repertory Theatre in Imphal (Manipur). In addition to the Mahabharata plays, Panikkar has employed his range of distinctive styles in productions of Kalidasas Vikramorvashiyam (Urvashi Won by Valor, 1981, 1996) and Shakuntalam (1982); Mahendra Vikram Varmans Bhagavadajjukam (The Ascetic and the Courtesan, 1984, 1985, 1988) and Mattavilasam (1985); and Bhasas Swapnavasavadattam (The Dream of Vasavadatta, 1993), Pratimanatakam (The Statue, 1999), and Charudattam (2003). The performances are often in both Sanskrit and Malayalam, setting up tensions between the classical and the modern both in the conception and reception of these works. Similarly, in addition to his Mahabharata sequence, Thiyam has directed Bharatis Andha yug and Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din in Manipuri for the Chorus Repertory Theatre, transplanting these major Hindi plays and their classical subject matter to the linguistic and cultural contexts of his remote northeastern state. The third phase in this collective practice consists of revivals, translations, and transmutations of the Sanskrit plays not only of Bhasa but of Kalidasa, Shudraka, Vishakhadatta, and Mahendra Vikram Varman by other national-level directors. Shanta Gandhi was chronologically the crst to revive Bhasa, with productions of both Madhyam vyayog (The Middle One) and Urubhangam (The Shattered Thigh) for the National School of Drama in 196566, more than a decade before Panikkar and Thiyam turned to these plays; in addition, she directed Vikram Varmans Bhagavadajjukam in 1967. Habib Tanvir also took up Urubhangam and rendered it as Duryodhana (1979) in the Chattisgarhi folk style that is his hallmark as a director. Tanvirs other well-known folk productions of Sanskrit plays are Vishakhadattas Mudrarakshasa (The Signet Ring of Rakshasa) and Shudrakas Mrichchhakatika (The Little Clay Cart). Vijaya Mehta has directed Kalidasas Shakuntalam in Hindi, Marathi, and German, and Mudrarakshasa in Marathi. Kumar Roy has done a Bengali version of Mrichchhakatika, while Ebrahim Alkazi has brought Mohan Rakeshs Hindi translation of this play to the stage (1974). B. V. Karanth has directed Mudrarakshasa (1978), Kalidasas Malavikagnimitram (Malavika and Agnimitra, 1982), and
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Bodhayan Kavis Bhagavadajjukiyam (1978). Because most of the old and new playswhether text-centered or performance-orientedcirculate in multiple languages, the cumulative e,ect of this engagement with the past has been to keep classical Indian plays, playwrights, and dramaturgy, mythic and epic narrative, and the signiccant phases of ancient, medieval, and precolonial history constantly in view before national (and occasionally international) audiences. To rewrite my own earlier reformulation of T. S. Eliot, the radical contemporaneity of the past in presentday Indian theatre has in fact created a domain in which two and a half millennia of texts and performance practices maintain a simultaneous existence and compose a simultaneous order. Myth, History, and The Nation In the theatre culture of the last cve decades, this varied body of mythichistorical drama represents a powerful fusion of textual complexity and performative e,ect, and a wide range of aesthetic, dramaturgical, and theatrical initiatives that have determined its preeminence in the contemporary repertoire. Given the controversy over the status of premodern legacies in recent discussions of nations and nationalism, however, the ubiquity of the past in the theatre of a new nation has made the issue of cultural antecedents both thematically central and unusually provocative in the Indian context. Analyzing nationalism without any specicc reference to India, Anthony D. Smith describes the place of the past in the life of modern nations as [t]he central question which has divided theorists of nationalism (163), the fundamental disagreement being between those who regard the nation as a preeminently modern institution and those who see it as the modern expression of preexisting experiences of nationhood. As Ronald Beiner explains concisely, a radically modernist view of the nation serves to debunk nationalist mythmaking, whereas the view that nationalist sentiment is linked to authentically premodern cultural resources helps to legitimize these sentiments of national belonging (6). In the inbuential formulations of Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, Elie Kedourie, and Benedict Anderson, the modernist position has dominated historical and sociological studies of nations and nationalism since the 1980s, but it has also invited criticism for its historical shallowness and its systematic failure to accord any weight to the preexisting cultures and ethnic ties of the nations that emerged in the modern epoch, thereby precluding any understanding of the popular roots and widespread appeal of nationalism (Smith Myths, 9). The alternative position, decned by Smith as historical ethno-symbolism,
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emerges from the theoretical critique of modernist approaches, as well as from a di,erent reading of the historical record. For ethno-symbolists, what gives nationalism its power are the myths, memories, traditions, and symbols of ethnic heritages and the ways in which a popular living past has been, and can be, rediscovered and reinterpreted by modern nationalist intelligentsias. It is from these elements of myth, memory, symbol, and tradition that modern national identities are reconstituted in each generation, as the nation becomes more inclusive and as its members cope with new challenges. (9)
While distinguishing his approach from primordialist and perennialist conceptions of the nation, Smith emphasizes several attributes of nationalism that necessitate the long view: the processes of nation formation are historical; they unfold over extended periods of time; and the collective cultural identities essential to nationhood are cemented by the faculty of memory. In short, nations and nationalism may be modern constructs, but the cultural and political bases of nationhood are not. Correspondingly, the need is not to assert the existence of nations in the past but to determine what the appeal to historical and cultural antecedents means in the present. Smiths ethno-symbolic approach o,ers a fresh theoretical perspective on a constitutive cultural trait that also undergirds the theatrical works under discussionthe continuity and evocative power of the countrys myths, memories, and traditions. In India, the premodern past is not in itself either merely invented or merely imagined: as the accumulation of the complex political, religious, social, and cultural formations of three millennia, it has an archival, textual, and cultural existence independent of its modern uses.1 Similarly, we do not have to commit the fallacy of retrospective nationalism or assert a spurious civilizational unity to recognize that such mythic narratives as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, such classic authors as Kalidasa and Jayadeva, and forms of socioreligious literary experience, such as bhakti, have maintained a more or less continuous presence in Indian culture through oral, written, and performative modes of transmission. The issue, then, is not whether the past is real outside its modern constructions, but how it comes to be reimagined during the modern period, and what role these reconstructions play in the evolving ideas of nation and nationhood. After the mid-nineteenth century, appeals to an idealized Indian past become a key element in the nationalist advance toward sovereign nationhood; following independence, new stages of literary and cultural modernity have subjected the colonial-era formations to revision and have created zones
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of expectation in which evocations of the past rebect inevitably, and ambivalently, on the long-conceptualized but newly actualized nation. The mythic and historical plays of the post-independence period thus represent earlier times to stage the nation in the present, but the full complexity of this symbolic identiccation emerges only in contradistinction to colonial views of the Indian past. First, the ideal communal antecedents that the nineteenth-century nationalist intelligentsia imagined for the Indian people exempliced what Gayatri Spivak terms a strategic essentialism because a uniced collective identity of this kind was necessary to the success of an anticolonial movement. In a perhaps unconsciously Eurocentric and orientalist move, Smith suggests that the eventual basis of the ideas and activities of . . . Indian nationalists, and of the modern Indian nation as a whole, lies in the initial formation of a Hindu ethnic community in the Vedic era (172). But Bipan Chandra places the ethnic bonds in a di,erent light when he suggests that Indian models of nationalism di,er fundamentally from those of Europe because they sublimate di,erence.
In India, nation and nationalism were basically the result not of ethnicity or the historical formation of the nation around language and culture but of a movement against colonialism. . . . The people (or the nation) in India were formed as a unity because their economic and political interests became increasingly common as did the interests of their social and cultural development. But the people or the nation continued to be di,erentiated by language, ethnicity and culture. . . . If these common interests had not developed, they would not have formed a nation, even if they had shared a common language and ethnie, as in the case with Arabs. (910)
Despite the emergence of a common composite culture and shared interests, therefore, the calculated provisionality of India-as-nation in colonial nationalist discourse problematizes the national implications of specicc myths and histories in postcolonial representations, as well as appeals to classical antiquity as the source of unity and common cultural values. In addition, if anticolonialism had united a diverse populace against a common adversary to make the nation possible, the postcolonial politics of the secular nation-state have increasingly challenged the idea of India (especially since the 1980s) and have tended to deconstruct the nation back into its principal ethnoreligious components, represented most strongly by Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh fundamentalisms. When such
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post-independence plays as Bharatis Andha yug (1954), Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din (1958), and Karnads Yayati (1961) evoke the epic and classical Hindu world, authors and audiences are strongly aware that the representation whatever its view of its subjectis received in a diverse religious, social, political, and economic environment. Other plays, especially Karnads Tughlaq (1964) and Tal-danda (1989) and Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal (1973), are in fact about the historically grounded problem of irreducible religious and cultural di,erences on the subcontinent, and the fundamental divisiveness of hierarchical Hinduism. These playwrights thus represent the past not to assert the uniced Hindu identity of the modern Indian nation-state, as Rumina Sethi has argued (28), but to scrutinize the dominant tradition in the context of a pluralistic nation. The evocation of the nation is not (and does not need to be) explicit; rather, it is an inevitable e,ect of the restaging of myth and history. Signiccantly, post-independence playwrights also enact the space clearing gesture of coming to terms with the past before turning to the historical present as an equally substantial subject of representation. Second, nineteenth-century Indian nationalism stands in a paradoxical epistemological relation to European institutions: while colonialism usually implies a fundamental antipathy toward the subject culture, and anticolonialism implies political, economic, and cultural opposition to the colonizer, the discovery and recovery of the Indian past was a collaborative enterprise between the European orientalists and Indian nationalists. The indigenous modes of cultural preservation, transmission, and circulationwritten as well as oralthat had prevailed in postclassical India were qualitatively di,erent from the massive e,ort of reconstruction that European philology and historical scholarship performed between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries. As chapter 5 demonstrated with reference to drama and theatre, European scholars gave a scienticc basis and decnition to the qualities that informed nationalist rhetoric about a resurgent Indian civilization. Consequently, as Sethi notes, the nationalist exercise of reviving the past paradoxically reestablishes the unchanging Sanskrit Indic civilization of the orientalists. If the early orientalists perceived their origins in Sanskritic India, the nationalists used that very India to cx the origins of the modern nationstate (12). Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veers formulation of the postcolonial predicament reappears in relation to this cultural circularityfor the emerging nation-state there is no escape from orientalist categories with respect to either the traditional past or the modern future.
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These challenges to the ideas of the nations cultural unity and epistemological autonomy indicate that the simplistic binaries of colonizer/ colonized, indigenous/alien, positive/negative, and colonial/postcolonial are dicult to sustain in relation to India. The issues of colonialist (mis)representation, nationalist reaction, and postcolonial revision can instead be subsumed within the dialectic of satiric and heroic discourses that has shaped European and Indian constructions of India since the late eighteenth century. Vinay Dharwadker describes these antithetical, constantly interacting discourses as two intricately constituted bodies of knowledge, thinking, writing, reading, and interpretation that emerge from the mutually transformative encounter between India and the West in the colonial period and continue into the present (Future 2: 224). The heroic and satiric modes of representation are broad strategies for, respectively, praising and denigrating the historical traditions, religious and philosophical systems, social and political institutions, and cultural and civic practices that constitute India as subject. The satiric mode employs irony, invective, and ridicule for the purpose of attack; the heroic mode adopts an idealistic, romantic, or sentimental stance for the purpose of celebration. In the colonial period the satiric mode is practiced by British modernizers and Indian reformists; the heroic mode, by European cultural relativists and Indian nationalists. In both modes of representation, however, the discourse of the European outsider is directed at the native other, whereas the discourse of the Indian insider is largely self-rebexive. In postcolonial times, the outsider withdraws from direct political control of the colony and attacks or praises his object from a distance, while the insider increasingly shapes the historical and contemporary understanding of his culture with his heroic self-praise or satiric self-criticism (Dharwadker, Future 2: 241). This interaction of discursive modes is especially relevant to representations of myth and history because competing constructions of the past are central to the dialectic in both the colonial and the postcolonial periods. In radical opposition to the appreciative classical scholarship of William Jones and others, the hegemonic orientalist texts of Indian political and economic history, such as James Mills History of British India (1817) and Vincent Smiths Early History of India (1904), parallel Hegels philosophical defense of European imperialism in Asia, particularly in India, and present the traditions of Oriental civilizations as irrational malformations in order to justify the removal of human agency from the autonomous Others of the East and [its placement] in the hands of the scholars and leaders of the West (Inden, Orientalist Constructions,
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421). The works of Indian cultural nationalists, in contrast, attempt to rediscover in history and myth the ideal narratives with which to supplant the colonists denigratory accounts and mobilize cultural opposition to British colonial dominance. The nationalist countero,ensive against orientalist reductions of Indian history and culture is most intense between about 1890 and 1940 and produces philosophical and polemical as well as literary texts. It includes, for instance, the English-language lectures and essays of Swami Vivekananda, which assert the power of Hindu spiritualism (as embodied in Vedic texts and Vedantic philosophy) to resist Western materialism; Bal Gangadhar Tilaks commentary on the Bhagavad-gita in Marathi, which advocates the ideals of practical action and spiritual discipline embodied in an ancient epic warrior hero; and the historical plays of Jaishankar Prasad in Hindi, which portray the reign of the seventh-century Hindu emperor Harshavardhana as the apex of Indias greatness.2 In all these works, the Golden Age of classical Hinduism serves as a rhetorical frame of reference or as a cctional setting to neutralize the indignities of colonial subjection. The end of colonialism naturally intensices this interest in cultural legacies by giving the new nations free citizens the opportunity to repossess their past. The continued dialectic of heroic and satiric modes in postindependence Indian writing, however, has precluded any unilateral appropriations of the precolonial legacy. A sizeable literature of nationalism, national integration, and nation worship (desh-bhakti ) creates and sustains a view of the past very similar to that of the earlier cultural nationalists. To adapt a comment by Doris Sommer, this literature clls the epistemological gaps [in] the non-science of history, gives legitimacy to the new nation, and directs its history towards a future ideal (76). At the same time, a multilingual, multigeneric body of post-independence Indian writingincluding the plays under discussion heredraws on history and myth as narrative sources precisely to reappraise and de-idealize the past. A late-colonial historical novel, such as Raja Raos Kanthapura, can function as the literary dimension of nationalist ideology by claiming truth and authenticity for its mythologized history. But Rumina Sethis description of the idealization of cultural myths and models as an ongoing process concomitant with the persistence of the demands for an exemplary nationhood (198) can scarcely apply to serious writing of the post-independence period, which invokes the past mainly for purposes of interrogation and critique. As Saleem Sinai (the hero mysteriously handcu,ed to history) warns at the end of Salman Rushdies Midnights Children (1980), history is like a row of pickle jars on a shelf,
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waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation (549). Rushdies chutniccation of modern Indian history in this novel, Shashi Tharoors parody of the Mahabharata in The Great Indian Novel (1989), and the entire tradition of mythic and historical plays mentioned at the beginning of this chapter reveal a skeptical, often cynical rebexivity that undermines heroic nationalist and neonationalist constructions of myth and history and urges the culture as a whole to revise (and modernize) its selfperceptions (Dimock et al., 2734). The cultural legacies it constructs for the nation, moreover, subject to irony both the imaginary past and the imagined community of the sovereign nation in the present. I have so far used myth and history as interchangeable categories because together they constitute the text of the past in colonial and postcolonial Indian cultural forms. Indigenous Indian taxonomies also do not distinguish clearly between the two as narrative modes. A mythic text, such as the Mahabharata, is described as itihasaliterally, thus it waswhich is the Sanskrit term for history, and nationalist cctions, such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyays Ananda math (The Monastery of Joy, 1882) and Raos Kanthapura, present a mythologized history as reality. But beyond this common function of evoking the past, myth and history diverge signiccantly in their modes of composition, transmission, and reception. Myth in India is aligned with poetry, symbol, ritual, oral recitation, continuous textual renovation, and performance. History involves the conbicts between institutionalized and revisionary historiography, the interpenetration of true and cctive forms, the processes of ideological mediation, and the manipulation of knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs. In short, history may be mythologized and myth may be historicized, but in the modern context they are distinct narrative modes. In this chapter, I focus on the theatricalization of myth by considering plays and performances based on the Mahabharata, the most conspicuous mythic text in contemporary Indian writing. Chapter 7 then takes up the texts and contexts of history writing in plays dealing with classical, premodern, and modern Indian history. The Mahabharata as Postcolonial Text: Nation and the Forms of Epic Representation The Mahabharata is virtually a self-selecting text for a discussion of the ethno-symbolism of myth in contemporary Indian theatre: in addition to being an ancient work that maintains a continuous and pervasive cultural presence through multiple modes of transmission, it is the classic
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most fully absorbed into the dialectic of heroic and ironic, (neo)nationalist and antinationalist discourses in the modern period. As A. K. Ramanujan suggests, the epic is not a text but a tradition (Repetition, 162), one that involves the classical and modern languages of the Indian subcontinent as well as Southeast Asia. At any given historical moment, the dissemination of the Mahabharata involves the full spectrum of indigenous cultural formsoral and written, textual and performative, literary and philosophical, classical and folk, elite and popular. The coincidence of colonialism, orientalist recuperations, and a protonationalist renaissance around the mid-nineteenth century, however, inaugurates a new self-rebexive phase of cultural appropriation in which the epic becomes strongly identiced with the cultural history and identity of India as an imagined community and gives rise to new modes of commentary, exposition, cctionalization, and theatrical representation. The incorporation of Indian classics into European philological and critical scholarship, the assimilation of literary forms to print culture, and the institutionalization of urban commercial theatre are among the new conditions for the circulation of the Mahabharata. These shifts distinguish the premodern phases in the life of the epic from its modern afterlife, and the predominantly nonurban sites of earlier transmission from the urban locations of new print and performance genres. Furthermore, the modern urban forms that emerged during the nineteenth century have continued to evolve after independence, but in modalities that are largely antithetical to those of the colonial period. The Epic of Ambivalence The conception of the Mahabharata as an encyclopedic, universalist poetical history of mankind begins with the rebexive claim within the poem that whatever is here, on Law, on Proct, on Pleasure, and on Salvation, that is found elsewhere. But what is not here is nowhere else (van Buitenen, 130). More important to the assimilation of cultural memory to nationalist causes, however, is the symbolic identiccation of the nation with its myths, which in the case of the Mahabharata appears in the title itself. The word Mahabharata commonly refers to the eighteenday war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas that destroyed a dynasty and marked the end of an epoch. However, the title literally means the great or complete Bharatathe story of the descendants of King Bharata (the son of Shakuntala and Dushyanta) which began as the Bharata of 24,000 verses and swelled into the Mahabharata of 100,000 verses over the course of a millennium (ca. sixth century b.c. to a.d. 400).
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In addition, Bharata is the ancient Hindu name for the Indian subcontinent (the land of the Bharatas), which became at independence the ocial Indian name for the new republic, clearly distinguishing it from the Europeanized name India. With no orthographic change, the great history of the Bharatas and the epic war can thus also mean the great history of Bharata (India), inserting the nation back into an ancient text and providing a unique instance of the homology of mythic narrative and nation. The homology has been reinforced, moreover, by both orientalist and nationalist commentators in the modern period. The German Indologist Hermann Oldenberg described the Mahabharata as the national saga of India in the fullest sense of the term because it revealed the united soul of India and the individual souls of her people, and served as the strongest link between old and new India, the India of the Aryan and of the Hindu (qtd. in Dandekar, 14, 71). The Indian nationalist Aurobindo Ghose echoed this view in describing the Mahabharata as the creation and expression of a collective national mind. It is the poem of a people about themselves (Dandekar, 245). The same views reappear after independence in R. N. Dandekars inaugural address at a conference on the Mahabharata organized by the Sahitya Akademi: the Mahabharata is the Book through which India identices herself, for, it rebects, in a highly animated manner, the psyche and the ethos of the Indian people (iii). It is the one work that has proved to be of the greatest signiccance in the making of the life and thought of the Indian people, and [its] tradition continues to . . . inbuence, in one way or another, the various aspects of Indian life (Dandekar, 12). K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar argues that the national and the racial exceed the local and the personal in the epic, and V. Raghavan calls it the cultural encyclopedia of the Hindus (Dandekar, 170). Paradoxically, the orientalist-nationalist designation of the Mahabharata as national epic persists despite the predominance within the poem of narratives of intense emotional su,ering, moral irresolution, and physical violence. In the Hindu conception of time, one complete cycle in the history of the cosmos consists of four epochs (yugas) in which virtue and morality decline by a quarter with each successive transition. The action of the Mahabharata takes place toward the end of the penultimate epoch of suspicion and doubt (the dvapar yug) and the beginning of the epoch of open discord (kaliyug), which represents the lowest point in the capabilities of individual human agents as well as society as a whole. One of the characteristics of kaliyug is the breakdown of family structures;
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hence, it is symptomatic that the conbict in the epic is between two branches of the same family, and the cnal catastrophic confrontation is a war without victors. In G. C. Pandes sociocultural reading, the Mahabharata rebects the contradictions of an age of transition when an old aristocratic and ritual order was yielding place to a new order in which lawlessness, tyranny, social miscegenation, religious skepticism, and heterodoxy were emerging as signiccant features (Dandekar, 123). JeanClaude Carrires text for Peter Brooks production of the Mahabharata invokes the qualities of kaliyug when at Pandus death the poet-author Vyasa prophesies a universal struggle without pity, an outrage to intelligent man. The heroes will perish without knowing why (25). On the brink of war, the Pandava brothers repeat a prophecy by the monkey-god Hanuman, who sees the coming of another age, where barbaric kings rule over a vicious, broken world; where puny, fearful, hard men live tiny lives (Carrire, 119). Signiccantly, this crisis of degeneration does not belong safely to remote antiquity but encompasses the historical present, because the epoch of 256,000 years that began with the Mahabharata is still only in its infancy. As Ruth Cecily Katz points out, the full signiccance of the concept of Kaliyuga in the Mahabharata, becomes evident when one focuses on the fact that the Kaliyuga is the present age (179). The e,ect of this spirit of the age on human agents is the impossibility of moral action even on the part of those who, like dharma-raja (the master of dharma) Yudhishthhira, are the very embodiments of justice and morality. War becomes inevitable in the epic because the Kauravas refuse to give the Pandavas their rightful share in the kingdom of Hastinapur, but clear moral distinctions between good and evil are impossible to sustain because even the most culpable Kaurava characters (such as Duryodhana and Duhshasana) have redeeming qualities, and many of the older partisans (such as Bhishma and Drona) are men of great stature who choose to cght on the Kaurava side out of loyalty or a sense of family solidarity. During the course of the war, issues of ethics and morality become unresolvable because the Pandavas eliminate the principal Kaurava warriorsBhishma, Drona, Karna, and Duryodhanaby deceit and trickery, and in each case the instigator is Krishna, Arjunas charioteer and the one major character in the Mahabharata who is invested with divinity. Katz describes the duplicity underlying the Pandava victory as one of the most crucial controversies of Mahabharata scholarship, because all their ultimately e,ective actions in the war are opposed to the Indian rules of warrior chivalry reiterated in the epic, which both
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sides have accepted before the war begins (VI.1.2832), if not to more universal moral imperatives (155). Furthermore, the authors of the epic stress the immoral nature of these acts and censure Krishna as well as the Pandava brothers, through the dramatic speech of the victims as well as through omniscient authorial comment. Victory for the Pandavas is essential but possible only through treachery: hence, good men are forced to make evil choices, and the decisive events in the epic of dharma (law, morality, justice) are acts of adharma (lawlessness, immorality, injustice). Van Buitenen therefore describes the epic as a series of precisely stated problems imprecisely and therefore inconclusively resolved, with every resolution raising a new problem, until the very end, when the question remains: whose is heaven and whose is hell? (qtd. in Katz, 176). Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of the Mahabharata: From Example to Irony This powerful but ambivalent mythology has shaped the assimilation of the Mahabharata to the cultural-political discourses of modernity and nationhood in India. A juxtaposition of major nineteenth- and twentiethcentury works (see appendix 7) reveals both the commonalities and disjunctions between colonial and postcolonial modes of re-presentation. The traditions of textual scholarship, scholarly commentary, philosophical meditation, popular prose retellings, and literary elaborations that crst emerged during the nineteenth century emphasized the highcultural, heroic, and didactic qualities of the poem. Among the works of nineteenth-century Indian cultural nationalists, Romesh Chunder Dutts condensed English verse translations of The Great Epics of Ancient India (with an introduction by Max Mller, 1900), Swami Vivekanandas The Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and Aurobindo Ghoses commentary on the two epic poets, Vyasa and V almiki (pub. 1956) rebected the impulse among Indian intellectuals to record and reinterpret the classics for a literate middle-class public, both in India and abroad. On the European side, M. Monier-Williamss Indian Epic Poetry (1877) belonged to the tradition of Indological scholarship, while Annie Besants The Story of the Great War (1899) and Flora Annie Steeles A Tale of Indian Heroes (n.d.) were, respectively, pedagogic and popular in their objectives. The theatre of the colonial period replicated at several di,erent levels the nineteenth-century intellectual project of inscribing the Mahabharata with nationalist meanings. Such plays as Michael Madhusudan Dutts Sermista: A Drama in Five Acts (1859) and Rabindranath Tagores Chitra:
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A Play in One Act (1892; rpt. 1914) initiated the modern tradition of literary drama that takes up specicc episodes in the Mahabharata for poetic elaboration but remains outside the domain of commercial theatrical performance. At the other extreme, in the commercial theatre of the colonial period, well-known episodes of combat and death from the Mahabharata became the mainstay of mostly anonymous plays that used the vadh (slaying) of the protagonist as an occasion for topical anticolonial commentary. In general, the repugnant characters in these plays transcend cultural di,erence to represent the colonizing English, while the wholesome characters assume a heightened Indianness to reinforce nationalist feeling. For instance, the death of Arjunas young son Abhimanyu, who was lured into an impenetrable battle formation and slain by seven senior Kaurava warriors, signices the destruction of heroic Indian innocence by immoral adversaries. But the slaying of an archvillain, such as Duhshasana or Kichaka, allegorically signices the destruction of an alien oppressor and becomes a focal point for the performance of militant anticolonialism. In the best-known example of this methodK. P. Khadilkars Kichaka vadh (1907)the title character who attempts to violate the honour of Draupadi, the wife of the Pandavas now identiced with the revolutionary cgure of Mother India, transparently evokes the British viceroy, Lord Curzon. The agent of vengeance against Kichaka is Bhima, the middle Pandava brother of superhuman strength, who represents a resurgent Indian masculinity coming to the aid of a nation imagined as feminine and maternal. Khadilkars nationalist intent constructed an unambiguous allegory of good versus evil out of an ambivalent text, and the entire episode of the censorship and suppression of this play became paradigmatic of the anticolonial uses of the Mahabharata in the commercial theatre (see Solomon). This politicization of the epic was contemporaneous with its transformation into popular musical spectacle in such classics of the Parsi theatre tradition as Pandit Narayan Prasad Betabs Mahabharata (1913), and Radheyshyam Kathavachaks Draupadiswayamvara (The Wedding of Draupadi, 1935) and Veer Abhimanyu (Brave Abhimanyu, 1916). In southern India, the Karnataka-based Gubbi Veeranna Companys open-air production of the play Kurukshetra with real chariots, horses, and elephants constituted another landmark in the transmutation of epic myth into popular spectacle. As appendix 7 shows, since independence the text-based traditions of philosophical, scholarly, critical, and popular engagement with the Mahabharata have not only continued but expanded considerably. The monumental critical edition of the Sanskrit text, begun at Punes Bhandarkar
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Institute in 1918, reached completion in 1970. J. A. B. van Buitenens 3 volume English prose translation (1970), although incomplete, is the standard scholarly work of its kind, whereas P. Lals English transcreation (196880) provides a complete and innovative poetic version by a contemporary Indian-English poet. The novelist R. K. Narayan, the politicianscholar C. Rajagopalachari, and the British author William Buck have produced the most popular prose retellings, while the Sanskritist Iravati Karve and the Bengali poet Buddhadev Bose have produced the most inbuential philosophical commentaries. The traditions of popular and spectacular urban performance based on the Mahabharata, however, have now been transferred mainly to the new media of clm, television, and video. For instance, in addition to being a staple subject for the popular cinematic genre of the mythological, the Mahabharata appeared as a 52part megaseries on Indian national television in 1989 under B. R. Chopras direction, following Ramanand Sagars equally lavish production of the Ramayana in 1987. Both series are available on videocassette, thus consolidating a contemporary mass audience for the epics. Shyam Benegals earlier clm Kalyug (1980) provides a serious counterweight to the popular spectacles, skillfully playing on the idea of the age of strife and the age of the machine in its title as well as its main narrative by retelling the Mahabharata as the saga of a conbicted industrial dynasty in 1970s Bombay. It is as a literary intertext, however, that the Mahabharata has undergone the most radical transformation in the past half-century, assuming new relations to the individual, the nation, and national culture through the range of modernist genres recorded in appendix 7. In the cction, poetry, and serious cinema of V. S. Khandekar, S. L. Bhairappa, Shyam Benegal, and K. Sacchidanandan, female characters, such as Draupadi, Kunti, and Gandhari, have voiced a powerful critique of patriarchy, while male characters, such as Dhritarashtra, Yudhishthhira, Duryodhana, Karna, Ashwatthama, and Abhimanyu have emerged as archetypes of selfdelusion, equivocation, defeat, and death. Similarly, the literary drama of Dharamvir Bharati and Girish Karnad moves away from the trope of heroic resistance and foregrounds the problems of moral indeterminacy, victimage, and injustice in the epic. The Mahabharata-based performance sequences of K. N. Panikkar, Ratan Thiyam, and Habib Tanvir focus on antiheroes, outsiders, and victims, notably Duryodhana, Karna, Ashwatthama, and Abhimanyu. These literary revisions of the Mahabharata by urban authors in the post-independence period register the clearest
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shift from heroic self-praise to ironic self-rebexivity; they constitute the literary dimension not of nationalist ideology but of an ideology that simultaneously acknowledges and questions the power of the past in the mythology of the new nation. As Bhairappa notes in a typical authorial comment, the Mahabharata is an irresistible theme for an Indian writer, but it has to be understood afresh, with ones twentieth-century mind (Dandekar, 264). The Mahabharata and the New Radicals of Urban Performance In this broad thematic shift from example to irony, theatre has assumed an unusually prominent role because specicc episodes from the Mahabharata have served as recurrent source texts for new forms of urban performance that are primarily visual, aural, and spatial rather than verbal in emphasis. Like the many traditional modes of Mahabharata recitation and performance, these contemporary productions underscore the physicality of enactment in specicc performative circumstances. Unlike the traditional modes, they are orchestrated by experimentally inclined urban directors; participate in the aesthetic, material, and cultural environment of urban theatrical performance; are seen primarily by urban and semiurban audiences in India; and cgure prominently among Indias cultural exports to various parts of the world, especially to the West. In thematic terms, these plays grapple to various degrees with the philosophical and moral ramiccations of the Mahabharata story, but their distinctive achievement has been to create a performer-oriented, multimedia theatre experience through the resources of classical dramaturgy, regional forms of music, dance, ritual, and martial training, and postmodern performance modes. The result is traditional Indian performance (based on a classic text) that is paradoxically modern, if not avantgarde, in its techniques and e,ects. The Mahabharata is the ancient text most closely associated with the new aesthetic because, as mentioned earlier, it dominates the productions of the two leading contemporary proponents of theatre as a bodycentered art: Panikkar and Thiyam. Furthermore, the performance of the epic in the productions of both directors is fundamentally intertextual with the work of Bhasa, the classical Sanskrit author whose six Mahabharata plays represent the earliest assimilation of epic poetry to drama; indeed, Bhasa has emerged as the classical author more prominent in contemporary Indian performance than even Kalidasa because of the
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partially overlapping Mahabharata sequences of Panikkar and Thiyam.3 Panikkar established his pioneering role in the Bhasa revival with a landmark production of Madhyam vyayog (The Middle One) at the Kalidasa Samaroh in Ujjain in 1978. This seriocomic vehicle about an imaginary meeting between the middle Pandava, Bhima, and his demonic son Ghatotkacha was followed in 1984 by Karnabharam (The Burden of Karna), an enigmatic and ostensibly incomplete play that suggests rather than shows the death of Karna, the unacknowledged Pandava heir, on the battleceld. Three years later, Panikkar produced Urubhangam (The Shattered Thigh), Bhasas unconventionally tragic play about the death of Duryodhana. Notwithstanding his extensive repertoire of other classical plays by Bhasa, Kalidasa, and Mahendra Vikram Varman, the three plays of 1978, 1984, and 1987 together constitute his most signiccant work in relation to both Bhasa and the Mahabharata. Thiyams intertextual productions have followed a distinctly di,erent trajectory. Having developed an interest in Bhasa in part because of the example of Panikkars Madhayam vyayog (1978), he was the crst to mount Urubhangam in 1981, in a production that some critics described as a future touchstone for Indian theatre. Turning to an episode in the Drona Parvathe death of Arjunas son, Abhimanyu, in battlein 1984 Thiyam premiered his most successful Mahabharata play, Chakravyuha (Battle Formation), which depicts the entrapment of the young Abhimanyu by both Kaurava and Pandava elders. There are extensive references to this crisis in Bhasas Duta-Ghatotkacham (Ghatotkacha as Envoy), which deals with the aftermath of Abhimanyus tragic slaying in both the warring camps. But Chakravyuha is a fully realized, full-length original production focusing on the destruction of an impressionable young hero, and is not in any sense a prequel to Bhasa. Seven years later, Thiyam completed his own signiccant Mahabharata trilogy with Karnabharam (1991), a tribute to Panikkar as well as an allegory of the destructive politics of the Manipur region. Thiyam has produced a fourth Mahabharata play with the eponymous title of Abhimanyu, but his signiccant engagement with the epic again consists in the three plays produced between 1981 and 1991. The only other contemporary play linked to the Panikkar-Thiyam sequences is Habib Tanvirs Duryodhana (1979), a folk version of Urubhangam in the Chhattisgarhi dialect of Hindi, which represents an isolated experiment with the Mahabharata in Tanvirs career. The intertextual celd of major post-independence Bhasa revivals involving the Mahabharata can therefore be depicted as follows:

Bhasa (Sanskrit) Madhyama vyayogam (The Middle One) Karnabharam (The Burden of Karna) Urubhangam (The Shattered Thigh) Dutavakyam (The Embassy) Duta-Ghatotkacham (Ghatotkacha as Envoy) Panikkar (Sanskrit and Malayalam) Madhyam vyayog (1978) Karnabharam (1984) Urubhangam (1987) Dutavakyam (1996) Thiyam (Manipuri) Karnabharam (1991) Urubhangam (1981) Chakravyuha (1984) Abhimanyu (n.d.)
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Tanvir (Chhattisgarhi) Duryodhana (1979)
This interlinked Bhasa-Panikkar-Thiyam-Tanvir sequence represents the most complex instance of the dispersal of the classic within contemporary urban performancea multilingual dissemination in which Bhasas original texts and their relation to the Mahabharata are just as important as the meanings they have acquired in the present. The diversity of the re-presentationsin the medium of drama that is centered on performance rather than texthas also opened up new possibilities of cultural and political a,ect in the Mahabharata narrative. Panikkar presents the classic classically, in the original Sanskrit, and in accordance with the dramaturgical principles of the Natyashastra. His interest in recuperating a more or less essential Bhasa has a complex motivation: he belongs to the city in which the Bhasa manuscripts were discovered and edited; to the community of Chakyars in Kerala who are considered the living embodiments of classical Indian theatre traditions, like the Noh families of Japan; and to a cultural region that has preserved a continuous, if rather obscure, link with Sanskrit theatre through such forms as kudiyattam and kathakali. But more than any other theatre professional in India, he has theorized the relation of epic narrative to classical theatre, and of both to contemporary theatre conceived as a performercentered practice grounded in tradition. If Bhasas plays exemplify the relation of the Mahabharata to drama, Panikkars revivals exemplify the quest for a carefully mediated existence for Bhasa in the present. Thiyam, in contrast, transplants both Bhasa and Panikkar to the theatrical, cultural, and political contexts of the embattled northeastern state of Manipur. He performs the classic in Manipuri, the dominant language of the
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region, and in a style that blends classical dramaturgy more eclectically with regional cultural forms, such as thang-ta, a martial art; natasankeertana, a lyrical style of devotional music; and wari-leeba, a type of oral recitation that paints pictures through words and is based mainly on episodes from the Mahabharata. Despite these di,erences, both Panikkar and Thiyam practice an elaborate, spectacular, and stylized Mahabharata theatre that maintains a close verbal dependence on Bhasas text and emphasizes physical and technical elements, such as costume, design, lighting, movement, gesture, and speech. In contrast, a play like Habib Tanvirs Duryodhana disrupts this classic-contemporary continuum at several levels. Linguistically, it renders the classic neither in the original nor in a major regional language but in the tribal dialect of the Chhattisgarh region in central India. Textually, it translates the classic into the tribal context, retaining the principal characters and events but presenting them in the cultural register of folk performance. Dramaturgically, Tanvirs production employs tribal actors on a bare stage and underscores the pathos of Duryodhanas antiheroic death, for a performance experience that is the radical opposite of the intricate physicality and visual opulence of Panikkar and Thiyam; its emphasis is rather on the simple a,ective pathos of the death of an antihero. Collectively, then, these Bhasa intertexts establish an existence for the Mahabharata in contemporary urban performance that ranges from classic to vernacular in terms of language, from classical to folk in terms of presentational style, and from the center to various margins in terms of cultural geography. This entire tradition of modern urban modes of transmission-throughperformance also stands apart from the pervasive presence of the Mahabharata in ritual, traditional, and folk genres, consisting both of oral recitation and more or less complex forms of theatrical performance. Suresh Awasthi describes the performing tradition of the Mahabharata as the richest and most varied aspect of the epic tradition because it deviates often from the literary tradition, presents alternative versions of many episodes, and reinterprets the epic characters (Dandekar, 183). By utilising the thematic and textual material and conventions of both the literary and the oral traditions, it also serves as a connective link between the two (183). More important, the nonurban performing tradition assimilates the mythic and symbolic elements of the epic to local and regional inbuences; unlike the inherent universalism of urban literary genres, it grounds the epic in a specicc geography. The numerous
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traditional forms of Mahabharata performance could be imagined as a pair of concentric circles of di,ering complexity. The inner circle consists of oral traditions of storytelling, singing, and recitation, such as the warileeba of Manipur, the ojhapali of Assam, the pala of Orissa, the pandavani of Madhya Pradesh, the akhyana of Gujarat, the keertana of Maharashtra, and the harikatha of the southern states. Pandavani, akhyana, and keertana are one-person musical performances deriving their e,ect entirely from the virtuosity of the performer, with pandavani also depending heavily on improvised narrative and mime. The outer circle consists of traditional and folk performance genres such as the kudiyattam and kathakali of Kerala and the yakshagana of Karnataka. The conventional repertory of each of these genres includes cycles of stock episodes based on the Mahabharata that reveal a special focus on such characters as Duryodhana, Karna, Ghatotkacha, Krishna, and Bhishma, and on character clusters, such as Arjuna-Subhadra-Abhimanyu and Draupadi-Kichaka-Bhima. Part of the outer circle, but not identical with its other constituents, is a form like the terukkuttu of Tamil Nadu, which represents a convergence of local goddess worship with Vaishnava devotionalism through the medium of the epic Mahabharata (Frasca, 135). Performed during an annual festival for the propitiation of the goddess Tiraupatiyamman (Draupadi), terukkuttu is considered the most important form of ritual reenactment of the Mahabharata in India. The Mahabharata is thus the ur-source of a vast interconnected tradition within which we can distinguish epic, classical, postclassical, colonial, and postcolonial phases without relinquishing a sense of continuity. At any given historical moment, the innumerable sites of transmission constitute the total representational context within which any single genre or performance may be considered. The range of representations is also characteristically broad, including within it high and low, urban and rural, modern and traditional, textual and performative genres. The three works that are the focus of the following sections exemplify the diversity of modern urban practices and modes of reinscription. Bharatis Andha yug rewrites the Mahabharata as modernist poetic drama, whereas the highly aestheticized, traditionalist productions of Panikkar and Thiyam invest contemporary urban performance with the resonance of myth, in large part by working through the Mahabharata plays of Bhasa. With the culture and politics of the new nation as referents, all three works underscore the power of the premodern legacies of myth and memory to intervene in the historical present.
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The Cosmo-Modernist History of Mankind: Dharamvir Bharatis Andha yug

Andha yug would never have been written, if the matter of writing or not writing it had remained under my control. When the whole entangled design of this work crst took shape in my consciousness, I fell into deep perplexity. I also felt a little afraid. I felt that if I took even one step onto this accursed terrain, I would not be able to come back alive. . . . But after a certain stage, my mind lost its fear. Resentment, disappointment, bloodshed, vengeance, discgurement, ugliness, blindnesswhy should one binch from these states, when it is in them that the few rare traces of truth lie hidden? Why shouldnt I plunge into them fearlessly? dharamvir bharati Andha yug is not a rewriting of history. Through the language of the past, it is a poetic expression of an understanding of its own age. mudrarakshasa
Andha yug is the crst acknowledged classic of post-independence Indian theatre, and perhaps the work that best exemplices the merging of literariness and theatricality because its reputation as a tour de force of poetic drama coexists with an extraordinary, although uneven, performance history spanning more than four decades. Broadcast on Allahabad Radio in 1954, published in September that year, but not performed on stage until 1962, the play was quickly proclaimed a seminal work of both the new poetry and the new drama in Hindi, although the shock it administered to conventional literary expectationsincluding those of the author himselfhas not worn o, even cfty years later. Less than a decade after independence, the most signiccant new play in an Indian language begins by describing the war in the national epic, the Mahabharata, as the origin of a blind civilization in which conditions, mentalities, and souls have all alike turned grotesque (2). After serving as the source of heroic example and spiritual comfort in the discourse of anticolonial nationalism for more than a century, the Mahabharata suddenly emerges in Bharatis play as a locus of overwhelming grief, futility, savagery, and death. By designating that mythic past as the progenitor and determinant of the present, the play also constructs the crst powerful cautionary allegory for the newly constituted nation. Andha yug thus symbolically separates pre- and post-independence literary conceptions of myth and history and inaugurates the tradition of interrogation,
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problematization, and critique that has dominated theatrical and cctional representations of the Mahabharata since the mid-1950s. The very disjunction between expectation and actuality in the use of myth also boldly redecnes the playwrights status as (poetic) author, (poetic) dramas potential for cultural intervention, and theatres role as a site of moral self-rebection. In an unusual bracketing of genres, Nemichandra Jain describes the play as the crst modern work in Hindi to demonstrate that there is a very deep relation between poetry and drama, and that a superior dramatic work is in fact a species of poetry. . . . Andha yug is easily the most signiccant, profound, and meaningful statement in postwar Hindi poetry, and it is not an accident that this statement has been presented in the form of a play (Taneja, 29). Critics commonly regard the eight-year interval between the plays publication and crst staging, then, as a sign that directors and audiences capable of tackling its searing poetic e,ects did not appear in urban Indian theatre until the 1960s. According to Jaidev Taneja, the new generation of viewers was initially disinterested in the antiquity of the plays subject matter, while the older generation could not accept its iconoclasm and modernity. After a reported six-year period of preparation, Satyadev Dubey mounted his pioneer production for Theatre Unit (Bombay) on the sixth-boor rooftop terrace of Ebrahim Alkazis Cumballa Hill apartment building, reaching about 1,200 middle- and upper-middle class spectators in the course of twelve performances in NovemberDecember 1962 (cg. 8). That Dubey achieved a crucial breakthrough in translating the plays intense poetic structure into sustainable theatrical action is evident in the uniquely complex and extensive performance history Andha yug has accumulated since that experimental beginning in Bombay. It includes two major revivals by Dubey (1964 and 1989) and a succession of productions by some of the most important contemporary directors: Ebrahim Alkazi (1964, 1967, and 1974); Ratan Thiyam (1974, 1984, and 1994); Mohan Maharshi (1973, 1975, and 1992); M. K. Raina (1977 and 1986); and Bansi Kaul (1983). Other metropolitan productions have been directed by Ravi Baswani (1974), Ramgopal Bajaj (1992), Arvind Gaur (1994), and Kamlakar Sontakke (1997), while important regional productions have come from Ajitesh Banerji (1970), Dulal Roy (1973), Satish Anand (1973 and 1976), Ravi Baswani (1975), Kamlakar Sontakke (1974), Rajendra Gupta (1974 and 1975), and Bhanu Bharati (1977). The languages of performance have included Bengali, Manipuri, Assamese, and Marathi, in addition to the original Hindi; the venues have ranged from metropolitan areas, midsized cities, and district towns in India to Mauritius,
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Japan, and Germany. Indeed, with productions in such towns as Agra, Aurangabad, Azamgarh, Banaras, Bilaspur, Chandigarh, Gorakhpur, Guwahati, Gwalior, Imphal, Indore, Jaipur, Jamshedpur, Kanpur, Lucknow, Nagpur, Nainital, Patna, Prayag, Raipur, Sagar, and Ujjain, Andha yug has circulated more widely within India than any other contemporary play. Over the same period, it has also been the subject of philosophical commentary, textual explication, and critical interpretation on an unparalleled scale. The force of Andha yug as a decnitive event in contemporary Indian theatre can therefore emerge fully only when it is considered at all three
Fig. 8. The epic on the rooftop stage. Satyadev Dubey and others in the crst production of Dharamvir Bharatis Andha yug, performed on the terrace of Ebrahim Alkazis Cumballa Hill apartment. Directed by Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit, Bombay, 1962. Courtesy of Natya Shodh Sansthan, Calcutta.
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crucial a,ective levels: as a condensed epic, as an allegory of its times, and as a tangled but compelling verse drama whose theatrical potential has been ambitiously realized in performance. Bharati specices the timespan of the play as extending from the evening of the eighteenth day of the Mahabharata war to the moment of the death of Krishna in the Prabhas tirtha [a pilgrimage site near Dwaraka in Gujarat] thirty-six years later. However, acts 14, which include an interlude and constitute the bulk of the play, deal with the immediate aftermath of the war among the defeated Kauravas. In act 1, The Kaurava City, the blind king Dhritarashtra and his voluntarily blindfolded wife, Gandhari, await news of their oldest son, Duryodhana, commander of the Kaurava army and the only survivor among the one hundred brothers who had gone into battle eighteen days earlier. The appointed messenger for the Kauravas is Sanjay, the neutral observer who had received the gift of divine vision so that he could see the events of the war at a distance and describe them to the blind royal couple. In act 2, The Birth of the Beast, Sanjay arrives with the news of the cnal defeat of the Kaurava forces and Duryodhanas temporary concealment in the waters of a magical lake. The character who dominates this act, however, is not Duryodhana but Ashwatthama, son of the preceptor Dronacharya whom the Pandavas killed by treachery on the battleceld because they could not overcome him in fair combat.4 Taking his cue from the equivocation that killed his father Yudhishthhiras refusal to distinguish between man and beastAshwatthama resolves to take revenge against the Pandavas by inventing a new identity for himself as narapashu (man-beast). In act 3, Ashwatthamas Half-Truth, this son deranged by grief is juxtaposed against two others: Yuyutsu, the one Kaurava son who fought on the Pandava side because he placed dharma above the bonds of family; and Duryodhana, who is now on the verge of death because Bhima has dealt him a treacherous blow to the thighs in single combat. Enraged by the mounting evidence of Pandava duplicity, Ashwatthama stumbles onto the means of his revenge in a moment of grotesque inspiration he will attack the Pandava camp during the night and destroy the clan while its members are sleeping. A brief interlude, titled Feathers, Wheels, and Bandages, announces the arrival of Ashwatthamas chariot at the Pandava camp. In act 4, Gandharis Curse, the Kauravas grieving mother takes desperate comfort in Sanjays description of the massacre Ashwatthama carried out inside the Pandava camp. But the cve Pandava brothers, their wife Draupadi, and Abhimanyus pregnant wife, Uttara, escape Ashwatthamas cosmic weapon of destruction because of the interventions of
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Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, and Lord Krishna himself. The knowledge of Krishnas partiality to the Pandavas and the sight of her last dead son then lead Gandhari to curse Krishnas progeny and prophesy his own animal-like death at the hands of an obscure huntsman in the forest. Act 5, Victory: A Serial Suicide, advances the action by many years to show that Yudhishthhiras supposedly ideal reign over Hastinapura has turned out to be an exercise in futility and disillusionment because the culture he had inherited was feeble and accursed. The selfdestructive impulses within this culture now cnd expression in the suicide of the despised Yuyutsu and in the self-immolation of Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, and Kunti (the mother of the Pandavas) in a forest cre. Taking up the action after another interval, Conclusion: The Death of the Lord describes Krishnas calm acceptance of his own foreordained end in the forest near the city of Dwaraka on the Gujarat coast. At the precise moment of his death the dvapar yug ends, and kaliyug, the conbicted epoch that contains the present, arrives on an earth bereft of divinity. As this synopsis suggests, Andha yug maintains its atmosphere of unrelieved su,ering through two critical structural choices: by beginning with the end of the epic war, it bypasses the heroic moment and moves directly to the experience of irrevocable loss, and, by focusing on the defeated Kauravas rather than the victorious Pandavas, it deals with political and emotional traumas that can no longer cnd resolution. Using sung narrative (katha gayan) at the beginning and end of each act to provide narrative continuity, Bharati constructs the rest of the play as a series of relatively self-contained but interlinked poetic tableaux, each cohering around a central motif or symbolic actthe blindness of an old king in a desolate city, the transmogriccation of a grieving son into a human beast, the terrible price that half-truths exact from their victims, a mothers grief at the annihilation of her o,spring, the urge toward selfdestruction among the young and the old, and the end of divinity on earth. Reduced still further to the essence embodied in the title of each act, this symbolic structure reveals a grim progression: desolate city man/beasthalf-truthscursesuicidedeath. Like Euripides Trojan Women, Bharatis play returns obsessively to death as categorical event and surreal visual spectacle, rendered unusually grotesque by an unseemly contact between the human and animal worlds and by the vividness with which the spare verse repeatedly evokes the brutality of physical combat. Man-eating vultures swarm over the Kaurava city and then take over the battleceld at Kurukshetra (67); wild beasts of prey drag the wounded Duryodhana o, into the bushes (52); Ashwatthamas graphic fantasies of
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revenge lead crst to the murder of an old man who had supposedly prophesied a false future, and then to carnage within the Pandava camp (6163). The other deaths in the last two actsYuyutsus suicide, the self-immolation of the Kaurava and Pandava parents, and the hunting down of Krishnaare di,erent only in that they are less inhumane, not less vivid. In this fervid, selective remapping of the Mahabharata, Bharati creates new meanings by fashioning unusual symbolic identities for characters who are already well-known (such as Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, and Krishna) and by inventing characters whose roles are primarily symbolic and allegorical in conception. The central trope of blindness, introduced in the title and repeated twenty-three times in the crst act alone, extends from Dhritarashtras physical handicap to every facet of his reign and comes to symbolize the failure of all forms of authority and political power. In a signiccant departure from the text of the Mahabharata, Bharati ascribes the same self-destructive qualities to the reign of dharmaraja Yudhishthhira in Hastinapura. The war was won with so much moral equivocation, violence, and bloodshed, and the Pandava brotherhood degenerated so rapidly afterward, that Yudhishtthira describes his victory as a long, slow, agonizingly accomplished suicide (84). Instead of providing the foundations of a just society, the new dispensation in the Mahabharata reveals self-destructive, impotent, degenerative tendencies in culture, and concrms an unbroken tradition of blindness behind the exercise of power (85). Even more destructive than this failure of political authority is the dissolution of moral certainties. Andha yug begins with the declaration that both sides in the conbict have destroyed maryada (the standard of principled conduct and ethical action)the Kauravas perhaps a little more than the Pandavasand the war will consequently have no victors, only losers. Because Bharati emphasizes Krishnas superhuman qualities as Prabhu (god, divine being) rather than his suprahuman identity as V asudev (the best of men), Krishnas complicity in the Pandava acts of treachery on the battleceld places divinity itself in doubt. The radical, inventive core of the play therefore consists in a threepronged attack on the Pandavas and Krishna by Gandhari, Ashwatthama, and Yuyutsu, which makes these three characters central to a degree that is unique in modern Indian literature and theatre and, through intense poetic dialogue, presents them as embodiments of extreme states of being. The minor characters in the play, in contrast, are neither agents nor victims but more or less disengaged and e,ete spectators: the three interchangeable old Kaurava warriors, Vidura (Dhritarashtras half-brother),
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Kripacharya (Ashwatthamas maternal uncle), and Kritavarma; the gobetween Sanjay; and two sentries who guard the palace at Hastinapur with a self-proclaimed imperviousness to experience. Reminiscent of the lower level characters in a Greek chorus, the sentries in particular embody the spiritual emptiness that Bharati associates with the Hegelian slave mentality more than with social or political oppression. Their presence both heightens and debates the pervasive violence of emotion and event in the play, while their commentary on the action reveals two purposefully antiheroic aimsto stay alive in a time of death and to remain una,ected and unchanged by events that have brought about the end of an epoch. Five decades after its initial appearance, the status of Andha yug as a radical reworking of the Mahabharata, a play of shocking greatness (Dubey, CIT, 96), and a contemporary stage classic is secure among Indian directors, performers, theatre audiences, and readers. What needs to be recovered for the sake of revaluative interpretation from the extensive (and so far untranslated) authorial and critical commentary on the play in Hindi is the double allegory embedded in the plays mythic cction, one specicc to Hindu-Indian culture, the other ambitiously universalist in scope. At an intracultural level, the play accepts that the advent of kaliyug entails a continuous decline in values since the time of the Mahabharata and asserts that the postwar patterns of moral equivocation, impotence, and violence will continue to decne the culture of the nation because they constitute its true cultural legacy, and there is no future free of the present (Andha yug, 32). The immediate experiential sources of this grim epochal vision lie in the historical events whose memory was still fresh in the early 1950s: the Quit India movement of 1942, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the genocide occasioned by Partition in 194748. Mahatma Gandhis August 1942 ultimatum to the British to quit India, at a time when Fascist forces had the advantage over the Allied powers in both Europe and Southeast Asia, accompanied his call for a nationwide nonviolent struggle on the part of the Indian populace and led to a massive popular rebellion that the British government (embroiled in an unmanageable global war) suppressed with unprecedented brutality. The following year, the cessation of rice imports from Southeast Asia, the governments wartime policy of diverting food to the army in the northeast, procteering, and administrative mishandling resulted in a man-made famine that killed about three million people in Bengal. The communal holocaust of Partition, with anywhere between one and three million estimated victims, does not need much elaboration here: for a writer and thinker like
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Bharati, the bloodshed canceled any positive emotions that the event of independence may have otherwise produced. Bharatis antitriumphalist philosophical stance, in fact, has a deeper national source than the specicc historical events of the 1940s. The anguish of the principal characters in Andha yug also evokes the disillusionment that had set in with surprising swiftness once India was decolonized. The playwright singles out two impulses within the extended nationalist movement for particular criticism because, even though they were products of historical necessity, they proved to be at best expedient strategies that prevented the serious political and moral education of the common individual. The crst was the tendency toward uncritical selfgloriccation during the late-colonial period: the extraordinary attachment that we developed towards our tradition at that time, Bharati notes, was an antidote to a humiliating present, but it was fundamentally hyper-emotionalit lacked serious rebection of any kind (Manava mulya, 220; cited hereafter as MM). Bharati is particularly critical of the posturing about the spiritual supremacy of the East, which was encouraged by a few tired, defeated outcasts of European civilization enamoured of occult knowledge and mystical philosophy (MM, 220) and only too readily reproduced by a native intelligentsia seeking compensation for its material and political subjugation. Although he categorically rejects the totalitarian communist state as a political model, Bharati prefers the theoretical clarity of the Marxist position, which perceives tradition as itself a dynamic process subject to history. One of the writers most important responsibilities in independent India, then, is to forge a meaningful relationship with the cultural pastnot only for himself but to liberate the common man from the blind beliefs, disa,ections, unreason, stupor, and dead traditions that inhabit his mind. . . . In this perspective freedom is not simply an external condition, but an internal value as well (MM, 231). The harshness of Andha yug is thus part of the reaction against the cocoon of cultural complacency that Indians had supposedly spun around themselves in the transition from colonial subjection to independence. For Bharati, the second problematic move in anticolonial nationalism was the cult of personality. This was again a historical necessity because, after centuries of repression, ordinary Indians had lost the capacity for self-reliance and independent thought. But regardless of the greatness of the men who were deiced during the nationalist movement (Gandhi and Tagore, for instance), the appetite for hero worship was fundamentally reactionary and self-defeating. For Bharati, the proper cultural role of a
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national awakening would have been fulclled if every Indian citizen were alert, rational, free of economic, political, and social frustrations, searching on his own for the right values, principles, and ethical standards; seeking the path of development and moving towards it; but this was a long, unnegotiable way ( MM, 23536). The easy recourse to cults of personality provided a shortcut to compensate for the e,eteness of the individual, but its inevitable e,ect was a further decline in reason and intelligence. As Bharati states, We were busy creating a national consciousness but had no time to think about basic values (237). In Bharatis view, the expedient nature of nationalist ideology made the shift from positive to negative in national life, from sacricce, discipline, dedication, selbessness, devotion, truth, and surrender to emptiness, degeneration, impotence, regression, misguidedness, and pathetic unreason astonishingly rapid, but not inexplicable (234). He argues that the signs of decline were already in evidence by 1939, but as soon as the time of struggle ended and the time to rule arrived . . . the imbalance and unreason inherent in this whole arrangement became clearly visible (239). In Indian writing of that period, this dismaying reversal created a harsh new sensibility which challenged the old historical, cultural, and philosophical perspectives, and was very rapidly bent upon destroying the fading haloes, the pretenses to divinity, the old self-deceptions and masks (241). Writing within a few years of the emergence of this new sense of the times, Bharati feels that it is related to an entirely di,erent set of standards, di,erent contexts, a di,erent vocabulary, a di,erent temper. So much so that we feel that we almost speak two languages, live in two worlds (242). Although it seems to have arisen suddenly, this new sensibility expresses an important but neglected objective of the nationalist strugglethe participation of the average individual in the processes of history, his rejection of cults of personality, and his quest for self-determination (242). In relation to the new nation, therefore, Andha yug expresses the swift destruction of expectations after independence and a sense of cultural failure and crisis that writers, artists, and intellectuals felt most keenly. As a playwright who had already established himself in varying degrees as poet, cction writer, essayist, critic, thinker, translator, and editor, Bharati was particularly well-positioned to voice the collective malaise. He turned instinctively to the Mahabharata as the mythic vehicle for this experience because over centuries those ancient characters have become so deeply embedded in our racial unconscious that something said through their medium resonates much more strongly on several
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levels in the mind of the cultured reader, and the communicative power of words becomes a great deal more active (Taneja, 47). He also felt more successful in expressing the crisis of values in the present through the older myths. The action of the epic is therefore a fully intended parallel of the present: when I say After the war this epoch of blindness descended on earth, Bharati comments, I intend to evoke todays postwar period (Taneja, 46). As Taneja elaborates, the e,ect of world wars, the partition of the Indian subcontinent, and later, our wars with China and Pakistan on human existence, human values, and human relationships; the struggle for power, corruption, and moral blindness; and the disillusionment of the common man after independence are the signiccant contemporary contexts of Andha yug (95). At an even more ambitious intercultural level, Andha yug conbates kaliyug with the panorama of futility and anarchy that T. S. Eliot (commenting on James Joyces Ulysses) identiced as contemporary history, and it reconceives the narrative of the Mahabharata as the poetical history of all humankind at the midpoint of the twentieth century. In this respect Andha yug is comparable to condensed modernist verse epics, such as Eliots The W aste Land or St.-John Perses Anabasis, which enable a culture-specicc cction to assume the qualities of a universal narrative because of the interchangeability of time and experience across cultures. While Jean-Claude Carrire and Peter Brooks Mahabharata (1987) was a carefully crafted relativistic vehicle for bringing this material into our world and sharing these stories with an audience in the West (Carrire, xiv), Bharatiwriting some thirty years earliertook the inscription of universal human history in the action of the epic for granted. Anomalous as this move may seem in a Eurocentric twenty-crst century perspective, it strongly informs the composition of the play in the early 1950s, rebects important elements in the literary conditioning of a cosmopolitan postcolonial like Bharati, and challenges unexamined assumptions about the historical, political, and cultural positioning of the modern Indian-language author. Bharati makes his dual perspective explicit in the preface to Andha yug when he describes the play as a universal truth which I have achieved in a personal wayits propriety now lies in becoming universal once again (iii). The basis for the universalist position is Bharatis broadly secular-humanist view of the trajectory of Western civilization since the early modern period, as well as his understanding of the intersecting destinies of East and West since the eighteenth century because of colonialism and the emergence of transnational relations of power. The playwright
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sees modernity as the product of two antithetical impulses: a valorization of the individual at the philosophical level because of the decline of all suprahuman structures of authority, and a simultaneous reduction of the individual at the political and material levels because of the emergence of such repressive-exploitative systems as industrialism, totalitarianism, and capitalism. The contradictions between these forces came to a head during the century of the consolidation of empire. In an essay titled The Uncertain Future of a Glorious Past, Bharati argues that science, religion, philosophy, ethical values, social organization, race, and literature were among the institutions involved in the precipitous decline of European civilization that began in the nineteenth century and assumed the proportions of a global crisis by the middle of the twentieth century. Elsewhere, Bharatis view of the postwar world is similar to existentialist and absurdist formulations, though perhaps more romantic in its phrasing:
When the subject of civilizational crisis and the deterioration of human qualities is raised frequently, what we mean is that the present age has given rise to conditions in which man has lost control over his destiny and the process of history-makingman is getting closer to meaninglessness day by day. This is not merely an economic or political crisis, but one that is manifesting itself equally in all aspects of life. This is not a crisis either of the West or the Eastit has appeared all over the world at various levels and in various forms. (MM, 188)
The crisis a,ects all members of the world community not only because science has created a global village but because the inner self of humanity is undivided in one sense, and if a part of it becomes paralyzed . . . then it is the responsibility of the other parts . . . to give it the gift of life (MM, 227). In Bharatis view, to acknowledge and address this interdependence is one of the special responsibilities of the writer in an emergent nation because the nation is not an isolated [nirapeksha] unit the nation also derives meaning from the context of universal human destiny. In literature, it is salutary to understand nation-building in relation to the universal destiny of humanity (227). As a necessary corollary to this ambitious conception of the writers role, Bharati boldly describes Hindi literature as a world literature that is obliged to contend with the state of the world. In the preface to the crst edition of Manava mulya aur sahitya (Human Values and Literature, 1960), he argues that Hindi literature is neither an inert substance simply waiting to be acted upon by external inbuences nor a body of isolated writing that can develop apart
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from the major world traditions. The writers responsibility in India, he argues, is no di,erent from the writers responsibility elsewhere in the world. Hence, Bharati wants a new direction for Hindi writing, away from the two most inbuential movements of the pre-independence period pragativad (progressivism), which in his view took a reductive approach to global problems, and chhayavad (romanticism; literally, shadowism), which did not address the problem at all. Placed in this inclusive framework, Andha yug appears to participate in the history of modernity and shares in its major philosophical and literary attributes. Nietzsches godless universe resonates in the Death of the Lord in the cnal act of the play. The notion of a pervasive blindness in culture evokes the dark night or dark era of civilization (very di,erent from V. S. Naipauls 1964 conceit of India as an area of darkness), and the irrational violence recalls the theatre of the absurd. Hindi critics have compared the self-questioning of blind Dhritarashtra to the moral quandaries of Thomas Becket in Eliots Murder in the Cathedral and have also suggested that the Kaurava city of Hastinapur in Bharatis play sustains the same kind of ironic mythmaking as the metropoles of modernist classics. As Indranath Madan notes, Bharati has tried to catch the Kaurava city in its state of devastation and decline in exactly the same way as Eliot did with London in The W aste Land, and Joyce with Dublin in Ulysses. The situation of these cities is similar in that relationships are disintegrating, the status of humanity is in danger, faith has broken down (88). Again, Taneja emphasizes the degree to which the plays events are open to interpretation in historical and contemporary, national and global terms: Degeneration, blindness towards values, the absence of principles, selcshness, the lust for power, characterlessness, barbarity, skepticism, and resentfulness may belong to the time of the Mahabharata, the crst and second world wars, or at a national level, the period following the achievement of independence, around 195051it does not make any di,erence. In any country or time, the discgurement of minds and souls, misdirection, dysfunction, and disaster are what give birth to an age of blindness (42). At one level, the major characters in the play are thus representatives of the fast-declining civilization of the twentieth century (75)a century doomed by two world wars, fascism, totalitarianism, the nuclear holocaust, and the cold war. In universalist terms, the same characters enact a transhistorical allegory of the human condition, characterized by Dhritarashtras self-destructive blindness, Gandharis allconsuming grief, Ashwatthamas inhuman savagery, Yuyutsus self-hatred, Sanjays fatal neutrality, and the slave mentality of the interchangeable
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sentries. Juxtaposed against these forms of human fallibility, the supreme but sacriccial cgure of Krishna (like the historical Christ, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr.) evokes for Bharati the destruction of truth and principle in every era. At its most inclusive, then, Andha yug does not designate any specicc condition or age but at once contains within itself the past, the present, and the future (Taneja, 44). This quality of universality in a culture-specicc drama is the consummate expression of Bharatis complex philosophical, historical, and cultural self-positioning, and it undergirds both the major and minor theatrical productions of the last forty years. Andha yug has been performed in large and small open-air spaces as well as within the proscenium, but almost always on a bare stage with a few timeless props symbolizing ruina broken chariot wheel (sometimes pierced with an arrow) hung on a solid stone wall, broken doors, wornout steps, a collapsing dome. The program for M. K. Rainas 1977 National School of Drama Repertory production in New Delhi is typical in describing the play as the story of lost souls caught in the web of their weakness. It is also the story of their self-expression and quest for enlightenment. It is this very selfquestioning wherein lie the seeds of hope and light for all mankind (Taneja, 148). Most productions do attempt to create a period atmosphere by using styles of dialogue delivery and recitation, costumes and makeup, sound e,ects, and music that would evoke the antiquity of the epic war and its aftermath; some productions (notably those by Ebrahim Alkazi, M. K. Raina, and Ratan Thiyam) have even heightened the traditional e,ects by variously incorporating costumes and performance styles from kathakali, Kabuki, kudiyattam, chhau, and thang-ta, among other forms. But Ravi Baswanis minimalist 1974 presentation had barechested male actors in black trousers, their heads bandaged with di,erentcolored strips of cloth to denote distinct ethical and emotional states. To underscore the plays modern contexts, Baswani replaced ancient weapons with guns, paramilitary jackets, helmets, and sound e,ects suggestive of the Vietnam war. Ratan Thiyam achieved another milestone in the universalization of Andha yug by directing an open-air performance at the invitation of Tadashi Suzuki in Tonga, Japan, on 5 August 1994, a day before the forty-ninth anniversary of the atomic holocaust in Hiroshima. The remarkable conjunction of antiquity and modernity in the play and the potential extension of its meanings to all humanity have thus emerged as durable production concepts over four decades. Beyond this common understanding that the plays epochal meanings unfold at a certain level of generality, major productions of Andha yug
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tend to fall into two main categories: those that seek to create an intense and intimate emotional experience by emphasizing the poetic resonances of language and dialogue; and those that aim for a rich, even overwhelming sensory experience by exploiting the monumental potential of various staging environments. Dubey initiated the crst approach in his 1962 production by creating a functional and suggestive stage design for the open-air performance and by placing maximum stress on the sensitive enunciation of language. His audience was accordingly more aware of the captivating e,ects of poetic, theatrically e,ective dialogue delivery than of other performance elements (Taneja, 125). Dubeys 1964 revival in Calcutta was, if anything, even more memorable for the quality of its spoken dialogue, especially in relation to the characters of Dhritarashtra and Vidura. In the crst Calcutta production, he noted, we made a lot of technical blunderseven a tape-recorder came on accidentally in the middle[and] the set was all wrong. But in spite of all that we got away because of the language (Taneja, 126). Not only does Dubey reject the conception of Andha yug as a stage spectacle, he regards it as a play that should be done in close-ups, with the words modulated to the maximum e,ect, without any loss of vitality (qtd. in Taneja, 127). His preoccupation with the theatrical potentialities of language and poetic structure has established the most important precedents for later practitioners (including such important regional directors as Kamlakar Sontakke, Rajendra Gupta, and Satish Anand), who want to maximize the e,ect of what the characters are saying on stage. Dubey also carried his view of Bharatis verse drama as a meticulously orchestrated play of voices to a logical conclusion by undertaking a solo recitation of the entire text in August 1990a stunning performance which circled back to the very crst broadcast of Andha yug as a radio play in 1954. The principal antithesis to the purity of Dubeys approach appears in the extravagance and magniccence of Ebrahim Alkazis successive productions among real historical ruins in Delhi: at Ferozeshah Kotla, a late fourteenth-century site, in 1964; at Talkatora Gardens, a historic eighteenth-century complex in the heart of British New Delhi, in 1967; and, perhaps most memorably, in 1974 at the Purana Qila (Old Fort), a sixteenth-century forticcation that, according to legend, stands on the very site of Indraprastha, the ancient capital city of the Pandavas (cg. 9). For Alkazi, the vastness of the open-air settings is necessary to evoke the plays dramatic and philosophical sweep, and visual symbols have to do their work alongside heightened aural and tactile sensations. Indeed, in imagining the ideal medium for Andha yug he passes over print and stage
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performance and settles on the limitless adaptability of clm: I see epic characters against the elements rather than against man-made structures, against canyon, rock, blasted forest, deep jungle cave, marshland, swamp. I see Gandhari small, lost, a mere speck under the huge su,ocating bowl of sky, but a frenzied, protesting speck, a cursing atom in the act of explosion, detonating a chain reaction of vengeance against the whole Yadav clan (qtd. in Taneja, 12728). However, Alkazis 1967 production at Talkatora Gardens has also become a touchstone for the intimate, quintessentially theatrical connection between the performance environment, the moments of poignance in the audiences experience, and the meaning of the drama.
The natural stage-design of this open-air presentation was e,ective in its symbolism. A swarm of vultures, symbols of death, against the backdrop of desolate ruins; the broken chariot wheel (as though gesturing towards the defeat of truth); like a dispirited mind, darkness hiding in the recesses of lightless paths like a predatorpresaging disaster. The members of the Kaurava dynasty walk around here like the ghostly shadows of a bygone age. The sphere of their experience does not seem connected to the playhouse. Despite the evocation of an ancient time and place through costumes, make-up, ornaments, and weaponry, the meanings that erupted from the characters words, and the sensations that seeped through the stately gestures and movement, were stripped of their historical contexts, and began to confront the contemporary spectator with the truth of his own time. Those who have watched this production will perhaps never forget Gandharis curse, Ashwatthamas vengeance, and the soft rays of light bursting out of the foggy darkness, along with the melancholy-tender sounds of the bute, and the grave, tranquil, spellbinding voice of Krishna in the background accepting his curse. (Taneja, 129)
In the visually and stylistically richer 1974 production at the Old Fort, Gandhari and Ashwatthama enacted some of their respective scenes in the Kabuki and kathakali styles; the chorus followed Kabuki techniques; the characters were masked; and the lighting and sound e,ects kept the sensations of war in the foreground (cg. 9). Whatever the shortcomings of this ambitious and eclectic presentation, the inbuence of Alkazis monumental techniques is evident in the stylized convulsions of Ratan Thiyams 1974 Manipuri version and M. K. Rainas 1977 production, again at the Old Fort, which made spectacular use of painted banners as well as costumes in the yakshagana and kathakali styles. Between them,
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Satyadev Dubey and Ebrahim Alkazi thus test the limits of epic theatre as both verbal and visual poetry. While sustaining these large-scale emotional and sensory e,ects in performance, Andha yug has also proved to be an e,ective vehicle for communicating the force and signiccance of individual struggles. The plays allegorical meanings highlight certain emotional and intellectual qualities in the principal charactersDhritarashtras blindness and Ashwatthamas uncontainable rage, for instancewhich in turn have been rendered memorably by particular actors. The performance documentation for the play (an unusual archive in itself ) shows that drama and theatre critics persistently locate the meaning or value of a specicc production in the quality and e,ect of one or more performances by major stage and/or screen actors. In Satyadev Dubeys 1962 production, the Marathi-English actor Manavendra Chitnis made a lasting impression as Ashwatthama, with his dialogue reverberating like the howls of
Fig. 9. The epic at the Old Fort. Andha yug at Purana Qila, a sixteenth-century forticcation on an ancient archaeological site by the Yamuna river. Directed by Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Company, New Delhi, 1974. Courtesy of the NSD Repertory Company.
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a lost soul in the audiences consciousness well after the performance was over (Taneja, 125). Of the 1964 Calcutta revival in which Dubey himself played Ashwatthama, reviewer Mahendra Pal noted that the presentation was extremely impressive and the acting of a high quality. Dubeys voice, Gandharis loud wailing, and Dhritarashtras eyes will remain alive in peoples memories for a long time to come (126). Because of the success with which actors have transplanted the moments of crisis in Bharatis text onto the stage, the principal roles in Andha yug have become associated with a succession of major performers, and major performers have given even minor roles an unforeseen signiccance. Among the acclaimed stage and screen actors who have created the key role of Ashwatthama are Om Shivpuri (1967), Saumitra Chatterji (1970), Raj Babbar (1974), M. K. Raina (1974), and Naseeruddin Shah (1989). Gandhari has been played by Sulabha Deshpande (1964), Sudha Sharma (later Shivpuri, 1967), Rohini Oak (later Hattangady, 1974), Madhu Malati (1977), and Sunila Pradhan (1989). Three of these actressesDeshpande, Hattangady, and Pradhanare as successful in clm and television as in the theatre. The well-known character actor Amrish Puri played the blind Dhritarashtra in the two Dubey productions of 1962 and 1964 and the old supplicant in the 1989 revival; at various times, Dubey himself has acted Vidura (1962), Ashwatthama (1964), and Kritavarma (1989). The unknown actor Jatin Khanna, who impressed the Bombay critics with his wordless performance as the mute beggar in 1962, metamorphosed into the clm superstar Rajesh Khanna a few years later; in 1977, National School of Drama alumni Anang Desai and Anupam Kher (now a celebrated clm actor) were outstanding as the two sentries. To note another interesting pattern, several major directors of Andha yug have acted key parts in their own or others productions. Ratan Thiyam, who directed the play in 1974, 1984, and 1994, played Yuyutsu in Alkazis 1974 production and the old supplicant in his own Manipuri version the same year. Kamlakar Sontakke played Sanjay for Alkazi in 1967, while M. K. Raina played Ashwatthama for Ravi Baswani in 1974. In the literary, dramatic, and theatrical culture of the post-independence period, Andha yug thus occupies a position of singular power; paradoxically, this power has endured despite occasional arguments that the play is a bawed masterpiece on both the page and the stage. When reading Andha yug, Vipin Kumar Agrawal observes, we accept a lot of weak poetry by telling ourselves that were reading a play. Similarly, when we approach it as a play and discover no special qualities (from the viewpoint of staging or theatrical e,ect), we console ourselves with the thought
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that were reading a poem. . . . Hence for the enlightened reader there is neither good poetry in Andha yug nor a well-crafted drama (9596). As a text the play can appear single-voiced, overwrought, and relentlessly didactic; on stage it can come o, as an unplayable aggregation of disconnected moments in which the characters seem to stand apart from the dramatic business, being neither organized nor shaped by it (Taneja, 122). Even the most celebrated stage versions have not been fully satisfactory in performance. As an observer in the audience, B. V. Karanth found the dramatic pace collapsing repeatedly in the 1964 Calcutta production and the performance lacking in overall a,ective coherence (Taneja, 126). At the Old Fort in 1967, the majesty of the outdoor setting dwarfed the actors, the action lost its intensity, and an overelaborate presentational style dissipated the plays real energies. These diculties, however, have only added further nuances to the literary and theatrical appeal of Andha yug: the play epitomizes not only the seriousness with which the new drama got under way in the 1950s but also the complex interdependence of drama and theatre, authors and directors, writing and representation. The process of dispersal (linguistic, geographical, artistic) by which Bharatis play has maintained its presence on the stage for two generations of theatregoers in India is very di,erent from the relative self-suciency and exclusiveness with which director-centered vehicles, such as the Mahabharata plays of Panikkar and Thiyam, circulate in the theatre. In its totality Andha yug symbolizes the process of intense poetic engagement with the Mahabharata through which a part of the epic narrative is reactualized as a radically contemporary, major modernist vehicle for the theatre, equally inbuential in print and performance. The Mahabharata productions of Panikkar and Thiyam represent, in contrast, two other inbuential but divergent practices within the complementary celd of urban total theatrethe assimilation of Bhasa and the Mahabharata to elite, apolitical cultural performance in the case of Panikkar and their accommodation to the destructive politics of the national periphery in the case of Thiyam. K. N. Panikkars Urubhangam : Epic Performance as Cultural Capital K. N. Panikkars Mahabharata plays are powerful contemporary examples of the prestige that attaches to a revival of an ancient Indian classic in its original language, in a postcolonial performance culture preoccupied with evaluating its past legacies in relation to the products of modernity.
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The symbolic value of his work appears partly in the carefully selected occasions of performance. Madhyam vyayog, Panikkars crst and triumphantly successful Bhasa revival, premiered in 1978 at the Kalidasa Samaroh in Ujjain, the nations leading showcase for experiments with classical and traditional forms in dance, music, and theatre. Bhasas Dutavakyam followed at the same venue in 1980. The Sanskrit Urubhangam made its crst Indian appearance at the International Bhasa Theatre Festival, which Panikkar organized in 1987 to commemorate the seventycfth anniversary of Ganapati Sastris Bhasa edition. Three more such festivals have followed in 1989, 1994, and 2000, with strong support from both state and national cultural institutions. Over twenty-cve years, Panikkars Mahabharata trilogy as a whole has had extraordinary visibility both in India and abroad. Urubhangam was the only noncontemporary play performed at the Nehru Centenary Festival in 1989, and in March 2000 it was the opening production of the second National Theatre Festival organized by the National School of Drama in New Delhi. At the third National Theatre Festival in April 2001, Panikkar created a sensation by casting Mohanlal, one of the superstars of Malayalam cinema, as Karna in a new production of Karnabharam, once again in Sanskrit. All three plays have also been performed variously at international theatre festivals, academic institutions, and other cultural venues in Greece (1985), Japan (1985, 1988), the United States (1985 and 1987), Spain (1996), South Korea (1997), Italy (2000), and Singapore (2002). These occasions have reinforced the directors contemporary preeminence as theorist, scholar, and practitioner of classical Indian theatre, overshadowed his original Malayalam plays, and garnered him a succession of national and international honors: the Critics Circle of India Award for best Sanskrit play production (1982, 1984), the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for best director (1985), a Ford Foundation Fellowship for the study of Kerala folklore (198589), the Nandikar National Award (1988), and the Kalidasa Samman (1995). In addition, whether Panikkar and his group develop an original performance text or recast a classic, they exercise exclusive control over its development and subsequent staging, creating a performance history for a given work that is identical with their own expositions. As author and principal director, Panikkar thus has an integral relation to his work and his audience that is fundamentally di,erent from the unpredictable assimilation of a play like Andha yug into multiple directorial styles, languages, and regions. Panikkars Urubhangamhis version of Bhasas version of Vyasas version of the Mahabharatais a palimpsestic meeting of the classic and
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the contemporary on the grounds of the relation between narration and action. Indeed, Panikkar identices Vyasas epic as the ur-source of these two major modes of Indian cultural expression, with Vyasa functioning as the archetypal narrator and Bhasa as the archetypal playwright. The correspondence between their respective genres lies in a series of oppositions that in Aristotelian terms would characterize the manner of imitation. According to Panikkar, the nearer to Vyasa is more of narration, and the more of action is nearer to Bhasa. The macro-text vs the microtext, Sahitya [literature] vs Abhinaya [acting], narration vs action, event vs character, and vacya [what is worth narrating] vs sucya [what is worth enacting]this scheme is applicable for the evaluation of any dramatized text, whether it is from oral or from written source material (Mahabharata Rebected, 193). The microtext of Panikkars production is the same as that of Bhasas play, which evokes the atmosphere of devastation at the end of the Mahabharata war, records the cnal great battle between Duryodhana and Bhima, and memorializes the chief Kaurava prince in the moments leading up to his death. However, Panikkar uses the text as an occasion to explore the full range of possibilities of nontextual staging and communicates philosophical meanings through physical devices of enactment, thus both elaborating and reinterpreting the original. Bhasas Urubhangam begins with a short prologue spoken by the sutradhar and his assistant that describes the carnage on the battleceld and announces the imminent duel between the two bitter adversaries who have waited throughout the war for a chance to settle old scores. In act 1, three soldiers speak separately and as a chorus to conjure war as a cauldron of hate and brute force, of pride and glory as they describe the horricc sights in Kurukshetra (Haksar, 1056). The duel with maces begins in the middle of this act and is again reported by the soldiers, not shown directly. After Bhima shatters Duryodhanas thighs in violation of the rules of combat, act 2 of the play moves rapidly through to the climax. Enraged by Bhimas illicit action, Krishnas older brother, Balarama, pledges vengeance against the Pandavas, but Duryodhana urges restraint because he feels that further enmity would achieve nothing. The long cnal scene involves Duryodhanas parents, Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, his two principal wives, and his young son, Durjaya, an invented character who deepens the poignancy of dynastic and familial failures. The play ends ambivalently: although the dying Duryodhana tries to dissuade Ashwatthama from pursuing vengeance, Balarama describes the attack on the Pandavas as a certainty, and the cnal line shows Ashwatthama, weapon in hand, ready to kill those who sleep tonight (115).
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Despite its brevity, Bhasas Urubhangam is a radical classical text because of the subtlety with which it both conforms to, and deviates from, the established Mahabharata narrative and the prescriptions of the Natyashastra. Because the rules of Sanskrit drama proscribe violence on stage, Bhasa evokes the brutal aftermath of war and the visceral immediacy of hand-to-hand combat entirely through the resources of vividly descriptive, metaphorical language. Dead horses and elephants, soldiers and chieftains, for instance, are sharply etched by the harsh glare of sunlight as jackals and vultures devour them (105); Duryodhanas mace gleams like lightning on Mount Kailash and Bhima is like a mountain covered with streams of red mud as the two warriors collide in fury (106). However, the second act in Urubhangam alters the circumstances of Duryodhanas demise, deces a cardinal rule of classical Indian dramaturgy by portraying his death on stage, and draws unexpectedly close to Aristotelian catharsis in its e,ects. The purpose of these deviations is to reconceive the once arrogant and querulous Kaurava prince as the noble, stoic, and forgiving Suyodhana, and to recast his cnal struggle as a process of moral transformation. The signiccance of the renaming is that the precx dur in Sanskrit has the same meaning as the French precx mal, while su stands for good or fair. Speaking through his composite virtuous persona, Su(Dur)yodhana accepts the defeat of the Kauravas as apt punishment for their unjust treatment of the Pandavas and even exonerates Krishna and Bhima of blame for their illicit actions, because it was Vishnu himself, the worlds beloved . . . who suddenly entered [Bhimas] sharp mace and delivered me to death (109). In the Mahabharata the wounded Duryodhana bees into the forest, but Bhasas hero dies in his palace with his family around him: the extended scene is not only about the bitter outcome of the war and the end of the Kaurava line but also about the love and grief of parents and children, husbands and wives. Duryodhanas physical su,ering acquires a tragic quality because his family cannot comprehend it fullythe blind Dhritarashtra and Gandhari cannot see him, while his son Durjaya is too young to understand either bodily pain or emotional anguish. But with Duryodhanas familial identity as son, father, and husband reinforcing his dynastic identity as king, the private emerges as inseparable from the public at the end of the play. Panikkar amplices this spare text into a full-length performance by choosing to show what Bhasa only describes and by embedding the dramatic action in an elaborate, largely nonverbal structure of dance, recitation, song, percussive sound, and stylized movement. The mise-en-scne
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and dramatic pace in his Urubhangam seek to selectively recreate the elements of classical Sanskrit performance, with an almost ostentatiously bare stage; the use of a painted half-curtain to conceal painful sights and signal transitions within the play; and a slow, deliberate, incantatory style of dialogue delivery appropriate to the elite medium of Sanskrit. The distinctive experience of Panikkars production, however, comes from the extratextual elements for which Bhasas words provide an occasion, not a source. The crucial concept, decned in the Natyashastra and well known in Sanskrit aesthetics, is that of thouryatrika, the triple combination of geet (song), nritya (dance), and vadya (instrumental music), which Panikkar describes as the foundation of his innovative stagecraft. A substantial portion of stage time is occupied by male and female dancers who group and regroup constantly to evoke the war, to o,er choric commentary on unfolding events, and to make up an internal audience for the main dramatic action. The music (composed by Panikkar) draws on traditional but not speciccally classical regional styles and complements nearly all movement and speech in the play, ranging from solo singing to collective recitation. Some recitations also simply vocalize rhythmic consonant clusters that have no linguistic meaning but that constitute the oral accompaniment to dance movements. With the bute, small hand-held brass cymbals called manjiras, and the mridangam (a slender two-faced drum popular in southern India) as the principal instruments, Panikkar uses changes in musical orchestration and tempo as the primary signals of change in dramatic mood or circumstance. Unlike the simple two-part structure of Bhasas written text for Urubhangam, Panikkars acting text consists of a succession of more or less selfcontained performative units that coalesce into three major movements: the scenes on the battleceld, the duel and its immediate aftermath, and Duryodhanas death in the presence of his family. The method throughout is that of selective, suggestive elaboration. In the crst movement, dancers in varying combinations mime battle scenes (with real swords, shields, and spears), warriors on horseback, elephants on the battleceld, a cght unto death between two soldiers, and vultures devouring the dead. This segment reaches a climax when the two outer dancers in a group of ten metamorphose into Bhima and Duryodhana, and the others remain on stage to witness their confrontation. During the duel, the two principal characters freeze in their poses after every major gesture of assault, while one or more observers provide comment. All these scenes of combat employ modiced and improved versions of kalaripayattu, the martial art form particular to Kerala. The second movement in the play,
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which is the most innovative and philosophically the most complex, has no equivalent in Bhasa. To make the idea of Duryodhanas emergent alter ego concrete, Panikkar invents a second charactera theyyam (godhead or incarnation)who springs out of the formers shattered thigh and literally embodies his better self. Beginning with Duryodhanas entry on stage behind the traditional half-curtain, this scene develops a triangular dynamic in which the theyyam (aided by Balarama) counsels the wounded prince, allows him to sublimate his anger, and brings him to a state of recognition in which he can forgive his enemies and accept his impending death. The scene obviously has a crucial dramatic function: it places Duryodhana at the centre and creates a space for his ethical transformation through the agency of a character who is visible only to him. But it is also visually spectacular, presenting the theyyam as a largerthan-life cgure on stilts, with an enormous headdress and a red-and-gold costume. The yellow costume and normal appearance of Balarama then contrasts with both the imposing cgure of the theyyam and the prone cgure of the wounded Duryodhana. The third movement, which begins with the entry of blind Dhritarashtra and his entourage, is textually close to Bhasa but again unpredictable and intricate in its methods of elaboration. The dramatic dialogue in this scene is interspersed with choreographic patterns that focus attention on the key relationships among the Kauravas: Duryodhana and Gandhari; Duryodhana and his two wives; Duryodhana and Durjaya. Again, the emphatic and sorrowful enunciation of the words putra (son) and maharaj (lord, king, husband, father) in the performance connotes both the strength of familial relations within the Kaurava house and their inseparability from political relations. As Duryodhana approaches the moment of death, the theyyam returns to prepare him for the afterworld, while young Durjaya becomes another parallel self: father and son appear seated together on the boor with their backs to each other, while the half-curtain gradually conceals them. The myth of Duryodhana itself undergoes a structural variation to accommodate Bhasas unconventional reading of his character and Panikkars even more novel theatrical interpretation of it. The play ends, however, by superimposing the public on the private once again: the chorus of dancers returns to witness Duryodhanas exit, and Ashwatthamas unappeased rage shatters the elegiac mood of the cnal scene. What does it mean for a present-day urban audience to see this complex syncretic performance in which a remote yet familiar subject is thoroughly estranged by a premodern yet contemporary aesthetic? What
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does Panikkar aim to accomplish for his viewers, and what are the viewers expectations? As suggested earlier, the selective occasions for the Sanskrit productionsthe Kalidasa Samaroh, the Bhasa festivals, the Nehru Festival, the National Theatre festivalsshowcase individual plays and virtually predetermine their presentation as high-cultural artifacts. Audiences at such events know that watching a Sanskrit play based on the Mahabharata in a revival by the foremost living exponent of classical aesthetics in Indian theatre is an uncommon experience in itself and a valuable concrmation of the durability of Indian theatre traditions. They are also aware that the many-faceted conjuncture of past and present in a play like Urubhangam is an unusual aspect of Indian theatrical contemporaneity, to which practitioners such as Panikkar have contributed signiccantly by cross-fertilizing the classic with rich postclassical regional traditions. The feelings of estrangement from the plays conventions, language, and presentational style are accepted, then, as an appropriate and inevitable part of the experience. Indeed, the careful enunciation of Sanskrit dialogue in late twentieth-century urban performance spaces becomes virtually a self-sucient performative eventthe very act of utterance creates an elite cultural ambience on stage that is qualitatively di,erent from the exchange of vernacular speech. The typical spectator submits readily, with a sense of curiosity and delight, to the virtuosity of the multi-media presentation. The satisfying atypicality of a play like Urubhangam, however, also decnes its limits. Despite its sensory appeal, the performance precludes any real experience of violence, pain, rage, or loss, and has none of the corrosive qualities of Bharatis Andha yug. Panikkars comments on the play indicate that he regards it as a virtuoso vehicle in which the process of enactment takes precedence over intense emotional or moral identiccation. The program for the 1987 Bhasa Festival production states that the elements of traditional Indian theatre are studied, examined, and employed in the performance, keeping in mind the modern sensibilities of todays audience. Thorough training in traditional dance, music, and body dynamics has been a part of theatre training of the actors, which has enabled them to interpret this Sanskrit masterpiece (Panikkar, Program, 2). The publicity material for the Nehru Festival performance describes the play as a treat for the senses. The colour, the music, the choreographed movements all add to the majesty of Bhasas classic. The emotions are all reined in and kept under control (Panikkar, Nehru Theatre Festival, 2). Clearly, the prestige of the classic and the aesthetics of performance sublimate and heightenwithout neutralizing it
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the central emotional situation in Bhasas play: the agonizing death of the last and most important of the Kaurava princes as his blind parents and wives mourn the passing of an age. Ratan Thiyams Chakravyuha : Violence, Heroism, and Sacrifice
Insurgency and counter-insurgency has released a dynamics of violence, terrorism, and corruption. The armed forces of the state and the Union, under the guise of terrorizing the insurgents, are terrorizing people [in Manipur], using the dreaded Armed Forces Special Power Act. The insurgents, in striking at the security forces, are also letting loose a reign of terror. . . . Not a single idea remains that has not been perverted, nor any single organization that has not been corrupted, nor any walk of life where corruption has not spread its tentacles. Even traditional rituals centering around man and natures life cycle are emptied of their spiritual meaning and clled with corruption. The pasta burden; the futurenot on the horizon; the presentdead. Freedom from fear is a distant dream; hope we have none. soyam lokendrajit
Ratan Thiyams Mahabharata plays are inseparable from the crisis of cultural and political identity that has marked the colonial and postcolonial history of Manipur since the late nineteenth century, and has dominated day-to-day existence in this remote northeastern region for more than a generation. The roots of the crisis lie in the conbicting trajectories of political and cultural development. Because of its geography, Manipur played a strategic role in the outward passage of Hinduism and Sanskrit from India to Southeast Asia and became an important outpost of Brahmanical-Sanskrit culture on the subcontinent. Politically, however, it was a kingdom that had maintained relative independence even under British rule (18911947) but that had acceded to the Indian Union on questionable terms in 1947, achieving statehood within the republic only in 1972. The historical basis of the integration with India was at best problematic: demographically, Manipuris represent less than one percent of the total Indian population and, in terms of ethnicity and language, stand outside both the Indo-European and Dravidian strains that dominate northern and southern Indian culture, respectively.5 Notwithstanding the cultural links with Hinduism, Manipuris have come to regard their political subordination to India as an annexation that marginalizes and
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disempowers them in their own land. Since the 1960s, the Union governments political backlash against underground insurgent movements as well as popular demands for the right to self-determination has created a cycle of repression and violence that, as Lokendrajit records, is far-reaching in its e,ects. The concerted theatrical response to this situation of crisis in Manipur has been unusual in that it has privileged symbolic expression over open and direct political protest. Narratives from myth, history, and folklore dominate the work of such practitioners as Thiyam, Lokendra Arambam, Heisnam Kanhailal, and Harokcham Ebotombi because they are culturally resonant and adaptable to antirealistic, allegorical representation. In Manipur, Samik Bandyopadhyay notes, where state violence reigns supreme, state power is synonymous with corruption, and democratic institutions languish, myths in theatre serve several functionsas safe shelters, facile celebrations, romantic nostalgia, and occasionally as masks or even barricades from behind which one can snipe at the enemy (New Karnas, 73). Evoking a more familiar association, the critic E. Nilakanta Singh comments that when you go to the myths, you go to the collective unconscious of our own people (23). Kanhailal similarly assigns myth a great role in stimulating the artistic imagination and describes the fusion of myth and history as very essential in our society, as in Japan (Bandyopadhyay, New Karnas, 76). The Mahabharata appears in this Manipuri context as the ambivalent epic of war and violence that o,ers no clear moral categories or resolutions, only images of the destruction of both good and evil by the relentless logic of power. The resistance to hegemonic structureswhether religious, political, or familialalso explains the appeal of complex antiheroes, such as Duryodhana and Karna, or sacriccial victims, such as Abhimanyu, whose portrayal in contemporary Manipuri theatre obviates any certitudes about justice, virtue, or identity. Thiyams interest in the Mahabharata, in Bhasa, and in his older contemporary, Panikkar, as resources for a theatre of political and moral critique can thus be linked to multiple contexts and purposes. In one perspective, his Mahabharata plays are part of an ongoing engagement with myths and histories of violence that has led him to produce (on the regional, national, and international stages) Bharatis Andha yug, Sophocless Antigone, Badal Sircars Hiroshima, Utpal Dutts Vietnam, and most recently, Uttar priyadarshi, his theatrical version of S. H. Vatsyayans poem about Emperor Ashokas dramatic conversion from brutal militarism to the Buddhas eightfold path of enlightenment. In another, geographically specicc perspective, the plays concern with incompatible ideologies,
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coercive power relations, and the e,ects of hegemony allies them with the dominant thematic of contemporary Manipuri theatre, especially with other Mahabharata plays, such as Kanhailals Karna and Loitongbam Dorendras Draupadi. Thiyams principal objective is perhaps to question structures of authority: indeed, he was initially attracted to Bhasa because Bhasa had challenged the Natyashastra and had chosen for his heroes such characters as Karna and Duryodhana, who were traditionally ignored or denigrated in Brahmanic exegesis (Chakravyuha, ix). The protagonists of Thiyams three major Mahabharata plays are similarly nonheroes who allow the playwright to [take] a position in relation to the mainstream institutionalization of the mythical heroes (ix). Two of these plays have Duryodhana as a central character. In Urubhangam Thiyam follows Bhasas text: Duryodhana is caught in a conbict that o,ers a choice only between two evils and entails violence as the inevitable, inconclusive end. But in Chakravyuha the text is Thiyams own, and Duryodhana o,ers the playwright an opportunity to assess myself as a modern man because he always questions and protests, and is always aggressively materialist. . . . I like Duryodhana, for he swears by an ideology, remains committed to it, and performs the right duties, within a system (Thiyam, qtd. in Bandyopadhyay, New Karnas, 74). In contrast, the cgure of Karna brings issues of social hierarchy and cultural identity to the foreground in Manipuri theatre. In Thiyams Karnabharam the tension is between Karnas high (Hindu) identity as the natural son of Kunti, the Kshatriya princess, and his low (ethnic) identity as the foster son of Radha, the forest-dweller, much as in Manipur the tension is between a pan-Indian Sanskritic culture and the powerful ethnic and tribal strains that determine its specicc regional characteristics. In casting Abhimanyu as the protagonist in Chakravyuha, Thiyam also shifts attention away from the mature antiheroes to a young scapegoat who is betrayed by power grabbers in both the Kaurava and Pandava camps. The main narrative of the entrapment and death of Arjunas young, recently married son is based on chapters 3440 of the seventh major book of the Mahabharata, the Drona Parvan. Scene 1 is set in the preceptor Dronas camp on the twelfth day of the war, when the principal Kaurava partisans accuse Drona of secretly favoring the Pandavas and demand some proof of his loyalty. In reaction Drona resolves to create the cosmic wheel-shaped battle formation called the chakravyuha, and to kill one chief chariot-warrior (maharathi ) of the Pandavas. In scene 2, set in the Pandava camp the next morning, Abhimanyu has a nightmare
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about being snatched out of his mothers lap and lured to heaven, while Yudhishthhira relays the message about Dronas decision to destroy the entire Pandava army within the chakravyuha. Abhimanyu then reveals that he had heard his father Arjuna chant the secret formula for penetrating the formation when he was still in the womb of his mother, Subhadra. A bashback recreates the romantic-erotic scene between Abhimanyus parents, in which they express their mutual love while also sharing their anxiety about the times and the future of their son. Unaware that the child in the womb is listening, Arjuna begins to whisper the cosmic secrets of the chakravyuha to Subhadra, but she falls asleep before the mantras are complete. Following the bashback, Abhimanyu reminds his uncles Yudhishthhira and Bhima that he can only enter, not leave the formation; but, eager to gain an advantage over the Kaurava army, they urge him to open up a breach so that they can follow. In scene 3, Drona begins to build the chakravyuha as Abhimanyu prepares to enter it with the aged Sumitra as charioteer. Scene 4 has Jayadratha guarding the gates of the formation when Abhimanyu begins his o,ensive, and scene 5 shows him achieving such success against the Kauravas that Duryodhana desperately calls on Drona to kill him. In scene 6, the seven great Kaurava charioteers known as the saptarathiDrona, Ashwatthama, Kripacharya, Karna, Shakuni, Duhshasana, and Duryodhanasurround Abhimanyus chariot and mortally wound Sumitra. Then they collectively force Abhimanyu onto open ground and kill him. In a short epilogue, the dead Abhimanyu ponders over the meaning of his sacricce. The parallel between this narrative and the violence in contemporary Manipur is established in the prologue itself through an invocation of the political symbolism of the (coercive) modern nation state: as the sutradhar says, national bags conceptualize politics. . . . This is a war of bags . . . This is a war of power grabbers (10). Indeed, Thiyams topicality becomes heavy-handed when Shakuni talks about the deceptive art of politics and refers to one of the cornerstones of Jawaharlal Nehrus national policy, the economic cve-year plans, as colourful dreams heralding a bright future that are never implemented but that enable a politician to become a leader, a king (15). At a more complex thematic level, Thiyam rejects the simple binarism of good and evil in political conbict by making Duryodhana a vocal critic of his adversariesin fact, he articulates in this play the critique of the Pandavas that comes from Ashwatthama in Bharatis Andha yug. Duryodhana bitterly attacks the popular perception of the Pandavas as harbingers of truth, when in fact they have already killed the patriarch Bhishma by treachery, and he has the moral acuity
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to acknowledge that both Kauravas and Pandavas speak with forked tongues. He also denies the accusations of untruth, injustice, and corruption against him, and insists that discriminating future generations will vindicate him: Those who are swayed by the superccial will side with the Pandavas, but those who delve to understand the intricacies and subtleties of life will opt for the Kauravas (19). In the war over the possession of a kingdom (be it Hastinapur or Manipur), the motivations of those who seek to retain their claims through violence are not dismissed outright but recognized as complex. Drona also underscores Duryodhanas sense of ambivalence by describing the battleceld of Kurukshetra as a place where there is no discrimination between right and wrong (22). Thiyam underscores the contemporaneity of the Mahabharata further by commenting that the Abhimanyu story o,ered him an opportunity to attack the cult of heroism which is only too often held up to the Manipuri youth by political forces playing for sectarian stakes, to drive them to senseless acts of virtual suicide (Bandyopadhyay, New Karnas, 74). The long scene of Abhimanyus entrapment (scene 2, pp. 2236) shows the subtlety of seduction on the part of the elders and the susceptibility to seduction on the part of the young because of the code of heroism that has been part of their ideological conditioning. The battery of his uncles Yudhishthhira and Bhima is what throws Abhimanyu into a rapture of heroism, where he resolves to leap on the army deployed by Dronacharya. Though I may be young and alone, I swear to kill all the major and minor charioteers of the enemy force to save the honour of the dynasty of my parents (3536). At the end of the play, as the dead Abhimanyu wonders in his moment of farewell whether he is scapegoat or martyr and heralds the arrival of kaliyug (echoing Bharatis Andha yug, which Thiyam had already produced in Manipuri), the umbrellas that have been ubiquitous on stage are resymbolized as canopies of power, which were given to the great Kings and emperors of this world . . . as shields to protect truth from the blistering acid of sinful lies. But you have polluted this fair and pure earth with your blind egos and criminal use of power. The germs proliferated by sins . . . will gradually eat into the hearts and minds of future generations. All shall be engulfed in a thick smoke of selcshness. No Duryodhana shall ever receive the pious words of any Yudhishthhira. The search for truth will remain unfulclled (51). The melodramatic excess of the dialogue (or perhaps of the translation) does not obscure the passion with which the play laments the destruction of the young. At the very end of October 1984, the premiere performance of Chakravyuha was suddenly canceled because of the assassination of
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Indira Gandhi in Delhi, a day after she had proclaimed in Bhuvaneshwar, the venue of the premiere, that if she died a violent death every drop of her blood would seep into and irrigate the soil of her country. This accidental association between Thiyams play and the grotesque drama of political assassination has, if anything, deepened the uncertainty of the distinction between innocence and corruption, purity and pollution, murder and martyrdom. (For details on the postponement of the premiere of Chakravyuha because of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, see Kavita Nagpals introduction in Thiyam, Chakravyuha, viiviii.) The thematic emphasis on violence and sacricce involves the verbal, ethical, and philosophical content of the play, but this constitutes only part of its meaning in performance. In the version of Chakravyuha published by Seagull in 1998, Kavita Nagpals detailed pre-text describes the stages in the plays evolution, the development of its political message, and the numerous performance traditions it assimilatesfrom such pervasive inbuences as thang-ta, wari-leeba, and nata-sankeertana to more local e,ects, such as those of dol jatra (a celebration associated with the spring Holi festival that provided the movements in the prologue) and pena (a style of narrative singing used in the Arjuna-Subhadra scene). The performance text beshes out the dialogue with exhaustive descriptions of movement, gesture, sound, and light e,ects, making it possible for the reader to imaginatively reconstruct the action in its entirety. The intense and tragic interaction between characters that constitutes the dramatic core of Chakravyuha is framed by a slow and deliberate paratext consisting of recitation, incantation, singing, and ritual, as well as the visual symbolism of bags and canopies and the nonverbal poetry of choreographed movement, sound, and light. For instance, the opening prayers to Brahma and Vishnu in Sanskrit (not Manipuri) and the description of the formation of theatre from the four Vedas in the prologue are set pieces with no intrinsic relation to the story of Abhimanyu. The Sanskrit Tulasi Shloka that opens scene 1 has a self-sucient theatrical e,ect, although dramatically it establishes Dronas Brahmanism to intensify his anxiety at being called to account by the Kauravas to fulcll the duties of a Kshatriya guru. The beginning of the bashback within scene 2 suggests the care with which the visual, the sensory, the symbolic, and the thematic are brought together in this production:
A womans voice begins a song accompanied by the pung (drum) and cymbals. A dim red circle of light appears centre stage. Abhimanyu gets up and in slow rhythm steps moves into this red circle which represents the
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womb. Seven actors, four from the right centre wing and three from the left centre wing, move in to form a circle around Abhimanyu. A blue light on a stand fades in from the right upstage fourth wing revealing Arjuna and Subhadra entering from left upstage fourth wing. The entire action takes place simultaneously. . . . Abhimanyu goes down in a foetal position in the centre of the red circle of light. The seven actors holding large tasselled cymbals kneel around him. These are the seven who will become the attacking charioteers in the Chakravyuha. (2829)
This fusion of the verbal-thematic with the visual-aural in Thiyams theatrecraft sets him apart from other contemporary Indian directors and has made Chakravyuha the most successful and well-documented of his Mahabharata plays. Among other honors, it won the Fringe First Award at the Commonwealth Arts Festival in Edinburgh in 1986 and was included in the Nehru Festival in 1989, making Thiyam the youngest director featured at the Nehru Festival. But the very complexity of the presentation has also proved to be counterproductive in two ways. In his introduction to Thiyams play, Bandyopadhyay considers it a pity that in spite of Ratans insistence on the Manipuri locus of his treatment of the Mahabharata, his trilogy has been too often and too readily read as an overture to the dominant Hindu mainstream culture of India, a celebration of Aryanism. The Natyashastra elements used in the productions have been blown out of all proportion and privileged over the stronger and more vital presence of the indigenous Manipuri elements to give them a revivalist dimension (Chakravyuha, ix). Thiyams critique of dominant structures thus unexpectedly turns into a tribute to Indian culture and Hindu tradition. Second, the overemphasis on style carries with it the potential danger of neutralizing the political message. For Soyam Lokendrajit, Thiyams theatre reveals an opportunistic impulse to plunge into the exotic classic, to try and csh out some esoteric but allegedly contemporary meaning, wrap it in the gorgeous attire of performance motifs torn out of context from an already rich performance tradition a form perhaps aesthetically too heavy for the soullessness of its inner content (27). Other younger Manipur directors have complained that the plays of Thiyam and Kanhailal are commodities of cultural tourism, rarely available to audiences in Manipur. If Panikkars Mahabharata theatre is consciously apolitical, Thiyams consciously political theatre is partially dissipated by his even more conscious artistry.
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Assessed in its totality, the presence of the Mahabharata in contemporary Indian theatre is an important measure of the decnition and development of the nation as a political and cultural entity. Playwrights have used episodes from the epic to interlineate their approaches to gender, nation, family, community, and society with the meanings of the past, and the narratives have retained their established associations while also acquiring powerful new expressive dimensions. The distinctiveness of theatre-as-representation appears most forcefully in comparison with the pervasive presence of the epic in contemporary popular and masscultural media as well as in traditional folk performance. First, on the serious urban stage the Mahabharata is an epic of upheaval and loss, qualitatively di,erent from the extravagant cultural spectacle seen on television in 1989; it encourages critical self-scrutiny rather than the self-aggrandizing celebration of a mythic Hindu-Indian past. Second, in theatrical performance, as opposed to clm, television, and some prose cction, the epic is always represented in part, not in its entirety. Since the time of Bhasa, specicc characters or episodes have been the mainstay of the Mahabharata theatre because they possess a self-suciency and a potential for elaboration that are especially suited to the relative brevity of performance. Ironically, the Carrire-Brook production of the Mahabharata (widely received as an epoch-making event in world theatre) is therefore based on an impulse that is cinematic and televisual, not theatrical. Third, literary plays based on the epic, such as Kelu Janmejaya, Yayati, and Agni mattu mal, vary signiccantly from each other and highlight the authors originality, but the performance-oriented works, such as the interrelated sequences of Panikkar and Thiyam, have tended to replicate a few classical models in terms specicc to their own geographies. In this respect a play like Andha yug is unique, whereas Urubhangam and Chakravyuha are embedded in their respective intertexts and their regional cultures of traditional and folk performancebut all three works stand at a considerable distance from the popular reenactments of the Mahabharata in the various media of mechanical reproduction.
chapter 7
#
The Ironic History of the Nation
Postcolonialism and the Problem of History Commenting on the points of contact between two dominant late twentieth-century posts, Linda Hutcheon observes that postmodernism and postcolonialism are alike in undertaking a dialogue with history: diverging from modernisms ahistorical retreat from temporality, the postmodern questions, rather than concrms, the process of History . . . [and] this is where it overlaps signiccantly with the post-colonial (Circling the Downspout, 152). Euro-American theory of the past few decades has successfully re-visioned history as both narrative and text and problematized its status as a coherent, unmediated, and authoritative form of knowledge about the past. Interestingly, one of the most e,ective instruments of destabilization has been historys resemblance to contiguous disciplines. Taking archaeology as his contemporary model, Michel Foucault argues for the end of such vast unities as periods and centuries (which make possible a total history) and decnes fragmentation, rupture, and discontinuity as the conditions of historical writing. His own work, which deals with such subjects as insanity, illness, sexuality, and punishment, radically reorients the celd of historical inquiry (Archaeology, 9). Hayden White, in contrast, approaches history as an archetypal narrative prose discourse ordered through various modes of emplotment, argument, and ideological implication, and suggests that the historian performs an essentially poetic act in precguring and explaining historical events (Metahistory, x). The element of interpretation in history subverts its claims to
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objectivity and scienticc rigor; but, as Hutcheon clarices, this emphasis on textuality does not render history obsolete but reconceives it as a human construct (Poetics, 16). In postcolonial theory, the postmodern critique of textualized history has been reconcgured to account for the epistemological and cultural e,ects of European dominance over non-European societies in the postRenaissance period. Since the appearance of Edward W. Saids Orientalism in 1978 and the launching of Subaltern Studies as a collective project in 1982, postcolonial studies not only has questioned the idea of history as an autonomous and self-authenticating mode of thought (White, Tropics, 29) but has stressed the complicity between historical discourse and colonialist strategies of cultural domination and self-legitimation because the production of ocial histories in the colonial world is almost exclusively the prerogative of the colonizer. Said describes the Western historical enterprise in Egypt and the Middle East as largely a displacement of history by vision, a type of synchronic essentialism that denies the Orient both historicity and historical agency. Such essentialism, in Anouar Abdel-Maleks words, transcxes the being, the object of study, within its inalienable and non-evolutive speciccity, instead of decning it as . . . a product, a resultant of the vection of the forces operating in the celd of historical evolution (108; also qtd. in Said, 97). Saids redecnition of Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient has also been instrumental in India in dismantling British colonial historiography, which ascribes a similar ahistoricity to Indian civilizations and makes similar claims to a privileged knowledge of the subcontinent. Subaltern historians have extended the anti-Orientalist argument by demonstrating a continuity between the colonialist elitism of British historians and the bourgeois-nationalist elitism of Indian historians, both of which enforce the prejudiced view that the development of national consciousness and the making of the Indian nation were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements (Guha, 1). The subaltern position thus relates neocolonialist discourse in Britain to neonationalist discourse in India and implicates post-independence Indian historians in further misrepresentations of their own history. The antiorientalist and subaltern critiques of colonial and neocolonial historiography, however, have elided two relations that are fundamental to Western conceptions of history and equally relevant to Indian practicethe interpenetration of true and cctive modes of representation in historical writing and the role of historical cctions (narrative, poetic, and theatrical) in the symbolic constitution of the nation. The possible
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overlap between poetry and history as representational forms is a subject as old as Western poetics itself: while poetrys concern with universal truths makes it more philosophical and more worthy of attention than history, Aristotle allows that the poet may writ[e] about things that have actually happened . . . for there is nothing to prevent some of the things that have happened from being in accordance with the laws of possibility and probability (44). In this perspective the truth of historical poetry, like that of poetry in general, also presumably retains its superiority to the truth of history. During the early modern period in Europe, the extensive and often urgent assimilation of history to the poetry and drama of emergent nation-states creates a fully theorized understanding of the cautionary and consolatory value of past examples, as well as the ideological manipulation of both historical knowledge and historiography in historical cctions. The dominant seventeenth-century view is that a cctionalized representation of history allows an audience to read the narrative about the past as an analogue to its own predicament. Codiced in the seventeenth-century genre of the historical parallel (see Wallace, 26573), this dialectic of history and cction involves a range of textual and interpretive practices that inform such early examples as Shakespeares history plays (159298), Drydens The Duke of Guise (1682), and Joseph Addisons Cato (1714), as well as later works, such as Sir Walter Scotts Waverly novels (181425), Brechts Galileo (1945), and Arthur Millers The Crucible (1953). Central to this dialectic is the relation of history to various forms of cctional representation and the relation of the past to the present. First, all historical narratives are fundamentally intertextual because a serious historical cction both emerges from and returns to history; indeed, as Hayden White suggests, at one level they can be regarded as alternative forms of cgural representation. Second, the intertextual connection has important interpretive implications because cctionalized history always stands in a determinable ideological relation to textualized historyconcrming, repudiating, or radically reshaping its message. Third, a cctional reenactment of the past succeeds only when it resonates in the present. As Walter Benjamin notes, every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.) (Illuminations, 255). Fourth, an audience or interpretive community possesses both knowledge of and attitudes toward history that change over time, so that the meaning of a historical parallel is
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accretive as well as open-ended. At a particular historical moment this meaning seems to depend collectively on the authors manipulation of history; the audiences knowledge, expectations, and interpretive inclinations; and the larger sociopolitical situation that contains author, text, and audience in the present. The role of cctionalized histories in the discourses of nationhood and nation-formation epitomizes the analogical and ideological force of past-present relations, and in this representational context drama has priority over other cctional genres. Among symbolic forms, the nation is most easily recognizable on the stage, and the recognition is especially powerful when the stage seeks to enact the history of the nation itself. To the degree that a segment of the past is intended to link up with the present-day reality of the audience, Herbert Lindenberger argues, the latters own national past has a special status among thematic materials (6). The drama of the nations past is therefore one of the strongest expressions of what Loren Kruger calls theatrical nationhoodthe idea of representing the nation in the theatre, of summoning a representative audience that will in turn recognize itself as nation on stage (3). The development of the national history play within the institutional context of an emergent populist theatre of the nation in 1590s England o,ers perhaps the most powerful instance of the interrelations between the matter of history, the form of drama, and particular sociopolitical conditions of reception. Relating this genre to the Elizabethan writing of England, Richard Helgerson conceives of the 1590s as a historical moment when nation, theatre, and playwright were all alike caught between the opposing claims of popular and elite, inclusive and exclusive representation. Shakespeares history plays served at a crucial moment in the history of the English stage as [sites] of individual and collective struggle and self-legitimation and have remained a paradigmatic expression of Anglo-British national self-understanding (204). At other nationalhistorical moments, the history plays of Nicholas Rowe in England (1714 15) and historical verse dramas, such as Ibsens Brand (1865), Peer Gynt (1867), and Emperor and Galilean (1873) in Norway, and Strindbergs Master Olof (1872) in Sweden, establish the same integral relation between the nations past and the forging of a formative national consciousness in the present. Common to these disparate texts and locations is the understanding that dramatizing the history of the nation on stage subjects the nation itself to particularly acute scrutiny. Following the critique developed in chapter 5, it is vital to extend these perspectives on history, cction, nation, and theatricality to postcolonial
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representations of history, which incorporate as well as transform the European models of theory, practice, and interpretation. In postcolonial India, where the past now appears to be largely an orientalist (mis)construction appropriated by neonationalism, history has become problematic both in itself and in terms of the past it constructs for the nation. The colonialist mediation of Indian history, which exemplices the problems of emplotment, explanation, and ideological implication addressed by postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists in the West, has already invited a powerful correction in the antiorientalist and subaltern revisions of colonial and neocolonial Indian historiography. My argument, however, is that the historiographic text is not the only, or even the most important, site of ideological contestation: in colonial and postcolonial contexts, legitimized histories coexist and often collide with nonhistoriographic, overtly cctional forms of historical writing and performance that perform complex epistemological and cultural functions and intervene signiccantly in the discourse of history. In theory it is possible for history and its cctional intertexts to be ideologically consonant, but, more frequently, in practice historical cctions work precisely to neutralize or repudiate the cgurations of institutional history and serve as alternative sources of historical knowledge for audiences ideologically resistant to the dominant narratives. When the dominant texts of history are subject to critique, historical cctions also inevitably draw attention to the inherited problems of historical representation even as they re-present history and invest it with new, often ambivalent, meanings. In this chapter, I use three acknowledged classics of contemporary Indian theatreMohan Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din (A Day in Early Autumn, Hindi, 1958), Girish Karnads Tughlaq (Kannada, 1964), and Badal Sircars Baki itihas (The Rest of History, Bengali, 1965)to explore the complex discursive, cultural, and theatrical intertexture of history plays in postcolonial India. My object is not to ct these plays to a deterministic theory of historical drama but to demarcate the textual traditions and cultural-political contexts in which they are implicated through their dual existence as verbal artifacts and works for the theatre. Rakeshs Ashadh ke ek din is the crst signiccant full-length, realistic prose play of the post-independence period in any Indian language, and its subject is Kalidasa, the classical Sanskrit playwright-poet whom multiple discourses have established as the canonical cgure par excellence in Indian literary and cultural history. Rakesh was already an established literary editor and author of short cction when he turned to playwriting in the late 1950s, but neither he nor his various audiences could have anticipated
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the rapidity with which Ashadh ka ek din was proclaimed as the founding text of modernity in Hindi (and by extension, Indian) drama. It won the annual Sangeet Natak Akademi award for best play of 1958 and achieved celebrity on stage during the following decade with major productions by Shyamanand Jalan, Ebrahim Alkazi, and Satyadev Dubey (see appendix 4). Rakeshs purpose in writing a history play, however, was not to engage with any specicc historical, literary-historical, or biographical intertexts relating to his subject. Instead, he took on the construction of Kalidasa as civilizational hero and cultural icon in orientalist and culturalnationalist discourses, the hagiographic tendencies within traditional Indian culture, and the private/public dichotomy in the life of the modern artist. The play o,ers, then, a deromanticized portrait of a provincial genius who moves to the imperial metropolis, struggles with the rewards and obligations of state patronage, and never quite grasps the tragic selfsacricce of the muse he had left behind in the village of his birth. Karnads Tughlaq is the third major history play of the postindependence period, following Rakeshs Ashadh (1958) and Lahron ke rajhans (1963). Published originally in Kannada in 1964, and directed in that language in 1966 by B. V. Karanth, the play exploded on the national scene during the next decade with landmark productions by Satyadev Dubey, Alyque Padamsee, Arvind Deshpande, and Ebrahim Alkazi, in Urdu, English, and Marathi (see appendix 4). Tughlaq is now one of the most frequently read, discussed, and performed contemporary Indian plays, both in India and abroad. It o,ers an especially suggestive contrast to Ashadh because it moves to a radically di,erent phase in the history of the subcontinentthe period of Muslim dominance that began in the twelfth century and ended the classical Sanskrit culture of Kalidasa as well as the hegemony of Brahmanical Hinduism, especially in north India. The protagonist of Karnads play is Muhammad bin Tughlaq, a brilliant but spectacularly unsuccessful fourteenth-century Muslim sultan of Delhi, known popularly as mad Muhammad; Karnads primary historical source is the Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi (1357), a chronicle history whose author, Zia-ud-din Barani, spent seventeen years at Tughlaqs court but died in self-imposed poverty the year the work was completed. Unlike Ashadh, which overlays its historical core with an invented narrative, Tughlaq paradigmatically exemplices the full hermeneutic complexity that a postcolonial history play possesses in relation to its historiographic sources, its e,ect on viewers, and its applications to modern (Indian) sociopolitical experience. As inscribed in the play and staged for a variety of national audiences over a period of time, the impossibly complicated
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history of the subcontinent precgures and reenacts the trials of the nation as a modern, secular state in the present. Sircars Baki itihas (1965) alters the terms of the discussion, and serves as an antithetical postscript to the plays by Rakesh and Karnad because history is its subject, not its source: instead of re-presenting characters and events from the past in the usual manner of a history play, it creates a present-day cction to comment rebexively on the process of historywriting, the distance between a constructed history and actuality, and the relationship of private to public histories. Along with Evam Indrajit (And Indrajit, 1962) and Shesh nei (Theres No End, 1969), this play belongs to a cluster of groundbreaking early works for the proscenium by Sircar in which he represents the preprogrammed repetitiveness of middle-class life in the modern Indian megapolis (in this case, Calcutta) as an existential deadend. The contemporary setting becomes entangled with the issue of history because of the e,orts of a young suburban couple to unravel the mystery of a chance male acquaintances suicide. As they present competing versions of the events that led up to the desperate act, they transfer to the domain of private experience the principle of causality that is crucial to positivistic conceptions of history. The two versions, however, are not only imaginary but mutually incompatible and entirely subjective. When the dead man appears at the end to provide the true explanation of his demise, he erases the distinction between private and public, individual and universal experience by describing his suicide as the only rational response to the accumulation of misery that is recorded human history. Like Dharamvir Bharatis Andha yug, Sircars Baki itihas jolts the reader-viewer into recognizing the radical cosmopolitanism with which the ordinary urban individual in mid-twentieth century India rebects on and relates to the history of the world. It is important to consider these varied interfaces with history not only because the plays in question represent a major contemporary genre in Indian theatre but also because they have radically altered the nature and place of history-as-theatrical-subject. Replacing the heroic past of anticolonial nationalist discourse with an imagined or recovered past of conbict and violence, these post-independence history plays bear the same antithetical relation to the idealizing historical drama of Girish Chandra Ghosh, D. L. Roy, K. P. Khadilkar, and Jaishankar Prasad as Andha yug does to the popular and literary tradition of Mahabharata plays in the colonial theatre. More broadly, the focus on history o,ers a much-needed methodological alternative to allegory, the literary mode most closely associated with the nation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. In Fredric
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Jamesons well-known formulation, the experience of colonialism and imperialism turns all third-world texts into national allegories, and the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society (69; emphasis omitted). The discourse of history, however, diverges from Jamesons private/public dichotomy to o,er a public/public split, and its resemblance rather than identity with the present resists reduction purely to allegory. As John M. Wallace argues in the context of seventeenthcentury English historical writing, an audience can always reduce history to a topical allegory, but the historicist critic must reiterate the analogical structure of historical cctions because past examples and present predicaments are never identical, and one character can never substitute completely for another (273). Similarly, the turn toward history preemptively qualices Homi K. Bhabhas inbuential conception (following Tom Nairn) of the isomorphic relation between nation and narrative, where the Janus-faced ambivalence of language itself allegorically inscribes the Janus-faced discourse of the nation (3). Employing strategies that Bhabha fails to theorize, historical drama creates ambivalence by collapsing the nations past into its present, and its narrative unfolds not only as text but as performance. Most importantly, then, the history plays of Rakesh, Karnad, Sircar, and others forge a relation between text-based, thematically dense literary drama and the culture of urban performance that is one of the signiccant breakthroughs of the post-independence period, even as they connect playwright, subject, and audience in ways markedly di,erent from those of the visually oriented, opulent mythic theatre of K. N. Panikkar and Ratan Thiyam. Kalidasa, Canonicity, and Postcolonial Modernism: Mohan Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din The portrait of Kalidasa in Mohan Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din, the crst major realistic prose play of the 1950s, is an unambiguous sign of the revisionary project of post-independence Indian theatre. As a historical cgure Kalidasa is subject to the same indeterminacies that complicate the study of literary authorship in Indian antiquityeven his dates range from the second century b.c. to the cfth century a.d. The strongest tradition, which links him to the Gupta emperor Chandragupta II of Ujjayini (ca. a.d. 375415), is based at least in part on the scholarly desire to replicate in classical India the aliation between an imperial court, a royal patron, and an epic poet of genius that informs the relationship
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between, say, Rome, Augustus Caesar, and Virgil in Western antiquity (see Miller, 912). The tradition is, of course, sustained by the classic qualities of Kalidasas oeuvre, which includes three long poems, Ritusamhara (A Gathering of Seasons), Meghaduta (The Cloud-Messenger), and Kumarasambhava (The Origin of the Young God); a dynastic epic, Raghuvamsha (The Lineage of Raghu); and three plays, Malavikagnimitram (Malavika and Agnimitra), Vikramorvashiyam (Urvashi Won by Valor), and the universally known Abhijnana Shakuntalam (Shakuntala and the Ring of Recollection). Far more important than the historicity of Kalidasas life or work, however, is his iconic role in the colonial and postcolonial constructions of Indian literature, culture, civilization, and nationhood, well-known to Rakesh as a trained reader of Sanskrit, a modern Hindi author, and a postcolonial literary modernist. In theatricalizing Kalidasa, therefore, Rakesh takes on a body of commentary, exegesis, scholarship, criticism, and ideological mythmaking that spans nearly two millennia and encompasses the Indian literary and cultural past from classical to postcolonial times. This network of discourses contains at least cve distinct and notable strains. First, from the seventh century onward, the canonicity of Kalidasa is established by Indian traditions of poetry, poetics, drama, and critical commentary, which acknowledge his excellence in both major forms of classical compositionnatya (drama) and kavya (poetry). Some key texts in these traditions include commentaries on the poems and plays by Raghavabhatta (date unknown), Vallabhadeva (eleventh century), and Mallinatha (fourteenth century); works of poetics by Dandin, Dhananjay, Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, and Mammata (eightheleventh centuries); and poetic works that pay tribute to Kalidasa, such as Banabhattas Harshacharita (seventh century) and Narayana Bhattas Venisamhara. Second, the orientalist apotheosis of Kalidasa begins with Sir William Joness translation of Shakuntalam in 1789, in the preface to which he announces his discovery of Sanskritand hence of Indo-European civilization and historyto Europe. This work initiates the philological tradition, still inbuential in Western Indology and area studies, that establishes Sanskrit as the premier Indian language, drama as its most highly evolved form, and Kalidasa as its foremost practitioner. Third, this Anglo-European revaluation of Indian antiquity, so di,erent from the usual forms of colonialist derogation, enables nineteenth-century Indian nationalists to appropriate Kalidasa as the symbol of a redeeming ancient civilization and to construct around him the idea of a national literature and theatre. Fourth, a body of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European commentary, translation, and experimental performancewhich includes the work
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of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, Edward Gordon Craig, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barbasingles out Shakuntalam as the exemplary work of Indian drama and creates a reception history for it that is more complex than that of any other Indian text (see Figuera, 1213 and 19091; she records forty-six translations of Shakuntalam in twelve European languages between 1790 and 1890). Finally, in the cultural-nationalist discourse of the post-independence period, Kalidasa continues to symbolize the golden age with which a decolonizing culture should reconnect itself and serves as a touchstones for a new, authentically Indian theatre.1 Rakesh positions Ashadh ka ek din in systematic opposition to all these discourses by adapting modernist minimalism and irony to his objectives as a nonanglophone, mid-twentieth-century Indian playwright. Like Shaws Caesar and Cleopatra and Saint Joan or Brechts Galileo, the play humanizes and demystices the idea of greatness in history. In place of the legendary mahakavi (great epic poet) of Indian tradition, Rakesh creates a self-centered but insecure aesthete preoccupied with his talent and anxious about nurturing it in the right environment. This self-absorbed private self appears in the foreground; the epic oeuvre that is the basis of Kalidasas extraordinary fame becomes a seemingly e,ortless o,stage production tangential to his social, romantic, and spiritual crises. Similarly, instead of the self-possessed metropolitan poet vital to the narrative of Indian classicism, Rakesh portrays a provincial prodigy who departs reluctantly from the poetic landscape of his origin, remains alienated from the world of fame and power in the imperial capital, and returns to his village at the end to reconnect (unsuccessfully) with his past life. To the extent that the play deals with Kalidasas work at all, poetry virtually erases drama: by including only one passing reference to Shakuntalam, Rakesh evades a confrontation with the most daunting precursor cgure in the tradition of Indian theatre. The modalities of Ashadh are also deliberately antithetical to those of Kalidasas poetry and dramawhile Kalidasas works emphasize the heroic and erotic modes (vir rasa and shringar rasa), Rakesh resorts to irony and tragedy. Instead of the happy resolutions of Kalidasas plays and the exquisite recnement of his poetry, we witness the unhappy drama of Kalidasaa Dushyanta for whom there is no ring of recollection and no reunion with the beloved. All these features of Ashadh ke ek din are consistent with those of the modern history play, but in at least two respects Rakeshs radical practice goes further. Kalidasa is the only historical cgure in his representation: the others are inventions who play designated roles in a parable-like narrative. And
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instead of the large cast of characters and grand temporal sweep evident even in modern Anglo-American history plays, such as Saint Joan and The Crucible, Rakeshs play contains only four principal characters and a single, spare village setting. Indeed, Kalidasa may be the protagonist but he is not the central character in his own storythat role belongs to Mallika, the cctional lover and muse who both actively and reactively constructs her life around the choices Kalidasa makes and who descends into poverty, prostitution, and illegitimate motherhood as he ascends the political-cultural ladder. In the meticulously symmetrical three-act structure of Rakeshs play, Kalidasa appears in the crst and third acts, a liminal cgure caught in the contingencies of departure or arrival. All three acts are set in the front chamber of Mallikas village home, with the cold mountain rain of the month of Ashadh (roughly JuneJuly in the Gregorian calendar) serving as an elemental motif at the plays beginning and end. In each act, the progressive deterioration of visible domestic space signals the passage of a few (unspeciced) years and the collapse of Mallikas precarious feminine world. The same qualities of symmetry and counterpoint mark relations between the plays main characters. Mallika and Ambika, daughter and widowed mother, have opposing ideas about the rights and obligations of love. Kalidasa and Vilom (a character whose name literally means opposite) represent the di,erence between insecure creativity and selfpossessed cynicism, which Vilom expresses disingenuously as a di,erence of degree, not kind: What is Vilom? An unsuccessful Kalidasa. And Kalidasa? A successful Vilom (Rakesh, Sampurna Natak [Complete Plays], 51; cited hereafter as SN). The relationships of Mallika and Kalidasa and of Ambika and Vilom are empathetic, though not in the same way or for the same reasons; those of Mallika and Ambika and of Kalidasa/Mallika and Vilom are adversarial. Rather than evoking any known account of the poets life, these patterns of sympathy and antipathy develop the thematically signiccant binaries of man/woman, love/ambition, success/failure, and center/periphery, problematizing the specicc history of Kalidasa as well as the form of the history play. As a tragic love story, Ashadh ka ek din portrays the amorality and inequality that characterize the poets attachment to his muse. Act 1 establishes that in her pursuit of beauty, sensation, and romantic intimacy with the poet in an exquisite landscape, Mallika has jettisoned the gross necessities of life and conventional choices, such as marriage and respectability. Dependent on her companionship and temperamentally narcissistic, Kalidasa tacitly accepts and arms her unconventionality,
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but when he is unexpectedly o,ered the position of court poet in the Gupta capital of Ujjayini, his ambivalence toward the relationship becomes evident. He initially spurns the o,er not because it would mean separation from Mallika but because he is uneasy about the obligations of royal patronage and the e,ects of a metropolitan milieu on his poetic talent. Mallika persuades him to accept the position not only because his life in the village has been one of obscurity and humiliation but also because he has exhausted the poetic possibilities of his environment and needs new sources of inspiration. After years of arguing that marriage with Kalidasa was impossible because of his straitened circumstances, Mallika now excludes herself from his secure future on the grounds that she does not wish to assert her own self-interest at a time when his life is assuming a new direction. At the end of the act Kalidasa humbly waits for Mallika to give him leave to go but mentions neither marriage nor the possibility of a future together. In act 2, the signs of decay in Mallikas home are already pronounced: her mother, Ambika, has become an invalid, and the women have not heard from Kalidasa since his departure, although rumors about his poetic success and marriage to an accomplished princess circulate in the village. In the trajectory of Kalidasas extraordinary career Mallika now regards herself as an insigniccant detail but has kept abreast of his work by acquiring manuscript copies from passing merchants. Her painful resignation is shattered, however, by the news that Kalidasa has stopped in the village on his way to assuming the governorship of the province of Kashmir. A succession of ocious courtiers (including the poets wife, Priyangumanjari) then intrude on Mallikas home to experience authentic village life, discover the sources of Kalidasas exceptional talent, and satisfy their curiosity about the village girl who is known even in court circles as his muse. Her pride already shaken by the princesss well-intentioned but callous suggestions of marriage and rehabilitation, Mallika arrives at a state of emotional collapse at the end of the act as the long-awaited reunion with Kalidasa turns into a nonevent: he is heard approaching her home on horseback but, inexplicably, rides on. In act 3, Ambika is dead and the house on the verge of collapse, while Mallika has resorted to prostitution and given birth to an illegitimate daughter. Matul, Kalidasas crippled uncle, returns from the capital city with the news that the poet has given up his position in Kashmir and perhaps taken up the life of an ascetic in the holy city of Kashi (Banaras) events that seem to nullify Mallikas own long su,ering and sacricce. An agitated Kalidasa now arrives at her doorstep to concrm and justify
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his renunciation and to explain that he had not seen Mallika on his earlier visit for fear she would destroy an already shaky resolve. He also acknowledges that the poetry of his maturity has been nothing but a series of meditations on their relationship, and the blank manuscript she had sewn together as a gift for him has become the unwritten epic of her su,ering. The realities of the present, however, impinge on his still self-absorbed discourse: he becomes aware of Mallikas infant daughter and of Viloms new rights over Mallika as customer and mock-husband. With this unambiguous reminder that time has passed them by, Kalidasa slips away once again, leaving Mallika to weep over her child. Rakesh, the Hindi Stage, and the History Play In the foregoing account, Ashadh ka ek din emerges not as a dramatized life of Kalidasa but as a parable of the irreconcilable claims of love, creativity, and ambition. As an ostensible history play that quickly became a stage and print classic, it therefore invited two predictable objections: that Rakeshs history was wholly cctional and that the main purpose of this fabrication was to debase the symbol of Indian literary greatness. As Rakesh acknowledged in the preface to his second play, Lahron ke rajhans (1963), Ashadh gave rise to numerous arguments regarding its historical accuracy, its theatrical possibilities, and most of all, its portrayal of the character of Kalidasa (SN, 196). The two most frequent complaints were that a disciplined, dedicated, enlightened soul like Kalidasa is portrayed in the play as a weak man and that the playwright had failed completely to explain the talent and greatness of his protagonist by focusing only on his moral failure (196, 8). Rakeshs diary entry for 6 February 1959 mentions that a local literary personality in Lucknow had refused to inaugurate a performance on 10 January on the grounds that the play belittled Kalidasa, and even prominent Hindi authors, such as Bhagvati Charan Varma and Amritlal Nagar, had openly voiced their antagonism toward the work (Rakesh, Diary, 226). While Rakesh was not invulnerable to these early reports of protest and ostracism, his reasoned responses to the controversy express his vision of a new Hindi theatre as much as his views on drama as cctionalized history and Kalidasa as historical subject. In the preface to the crst edition of Ashadh ka ek din (1958), he comments that drama in Hindi is not linked to any particular theatrical tradition; its renewal on stage, however, can depend neither on the unusable achievements of Western theatre nor on the patronage of the state, because
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the question is not merely one of economic convenience but also of a certain cultural outlook. The Hindi stage will have to take a leading role in representing the cultural needs and aspirations of the Hindi-speaking region. . . . The kind of theatre that is needed to present the color and rhythm of our daily lives, to express our emotions and sensations, will have to be quite di,erent from the Western stage. The design and substance of this stage will take shape through the medium of theatrical experimentation, and it will develop in the hands of capable actors and directors. (SN, 104)
Rakesh saw Ashadh ka ek din as a contribution to this quest for new theatrical possibilities. The plays unexpected success in printthe second impression went to press within three months of crst publication, before any performances had been plannedled him to reemphasize the priority of performance. In the preface to the second printing of 1958, he expresses his belief that the real value of a dramatic workits success or failureis decided only on the stage. For good, successful plays to be written, the expectation is that they would be acted on stage before publication, and would then be given cnal form only in the light of that experience. But it looks as though we will take some years to get to that point (SN, 105). Eagerly anticipating the plays theatrical debut (in 1959 he toyed with, but abandoned, the idea of producing it himself ), Rakesh also points out that the one unchanging set in Ashadh should simplify the staging process and keep production costs down, but that the main roles of Kalidasa, Mallika, and Vilom will demand seasoned actors. Moving beyond performance, Rakeshs defense of his objectionable portrayal of Kalidasa is theoretical, polemical, and philosophical in nature, but mindful of the di,erences in genre that make the cgure of Kalidasa on stage far more a,ecting and provocative than a novelistic or poetic representation. On the issue of historical accuracy, he argues that there are no indisputable facts about Kalidasas life, only conjectures that have hardened into orthodoxy to support particular ideological-cultural agendas. Hence, he engages with broad cultural constructs rather than specicc historiographic or literary-critical intertexts and describes the objections to Kalidasas character as rebecting certain critical predispositions (196). There are two other positions related to this argument. Rakesh asserts that his Kalidasa actualizes the authorial self implied in such works as Abhijnana Shakuntalam, Kumarasambhava, and Meghaduta, with greater psychological validity than the idealized cgure of popular lore and cultural-nationalist discourse. The Kalidasa of Ashadh is also not weak but vulnerable, unstable, and harrowed by his inner struggles;
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Vilom appears stronger only because he has put an end to such turmoil: In Ashadh ka ek din, the defeated man is not the despairing Kalidasa, but the self-possessed Vilom (197). Similarly, Rakeshs arguments regarding the general relation of history to historical cctions involve the category of literature rather than theatre, but they are honed by his practice in the two history playsAshadh and Lahron ke rajhansand also constitute the crst serious commentary on the subject in post-independence Indian theatre:
The dependence on history or historical cgures does not turn literature into history. History gathers facts and presents them in chronological order. This has never been the object of literature. It is also no accomplishment for literature to cll the empty chambers of history. . . . For this reason, history is not expressed in literature through its incontrovertible events, but through an imagination that links events together and creates a separate, new history of its own kind. This creation is not history in the accepted sense. To cnd that history one really should go to the scholarly tomes. (SN, 19698)
Most important, for Rakesh the connection between the past and the present is symbolic, not analogical. Kalidasa is not so much an individual as a representation of the creative energies within Indian culture and of the internal struggles that destabilize the creative self in every age. It is immaterial to him whether the man we call Kalidasa even really had that name or su,ered any authorly crises: the main thing is that in every age many have had to go through that phase, and we ourselves are among those who are passing through it now. . . . I for one could not cnd a better label, a better sign, for our cumulative creative abilities (196). Why, then, did Rakesh choose history over pure symbolist invention in his play? It was simply to bring the point home. Sometimes it seems to me very convenient to exploit a deep-rooted sentiment. . . . With the name Kalidasa, which is an accepted thing with the people, I did not have to create an image (Mohan Rakesh, 32; my emphasis). Instead of expending his energies on the invention of a character about whose dilemma or mental struggle people would not be convinced, he decided to take a symbol from history and use my energies in creating a play for and of today (33). In this provocative audience-centered conception focused primarily on the present, the cgure from history can fulcll its modern symbolic potential (like Saint Joan or Galileo) only if viewers surrender their habitual modes of thought. Rakesh regards the resistance to his
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demysticcation of Kalidasa, therefore, not as a contest over the facts of history but as the symptom of an uncritical, adulatory traditionalism that always want[s] to place our civilizational symbols on a superhuman plane. Any sign of human fallibility in them hurts us. . . . Because we expect nothing from ourselves, it seems impossible to us that one can remain on a human level and still accomplish something great. That greatness is possible only at a human levelthis would be too hard for us even to contemplate (SN, 196). The reinvented Kalidasa of Ashadh ka ek din thus exposes, but has the potential to redeem, our cultural decciencies. Paradoxically, if in philosophical and cultural terms Rakesh asserts his authorial right to remake history in the image of the present, the plays visual and aural qualities return it powerfully to history, particularly in performance. No major director has ignored Rakeshs meticulous stage directions regarding the atmosphere, shape, texture, and arrangement of the spaces and objects constituting the mise-en-scne: a rustic chamber replete with the signs and symbols of Hindu antiquity, such as painted swastikas and lotuses, small clay lamps, metal utensils covered with kusha grass, and a leopard skin thrown over a low stool. The director Vivekdutt Jha noted that recreating Kalidasas period on stage in his Sagar production required a great deal of labor, and it was vital for every physical object to be in its proper place during the staging. In his 1972 production in Delhi, Faisal Alkazi saw the play in terms of some special visual-aural images: by integrating light and sound with the material-human environment, he created vivid tableaux that both heightened and framed the plays moments of emotional crisis and became indelibly imprinted in his mind (see SN, 10910). The successful evocation of antiquity in the sets for the Ebrahim Alkazi, Joy Michael, and Padamsee productions of 1962, 1968, and 1972, respectively, also came in for specicc praise from reviewers. The loyalty of stage directors to Rakeshs imagined environment extends to costumes as well: there has been no major production of Ashadh ka ek din in modern dress. The styles of costume vary from the simple to the exotic and even the ascetic, but the characters obvious physical inconsonance with the contemporary urban Indian (or Western) spectator marks them as di,erent even as their predicaments assume familiar qualities. What is true of set design and costumes is also true, in much more complex ways, of language. From both literary and theatrical standpoints, the most celebrated attribute of Ashadh ka ek din is its diction, a unique and perfect medium that simultaneously evokes the classical and the contemporary and sustains the plays period atmosphere while maintaining a
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quality of natural but cultured communication. Satyadev Dubey pointed out that the plays modernity was not allowed to encroach on the poetry of the situation which had been crystallized in dialogues which startled the Hindi world with their austere musicality. Though the Hindi used was Sanskritized for the sake of the period, yet the play brought to the Hindi language a fully evolved dramatic idiom, bawless in its speech rhythms and [possessing] a distinct modern ring (Rakesh). Jha regarded Rakeshs ability to get his meaning across to ordinary viewers while negotiating a Sanskritized diction as his greatest success and one of the plays major strengths. Indeed, so vital is the linguistic medium to the plays emotional e,ects that when author-critic Kanhaiyalal Nandan saw the Theatre Groups 1972 English production in Bombay (in Sarah K. Ensleys translation), he felt that the empathy and delicacy of emotion associated with Kalidasas character were completely drowned out by the formal enunciation of a melodramatic English. . . . There was not even a remote sign here of Kalidasas emotional susceptibility and the profound inner conbict that should have consumed him at the end (SN, 120). Elsewhere, in Joy Michaels 1968 English production at Mary Washington College in Virginia, Ensleys English translation still could not domesticate a play that the reviewer, George St. Julian, described as the modern product of an alien culture. St. Julian found Michaels presentation to be excellent and beautiful, but still a very dicult experience for American actors and spectators to absorb because of its aesthetic distance from the orthodoxies of the American stage in 1968 (118). Not surprisingly, among the leading plays by Rakeshs generation of playwrights, Ashadh ka ek din has been the one performed least frequently in translation. Given Rakeshs investment in the pastness of the past as well as its presence and his interest in revitalizing the Hindi stage through modernist experimentation, the real vindication of his unorthodox methods perhaps lies in the intense excitement Ashadh ka ek din has generated among theatre professionals and critics since its appearance. Dubey, who directed the play for Theatre Unit in 1964, saw it as a revolutionary breakaway from Hindi playwriting till then and described its publication and crst production by Anamika in Calcutta as electrifying events that elevated playwriting to an enviable top position. So far it had only been a poor relation of the other literary forms, but now it commanded a new respect in spite of being the least remunerative (Rakesh). Relating the play speciccally to the mass of so-called historical plays in Hindi, Nemichandra Jain noted the absence in it of revivalist fervor and melodrama, and the presence of a far more modern and acute vision, because
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of which it is in a true sense the beginning of modern Hindi drama (SN, 8). Such appraisals validate Rakeshs radical positions on history, tradition, canonicity, and creativity, but remarks by directors and performers also suggest that these thematic emphases have formed an important part of their own respective approaches to the plays communicable meanings. As Jha observes (echoing both Rakesh and Dharamvir Bharati and voicing the majority view among theatre professionals), Indian culture tends to idealize tradition and deny signs of vulnerability in its icons, but by presenting Kalidasa along with his weaknesses on stage, the playwright has made an important contribution towards the breaking of traditional modes of thinking in society (112). Beyond History and Tradition: Gender, Patronage, and the Politics of Language The antitraditionalism of Ashadh ka ek din, stressed by the author, his audience, and his interpreters in the theatre, is the ultimate justiccation for the liberties Rakesh takes with the past. But its modernity (or contemporaneity) also emerges in several other thematic emphases to which history is peripheral. In the cgures of Mallika and Ambika, the play creates a new kind of female subject, as challenging to conventional Indian notions of femininity as the character of Kalidasa is to literary and cultural tradition. Mallika is the transhistorical muse whose beauty, sympathy, and loyalty are claimed to an extraordinary extent by the extraordinarily gifted poet. In rejecting convention, respectability, and the possibility of happiness in her own life, Mallika is the crst mature heroine in modern Indian theatre to disrupt the equation of idealized Indian femininity with marriage, domesticity, chastity, and legitimate motherhood. Her opposition to marriage is not an empty gesture: she knows the price of her decance yet persists because for her the bond of feeling has a purity and permanence that places it above all other relations. She also asserts an essentially modern sense of selfhood: Mallikas life is her own possession. If she wants to destroy it, what right do others have to criticize her? (SN, 32). This claim to self-possession is radical in a patriarchal culture that empowers women in mythic, religious, and political contexts, but that is compelled to silence them in the sexual and domestic roles of lover, wife, and mother. Similarly, Ambika deviates strongly from the Indian cultural stereotypes of unquestioning maternal love and passive female su,ering, emerging instead as a woman embittered but not vanquished by a life of struggle
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and disappointment. She rejects the Kalidasa-Mallika relationship not merely, or even especially, because it deces convention but because she sees it as driven entirely by the poets needs and lacking in mutuality. When Kalidasa expresses indi,erence toward public recognition, Ambika dismisses his doubts as self-important posturing. When Mallika refuses to impede the poets progress by bringing up the question of marriage, Ambika counters that Kalidasa has no intention of doing so himself: I understand that kind of man very well. His only relation with you is that you are an instrument through which he can love himself, be proud of himself. But arent you a sentient human being? Doesnt he, and dont you have some responsibility towards yourself ? (SN, 41). When the courtly visitors invade her home (in act 2), Ambika knows that Kalidasa is trying to assuage his guilt, but that he will not have the courage to face Mallika. Hence her fury at the intrusion, her attempts to denounce Kalidasa before his royal wife, and her judgment that he is not worthy of Mallikas grief. She directs her critique at the self-centered, outwardly ascetic, creative male self, which is no less destructive of Mallikas innocence and happiness than Viloms sexual predations. Interestingly, among the performers who have created the role of Ambika, the only outstanding cgure seems to be the IPTA-trained stage and screen actress Dina Pathak, who appeared in Padamsees 1972 English production. The role of Mallika, in comparison, has become almost inseparable from the art and life of Sudha Sharma (Shivpuri), who played it to wide acclaim in Ebrahim Alkazis 1962 NSD production, and later in the 1973 Dishantar production, both times against her (future) husband, Om Shivpuri (cg. 10). I probably cannot describe in words how close that character is to me even today, which I was living through when I performed the role of Mallika, Sudha Shivpuri wrote in a 1992 memoir (SN, 115). Both she and Om Shivpuri were NSD graduates and founder members of the schools Repertory Company, for which they played the lead roles in Karnads Tughlaq, Rakeshs Lahron ke rajhans, and Sophocles Antigone (all in 1966). But while Om Shivpuri went on to a successful and visible career as a serious character actor in Indian middle cinema and commercial Bombay cinema, his wife remained principally a stage actress with a regional audience. When asked about her feelings about this disparity in their creative lives, Sudha Shivpuri claims to have repeated the lines from Rakeshs play in which Mallika expresses stark despair at the news that Kalidasa has abandoned his life at court: Although I was not a part of your life, you have always been part of mine. I never let you get too far away from me. As you wrote, I felt that my life also had meaning,
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that I had also achieved something. And are you going to make my existence meaningless now? You may become estranged from yourself, but I can no longer do that. Can you look at life through my eyes? Do you know how I have spent these past years of my life? What I have seen? What I was and what I have become? (90). For a decade in the stage life of the play, the emotional drama and tragic unraveling of the KalidasaMallika relationship acquired even greater intensity through this association with the actors lives, and the retrospective text of Shivpuris memoir recaptures that poignancy: Today, when Mohan Rakesh is no longer with us and his Kalidasa has also left me alone and gone away, become disengaged from life, once again I remember those same lines from Ashadh ka ek din and console myself (116). This unexpected mediation of theatre by real-life experience modices but does not cancel the perception that Rakeshs iconoclasm in Ashadh ka ek din is compromised by a rather conventional masculinist insistence on feminine endurance. Mallika resists patriarchy in one respect but capitulates to it in another because the fulcllment of male creative
Fig. 10. Poet and muse, husband and wife. Om Shivpuri as Kalidasa and Sudha Sharma (later Shivpuri) as Mallika in Ashadh ka ek din, directed by Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD, New Delhi, 1962. Courtesy of the NSD Repertory Company.
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promise is the ideal to which she willingly sacricces her life. Despite her passion for beauty, creativity, and sensation, Mallika is ultimately a passive cgure who cnds vicarious fulcllment in someone elses ambition and, even after years of su,ering, o,ers no reproach. Not surprisingly, each of the three acts in the play ends with an act of abandonment on the part of Kalidasa: when he leaves for Ujjayini alone; when he deliberately avoids a meeting with Mallika during his subsequent visit to the village; and when he leaves her home abruptly at the end, unable to endure the shape of her present life. For the plays various directors, the love between these characters therefore evokes such qualities as incompatibility, tension, irony, bitterness, and helplessness. For all his ambivalence toward Kalidasa, Rakesh also clearly romanticizes Mallikas self-negation. In the preface to Lahron ke rajhans, he comments that Kalidasa and Vilom are not in themselves the symbols of victory and defeat; that function belongs to Mallika, who is the embodiment of Kalidasas will to believe. Mallikas character is not only that of lover and muse, but also of that rooted, unwavering constancy which endures even when all outward signs of life have been consumed (SN, 197). That Mallika retains her autonomy in relation to everyone except Kalidasa (he admits at the end that she has been his only subject) implies a vision of creativity in which a womans su,ering is the necessary price of a mans achievement. Ambikas critique attacks this presumption but cannot dislodge it because her rage prevents neither the destruction of Mallikas life nor her own abject end. If Mallika and Ambika are ambivalent portraits of the new Indian woman, the overtly socioliterary thematic in the play concerns the relations of art to state patronage and of the center to the peripheryboth vital issues in a new nation in which literary and theatrical art (unlike mass-cultural forms, such as clm and television) could not be economically self-sustaining, and a national literature could not, in important respects, be more than an aggregation of regional literatures. The persistent classical legend of Kalidasa is that of a country fool who was thrust into courtly life through subterfuge but who transformed himself into the supreme poet through determination and the grace of his patrongoddess Kali (hence the name Kalidasa, the servant of Kali). Rakesh recasts the legend as the story of the self-conscious genius from the provinces who conquers the metropolis through sheer talent, renounces his success because of his nostalgia for an uncorrupted life, and cnds at the end that he is a stranger in both environments. While this narrative seems to uphold the antiromantic modernist view of the artist, it
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is also the crst self-rebexive text to address issues pertinent to postindependence forms of authorship in both literature and theatre: the privileges and obligations of patronage, the poets relationship with his audience, the e,ects of public recognition, and the unequal relation of village to city. The playwright and his stage interpreters are in substantial agreement about the meaning of Kalidasas character. Rakesh asserts that the writers relation to state patronage is the most important sign of contemporaneity in the play, without which the wrenching irony of Kalidasa and Mallikas lives would not have emerged clearly. In this play, he comments, I wanted to portray the dilemma of the present-day writer, a writer lured by the sort of temptations being o,ered by the state . . . and his commitment to himself. . . . The play is about the contemporary mind (Mohan Rakesh, 32). In line with this view, Satyadev Dubey presented Kalidasa as the embodiment of the modern artist, obsessed with his creative problems but [smarting] under the humiliations heaped by the establishment, while in his 1972 production Faisal Alkazi attempted to stress the general applicability of the plays central problemhow a creative artist is completely crushed and broken by a system (SN, 110). The imperial court in Ashadh, described but never shown directly, is certainly a plausible analogue for a postcolonial nation-state, in which a centralized cultural bureaucracy (embodied in the three national academies) plays a decisive role in fostering cultural forms; the institution of theatre is organized along patronal rather than commercial lines; and the states support has economic as well as symbolic value. In Rakeshs opinion, Indian writers handle the consequent strugglebetween the writers need for survival and recognition and the principle of artistic autonomywith singular ineptitude: If they were really indi,erent to money or to the returns on their writing, then many of them wouldnt be seen seeking those favors which would compromise their egos, their conscience, and everything of this sort. It is not an aversion to money, its not an aversion to rewards. Its a complex of some sort from within. . . . We just dont assert ourselves; we just dont put our foot down (Rakesh, Mohan Rakesh, 26). In the play, Kalidasa is afraid that to accept a court sinecure is to prostitute his talent, but as his neutral friend Nikshep reminds everyone, opportunity waits for no one. If Kalidasa does not leave here, the court will su,er no harm. The oce of court poet will not remain vacant. But all his life Kalidasa will remain what he is todaya regional poet. Even those who are praising Ritusamhara today will forget him in a little while (SN, 4647).
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This is the essential quandarythe state recognizes and rewards talent on its own terms, but the artist who does not seize the opportunity for recognition risks oblivion. Kalidasas ambivalence resonates in Mohan Rakeshs diary entry for 5 February 1959, where he expresses irritation at the scandal caused by his representation of Kalidasa, along with a realistic sense of what was at stake:
Ive already accepted that somebody else will receive the Sangeet Natak Akademi prizealthough Awasthi [Suresh Awasthi, secretary of the Akademi] did say the other day, Friend, the rumour is that your plays getting the prize. Its very high up. I dont know. Nor do I want to know. One unnecessarily ruins ones sleep. I feel vexed only on account of the publishers, otherwise except for living on the royalties from my books, I dont want to anticipate or expect anything. But how can this be done? How? One publisher has sent twenty-four rupees as my six-month earnings, while another has sent eight rupees as the outstanding balance for a whole year! Heavens! (SN, 106)
However, after Rakesh had won the Akademi award and strengthened his reputation as a literary playwright, a radio broadcast of the play in October 1959 caused an equal and opposite reaction against the states appropriation of his work: Last night they broadcast [Ashadh ka ek din] as a national play. I felt like committing suicide after listening to it. And I feel like destroying all that I have written (SN, 106). Of course, Kalidasas crisis (unlike Rakeshs) is not that the court trivializes his work but that poetry becomes merely a stage in his advancement to full-bedged political life under a new name and proves to be a liability. The poets disa,ection, then, brings the court to his village and the center-periphery dichotomy into the foreground, along with its distinctive implications for an old-but-new, traditional-but-modern, multilingualbut-hierarchical postcolonial culture. In Ashadh ka ek din the imperial metropolis is the converse of the village and can regard the village only in three waysas an idyllic retreat from the depredations of politics, as an exotic source of poetic inspiration, and as second-rate cultural space. These perceptions are at a signiccant remove from the city-village opposition that informs two inbuential but antithetical visions of the modern Indian nationGandhis idea of the village as the critical socioeconomic and political unit in independent India and Nehrus commitment to modernization, urbanization, and industrial development. Bracketing the issue of political economy, Rakesh depicts the village as the stimulus
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for literary experiences that the city cannot comprehend, but which it romanticizes and celebrates with empty bureaucratic gestures. Far worse than Priyangumanjaris unconscious cruelty in this respect is the encounter of rural simplicity with urban bureaucratic protocol, the epitome of mediocrity and sterility. Faisal Alkazis 1972 production maximized the di,erences by employing a thoroughly articcial manner, rich costumes, heavy ornaments, intricate hairdos, and exaggerated makeup for the various courtly characters, while the villagers wore simple, faded earth tones and no makeup. In the plays most darkly comic moments, Anusvar and Anunasikinterchangeable male courtiers whose names derive from nasal sounds in the Devanagari alphabetparodied bureaucratic inaction by cnding every possible self-important reason not to perform their assigned task (to prepare Mallikas home for the princesss arrival). Needless to say, such a tableau has enormous resonance in a context in which artists are contemptuous of the cultural bureaucracy in the same measure that they are subject to its whims. More ironically, Rakeshthe archmetropolitan, cosmopolitan, modernist authorseems to turn the tables on his own craft by portraying the village as the realm of beauty and inspiration, and the city as sterile, silly, intellectually second-rate. The cnal arena of center-periphery interactions is language. The female aesthetes in the play, Rangini and Sangini, are disappointed to cnd that Mallika speaks much the same language as they do, and there are no local terms for everyday objects and spaces in the village. They want to engage Mallika in learned debate about dialectal di,erences in Sanskrit, and, when Mallika resists their literalism about Kalidasas metaphors, they take o,ense and accuse her of doubting the truth of his poetry. This imperialism of Sanskrit in Rakeshs play has contemporary analogues in three kinds of hierarchical relations: those within a major Indian literary language, such as Hindi, between a dominant form and several subordinate dialects; those among the various Indian languages, where one language may dominate several others; and those between Indian languages and English, the language of modern-day imperialism. Rakesh describes English as a comfortable coat that might make him look smart but that does not suit the contours of his body. At the same time, through the pedantry of the courtiers in Ashadh ka ek din, he mocks the articcially elevated Hindi of the Hindi enthusiasts, which is no language at all [but] only a set of phrases and certain haphazard things put together, a particular type of vocabulary which, quite frankly, mean nothing to me. . . . Its the kind of Hindi which is not the mature language, literarily speaking; its the language of state patronage (Mohan Rakesh, 30).
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However, just as there are dominant and subordinate traditions within each Indian language, and just as some Indian languages are dominant over others, all indigenous languages occupy increasingly marginal positions in relation to English, which must now be recognized as an Indian as well as Western language. Indeed, at the beginning of the twenty-crst century, the subordination of the village is an equally plausible image of the relative insigniccance of the stay-at-home in comparison with the diasporic writer, who travels, Kalidasa-like, to metropolitan centers altogether outside his or her culture of origin. In the last two decades, the singular success of Indian-English writers (especially novelists) in the West has transformed the contemporary understanding of Indian writing, initiating a new politics of language in postcolonial literary production. For instance, in the introduction to Mirrorwork (1997), an anthology of 50 years of Indian writing, Salman Rushdie claims that the prose writingboth cction and non-cctioncreated in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 ocial languages of India, the so-called vernacular languages, during the same time (vii). Coming from an author who left India for England in 1960, at the age of thirteen, this statement captures precisely the metropolitan arrogance that has invested the characters of Rangini and Sangini, Anusvar and Anunasik in Ashadh ka ek din with a prescient irony. The sociocultural meanings that Ashadh ka ek din has thus accumulated since its appearance in 1958 suggest an interesting correlation: if, for Rakesh, Kalidasa is more important as a symbolic than as a historical cgure, the symbolic reduction of this historical cgure is ideologically more signiccant than the literal details of the drama. For the play to carry the powerful antitraditionalist, antihagiographic message that directors, performers, theatre audiences, and readers have celebrated, it is sucient that Rakesh adopts an ironic rather than heroic or romantic attitude toward his subject. By refusing to create an ideal author to explain an ideal oeuvre, Rakesh follows the modernist dictum of separating the poet from his work; by placing the poet in deterministic institutional contexts, he inserts postcolonial into modernist perspectives. His emphasis on the fallibility of cultural heroes applies to such modern icons as Gandhi, Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore as much as to the ancient cgure of Kalidasa. With these objectives, Rakesh is able to circumvent both an analogical and allegorical relation to history, so as to focus on his parabolic narrative about poetry and the poet. Even within the tradition of post-independence historical
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drama that it initiates, Ashadh ka ek din stands apart for its economy and starkness and for its insistence that historical accuracy and authenticity are tangential to a subject that belongs to the realm of cultural mythmaking. The singularity of Rakeshs play becomes especially evident in comparison with Girish Karnads Tughlaq, which also questions the accuracy and authenticity of history, but in relation to cultural, textual, epistemological, formal, and political issues that have a more conventional association with the genre of the history play. Girish Karnads Tughla q as a History Play The Past, the Present, and the Nation Karnads account of the genesis of Tughlaq (1964)put forward in numerous essays and interviews over the last four decades and repeated often by his criticsis a disarmingly simple narrative, quite at variance with the aura the play has acquired over the same period of time. While attending Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar in the early 1960s, he felt challenged by the verdict of noted Kannada critic Kirtinath Kurtkoti that modern Kannada drama had no crst-rate historical plays, and he began a process of self-education in premodern Indian history to search for a possible dramatic subject (CIT, 79). The marvellous discovery of Muhammad bin Tughlaq in an elementary-level textbook motivated Karnad to take on the full range of historiographic materials available at Oxford, which in turn led to a series of revelations about the uncanny persistence of the past in India. In a 1971 interview, Karnad recalls that Tughlaq struck him as the most idealistic, the most intelligent king ever to come [to] the throne of Delhi, including the Mughals, who nevertheless ended as one of the greatest failures because of contradictions within his personality and the self-defeating nature of his politics (Paul, Girish Karnad). The twenty-year period of Tughlaqs decline as a ruler also o,ered a striking parallel to the crst two decades of Indian independence under Jawaharlal Nehrus idealistic but troubled leadership, and Nehru appeared remarkably like Tughlaq in his propensity for failure despite an extraordinary intellect. Yet the play was not meant either as an obvious comment on Nehru or an exact parallel of the present; rather, it addressed the emerging ambivalence of power relations in the political and public spheres that were based, for the crst time in Indian history, on the principles of mass representation and enfranchisement. In a sense, Karnad observes, echoing Dharamvir Bharati, the play rebected the slow disillusionment my generation felt with the new politics
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of independent India: the gradual erosion of the ethical norms that had guided the movement for independence, and the coming to terms with cynicism and realpolitick (In Search, 98). Karnad describes the inbuences on him at the time of the plays composition as eclectic, even opportunisticthey include Jean Anouilhs Beckett, Albert Camus Caligula, Bertolt Brechts Galileo, the history plays of Shakespeare, Sergei Eisensteins clm Ivan the Terrible, and every historical play he could see in England, on stage and on the screen. Yet the principal structural model for Tughlaq was not Western and literary but Indian and popular, and Karnad turned to it not because he sought a large audience in the theatre but because, as an Indian student in England writing a Kannada play, he discounted the possibility of performance altogether. No one had thought of putting Yayati [Karnads crst play] on the stage. I thought my second play would meet the same fate. Why not write a play on a grand scale? A play involving about cfty characters! (CIT, 79). The spaciousness of the overall design, and the conventions of presentation in Tughlaq, therefore came from the genre of the sprawling, visually opulent historical spectacular that Karnad had known throughout his Karnataka childhood and adolescence as the Company Natak, after the Parsi commercial companies that mounted these touring productions. In a 1989 essay, he comments at length on the basic spatial division that ordered the socially unequal, none too subtly delineated world of the popular history play.
The stagecraft of the Parsi model demanded a mechanical succession of alternating shallow and deep scenes. The shallow scenes were played in the foreground of the stage with a painted curtainnormally depicting a streetas the backdrop. These scenes were reserved for the lower class characters with prominence given to comedy. They served as link scenes in the development of the plot, but the main purpose was to keep the audience engaged while the deep scenes, which showed interiors of palaces, royal parks, and such other visually opulent sets, were being changed or decorated. The important characters rarely appeared in the street scenes, and in the deep scenes the lower classes strictly kept their place. The spatial division was ideal to show the gulf between the rulers and the ruled, between the mysterious inner chambers of power politics and the open, public areas of those a,ected by it. (In Search, 98)
Karnad concedes, however, that in the actual process of writing the deep/shallow distinction became impossible to sustain: the comic scenes
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gathered an uncontainable energy, while the serious scenes became gradually emptier, and the plays two worlds drew ever closer to each other until they merged in the cnal scene. In this respect, as in many others, Tughlaq is the precocious masterpiece of a twenty-six-year old author who transformed a popular formula by surrendering his subject to the stresses of existentialist unease, modernist irony, and an intuitive historical revisionism. Contrary to Karnads expectations, the play had its crst Kannada production within six months of publication at the Indian National Theatre in Bombay (1965), and a second, more important production at Kannada Bharati in Delhi under B. V. Karanths direction (1966). Thereafter Tughlaq took on an active life on stage in several notable translations. Karanths Urdu translation was directed by Delhi-based Om Shivpuri for the NSD Repertory Company in 1966 and for his own group Dishantar in 1972; by Ebrahim Alkazi for the NSD/NSD Repertory in 1972, 1974, and 1982 (the last in London); and by Arun Kuckreja for Ruchika (Delhi) in 1975. At Alyque Padamsees request, Karnad himself undertook an English translation for the 1970 Bombay production by Theatre Group, and this version, published in 1972, has made the play available to the broadest range of performers, from metropolitan college students and amateur provincial groups to such high-procle impresarios as Bangalores Arjun Sajnani. The Marathi translation by Vijay Tendulkar was crst performed by Awishkar (Bombay) in 1971 and has had important revivals in the same city under the direction of Achyut Vaze (Prithvi Theatre, 1979), Satyadev Dubey (Theatre Unit, 1989), and Madhav Vaze (National Centre for the Performing Arts, 2001), as well as amateur student and commercial productions throughout Maharashtra. Other important stagings of Tughlaq include Dubeys Urdu version for Theatre Unit (Bombay) and Shyamanand Jalans Bengali version for Padatik (Calcutta). Paralleling this active performance record is the plays multilingual presence in print, in Kannada, Hindi-Urdu, English, Marathi, Bengali, and Gujarati, among other languages. The English translation, in particular, has appeared under the Oxford University Press imprint in India as an independent work (1972), along with plays by Sircar and Tendulkar in a volume titled Three Modern Indian Plays (1989), and most recently in a volume of Three Plays by Karnad (1994). The play has had notable success in all its modes of existence: If I was asked to name one play that could represent contemporary theatre in India, theatre critic and editor Rajinder Paul commented in 1982, Id unhesitatingly say Tughlaq (Last Month). For forty years theatre audiences have found it to be technically perfect, philosophically complex, and ever relevant,
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while readers and viewers alike have recognized it as a work o,ering durable insights into the political life of the nation. The iconic force of Tughlaq in contemporary Indian theatre and culture derives signiccantly from the complexity of its construction as a history play along principles that are antithetical to Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din in almost every respect. Rather than deromanticizing a literarycultural icon, it o,ers a serious cctional reappraisal of a cgure ridiculed in history as well as popular lore. It follows the chronology of Tughlaqs reign closely, mixes historical and cctional characters with Brechtian cnesse, and creates the grand spectacles of state for which the stage is particularly well suited. In addition to its overall engagement with written history, the play also appropriates a specicc historiographic intertext, the Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi of Tughlaqs court historian, Zia-ud-din Barani. Using Baranis basic narrative, his attitudes, and portions of his text, Karnad arranges the thirteen scenes of Tughlaq as a sequence of self-canceling actions that articulates both political and psychological ironies. Politically, the play shows Tughlaqs futile attempts to be just and liberal toward a majority Hindu population that he is obliged as a Muslim ruler to persecute. In the crst scene (set in Delhi in 1327), Tughlaq invites his subjects to celebrate a new system of justice, which works without any consideration of might or weakness, religion or creed (Karnad, Tughlaq, 3). But the only character to benect from this utopian move is a lowly Muslim washerman, Aziz, who assumes the identity of a poor Hindu Brahman to win a false judgment against the sultan and secure a position at court. Later in the crst scene, Tughlaq announces his decision to shift his capital from Delhi to Deogir (which he renames Daulatabad), a city eight hundred miles away on the Deccan plateau, because Daulatabad is a city of the Hindus, and as the capital it will symbolize the bond between Muslims and Hindus which I wish to develop and strengthen in my kingdom (4). This reasoning so alienates provincial Muslim noblemen and religious leaders that they plot to assassinate Tughlaq; although Tughlaq foils the coup in his palace, he reconceives the move to the Deccan as an act of vengeance upon the people of Delhi (scene 5). The collective journey to Daulatabad becomes a nightmare of starvation, disease, and death (scenes 67), and when the action resumes in Daulatabad after a cve-year interval (scene 8), Tughlaqs subjects are hardened to a life of loneliness, punishment, and cathartic violence. At the end, Tughlaq is left to contemplate in dismay the famine, rebellions, and economic chaos that signal the collapse of his empire (scenes 913).
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The second-level ironies in the play uncover Tughlaqs sadistic, manipulative impulses and undercut his image of himself as an exemplary ruler. Developed mainly in scenes 24, these ironies show Tughlaq jockeying for position among such friends and adversaries as an incestuous stepmother, the historian Barani, and a powerful but credulous religious rival, Sheikh Imam-ud-din. Tughlaqs real nemesis and inverted double (and Karnads principal cctional invention) in this psychodrama, however, is Aziz, who after his initial coup pairs up with his childhood friend Aazam to subvert all of Tughlaqs well-intentioned moves. During the journey to Daulatabad Aziz reappears in his Brahman disguise to extort money from sick and dying travelers. When Tughlaq attempts to revive the imperial economy by issuing copper coins with the same token values as gold and silver, Aziz becomes a counterfeiter. In a last, despairing attempt to bring peace and legitimacy to his reign, Tughlaq invites Ghiyas-ud-din Abbasid, a descendant of the Baghdad khalifas (caliphs), to visit and sanctify his new capital. But Aziz, now a highway robber, murders Ghiyas-uddin and supplants him in the palace. Tughlaq has been left entirely alone by the time he confronts the impostor: his stepmother has been stoned to death for poisoning Prime Minister Najib, and Barani has used his own mothers death as an excuse to leave the court. At the end of the play, a haunted and exhausted Tughlaq acknowledges that he cannot punish Aziz because Aziz is his only future companion, his true and loyal disciple. Karnads explanation for the mingling of discrete worlds is political and topical: This violation of traditionally sacred spatial hierarchy, I decidedsince there was little I could do about itwas the result of the anarchy which climaxed Tughlaqs times and seemed poised to engulf my own (In Search, 98). The E,ects of Historical Representation Karnads recguration of history and his use of the doppelganger motif create complex verbal, structural, and psychological patterns, which U. R. Anantha Murthy analyzes in his introduction to the English translation of Tughlaq (viiiix). But the plays paradigmatic qualities as a historical cction and its cultural vitality derive principally from the multifold engagement with history that lies behind the words and functions di,erentially in the processes of reading and watching: some of these meanings may dominate stage productions, while others are germane to critical rather than producible interpretation. First, Tughlaq retrieves and makes current the relatively unfamiliar phase of Islamic imperialism in India known as the sultanate period (twelfth to early sixteenth century), which brought
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the golden age of classical Hinduism to a decisive end and introduced Islam as a dominant political and cultural force on the subcontinent. The sultanate is historically important in the record of Islamic conquest, the evolution of political institutions, and the unprecedented complication of religious interests. In the collective memory of contemporary Indian audiences, however, it has been e,ectively marginalized by the later periods of Mughal and British imperialism. Karnads play reinscribes the narrative of Tughlaq in the audiences memory, recning legend and oral tradition through a detailed historical reenactment. Consequently, recreating the ambience of premodern Islamic imperial culture through costumes, movement, lighting, music, props, scenery, and style of dialogue delivery has been one of the most compelling (and challenging) qualities of Tughlaq in performance, especially in lavish proscenium productions such as those of Padamsee (1970) and Sajnani (2003).2 The period atmosphere on stage defamiliarizes the action, even as the action makes familiar a relatively unfamiliar past. However, the most bamboyant display of the plays historicity has taken place outside the proscenium: Ebrahim Alkazis 1974 production at the Purana Qilathe venue where he also revived Bharatis Andha yug the same yearplaced the fourteenth-century drama on the ramparts of the premodern Islamic fort, creating that perfect conjuncture of historical action and environment that would have been possible only (for an audience) in Delhi. The second, essentially textual level of engagement with history in Tughlaq is linked to the postcolonial dialectic of satiric and heroic perspectives and to the mediated nature of the historical record. The history of Muhammad bin Tughlaq is the product primarily of medieval Muslim and colonial British traditions of historiography, whose modes of ideological implication have only recently begun to be scrutinized. Peter Hardy identices two levels of mediation in the institutionalized historiography of medieval India, one characteristic of the medieval Muslim historians, and the other of nineteenth- and twentieth-century orientalists. A fourteenthcentury court historian like Zia-ud-din Barani decnes history as a form of knowledge essential for understanding the salient aspects of Islam and aims to educate Muslim sultans in their duty toward their faith; in this framework, Tughlaq becomes a repugnant subject because of his disregard for the Quran in dealing with both the faithful and the faithless, and his attempts to limit Islams inbuence in the political and judicial spheres in India. According to Hardy, Barani therefore deliberately selects his material to portray Tughlaq as a foolish apostate who ruined his empire by pursuing the wrong beliefs and following the wrong advice (37).
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In contrast, orientalist commentators treat the turmoil of Muslim rule in India teleologically, as a sign of the necessity and superiority of British colonial rule. The classic statement of this position is the preface to the Bibliographical Index to the Historians of Muhammedan India, a four-volume guide to premodern historical accounts compiled by the colonial administrator Henry Elliot. Though the intrinsic value of these works may be small, Elliot argues, they will make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and equity of our rule (1: xx). Whereas Barani had attacked Tughlaqs acts of cruelty as un-Islamic, Elliot views the same events as concrmations of the absolute supremacy of Western over Eastern political institutions. After the mid-nineteenth century, British historians who write about medieval India draw on both Barani and Elliot to cast Tughlaq as the brilliant but unprincipled Oriental despot. Mountstuart Elphinstone acknowledges Tughlaq as one of the wonders of the age but ascribes to him a perversion of judgement which . . . leaves us in doubt whether he was not a,ected by some degree of insanity (1: 59). Vincent Smith cnds it astonishing that such a monster should have retained power for twenty-six years, and then have died in his bed (Oxford History, 254). Stanley Lane-Poole concludes that the sultan made no allowance for the native dislike of innovations, and so, with the best intentions, excellent ideas, but no balance or patience, no sense of proportion, Mohammed Taghlak was a transcendent failure (125). Christianity and Western conceptions of monarchy would presumably have developed Tughlaqs moral sense along with his intellect, but in the absence of these civilizing inbuences he surrendered to tyranny and madness. Since independence, the ideological resistance to orientalist positions and the move toward a revisionary history of medieval India have become icreasingly evident in the work of Indian historians. K. A. Nizami points out that, in presenting the historical literature of medieval India, Elliot blackened the Indian past to glorify the British present and used medieval Indian history as an instrument for the implementation of the formula, counterpoise of Indians against Indians, evolved by the British Army Commission (21). Romila Thapar comments in her History of India that the era of Islamic conquest, far from the being the dark age, is a formative period which rewards detailed study, since many institutions of presentday India began to take enduring shape during this period (1: 264). K. N. Chaudhuri describes Tughlaqs experiment with token currency as a serious monetary innovation, anticipating by half a century the introduction of paper currency in China (83). In the inaugural volume of a projected
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annual series entitled Medieval India, Irfan Habib and I. H. Siddiqui use extensive documentary evidence to discuss such neglected subjects as the formation of the ruling class in the thirteenth century and social mobility in the Delhi sultanate. This historiographic initiative must be recognized as part of the cultural context of Tughlaq, because the object of revisionary interpretation is the same in the play. Karnad revives the paradoxical Tughlaq of history and occasionally constructs his dialogue verbatim from historical documents, creating a complex ideological and intertextual connection between history, historiography, and his own cction. Indeed, the play intervenes actively in the controversy by presenting an explanatory psychological procle of its enigmatic hero and by thematizing the issues of cultural di,erence inherent in the historical debate. Finally, in a move that is characteristic of the historical parallel as a genre (and acknowledged by Karnad), Tughlaq invokes signiccant elements in modern Indian political and cultural experience by presenting an ostensibly unpolemical, self-sucient historical narrative that contemporary Indian audiences can apply to their own situation. In Western conceptions of historical drama, the synchronic force of parallels seems to depend on a sense of the continuity between past and present, which Lindenberger calls a central assumption in history plays of all times and styles. Accordingly, one of the simplest ways a writer can achieve such continuity is to play on the audiences knowledge of what has happened in history since the time of the play (Lindenberger, 6). This cannot be a universal criterion, however, because in the Indian context the audiences knowledge of history is both discontinuous and heavily mediated. Tughlaq is resonant as a historical parallel because it incorporates these problems of history writing but creates a convincing synchrony between premodern and contemporary India without shrinking into an allegory of any one political cgure or event. Its social and political applications have also evolved over the past three decades as post-independence Indian politics have taken unpredictable directions. For the audience of the 1960s, Karnads play expressed the disenchantment and cynicism that attended the end of the Nehru era (194764) in Indian politics. A decade later, the play appeared to be an uncannily accurate portrayal of the brilliant but authoritarian and opportunistic political style of Nehrus daughter and successor, Indira Gandhi. Now (yet another thirty years later) Tughlaq seems concerned less with specicc cgures than with two general political issues that have become dominant in the public sphere. The crst is the untenability of the idealistic and visionary politics that Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi practiced as national
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leaders and valorized in their respective meditations on political action The Discovery of India and The Story of My Experiments with Truth. The second is the politics of power relations between groups that are separated by religious or racial di,erence, in a society that is poised between secular and fundamentalist ideologies. Whereas Homi K. Bhabha speaks of a movement from the problematic unity of the nation to the articulation of cultural di,erence in the construction of an international perspective (5), Tughlaq grounds the problematic unity of the nation in historically inherited pluralities of religion and community that thwart the construction even of a national perspective. The context of an emergent but precarious twentieth-century Indian nationhood is thus the e,ective point of convergence for past and present experience in Karnads postcolonial cction. The Meanings of Tughlaq In comparison with such plays as Ashadh ka ek din and Baki itihas, Tughlaq is more unusual as both a written and a performed work because of the sureness with which its thematic emphases have shifted over four decades to accommodate the evolution of Indian postcolonialism, which has now approached a condition of pervasive crisis while still retaining almost inexplicablyits constitutive democratic features. Western political comparatists describe India as the crst great post-colonial state (Lyon), as a pluralistic society that is exemplary in the Commonwealth third world because it has successfully contained ethnic rivalry (Mayall and Payne, 9), and as a tenacious democracy that has remained a multiparty state while some of the other countries in South Asia and the majority of postcolonial nations in Africa, for instance, have turned into military regimes or one-party states (Low, 27074). Assessments of current Indian politics, however, emphasize a steady weakening of wellestablished institutions and the increased mobilization of diverse political groups, neither of which tendency augur[s] well for long-term stability (Kohli, Majority to Minority, 21). The suspension of democratic processes during the state of emergency from June 1975 to March 1977, the violent Sikh and Muslim separatist movements in the northern states of Punjab and Kashmir (which peaked during the 1980s and 1990s, respectively), the assassinations of Indira Gandhi (October 1984) and her son Rajiv Gandhi (May 1991), and the relentless confrontations over religious and communal issues (which reached a horricc climax in Gujarat in 2002) are key stages in the sociopolitical decline that has brought about Indias
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current crisis of governability (Kohli, Democracy). Enmeshed in this experience, Tughlaq now invokes not merely the loss of political innocence in the 1960s but the gradual attrition of the larger political and cultural processes that created the imagined community of India as an independent nation in the mid-twentieth century. The plays meanings have thus tended to coalesce around two issues of critical importance to the Indian political and public spheres. At one level, the play acts out a polarity that has fundamentally shaped modern political consciousness in India: the distinction between politics as the selbess extension of individual spirituality (Mahatma Gandhi) and vision ( Jawaharlal Nehru) and politics as the self-serving, sometimes demonic expression of individual fantasies of power (evidenced in Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, and, more recently, in Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu fundamentalist leaders). These two models of political action in turn imply radically di,erent relations between leaders and citizens, but by embodying both impulses within Tughlaq, Karnad also suggests a radical identity between them. At another level, Tughlaq o,ers an ironic, clearly prophetic commentary on the ideology of secularism and the forces that subvert that ideology. The idea of India as an assimilative, tolerant, multiform political entity was central to the nationalist thinking that emerged under the leadership of Gandhi, Nehru, Abul Kalam Azad, and others during the 1920s and 1930s. The demand for a separate Pakistan undercut this idea tragically and led to the trauma of partition in 1947. The fundamentalist and secessionist movements of approximately the last quarter of the twentieth century have severely tested the concept of a pluralistic, secular society in India. In this situation, Karnads portrayal of how di,erent religious groups coexist, and how they react to equality, has acquired new urgency.3 Indian Models of Political Action The commentary on leadership begins in the plays opening scene with a strong invocation of the Gandhian paradigm of political action. One of Tughlaqs subjects remarks that Tughlaq is a king who isnt afraid to be human, while another wonders why the emperor has to make such a fuss about being human . . . [and] announce his mistakes to the whole world (1). Tughlaq has shocked his subjectsHindu and Muslim alike by abolishing the jiziya, a discriminatory poll tax on Hindus prescribed in the Quran for nonbelievers, and by instituting a judicial process in which he can be sued by his subjects. The humility and self-questioning necessary for such public confessions of error are fundamental to Gandhis
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political practice. In The Story of My Experiments with Truth, for instance, Gandhi comments that in 1919, after the civil disobedience movement had turned violent in the Ahmedabad region, he confessed at a public meeting that he had launched the movement prematurely.
My confession brought down upon me no small amount of ridicule. But I have never regretted having made that confession. For I have always held that it is only when one sees ones own mistakes with a convex lens, and does just the reverse in the case of others, that one is able to arrive at a just estimate of the two. I further believe that a scrupulous and conscientious observance of this rule is necessary for one who wants to be a Satyagrahi. (424)
The precondition for political action in Gandhian satyagraha, which is essentially a weapon of the truthful, is a state of complete spiritual preparedness in the leader as well as in his followers, and at the beginning of Karnads play Tughlaq is seeking exactly such a state. He wants his people to follow him, but only if they have complete faith in him. At this stage Karnads hero is, to borrow Erik H. Eriksons term for Gandhi, a religious actualist whose very passion and power make him want to make actual for others what actualizes him. It is in terms of Eriksons assessment of Gandhi that Karnads early characterization of Tughlaq can best be understood: The great leader creates for himself and for many others new choices and new cares. These he derives from a mighty drivenness, an intense and yet bexible energy, a shocking originality, and a capacity to impose on his time what most concerns himwhich he does so convincingly that his time believes this concern to have emanated naturally from ripe necessities (395). A few scenes later, the revolutionary urge toward action and selfpuriccation characteristic of Gandhi shades imperceptibly into the urge toward modernity and renewal characteristic of Nehru, particularly in his role as the so-called architect of independent India. Unlike Gandhis strictly disciplined spirituality, Nehrus approach to public action is best described as the romance of leadership, in which the leader experiences intense love for the people and expects to be loved in turn. India was in my blood and there was much in her that instinctively thrilled me, Nehru writes. I was not interested in making some political arrangement which would enable our people to carry on more or less as before, only a little better. I felt they had vast stores of suppressed energy and ability, and I wanted to release these and make them feel young and vital
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again (50, 56). In Karnads play, Tughlaq expresses to his stepmother the same desire for a transformative union with his people, so that he may share with them the heady knowledge that history is ours to play with ours now! (10). For Tughlaq, as for Nehru, this sense of intense identity with the people is closely linked with both a desire for cultural modernity and an acute self-consciousness about history. I approached [India] almost as an alien critic, Nehru observes, full of dislike for the present as well for many of the relics of the past . . . I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity (50). Tughlaq similarly announces that he has to mend his subjects ignorant minds before he can think of their souls (22); he also describes to the courtier Shihab-ud-din his hopes of building a new future for India (40). The presence of the historian Barani as a character in the play also ensures that Tughlaq is always conscious of his role as historical subject and shaper of history, as Nehru was throughout his tenure as prime minister, perhaps most memorably in his midnight address of 15 August 1947, when he spoke of independent Indias tryst with destiny. Because of the complexity of Karnads approach to the political, however, these paradigms of purity and wholeness are undercut almost from the beginning by Tughlaqs second personathat of the master politicianwhich marginalizes the ethical and turns the most serious public crises into occasions for the leaders own emotional theatrics. In this sense the subject of the play is politics itself, which Tughlaq regards in part as a chess game that brings him the intellectual pleasure of eliminating his adversaries with cnesse. More pervasively, it enables him to rationalize murder and large-scale brutality: they gave me what I wantedpower, strength to shape my thoughts, strength to act, strength to recognize myself (66). In the character of Aziz the will to power is unhampered by any moral or psychological complexity, and the plays absolutist discourse of power comes appropriately from him, not from Tughlaq. Power for Aziz is a kind of licensed evil that need not be naturalized through discourse. To rape a woman only out of lust is a pointless game, in his view: First one must have powerthe authority to rape. Then everything takes on meaning! (57). Similarly, to be a real king is to rob a man and then . . . punish him for getting robbed (58). Tughlaqs self-rebexivity never produces this ironic clarity, and while Tughlaq is lost in epoch-making gestures, Aziz conducts his own micropolitics with singular success. The analogies with Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru thus foreground the more or less well-intentioned idealism of Tughlaq-Barani in the plays crst
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half and suppress the cruelty, repressiveness, and cunning of TughlaqAziz in the second. In contrast, the analogies with Indira Gandhi (and her political successors), perceived by Karnads audiences from about 1970 onward, reverse this emphasis and bring the two halves of the play together, because what Romesh Thapar calls her mercurial, manipulative, conspiratorial, brilliant style of leadership replicates the contradictions and tensions within Tughlaq to an extraordinary extent (qtd. in Gupte, 123). In the political mythology of the nation, Mrs. Gandhi appears as both demon and goddess, emasculating widow and nurturing mother (Gupte, 1822); in journalistic and scholarly writing, she is a mixture of paradoxes, a sign of the amoral politics of the late 1960s, and a pragmatist political to the very soul (Malik and Vajpeyi, 13, 22). But she is closest to Karnads protagonist in her propensity for choosing evil out of a compulsion to act for the nation and in the self-destructiveness of her authoritarianism. Thus, after the Allahabad High Court set aside her election to parliament in June 1975, Mrs. Gandhi declared a situation of national emergency instead of resigning from oce: What would have happened if there had been nobody to lead [the country]? I was the only person who could. . . . It was my duty to the country to stay, though I didnt want to (Moraes, 220). In serious political assessments, however, the emergency appears as a major cause of the rapid erosion of constitutional structures in Indiathe event that began the serious dissociation of politics from humane and moral action. The macabre (but evidently temporary) end of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty in 1991, and the wrenching reorientation of Indian politics that followed during the rest of that decade, are certainly much stronger analogues now for the public violence and private madness in Tughlaq than Nehrus romance of discovery. The Crisis of Secular Nationhood Karnad traces the political failure of the nation in Tughlaq to a complex ambivalence in the personality and intentions of the leader and to the ungovernableness of the people. The central crisis within the play, however, is that of irreducible social inequalities and religious di,erence. As my account of Barani suggests, these problems make the historical reign of Tughlaq an extremely suggestive parallel for modern Indian experience. Following the example of Ala-ud-din Khilji, sultan of Delhi from 1296 to 1316, Muhammad bin Tughlaq ignored Muslim sharia, or canon law, and attempted to rule and to administer justice along what are now called secular humanist lines. In doing so, he antagonized the sayyids and the ulema, the religious leaders and scholars whose inbuence in political
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and administrative circles diminished considerably. At the same time, he was inevitably alienated from most of his subjects because he represented the Muslim ruling elite in a predominantly Hindu culture. As Romila Thapar notes in her circumspect but discouraging account of communal relations during the sultanate period, orthodox Hindus and Muslims alike resisted any inbuence from the other in the sphere of religion. Although the Muslims ruled the incdels, the incdels called them barbarians. . . . Exclusion, in turn, was the only weapon which orthodox Hinduism could use to prevent assimilation, having lost its political ascendancy (1: 279). Tughlaq presents a full-blown version of the crisis of leadership and belief that occurs within a culture divided along the lines Thapar suggests. As a secular humanist who ignores the Quranic injunction to proselytize actively, Karnads protagonist initially refuses to impose a monolithic order on his people because the Greek philosophers have instilled in him a troubling plurality of vision. The assumption behind this refusal is that modern leaders must decne their roles in terms broader than those of religion, because politics and religion are separate spheres of action. Presenting the orthodox position (and using Baranis words from the Tarikh), the theologian Imam-ud-din reminds Tughlaq of the duties that the Quran specices for a Muslim ruler: to found a strong dynasty and to further the cause of Islam in the wider world. The separation of religion and politics is, in the imams view, merely a verbal distinction, but one that will destroy the sultan (Tughlaq, 21). As with Tughlaqs politics of humility, Karnad both presents and ironically undercuts the secular ideal. Despite Tughlaqs enlightened policies, the society within the play is not an enlightened one; and, despite his egalitarianism, his relation with his subjects remains that of oppressor and oppressed. For the plays communally divided characters, selfhood lies not in unity and equality but in di,erence; the negative equilibrium of hatred and suspicion is not wholesome, but it is predictable and hence safer. Karnad enforces this irony by meticulously maintaining the distinctions of religion and community throughout the play. While Tughlaqs quest is for harmony, the terms of di,erenceHindu and Muslim are the keys that unlock the literal and symbolic action of the play. (What is a nominal distinction at the textual level becomes concrete in performance, because Muslim characters of all classes look, dress, speak, and move very di,erently from their Hindu counterparts.) Tughlaq is most concerned about being just to his Hindu subjects (rather than to all his subjects) because he wants his treatment of the oppressed majority to be
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exemplary. So Aziz has to masquerade as a Brahman rather than appear as a poor Muslim. Tughlaq succeeds in persuading Sheikh Imam-ud-din to act as mediator with Ain-ul Mulk because peace would prevent the shedding of Muslim blood. He decides on the move to Daulatabad because it would be exemplary for a Muslim sultan to have a Hindu capital. As in Baranis history, every Hindu household in Karnads play becomes an illegal mint for producing counterfeit currency, as though in collective communal revenge against an alien king. The only thing that unites Muslims and Hindus, in fact, is that they despise Tughlaq equally. The contemporary applications of this impasse are the clearest signs of the crisis that has overtaken the constitutional principle of secularismthe basis on which India was founded as a nation in 1947since the period of Nehrus stewardship. Nehru was so deeply committed to the idea of Indian culture as assimilative and pluralistic that in The Discovery of India he interpreted all Indian history in that light. An inner urge towards synthesis, he argues in this historical commentary, is the dominant feature of Indian cultural, and even racial, development, and this feature has succeeded in absorbing each incursion of foreign elements (76). Religious orthodoxy is undesirable in Nehrus view because it impedes assimilation and progress, and religious di,erences should have no political or national signiccance (345). A leader like M. A. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was therefore not a modern thinker at all but a willing prisoner of reactionary ideologies, and, in demanding a separate Pakistan, he had condemned both Indias unity and democracy (389). In practice, however, such nationalist leaders as Nehru, Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, Maulana Azad, and others could not prevent the fundamentalist Jinnah from establishing a separate Islamic nation on the Indian subcontinent. This sharp ideological rift within the nationalist politics of late colonial India, which split one imagined community into two, resonates strongly in the religious politics of Tughlaq. But like Tughlaqs political impulses, the communal motivations of his subjects also cnd much stronger correspondences in the events of the last two decades. Even in the late 1980s, the Muslim and Sikh separatist movements in the north and the conbict between Hindus and Muslims over a holy shrine in the city of Ayodhya were serious indicators that cultural plurality had become intensely problematic in Indian society. The destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, unabated terrorist violence in Kashmir (which became embroiled in the global war on terrorism after September 11, 2001), and the escalation of militant Hindu nationalism to a point
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that brought on Indias crst organized pogrom against the minority Muslim population in the state of Gujarat in February 2002these are only some of the events that appeared to rapidly reduce the idea of secularism to an unattainable utopia (Gupta, 47). The defeat of the Hindu nationalist BJP government in the general elections of May 2004, which made way for a Congress coalition government under the leadership of Rajiv Gandhis widow, Sonia, and Indias crst Sikh prime minister, Manmohan Singh, may signal a swing of the pendulum back toward the secular idea. The post-independence experience in India as a whole, however, concrms that the religious issues in Tughlaq pose a question important to all traditional or diverse societies experimenting with democratic structures: whether religion can be, or indeed can be prevented from becoming, the primary basis of nationhood. Performing Tughla q : Politics, Religion, and the Public Sphere The performance and reception history of Tughlaq since 1965 has both reinforced, and diverged from, its interpretations as an open-ended history play. As a text, it centralizes a protagonist whose transformation from visionary leader to paranoid failure evokes major Indian models of political action, and whose contradictory character can be understood with reference to actual historical experience. For actors playing the title role of Tughlaq, this successive recall of key political cgures and leadership styles has to be a matter of suggestive evocation rather than mimicry. Predictably, the catalogue of actors who have created the role includes such major performers as Om Shivpuri (Urdu, 1966 and 1972), Arun Sarnaik (Marathi, 1971), and Manohar Singh (Urdu, 1972, 1974, and 1982), as well as more occasional players, such as Kabir Bedi (English, 1970) and Ashok Mandanna (English, 2003). But the available reception data suggest that Karnads complex, mercurial, inconsistent antihero has been dicult to sustain on stage, regardless of the quality of the actor. Leslie de Noronha found Bedi physically perfect for the role but unable to deal with its multifarious demands: Perhaps his statesman lacked the abrasiveness of cruelty. Perhaps his poet lacked delicacy. Perhaps his human being lacked shades of emotional grief. Kabir Bedi was excellent as Tughlaq, but neither great nor memorable. Physical stature and style are not enough (De Noronha). Despite his NSD training and repertory experience as both actor and director, Shivpuri struck Sudhir Tandon as possessing only a simulated grasp of technique, not the ability to express the felt
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dimensions of his character through the medium of his body (Tandon). Only Singh, NSD alumnus and leading Repertory cast member, made a strong enough impression in Ebrahim Alkazis three productions and Prasannas 1982 revival to establish a reputation as the actor born to play Tughlaq. The image of Singh looming large over the ramparts of Alkazis cognisance to enact a Macbethian high drama (Sondhi) has become an indelible memory for the Delhi audiences who watched these productions (cg. 11), but in 1982 even he seemed to stumble his way from anger to cruelty, hardly the poet and the visionary he is supposed to be (Paul, Last Month). The theatrical vibrancy (as distinct from the textual experience) of Tughlaq has in fact depended more on the large cast of characters and the strong secondary roles than on the histrionics of the central cgure. On stage, the interpersonal and the impersonal have proved to be more compelling than the personal. Sudha Shivpuri as stepmother to Om Shivpuris Tughlaq in 1966 and 1972, Sabira Merchant opposite Kabir Bedi in 1970 and Surekha Sikri opposite Manohar Singh in the 1970s have been among the most notable supporting performances, along with Mohan
Fig. 11. The sultan and his subjects. Girish Karnads Tughlaq at Purana Qila, directed by Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Company, New Delhi, 1974. Courtesy of the NSD Repertory Company.
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Maharshi as Aziz (1966), Om Puri and Anang Desai as Barani (1974 and 1982), Naseeruddin Shah as Azam (1974), and Vasant Josalkar as Najib (1982). However, it is the creation of the political and public spheres through faceless crowds and large groups of anonymous characters (subjects, soldiers, courtiers, ocials, members of Tughlaqs retinue, and servants) that turns Karnads stage most e,ectively into a microcosm of the nation and maintains its power of political signiccation. In this regard, the response of directors and viewers to Karnads structural device of the deep and shallow scenes has been suggestive. As conceived by the playwright, the spatial divisions (the court vs. the street) also signify di,erences that are social (the elite vs. the plebeian); political (the ruler vs. the ruled); psychological (the private vs. the public); ethical and moral (the pure vs. the corrupt); and generic (the serious vs. the comic). To actualize them on stage is to begin with a deeply hierarchical world that descends gradually into confusion and chaos. When Alkazi ignored this half-hearted tribute to the Parsi theatre and placed all of the action on the high walls of an actual imperial monument, Karnad himself described the e,ects as brilliant (In Search, 99). But Prasanna, the NSD director who used most of the 1974 cast in his 1982 production, returned to Karnads original conception and used a curtain running from wing to wing on an eight-foot high string to divide the deep stage space horizontally. Rajinder Paul speculated that, in addition to facilitating scene changes, the purpose of the curtain was perhaps to delineate the locale realistically, so that a neutral structure of permanent proscenium sets of levels, steps, arches, and bridges would not come in the way of various scenes achieving authenticity. But he found the careful decnition of locales an unnecessary and at times jarring exercise which is justicable neither on aesthetic nor on dramatic imperatives. It only forces us into viewing [the play] as a peep show (Last Month). Giving priority to the plays political action, viewers have thus seemed to prefer a direct encounter with various a,airs of state, without the distracting intrusion of a patently theatrical device borrowed from the Parsi commercial stage. A stronger concrmation of the resilience of Tughlaq as a political vehicle appears in the interpretive shifts through which successive productions, like strategies of textual interpretation, have accommodated the changing politics of the nation since the 1970s. The move from the disenchantment of the Nehruvian decades to a new phase of corruption and violence is evident in the program note to Arun Kuckrejas Delhi production of Tughlaq in September 1975, three months after Indira
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Gandhi had suspended constitutional rights and turned India (temporarily) into a police state:
Our interpretation of the play is one in which the politics of the entire situation are all-important and the violence of the second half of the play evident. It is for this purpose that all the murders merely mentioned in the script are presented on stage. The choice of contemporary-looking costumes, the use of pop music and an abstract setting are all geared to one main purposeto make the play as modern as possible, so that it has relevance to us today. The play now no longer remains merely the tragic history of a medieval monarch, but grows to larger proportions with Tughlaq himself becoming a symbol of our times. ( Jacob, Tughlaq)
As a symbol of the times, since the mid-1970s the visionary Tughlaq of the plays crst half has also receded, giving prominence to the vengeful tyrant of the second half. The keynote of Shivpuris 1972 version, for instance, was vulnerability, with an increasingly isolated Tughlaq seeking desperate comfort in the incestuous bond with his stepmother. A decade later, he appeared as a loud and mad Sultan, short-tempered and violent, [with] little to o,er to his subjects. His idealism, scholarship or statesmanship [are] hardly in evidence . . . . With hardly a scene of Tughlaq meeting with his beloved subjects, we are only shown the ill e,ects that a power hungry, eccentric, megalomaniac king has on the ruled (Paul, Last Month). Rajinder Paul saw this battening of Tughlaqs character as a baw in Prasannas directorial style, but Reeta Sondhi defended it as an appropriate modiccation of history by present impressions and experiences, which in the post-Nehru period included an irreversible hardening of attitudes among the young in India. Hence, the 19year old poet-philosopher-visionary becomes a cgment of ones imagination. The reality is the grand murderer who has rationalized the killings to megalomaniac tolerance levels (Sondhi, Tughlaq). Similarly, the endearing character of Aziz in Ebrahim Alkazis 1974 version became repelling in Prasannas. To continue creating viable political meaning for audiences, directors of Tughlaq have to reconcile it with a public sphere that has come to regard politics as devoid of all morality. Predictably, the communal issues in the play have become even more controversial, if not incendiary. Arjun Sajnanis 2003 English production, seen in Bangalore in March and in Hyderabad in September, o,ers the most recent glimpse into the problems of handling the changing political referents. The director (a restaurant owner as well as theatre accionado
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and clmmaker) locates the historical-but-contemporary quality of Karnads work in that Tughlaq tries to bridge a Hindu-Muslim divide back in the 14th century, which persists even today. I thought the play would be meaningful to audiences here (Prashanth, 2). However, he did not wish to undertake an extension of Tughlaq as part of current politics or draw a parallel between Tughlaq and any present-day ruler because every Third World country today has a problem with religion and politics; he also did not want to make his political point in a way that would o,end the sentiments of any part of his audience. In its Indian setting Sajnani prefers to see the play as a study of frustration, violence, and ensuing guilt, but he adds that he would like to take this play to New York, highlighting Tughlaqs e,ort to modernise Islam and the hurdles that came his way (Prashanth, 4). However, G. N. Prashanth (who reviewed the Bangalore production for a major southern Indian newspaper) questions the relevance of a staging that adheres verbatim to Karnads 1970 English translation and that fails to acknowledge the radically changed relations of Hinduism and Islam, in India and in the world. Since 1964, Prashanth notes, there has been movement from the Nehruvian socialist setting, through the Emergency, to what is now Savarkars time. Tughlaq, in this light, could have asked searching questions (4). The plays present context is the rise of the Hindu Right and its virulent twenty-crst century politics, making it all the more important for a director to reach into a pluralist Tughlaq and acknowledge that the play has lessons other than the need for communal amity (2). Because of Sajnanis reluctance to address these issues, his presentation does not venture into interpretation (3) but remains at the level of opulent entertainment. This tension between directorial intent and audience expectation reached a point of ironic irrelevance in September 2003 when the multinational manufacturing corporation Voltas commissioned Sajnanis production to promote its newest product and launched Vertis Gold [a 1.25 ton room air-conditioner] with Girish Karnads theatre masterpiece Tughlaq (Voltas). The sole performance in the city of Hyderabad was organized by the Indian Institute of Interior Designers and the ITC Kakatiya Sheraton Hotel and Towers. Attendance was also by invitation only because the show was intended for leading interior designers and a focused audience representing an important decision-making segment of consumers. Not only Karnads play but the whole genre of historical drama achieves a burlesque anticlimax in the assertion that it is indeed apt that the history-making Vertis brand be associated with a theatre epic which is both historic in its success, and historical in its subject matter (Voltas).
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Badal Sircars Baki itihas and the Burden of History Baki itihas (1965) is not a history play but a play about the history of the world; unlike Ashadh ka ek din and Tughlaqwhich have commanded indoor and outdoor stages as well as national and international audiences for several decadesit was written exclusively for proscenium performance and has maintained a relatively modest procle in the theatre. The crst Bengali production by Shombhu Mitras group, Bohurupee, in 1967 was followed by Rajinder Naths Hindi version in 1968 and Arvind Deshpandes Marathi version, most probably in 1969. The play was performed twice at the National School of Drama, under Ebrahim Alkazis direction in 1968 and that of guest director S. Ebotombi in 1981. Other important directors of Sircars early work, especially Shyamanand Jalan and Satyadev Dubey, mounted major productions of Evam Indrajit and Pagla ghoda between 1968 and 1972 but curiously left Baki itihas alone. In 1978, a showcase performance at Prithvi Theatre (Bombay), with well-known screen actor Dinesh Thakur in the cast, drew an audience of thirty-one people. Yet over the same period the play consolidated its position as one of Sircars seminal early works and as a classic text in the canon of postindependence literary drama. Given this inconsistency, it seems most productive to consider Baki itihas as a thematic counterpoise to Rakesh and Karnads representations of historyone that presents competing versions of the truth (like Akira Kurosawas clm, Rashomon) and that has succeeded as a text more than as a performance. The adjective baki, which qualices the noun itihas (history) in Sircars title, literally means that which remains, or that which is carried over. In this play the term also connotes that which is neglected, forgotten, marginalized, discarded, or deliberately erased. Sharadendu (Sharad for short) and Vasanti, the suburban Calcutta couple who are the lead characters, paradoxically begin their encounter with history because of the need for a viable cction. Vasanti is a published short-story writer who has run into writers block because she cannot think of a substantial new plot that would satisfy a discriminating editor. Sharad, a professor of Bengali literature at a local college, suggests that even a seemingly ordinary event takes on complexity if one investigates the chain of causation behind it. When he notices the newspaper item about Sitanaths suicide and recalls that they had met the man and his wife at Calcuttas famous botanical gardens the previous year, he urges his wife to begin imaginingwhy did this happen? Sitanath Chakravarti committed suicide by hanging himselfthis is the incident. But of what chain of circumstances
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is this the resultimagine that and write a story (23). In fact, both he and Vasanti produce independent conjectural reconstructions of the events leading up to Sitanaths death, and their versions are dramatized in the same mode of domestic urban realism as their own lives: Sircars representation is qualitatively indistinguishable from the plays-within-theplay created by his characters. The central cgure in Vasantis feminine narrative is Sitanaths wife, Kanak, a woman who has become obsessed with thrift and security in her adult married life because of a childhood of poverty and unhappiness. Her mother and oldest sister died of abuse and neglect; her father was burnt alive in a hospital cre; and her middle sister has recently abandoned respectability for the sake of cnancial security, becoming a rich mans mistress. Blaming all these misfortunes on the absence of the father, Kanak projects her anxieties about the past and the future onto the home that she and Sitanath will soon begin building for themselves. Unknown to Kanak, however, her father did not die in the hospital but went to prison for theft and has turned into a gambler and opium addict since his release. To protect Kanak from the shock of discovering the truth about the father whose memory she reveres, Sitanath has been paying for the old mans silence. When Kanak discovers that they have lost all their savings (without learning why), she decides to follow her older sisters example and leaves Sitanath for his wealthy friend Nikhil. Compelled by his own nature to preserve a lie for the sake of the only person he has cherished in his life, Sitanath hangs himself in that quintessential space of bourgeois domesticity, the living room. Sharad objects to Vasantis weak sense of causality and, in his masculine imagining of the event, places Sitanath at the center as a man haunted by a terrible secret. As the principal of a high school, Sitanath has just expelled a cfteen-year-old student for reading Nabokovs Lolita, and he is clinging obstinately to his decision despite pleas from colleagues and even his old mentor, Vidhu Babu. Sitanath does not consider Lolita just any book, but the dirtiest book in the world. A poisonous book. A shameless description of total deviance (58). A long conversation between Kanak and Sitanaths colleague Vijay reveals that ten years earlier, during a stay in a densely forested region, the couple had become deeply attached to an eleven-year-old girl called Parvati. Sitanath became angry with the girl one day and slapped her; in reaction she bed into the jungle, where she was raped by armed outlaws and left for dead. Devastated by guilt, Sitanath became seriously ill and was brought back to Calcutta, and although he has not referred to the incident for ten years, he has also
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not touched Kanak in all that time. Sitanath then confesses to Vijay that he has the same disease as Nabokovs hero, and his deviant desires have found a new object in Gauri, his mentors eight-year-old granddaughter. In this reconstruction Sitanath kills himself in a mood of intense selfhatred, to expiate an old crime and to prevent a new one. Vasanti cnds Sharads version greatly superior to her own but insists that both are equally unrelated to the real incident because they are imagined by nonparticipants. Inasmuch as the inventions of Sharad and Vasanti are simulacra of history-writing, they accomplish a double displacementfrom public to private experience and from the constraints of truth and objectivity to the freedoms of cction and the imagination. At this point, Sircars play suggests that a given event is not equivalent to its reconstructions and that the reality of any event is ultimately unknowable. The private-public relation then achieves a wholly new decnition in the play when the dead Sitanath appears before Sharad to provide the real explanation for his death. Sitanath carries with him a register containing images of human atrocity from the time of the Mahabharata to the present, including the building of the pyramids in ancient Egypt, the feeding of Christians to lions at the Colosseum at Rome, the punishment of Joan of Arc, the African slave trade, the Nazi concentration camps, Hiroshima, and, cnally, Vietnam. Sharad is initially unable to fathom the meaning of this compendium:
sharad: Why have you selected these particular pictures so carefully? sitanath: Well, this is what history is. sharad: History! sitanath: The history of mankind. The history of life. sharad: Thats a lie! This is the history of death. sitanath: (with a smile) What is life without death? [For a moment Sharad cannot think of an answer] sharad: But the history of death cannot be the history of life. sitanath: (with a long sigh) Maybe thats how it is. Separate histories for separate individualsmaybe that happens. This is not that. This is the left-over history. sharad: The left-over history? sitanath: Yes, the left-over history. But it also involves human beings. sharad: (after watching for a few moments) Why did you commit suicide, Sitanath? sitanath: Why didnt you commit suicide, Sharad? (94)
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Sitanaths counterquestion begins a movement within the play in which he becomes interchangeable with Sharad and Kanak with Vasanti, and Sitanaths personal history turns out to be exactly the same as Sharads. The di,erence is that according to Sitanath, all the vibrancy and excitement of his life with Kanak turned into dull habit because of the relentless pressures of day-to-day survival in the city, whereas Sharad protests violently that Vasanti is not a make-believe companionshe embodies life, and the meaning of life. When Sharad refuses to accept that eleven years of cohabitation with Vasanti have reduced life to meaningless repetition, Sitanath erases the distinction between individual and collective lives: Eleven years? Eleven centuries. Eleven thousand years. The history of the pointlessness of countless years. The history of the insigniccance of countless human insects! (1034). For Sitanath, Sharads denial of the utter insigniccance of human existence is the denial of history itself. Sharad wants to argue in panic that history is synonymous with personal success and happiness, but Sitanath wants to know what to do with the history that is left over. Yes, the remaining history. Not exams. Not a job. Not Kanak. Not Vasanti. The rest of history. The history of riots. The history of world wars. The history of countless years of murder, injustice, atrocity. The history of Kauravas and Pandavas, Alexander, Changez [Genghis] Khan, Napoleon, Hitler. The history of thousands of years is inscribed in the stones of the pyramids, the sand of the Coliseum, the walls of Jallianwalla Bagh, the scorched soil of Hiroshima! The left over history of thousands of years (104). Sharads response is to dissociate himself from this history, and to insist that there is another side to history too! The other face of war is peace. The other face of brutality is surely love. Otherwiseotherwise everyone would have to commit suicide! (105). Sitanath counters that hope belongs only to the weak-willed and deluded, while for those who are capable of exercising reason, self-destruction is the inescapable choice. Once again the question, Why did Sitanath kill himself ? has to be logically rephrased as the question, Why has Sharad (his alter ego) not yet killed himself ? The last few minutes of the play introduce an ostensible antidote to this nihilistic conclusion, when the couples friend Vasu arrives late at night with the news that Sharad is about to be promoted to the position of assistant professor at his college. Sharad tries desperately to convince himself that this big newsof professional and material advancement has saved him. But Sitanaths book of clippings has remained behind, and the nightmare of unacknowledged history returns to destroy Sharads momentary sense of assurance. At the end, Sharad clasps his head
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violently with both hands and sits down. His body has become rigid with anguishthe anguish of going through the rest of his life burdened by the rest of history (112). The last words of the play are simply his frenzied reminder to himself that Sitanaths visions will haunt him forever. Baki itihas is an instructive work to place beside Ashadh ka ek din and Tughlaqplays to which it is close in timebecause of the startlingly di,erent framework it creates for debating the problem of history in a postcolonial setting. By not engaging with any particular historical cgure, event, or narrative, it circumvents the issues of ideological emplotment, epistemological control, and cultural politics that underlie the construction of such subjects as Kalidasa and Tughlaq. Where Rakesh and Karnad deconstruct the invention of heroes and villains in cultural and political history, Sircar deconstructs history itself. Indeed, Baki itihas e,aces the question of institutionalized history altogether by selecting private rather than public experience as its subject, and then by arguing that the life of the individual is inseparable from collective human experience. It is this collectivity, which Sircar calls history, that the postcolonial subject must confront fully, because he or she is crst and foremost a citizen of the world. The ironic history of the (Indian) nation, so crucial to the history plays of Rakesh and Karnad, appears in Baki itihas as a short aside within the ongoing drama of civilizations. For instance, the plays only reference to an event in Indian history is to the April 1919 massacre in Jallianwalla Bagh, which metonymically represents the entire episode of British colonialism in India. Because Sircars universalism is presented directly and didactically, in a realistic play of contemporary urban life rather than through the indirection of myth or remote history, he appears in some respects to strike a romantic and idealistic note dissimilar to the ironies of Bharati, Rakesh, or Karnad. But his thematization of history is as much a sign of postcolonial modernity and cosmopolitanism as the imaginative reconstruction of a specicc past in Ashadh ka ek din and Tughlaq.
chapter 8
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Realism and the Edicce of Home
Theorizing Realism: The City, Everyday Life, and the Proscenium The principal antithesis to the intertexture of myth and history in postindependence Indian theatre (discussed in the preceding two chapters) appears in several interlinked groups of plays that portray the historical present rather than a received or imagined past and that possess a range of common features without displaying the closer family resemblances that would characterize a distinct dramatic genre. Focusing on contemporary life, these plays are more or less realistic in presentational style; their action is invented, not derived from preexisting narratives; their settings are urban (often metropolitan) or semiurban; and their primary level of signiccation is literal rather than analogical or allegorical. To a remarkable extent, these works have also settled on the private space of home as the testing ground of not only familial but social and political relations, so that domestic settings, love, marriage, parent-child conbicts, generational shifts, and the quotidian pressures of urban life appear as the common cctional substrata of plays that are thematically disparate. Following in part the conventions of social realism and proscenium performance that had decned modernity in late colonial theatre, important new plays in the urban-realist mode appeared concurrently with the crst major works of mythic-historic retrospection in the 1950s and have coalesced over cve decades into an equally, if not more, substantial tradition. Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, and Mahesh Dattani are among the
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major contemporary practitioners who work predominantly in the realist mode and possess a social imagination that expresses itself primarily through the psychodrama of family relationships. Other leading playwrights, such as Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, G. P. Deshpande, Mahasweta Devi, and Satish Alekar, have o,ered stylized variations on realism in specicc plays or groups of plays, or have assimilated its conventions to their respective forms of historical, environmental, political, and absurdist theatre. In its totality, the contemporary tradition of urban, realist, predominantly domestic drama is large and varied and includes some of the most inbuential plays of the last cve decades: Vijay Tendulkars Shantata! court chalu ahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session, 1967), Gidhade (Vultures, 1970), Sakharam binder (Sakharam the Bookbinder, 1972), Kamala (1981), and Kanyadaan (The Gift of a Daughter, 1983), all in Marathi; Mohan Rakeshs Adhe adhure (The Uncnished, 1969), in Hindi; G. P. Deshpandes Uddhwasta dharmashala (The Ruined Sanctuary, 1974), Ek vajoon gela ahe (Its Past One O Clock, 1983), and Andhar yatra ( Journey in Darkness, 1987), also in Marathi; Madhu Ryes Koipan ek phoolnu naam bolo to (Say the Name of Any Flower, 1974) and Kumarni agashi (Kumars Terrace, 1974), both in Gujarati; Mahesh Elkunchwars Raktapushpa (Petals of Blood, 1972), W ada chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion, 1985), Atmakatha (Autobiography, 1988), and the Yuganta trilogy (1994), in Marathi; and Mahesh Dattanis Tara (1990) and Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), in English. Despite formal and thematic di,erences, Badal Sircars Evam Indrajit (And Indrajit, 1962), Baki itihas (1965), Pagla ghoda (Mad Horse, 1967), and Shesh nei (Theres No End, 1969), in Bengali, Mahasweta Devis Hajar churashir ma (The Mother of Corpse Number 1084, 1973), in Bengali, and Satish Alekars Mahanirvan (The Great Departure, 1974) and Pidhijat (The Dynasts, 2002), in Marathi, also participate in this tradition by virtue of their urban settings and their preoccupation with contemporary middle-class life. Predictably, there is no single theory of realism or naturalism that undergirds this varied drama set mainly in the contemporary middleclass urban home. Rather, in the polyphonic theatrical discourse of the last cve decades, the subject of realism has occasioned a range of theoretical, ideological, and polemical positions that place a high value on theatres commitment to the historical present and its ability to contend with its own times. In terms of subject matter, the focus on contemporary urban experience sets the realist works apart from plays concerned with a mythic or historical past, as well as from plays immersed in the
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ostensibly timeless realms of folk narrative and traditional performance. In thematic terms, the persistence of home-as-setting has created a typology of home in post-independence Indian theatre, within which the practice of each major playwright forges distinctive connections between the private world of the family as an emotional and psychological entity and the public world of social and political action. In performance, these plays have established the proscenium stage and the enclosed auditorium as indispensable components of urban theatre architecture; realistic representation as an important common goal among directors, performers, and theatre craftsmen; and the staged space of home as an intrinsic part of the visual, psychological, and emotional experience of spectatorship. The full impact of realistic urban drama as a distinct kind of theatre emerges only when all three of these levels of communication are taken concurrently into account. Although the commentary on realism and urbanism by contemporary playwrights is largely a form of workshop criticismmaking theoretical positions a matter of deduction and inference rather than explicit formulationsome arguments have appeared frequently enough to emerge as general principles that are relevant to practice. First, proponents of realism regard this mode as a powerful manifestation of theatrical modernity that was admittedly inherited from colonial times but that has a vital role to fulcll in the postcolonial present: instead of being rejected because of its colonial origins, it must be modiced to suit present needs. Shanta Gokhale notes that in the crst experimental phase of Marathi playwriting after independence, the preferred mode of writing and presentation was realism, for it was felt that it was through this mode that the modern sensibility could best express itself (102). By expunging melodrama, spectacle, and sentimentality from the forms of realism inherited from the pre-independence period, a playwright like Vijay Tendulkar fashioned serious new vehicles for the stage that determined the direction of his own work and also exerted a profound inbuence on other theatre in Marathi and in various other Indian languages during the formative decades (ca. 195070). Signiccantly, unlike the raw realism of John Osborne and Joan Littlewood, which gave expression to marginal voices in England at this time, in Bombay realism . . . carried, not voices from the neglected margins of society, but from the mainstream, the educated middle-class, the upholders of norms, and also those who carefully deced them, in whom was invested the responsibility for creating a modern society in their newly independent country (Gokhale, 116). The new Marathi playwrights were not angry young men
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reviling the establishment, but socially conscious authors who wanted to understand their circumstances in order to e,ect change. Tendulkars generation in Marathi theatre therefore epitomizes the position that realism is the indispensable modern mode for understanding, coping with, and representing the post-independence present. Second, for authors committed to realism, the method is a dependable measure of what is most worth representing in literature and theatre. I write about the life around me, Tendulkar comments, adding that he cannot proceed with a play unless he sees his characters as real-life people. . . . A play basically requires living characters who speak their own language in their separate personal style (Play, 15, 26). Even when dramatic characters are modeled on actual people, the play must demonstrate the self-suciency of its cctional world through the characters own separate existence and expression while retaining its nearness to reality (Play, 5). Mohan Rakesh reiterates the importance of the mundane when he argues that works portraying an unfamiliar and extraordinary existence are never as popular as those which portray ordinary, everyday life. I live an ordinary life, and from every angle Im a very ordinary person. That is why I cnd it completely natural to write stories, to mold this atmosphere of ordinariness into stories (Sahitya, 42). Consequently, Rakesh is impatient with Indian authors who resort to a breathless experimentalism borrowed from other nations and cultures in order to convince themselves that they belong in the literary vanguard: [Their] vision is concerned with giving the stage a new and modern look from the outside, and not with searching for a theatre within our personal lives and circumstances. For that quest we need a deep understanding of our life and environmenta clear recognition of the theatrical possibilities of the assaults and counter-assaults on our sensibilities. Only this quest can lead us in the direction of really new experiments, and give shape to that theatrecraft with which even we have not yet become acquainted (Sahitya, 74). Clearly, Rakesh regards the ordinary Indian subject as a materially di,erent being from his or her Western counterpart and seeks a theatre capable of recognizing and expressing this di,erence. He therefore has reservations about the living-room ambience of Western realist theatre, which restricts the Indian playwright mainly to an urban setting and middle-class life and narrows the possible range of subjects. Girish Karnads objections to European/Shavian models of realism are more specicc: from Ibsen to Albee, the living room has symbolized all that is valuable to the Western bourgeoisie. . . . But nothing of consequence ever happens or is supposed to happen in an Indian living room! It is the
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no-mans land, the empty, almost defensive front the family presents to the world outside (Karnad, Three Plays, 10; hereafter cited as TP). In sharp contrast to these reservations, however, Mahesh Elkunchwar maintains that theatre everywhere is rooted in the middle class, accepts that the tradition he inherited in the 1960s was one of Ibsenite realism, and actively resists any critique of literary drama that attempts to throw out Shakespeare and Lorca and Chekhov and Strindberg and Ibsen and ONeill (CIT, 165, 178). Third, the preference for realism also translates into a preference for, and often a paradoxical defense of, the city. Historically, the city is deeply embedded in Indian political and literary experience because the successive Hindu, Muslim, and European empires on the subcontinent, and also the modern nation-state, have fostered urban culture and metropolitan cultural forms from classical times to the present. However, because of the ideological counteremphasis on village culture and on folk and traditional forms as the necessary bases of an authentic and egalitarian Indian aesthetic, numerous authors have felt compelled to arm the importance of the city as the site and subject of representation. What is striking about the opposing arguments is their radical incompatibility. While Habib Tanvir insists that the true pattern of Indian culture in all its facets can best be witnessed in the countryside and that villages have preserved the dramatic tradition of India in all its pristine glory and vitality . . . even to this day (Indian Experiment, 6), Rakesh is blunt about the relative (and antithetical) claims of village and city within the modern Indian nation in relation to both life and literature:
While it is true that most of Indias population lives in villages, there is no doubt at all that villages are not the next stage in the evolution of our lives. Villages are decidedly not at the centre of the political, economic, and communal vortices which create the problems hampering our progression, although village life is certainly being a,ected by them. Is it right that the artist who believes in the forward movement of life, and wants to help determine the shape of its future, should distance himself from a particular kind of life because it seems so appalling? Because he cannot discover vitality and beauty in middleclass life in the cities, is it an appropriate culmination of his ambition that he should content himself with watching the vigorous beauty of life and the sublime power of man in the villages? And is there really nothing healthy and beautiful in middle-class life in the cities? Is no human tenderness evident anywhere within those ravaged creatures? No sign of the strength of humankind? And is life in the villages
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really only beautiful and brilliant? Is it entirely free of such anomalies as falsehood, deception, thievery, and pretense? (Sahitya, 2223)
Assessing the same claims with reference to the issue of indigenousness, Elkunchwar asks why theatre in the villages alone [is to] be considered indigenous, and not theatre in the cities? An Indian who gets a Western education is also part of the Indian reality; an Indian theatre that is inbuenced by Western theatreespecially after such a long history of exchangeis part of our Indian experience (CIT, 175). Similarly, the director Rajinder Nath expresses an unapologetic urbanity when he asks whether all roots have to be ancient and asserts that there can be modern roots too, which one has to discover to deal with contemporary reality and experience (Nath, 28). Approaching the issue from various aesthetic and ideological positions, therefore, theatre practitioners of di,erent persuasions have collectively mounted a substantial theoretical defense of urban life as an appropriate and desirable subject of contemporary theatrical representation. Fourth, in keeping with the legacy of realist theatre in modern India, a very large number of post-independence playwrights have produced works primarily for urban proscenium performance, reinforcing the signiccance of that physical, material, and a,ective space to the content, staging, and reception of contemporary Indian drama. Because the space recreated within the proscenium is most often the family home, these plays have also established the family as the principal dramatic subject and the interior of the home as a conventional stage environment. Encapsulating the drama of Tendulkar, Karnad, Rakesh, the early Badal Sircar, Mohit Chattopadhyay, Manoj Mitra, Mahasweta Devi, Madhu Rye, C. T. Khanolkar, Jaywant Dalvi, G. P. Deshpande, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Satish Alekar, and Mahesh Dattani, among others, the proscenium tradition of domestic drama has unquestionably dominated post-independence theatre, however powerful its critique by proponents of other forms may be. The clearest armation of its principles has come from Elkunchwar, who, like Tendulkar, wants imaginative reform rather than revolution in the theatre. In a playful, self-deprecating account of his dramatic career presented at a seminar at Punes Theatre Academy in December 1985 (and appended to the published Marathi text of W ada chirebandi ), Elkunchwar expresses distaste for the drill-like gestural language of environmental theatre and describes the bodily contact between spectators and performers as an assault on my physical privacy (Natyapravas, 9394). These devices are unnecessary in his view because, when used e,ectively,
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the conventional signs of the stage are fully capable of achieving the important e,ects.
I do not really feel the need to take plays out of the proscenium arch. Even if a play is done in an open and unconcned space, our celd of vision automatically turns the performance and its setting into the proscenium. Similarly, even when a play is performed in an authentic environment, such as a work about convicts in a prison or [Karnads] Tughlaq in some old fort, we never forget that it is a play. Indeed, watching a play performed in such an odd space, by its very awkwardness, inevitably destroys the aesthetic experience. . . . It seems to me that a lot, and a lot that is new, can be achieved within the proscenium arch itself. After all, what is most important on stage is the body of the actor, and the struggle of that body is to express the human soul. To be truly experimental is to take the measure of this soul, because the soul is unfathomable and there is no end to its torment. I feel that to keep searching its depths is the real purpose of experimentation, and I also feel that we can achieve this within the proscenium. (Natyapravas, 9394)
In a 1989 interview, Elkunchwar rearms his qualiced acceptance of the inherited Marathi tradition by rejecting the notion of an old school of theatrical realism: Whats an old school? I might use the same torch as Kanetkar or Kalelkar, but I point it di,erently, see things with it that these writers never have done. Indeed, working within these conventions of theatre o,ers one several possibilities; its a position of strength. This one must acknowledge, I feelrather than abandoning, as so many people are doing today, the very notion of the proscenium theatre, or so many conventions (CIT, 165). Elkunchwars advocacy of the proscenium is not compromised by his strong interest in symbolist, expressionist, existentialist, and absurdist modesin his crst four plays, he notes, I was working under the inbuence of Strindberg, Chekhov, Lorca, Sartre and Camus, and it was only with Holi that he discovered a concdent realistic idiom (Interview, 2). No other playwright has been as forthright in his embrace of mimeticism, but Elkunchwars arguments extend implicitly to most urban playwrights who adhere to conventional staging practices and the principle of the invisible fourth wall. The post-independence playwrights commitment to realism, domestic life, urban experience, and proscenium performance is strengthened by a corresponding commitment to these forms of theatre among all of the collaborators in the production process: directors, actors, and the
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theatre craftsmen who make the stage stand for other spaces. The major directors whose careers in relation to new Indian drama have been largely devoted to the mode of urban realism and/or proscenium staging include Satyadev Dubey, Vijaya Mehta, Arvind Deshpande, Shreeram Lagoo, Dinesh Thakur, and Amol Palekar in Bombay; Shyamanand Jalan in Calcutta; Ebrahim Alkazi, Rajinder Nath, and Om Shivpuri in Delhi; and Mahesh Dattani in Bangalore. Like the playwrights whose work they bring to the stage, since the early 1960s these professionals have fostered and sustained the movement for a serious, conventional urban theatre aimed largely at a middle-class audience, even as a host of other major practitioners, notably Habib Tanvir, Badal Sircar, K. N. Panikkar, Ratan Thiyam, B. V. Karanth, and Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, have abandoned proscenium realism. (Sircar, a committed antirealist, acknowledges the strength of the proscenium tradition when he describes realism as the natural mode in theatre and the illusion of reality as the unwritten law of theatre [Changing Language, 17].) A director like Lagoo, who mounted the crst production of Mahesh Elkunchwars Atmakatha in 1988, echoes the playwright when he describes himself as a very old-fashioned director. I am content-oriented, not form-oriented. I have never felt the need, for instance, to do Ekach Pyala in the Kabuki form! . . . In the case of plays which are cast in a non-naturalist form, I do not think I am equipped to handle them. A play like Ghashiram kotwal, for instance, which Jabbar [Patel] has handled so beautifully, is quite beyond me (CIT, 122). Om Shivpuri similarly echoes Mohan Rakeshs preoccupation with the reality of life when he observes that from the point of view of a director, I consider Adhe adhure the crst meaningful Hindi play about contemporary life. It outlines some dense convergences in the ironic map of present-day existence. Its characters, situations, and psychological states are realistic and believable. . . . It has the capability of grasping the tension of contemporary life (Rakesh, SN, 331). Shivpuri notes that at crst he found only the box set appropriate to the plays atmosphere of tension but later resorted to locally obtainable, inexpensive props so that Rakeshs drama of the imploding middle-class urban family could be performed anywhere (SN, 336). Two other major directors of Adhe adhure share Shivpuris assessment of the play as a theatrical breakthrough. For Satyadev Dubey, the play exploded the myth that the Hindi playwright cannot produce a work dealing with contemporary situations and characters connected with our life (SN, 337). Alkazi recalls the audiences that bocked to various productions all over the country in large numbers and asks: How can a play which gives no quarter to popularity evoke
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such a reaction, unless the reason is that it expressed its meaning with consummate e,ectiveness? (SN, 340). Interestingly, many of the directors associated with the urban realist movement are also among Indias best known stage actors in the realistic style. Shreeram Lagoo, who describes himself as basically an actor, not a director, has brought his understated, naturalistic style of acting to leading roles in Vijay Tendulkars Gidhade and Kanyadaan, G. P. Deshpandes Uddhwasta dharmashala, Mahesh Elkunchwars Garbo and Atmakatha, and V. V. Shirwadkers Natasamrat (CIT, 122, 113). Vijaya Mehtas celebrated roles include those of Aai in Elkunchwars Wada chirebandi and the old, bereaved mother in Jaywant Dalvis Sandhya chhaya (Evening Shadows). Om Shivpuri played the male lead in all three of Mohan Rakeshs plays, Shyamanand Jalan had the lead role in his own production of Adhe adhure, and Amol Palekar acted in Elkunchwars Garbo. Among actors in this tradition who are not directors, Sulabha Deshpande in Tendulkars Shantata! court chalu ahe, Sudha Shivpuri in Adhe adhure, and Suhas Joshi in Sandhya chhaya, Natasamrat, and Kanyadaan are especially noteworthy. In terms of stagecraft, there are too many set and lighting designers working with proscenium venues even in the metropolitan areas of Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta to permit easy enumeration here; it should suce to say that in the performance of virtually every play in the urban-realist tradition, what the performers inhabit and what the spectators experience through their senses and emotions is the circumscribed space of home. The Typology of Home The authorial rebections on realism, their transmutation into literary drama, and their collective realization on the urban stage have created, then, a substantial typology of home in post-independence Indian drama. A range of individualistic representations drawing on ideas of ennui, violence, and disillusionment have kept home as a literal and symbolic place in the forefront of urban theatre since the early 1960s. In Badal Sircars groundbreaking early proscenium plays, marriage, family, and white-collar professionalism are the forms of middle-class entrapment from which the self-aware protagonist struggles to escape. As noted in chapter 7, in Baki itihas the dead Sitanath appears in Sharadendus Calcutta home to condemn the fatal disconnection between the individual self and universal history. In a more stylized play like Evam Indrajit, where an almostbare stage represents a succession of urban spaces (a college classroom,
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an interview room, an oce, a park) in addition to a home, the dialectical thrust of the action is still mainly against the constraints of domesticity. Indrajit acquires a precarious individuality in opposition to the interchangeable Amal, Vimal, and Kamal by not marrying Manasi, leaving Calcutta for such unfamiliar places as Madras and London, and allowing the Writer to create a buid identity that di,erentiates him from the discontented, homogenized male selves fashioned at the Institute of Bettermanship. Rakeshs Adhe adhure, the acknowledged classic of the collapse of the nuclear family in the modern metropolis, establishes an intimate connection between economic decline, emotional disintegration, and the space of home. The decrepit all-purpose room in which the entire action takes place is a representative segment of a house that has slid from a middle-class to a lower-middle class level (SN, 243), and the visible presence of remnants from an earlier life in this space is more intolerable than their absence would have been. In such an environment Mahendranath, Savitri, and their three children can neither break the cycle of constant mutual recrimination nor escape each other (cg. 12). Most recently, the upper-class urban tragicomedy of Mahesh Dattani has reenergized the drama of poisoned relationships in the challenging medium of English, although the playwrights penchant for plot-driven coups de theatre inserts a measure of supercciality and sensationalism into an otherwise accomplished oeuvre. As John McRae notes, Dattani takes the family unit and the family settingagain and again he uses the family home as his localeand fragments them. As relationships fall apart, so, in a way, does the visual setting. Not for him the single room set. Rather, he experiments, with great technical daring, using split sets, hidden rooms, interior and exterior: he stretches the space and clls it in every available direction, even out front, playing with the audience and its expectations (Dattani, Final Solutions, 7). In this inventive dramaturgy, the stage either represents several domestic spaces simultaneously, or several spaces among which home is central. In the plays Dattani has published so far, home is again a place of resentment, neurosis, confrontation, and barely suppressed violence, until a last-minute reversal exposes some guilty secret from the past that has fueled the mundane family antagonisms. Vijay Tendulkars drama of ideas represents perhaps the most substantial exploration of the symbolism of home because his customary method is to translate social and political conbicts into personal dilemmas and resituate them within the domestic sphere. The material-visual look of a home in his plays is always replete with the signs of class,
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ideology, and cultural positioning; home is the domain of private experience, but the social consciousness of its inhabitants is entangled in the problems of caste, class, gender, community, marriage, and the family. This involvement threatens every one of the relationships on which the family is founded, especially those of husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister. The main stage setting in Gidhade is the interior for a house . . . that reminds you of the hollow of a treean apt visual and tactile symbol for a family that has clled the void created by its loss of economic status with uncontrolled emotional and physical violence (Tendulkar, Collected Plays in Translation, 201; hereafter cited as CPT ). The living room of the house is the scene of incessant and grotesque confrontations between Pappa and his three adult children (Ramakant, Umakant, and Manik); a room above the garage (also visible on stage) is the sanctuary where Rama, an innocent married to Ramakant, tries to cnd temporary solace in a relationship with her husbands illegitimate brother, Rajaninath. Sakharam binder uncovers the same propensity for male violence at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. Sakharams
Fig. 12. Cant you somehow let that man get away from you? Manohar Singh as Juneja, Surekha Sikri as Savitri, and Uttara Baokar as Older Daughter in Mohan Rakeshs Adhe adhure, directed by Amal Allana, NSD Repertory Company, New Delhi, 1976. Courtesy of the NSD Repertory Company.
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old red-tiled house, the sort one cnds in the alleys of a small district town (CPT, 125) is the laboratory where he conducts his eccentric social experiments in the subversion of Brahmanism and the institution of marriage. The two simultaneously visible rooms within the house also come to represent Sakharams fatal suspension between radically opposed forms of femininitythe unabashed sexuality of Champa and the timid but manipulative chastity of Laxmi. In Kamala, Jaisingh Jadavs small bungalow in the fashionable New Delhi neighbourhood of Neeti Bagh (CPT, 3) is an appropriate setting for his callow careerism as an investigative journalist and the spatial expression of a sense of proprietorship that turns Jaisinghs upper-class wife, Sarita, into the same kind of commodiced object as the tribal woman, Kamala, he has bought in a besh market to expose the continuing trac in women. In perhaps the most resonant example of the intersection of private and public spheres, the middle-class Brahman home of the Deolalikar family in Kanyadaan becomes the site of a cerce battle when Nath, an idealistic politician, tries to bring his progressive caste politics into his home by encouraging his young daughter to marry an unemployed writer from the Dalit (formerly untouchable) community. The invasion of home by the politics of the world in the work of a social playwright like Tendulkar is counterbalanced by the signiccance of home in the politics of the world in the work of political playwrights, such as G. P. Deshpande and Mahasweta Devi. In Deshpandes Uddhwasta dharmashala, the university oce that is the scene of an inquiry into Sridhar Vishwanath Kulkarnis radical politics (cg. 13) alternates with his home, the scene of his failed marriage to the ideologically rigid and partyoriented Saraswati, his redemptive intimacy with a younger actress, Madhavi, and his soul-searching conversations with a son who is boundering. It is in the privacy of his study rather than in the turmoil of the outside world that Sridhar Vishwanath fashions himself as both public and private manrebellious party member, uncompromising intellectual, husband, lover, and father. Deshpandes Ek vajoon gela ahe celebrates Nana, a larger-than-life left-wing intellectual, entirely within the occasional context of a seventy-cfth birthday party arranged by his children. Once again, the family gathering brings political as well as emotional tensions to the fore, culminating in the unexpected visit of an estranged activist son, Uddhav, who dismisses his family as a group of armchair revolutionaries and rejects their politics. In Mahasweta Devis best-known play, Hajar churashir ma (based, like her other plays, on her own cction) the bond between Brati, a young revolutionary, and his ailing mother, Sujata, gives
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an intimately human quality to the Naxalite movement in Bengal. After Bratis death in a police encounter, deeply embarrasing to his upper-class bureaucratic family, Sujata begins a process of education and discovery through which she comes to understand oppression, resistance, and her sons true nature for the crst time. The cnal grouping within the tradition of realistic urban drama involves a collapse of the edicce of home. Home in these plays is not merely the testing ground for various familial, social, and political processes, but a long-standing material and symbolic structure that itself succumbs to the stresses of the present. The image of the house of politics as a ruined sanctuary (uddhwasta dharmashala) in G. P. Deshpandes play suggests vividly how a material construct may symbolize the ideological crisis in the life of an individual and a nation. Similarly, at the end of Tendulkars Kanyadaan, as Nath Deolalikar confronts the human cost of his ambitious sociopolitical experiments, the sounds of huge edicces crashing down begins . . . everything around him is collapsing . . . the roar of collapsing structures has risen to a terrifying pitch (64). In contrast with this largely metaphoric disintegration, home is a cgure of literal
Fig. 13. The inquisition at the university. Shreeram Lagoo (far right) as Sridhar Vishwanath Kulkarni in G. P. Deshpandes Uddhwasta dharmashala, directed by Shreeram Lagoo for Roopwedh (Bombay), Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival, New Delhi, 1989. Courtesy of Sangeet Natak Akademi.
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as well as psychological-social collapse in Elkunchwars Wada chirebandi (1985) and Cyrus Mistrys Doongaji House (1978). In Elkunchwars play, the ancient and respectable but dilapidated mansion of an upper-caste village family is a visible symbol of its socioeconomic slide from a privileged past to an intolerable present. Mistrys Doongaji House transplants the same tensions to a metropolitan setting and the context of a di,erent community. The three-story structure of the title is again marked by alarming signs of age and degeneration, but its Zoroastrian (Parsi) inhabitants confront speciccally urban forms of ethnic alienation, failure, and violence. In both plays there is nothing to sustain the present but the ghosts of old times, and the cnal collapse is due as much to the imperatives of progress and the problems of cultural di,erence as to the dissolution of family bonds, making the crumbling structure of home a cgure for the postcolonial nation itself. Home, Modernity, Migrancy This thematic preoccupation with home as the measure of historical, familial, and sociopolitical relations connects contemporary realist theatre in India in unusual ways to two dominant but antithetical formations in modern writing and experiencethe ambivalence about home in realist and modernist literature, where it denotes identity, rootedness, and belonging, as well as conbict, constriction, and loss; and the converse sentimentalization of home as the symbol of homeland, nation, and a lost past in the discourse of transnational diaspora. Writing about modern drama in general, Una Chaudhuri uses the term geopathology to designate the problem of place that erupts in realist theatre of the late nineteenth century and unfolds as an incessant dialogue between belonging and exile, home and homelessness (15). With the family home as its privileged setting,
modern drama at crst employs, as one of its foundational discourses, a vague, culturally determined symbology of home, replete with all those powerful and empowering associations to space as are organized by the notion of belonging. The dramatic discourse of home is articulated through two main principles, which structure the plot as well as the plays accounts of subjectivity and identity: a victimage of location and a heroism of departure. The former principle decnes place as the protagonists fundamental problem, leading her or him to a recognition of the need for (if not an actual enactment of ) the latter. (Una Chaudhuri, xii)
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Twentieth-century experience complicates this pattern of conbict by fostering the deeper ambivalence of home lost and home left. The voluntary renunciation of origins that is a constitutive element in the high modernism of Eliot, Joyce, and Ezra Pound contrasts with the forced dislocations of political refuge and exile that have a,ected large populations since World War II and have shaped the exilic consciousness of such authors as Brecht, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, and Ariel Dorfman. The need for a sense of home as a base, a source of identity even more than a refuge, Andrew Gurr comments, has grown powerfully in the last century or so, but deracination, exile and alienation in varying forms are the conditions of existence for the modern writer the world over; thus, the intellectual is committed either physically or spiritually to a homeless existence (Gurr, 1314). The problem of place has moved outward from the sphere of private experience to encompass the public sphere in the broadest sense. The urban-realist plays of Tendulkar, Rakesh, Elkunchwar, and Dattani follow the familial focus and conbictual structure of Western realist drama, but with crucial di,erences. First, there is usually no protagonist whose selfhood can render the struggle with home in individualistic terms and relate it to the idea of a singular destiny. Rather, the condition of victimization extends to all the inhabitants of home (in either a nuclear or an extended family) who are trapped by cultural constraints and economic circumstances into an impossible coexistence. The emotional and physical violence in Tendulkars Gidhade stems equally from the old father and his three adult children, while the two characters who possess moral selvesRama and Rajaninathhave neither the strength nor the resolve to assert themselves. In Rakeshs Adhe adhure, each member of the decaying household is equally alienated from every other member, creating the plays signature atmosphere of festering emotions and constantly erupting frustrations. The same is true of the emotionally stunted upper-class couples in Dattanis Bravely Fought the Queen. The major characters in these plays repeatedly draw attention to their own entrapment, but no one character possesses the ability to arrest the collective descent into hopelessness. Power and will are dispersed to create multiple antagonisms, not concentrated into individualized conbicts that move toward a decnite crisis. Second, the collapse of the family in the present is usually set against a happier (and more prosperous) past, as well as an implicit ideal of family conduct that is normative in the same measure as it is unattainable. Underlying the historical development of the family in contemporary
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India are mythic modelsderived mainly from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and reinforced daily in the mass-cultural narratives of cinema and televisionof perfect love, duty, obedience, and respect between husband and wife, father and son, older and younger siblings. The failure of a father to provide for his family, of a wife to love her husband, of a daughter-in-law to respect her parents-in-law, or of a brother to protect his sister always appears more egregious because it is measured against these deeply internalized norms of parental, conjugal, and clial conduct in Indian culture. Indeed, the acute awareness among characters that they are deviating from the prescribed norms accounts for much of the peculiar paranoia of these plays. Whatever the condition of home in the present, every character knows what a home ought to be. What a home we used to have, what an atmosphere there used to be in the house! Seva, the mother, exclaims in Tendulkars Kanyadaan, dwelling with typical regret on the memory of better times (30). By emphasizing the gap between idealized expectations and the realities of the moment, these plays collectively question the validity of inherited codes and place the urban Indian family on a recognizably modern footing. Third, the plays stress the condition of victimage but do not allow the liberation of departure, adhering instead to a pattern of continued entrapment that achieves classic expression in Rakeshs Adhe adhure. Unemployed and scorned by his family, Mahendranath in this play describes himself as a parasite who has devoured the family home from within. But his attempts to walk away from that hollow life have fallen into a completely predictable pattern of rebellious departure and humiliating return. When does he ever feel well after leaving the house? his wife, Savitri, asks, Isnt this what happens every time? (SN, 313). Savitri, the only breadwinner in the house, declares halfway through the play that she will no longer sacricce herself on the altar of family responsibility, and she tries to seek a new life for herself by rekindling an earlier relationship with Jagmohan, a wealthy childhood friend and admirer. It was impossible for me even earlier to endure all this here. You know that already. But now it has become completely, completely impossible, she tells Jagmohan (302). But although Jagmohan sympathizes with her, his life can no longer accommodate an old attachment, and Savitri returns to her prison house more disillusioned and bitter than ever. In fact, home in this play has the power to ravage characters even after they have supposedly escaped from it. The older daughter, who has unknowingly married one of Savitris young admirers, talks to her mother about carrying away something within herself from her home that constantly clls her with
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pent-up emotion and, according to her weary husband, leaves her overwrought in any and every situation.
older daughter: I come here . . . I come here only so that . . . woman [savitri]: This is your own home. older daughter: My own home! . . . Yes. And I come so that I may try once more to search for that thing because of which I am humiliated over and over again! (In an almost breaking voice) Can you tell me, Mama, what that thing is? And where its hiding? In the windows and doors of this house? In the roof ? In the walls? In you? In Daddy? In Kinni? In Ashok? Where is that awful thing which he says I have carried away within myself from this house? (263)
At the end of the play, as all cve characters return to the place they hate and wait for the cycle of recriminations to begin again, Savitri looks outwards with glazed eyes and sits down slowly in the chair, acknowledging the impossibility of release (325). Repeated in the majority of signiccant realist plays, these patterns of pervasive discontent, continued entrapment, and self-hatred create notable variations on the thematic structures popularized by Western realist drama. In a process distinct from the accommodation of Western dramatic models to Indian experience, contemporary Indian plays dealing with the physical collapse of home o,er an intranational counterpoint to the sentimental recall of home in diasporic cultural forms. While the postcolonial Indian subject in diaspora (especially in the West) occupies a position of increasing intellectual and economic privilege, the postcolonial condition in the postcolony itself is primarily a state of destabilizing political, economic, social, and cultural change. In post-independence India, the imperatives of modernization, progress, development, and integrationnecessary to the formation of a modern democratic nation-statehave caused the steady erosion of traditional economies, occupations, customs, beliefs, and practices. In the countryside, new systems of land ownership, new agricultural technologies, and political mobilization at the local level have displaced earlier forms of agrarian labor, capital, and political control. In the cities, large-scale industrialization, the emergence of new professional classes and multilayered bureaucracies, and the opening up of domestic markets to foreign investment have transformed the nature of work, the membership of the work force, and hence the family. Because of the uncontrolled movements of population
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resulting from some of these developments, such cities as Bombay and Calcutta have realized the nightmare stereotype of the third-world urban slum. In a di,erent sphere, the ideology of secularism encoded in the constitution, and the move toward progressive social policies have challenged, though not very successfully, the deeply divisive, hierarchical character of Indian society. Socioeconomic changes have joined with the e,ects of ethnic diversity, cultural heterogeneity, political radicalism, and religious division to fragment family and community life in both urban and rural areas, creating conditions of rootlessness and marginality that are often more truly disempowering than the pain of voluntary migration beyond the nations borders. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on three recent, familycentered realistic plays in which the sustaining cction is the loss of home at homeVijay Tendulkars Kanyadaan (Marathi, 1983), Mahesh Elkunchwars Wada chirebandi (Marathi, 1985), and Cyrus Mistrys Doongaji House (English, 1978). Tendulkars play moves the typical narrative of modern realist dramaa family conbict in a domestic settingin a startling new direction by making home a testing ground for the characters political convictions. It incorporates the constitutive features of the urban-realist tradition as decned at the beginning of this chapter but also reorients that tradition by relating the family crisis to the public, not the private sphere. In contrast, the destruction of home as a material structure (a house) and as an emotional space of ancestral memory, family attachments, and community bonds in the plays by Elkunchwar and Mistry is the unprivileged mirror-image of the nostalgia surrounding the cgure of home in transnational diasporic consciousness. As a social text, Tendulkars play situates home within a specicc regional/national history, while the other two plays trace the collapse of historically determined, previously dominant but now precarious modes of existence in two radically di,erent locationsa small village in the fertile Vidarbha region of northeastern Maharashtra in the case of Elkunchwar, and metropolitan Bombay, the capital of Maharashtra, in the case of Mistry (see map of Maharashtra). My analysis seeks to emphasize, crst, that contemporary Indian realist theatre has created its own distinctive variations on geopathology through a varied and thoroughly indigenized discourse of home. Second, modern diaspora is not necessarily the primary referent in the experience of dislocation, and diasporic writing, particularly anglophone cction, must take its place beside other discourses within the nation that determine and delineate postcolonial experience.
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Politics and the Home / The Politics of Home: Vijay Tendulkars Kanyadaan
A man should give his daughter, in accordance with the rules, to a distinguished, handsome suitor who is like her, even if she has not reached (the right age). But it would be better for a daughter, even after she has reached puberty, to stay in the house until she dies than for him ever to give her to a man who has no good qualities. manusmriti
Kanyadaan, the fathers gift of the daughter in marriage to a suitable groom, is a central ritual within the Hindu marriage ceremony, completed before the couple recite their wedding vows around the ceremonial cre. As codiced in the Manusmriti (a socioreligious compendium composed around the beginning of the common era), the ritual appears as one important link in mens lifelong guardianship of women, in their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. The text states repeatedly that
Map 2. Regional geography of Maharashtra, with surrounding states.
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women cannot have independencein childhood a woman should be under her fathers control, in youth under her husbands, and when her husband is dead, under her sons (Doniger, 115). Once a woman is given in marriage, she must obey her husband while he is alive and keep her vows to him inviolate after he is dead. A woman joined in the right way with a man also assumes his qualities, like a river bowing down into the ocean (Doniger, 199). In the laws of Manu, however, male authority carries legitimacy only when male responsibilities are discharged in the proper way; for marriage, these responsibilities include the careful and selbess selection of a mate for the woman. A father who demands a bride-price for his daughter unacceptably turns her into a commodity sold to the highest bidder. The best kind of marriage, instead, follows the law of Brahma when a man dresses his daughter and adorns her and he himself gives her as a gift to a man he has summoned, one who knows the revealed canon and is of good character (Doniger, 4546). Another crucial consideration in marriage is a parity of ritual and social status. A twice-born man (who belongs to one of the three higher-caste groups) should match with a woman of his own caste, or class, if he does not wish to reduce his o,spring to the status of servants, and the opposite event the marriage of a twice-born woman to a low-caste manis so unimaginable as not to be mentioned in the Manusmriti at all. Good fortune also comes only to families in which men value women, for the deities delight in places where women are revered, but where women are not revered all rites are fruitless (Doniger, 48). By o,ering their loyalty and obedience to deserving male guardians, women thus earn their respect and protection; the object of this reciprocity is to create the ideal family through which society may successfully perpetuate itself. In Tendulkars Kanyadaan, the familial and social symbolism of this ancient ritual collides against contemporary social processes whose very purpose has been to subject patriarchal authority, prescribed gender roles, and caste divisions to radical scrutiny. Set in Pune, one of the principal cities in Maharashtra, the play begins with an announcement by Jyoti, the twenty-year-old daughter of Nath and Seva Deolalikar, that she is thinking of marrying Arun Athavale, a young aspiring writer and journalist from the Dalit community (made up of formerly untouchable castes) whom she has met recently in a socialist discussion group. Nath, a lifelong socialist and a senior member of the states legislative assembly, is delighted by the news because the marriage would allow his Brahman family to make an exemplary social statement and give a concrete personal form to his left-liberal politics (cg. 14). Seva (a womens rights activist), however,
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cnds Jyotis decision hasty, impractical, and unmindful of the realities of cultural and class di,erences, but Naths enthusiasm overrides her objections as well as those of Jyotis elder brother, Jayaprakash. Shortly after the marriage, while Jyoti is still living with her parents, she tells them she is leaving Arun because his propensity for violence and abuse has driven her to the breaking point. But Aruns drunken self-abasement before her family, and Naths conviction that it is Jyotis duty to put all her strength into making [the marriage] work (44), force her to leave the parental sanctuary. Aruns compulsive violence soon becomes a threat to the nowpregnant Jyotis safety, but the unexpected literary success of his autobiography also encourages him to behave with increasing insolence and coerciveness toward Jyotis family. When Nath agrees under duress to preside over a felicitation meeting for Arun, a visibly hardened Jyoti intuits the reason for his hirelings speech and forces a cnal confrontation with her father. The very values he had instilled in his children, she tells him, have made it impossible for her to turn her back on Arun, but she cannot survive in Aruns world if she continues to inhabit her parents civilized sphere. Reminding Nath that she is putting his principles into
Fig. 14. Very, very glad to meet you, young man! Ive heard so much about you. Shreeram Lagoo as Nath Deolalikar, Sadashiv Amrapurkar as Arun, and Sushama Tendulkar as Jyoti in Vijay Tendulkars Kanyadaan, directed by Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Indian National Theatre, Bombay, 1983. Courtesy of Indian National Theatre.
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practice, at the end Jyoti severs all connection with her home and family. The ritual meaning of kanyadaan undergoes a double reversal here the father condemns his daughter to a fate worse than death by giving her away thoughtlessly to a man who has no good qualities, but it is the daughter who reminds him of the irrevocable nature of the gift. As a Marathi play from 1983 that uses caste as theme and a young Dalit writer as antihero, Kanyadaan inevitably evokes the twentieth-century history of the struggle over the practice of untouchability, as well as the more immediate phases of the Dalit movement in Maharashtra and in the nation as a whole. By making the emancipation of the so-called untouchable classes a vital part of their political programs throughout the nationalist movement, Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar had ensured the constitutional abolition of untouchability in the written document that was adopted in January 1950. By steering his own Mahar caste in Maharashtra in the direction of sustained political action, Ambedkar also instilled a new consciousness that developed rapidly after independence into a mass movement in that state and in other regions where similar communities were concentrated. In 1956 Ambedkar led a mass conversion of Mahars and several other untouchable castes to Buddhism in the city of Nagpur as a means of stepping outside the fold of hierarchical Hinduism altogether. In 1958 a national-level conference formally adopted the term Dalit as an intentionally positive alternative to such pejorative or ocial terms as untouchable and scheduled caste. In 1972, a group of radical Dalit writers launched the Dalit Panther movement along the lines of the American Black Panthers and the Indian Naxalites, expressing a new level of pride, militancy, and sophisticated creativity (Zelliot, 267). Dalit literature in Marathi, especially in the genres of poetry, cction, and autobiography, now constitutes not only a distinct strain within contemporary Marathi writing but also a model for the literature of oppressed groups in general throughout India. Over cve decades, therefore, the Dalit community in Maharashtra has used a sustained social critique of caste, politically e,ective self-expression, systems of protective discrimination in education and employment, and increased political representation to e,ect a signiccant, though by no means adequate, change in their circumstances. The presence of Arun in Kanyadaan connects the play to this history of the Dalit movement, just as the presence of Nath, the Brahman socialist, recalls upper-caste progressive reformers, such as Jyotirao Phule and Sane Guruji (whose photographs hang in Naths living room). Tendulkars choice of subject also appears to be deliberate and strategic, because any
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cctional representation of Dalits necessarily intersects with the communitys highly visible procle in the social and political life of Maharashtra. The plays reception on the stage and in print, however, points to the skillful but provocative (if not inbammatory), and ultimately apolitical, nature of Tendulkars intervention in the sociopolitical debate, leaving the work open to praise and censure in equal measure. When Kanyadaan opened at Bombays Indian National Theatre in February 1983, Dalit groups in Maharashtra attacked it as a malicious, reductive portrait of their community, made more objectionable by Aruns resemblance to a prominent Dalit writer. In the most notorious display of public anger, a shoe was hurled at Tendulkar during a discussion meeting in a small Maharashtrian town. The plays message was no less problematic outside the authors home state. Reviewing Rajinder Naths 1985 Hindi production in Delhi, Rajinder Paul commented that in his portraits of both Nath and Arun, the playwright is again in conbict with our democratic socialism and generosity of spirit towards the traditionally oppressed (Kanyadaan). Nemichandra Jain praised Subhash Guptas e,ective rendering of an unsympathetic role in the same production but found the exaggerated villainy of Aruns character unconvincing, and the marginalization of Arun for the sake of Nath theatrically unsatisfactory. In the popular media, the play was interpreted as a cautionary tale about how intercaste or interreligious marriages cannot be the key to a program of national integration, and even as a reactionary armation of the social order, as [Tendulkar] depicts the less-than-satisfying consequences of marriage between a Brahmin girl and a Dalit youth (Sharma). Counterbalancing these mixed responses is an impressive, though not extensive, performance history, and the literary prestige that the play has garnered over twenty years. The crst Indian National Theatre production of Kanyadaan had an outstanding and rather intriguing cast: Shreeram Lagoo as Nath, Suhas Joshi as Seva, Sadashiv Amrapurkar (who was also the director) as Arun, and two of Vijay Tendulkars own daughtersSushama and later the more celebrated Priyain the role of Jyoti (see cg. 14). This Marathi production was followed within a few years by three major Hindi versionsRajinder Naths in Delhi (1985), Shyamanand Jalans in Calcutta (1987), and Dinesh Thakurs in Bombay. In the South, the Madras Players (one of the countrys leading English-language theatre groups) mounted the crst notable English production, in Gowri Ramnarayans translation, in March 1998. Like the earlier Shantata! court chalu ahe, Sakharam binder, and Kamala, Kanyadaan has also emerged as the kind of serious social problem play by Tendulkar that college drama
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societies and amateur groups in smaller towns cnd particularly attractivewitness the all-female production by the JBAS Womens College Dramatics Club that was part of the Inter-Collegiate Drama Competition in Madras in 2000. Even observers dissatisced with the plays excesses and imbalances in performance have usually acknowledged it as a powerful work that explores the dynamics of modernity and social change in urban India and reinforces Tendulkars reputation as a serious thinker and gifted craftsman in the theatre. The plays literary reputation reached its apex in March 1994 when it received the K. K. Birla Foundations third Saraswati Samman, one of Indias highest literary honors, for its e,ective representation of the complexity of human relationships . . . . [and] the emotional connections and conbicts between the downtrodden and elite segments of society (Kanyadaan, xv). The foundations ocial felicitation commended Tendulkar for creating a vibrant work that compelled intelligent readers to think, challenged their materialistic pursuits, and expressed an enduring belief in human strength and loyalty. In his acceptance speech for the award, Tendulkar recalled the attack on his person a decade earlier with self-deprecating humor and noted: That slipper and this Saraswati Sammanthats what the composite destiny of this play must be! As the plays creator, I have respect for both verdicts (xi). These apparent contradictions between the literary strengths and theatrical weaknesses of Kanyadaan can be reconciled if we approach it not as a topical vehicle about the politics of untouchability or the formation of a young Dalit writer, but as a play of ideas about the relation of the political to the personal and of the public to the private. Tendulkar deliberately translates an inbammatory sociopolitical issue into intimate familial terms and makes home the battleground of a reverse generational conbict by setting the entire play in the living room of the Deolalikars middle-class bat in Pune. The incompatibility of Brahman and Dalit ceases to be an abstract principle and manifests itself as the friction between parent and child, sister and brother, husband and wife. The mise-en-scne in Kanyadaan thus serves as the indispensable visual environment for Tendulkars philosophical meditation on home and the world: the very cxity of the setting in a drama of violent emotions and turbulent relationships emerges as a deliberate incongruity that becomes germane to the plays structure of meanings. The peculiarity of Kanyadaan as a political play is that every major character regards home as the touchstone of ideology as well as experience. For Nath home is a microcosm of the political worldindeed, of the
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nationwhere by resorting parodically to the language of parliamentary process, legal rights, resolutions, and rules of order, he can claim to uphold democracy vigorously in our home. Democracy in the world, but tyranny at homewe dont deal in double standards like that (3). When Jyoti announces her interest in a Dalit mate, Nath immediately attaches himself to the symbolic signiccance of the event because the match would enable him to realize his political ideals on an intensely personal plane and make his home Indian in the real sense of the term (20). Conversely, Seva cautions Nath not to treat home as a partisan organization in which he can impose his discipline or reduce his daughter to a catalyst in a radical social experiment. She also urges Jyoti not to let the fact of Aruns untouchability obscure the real issues that an educated young woman like her should consider, because her life of privilege cannot be erased overnight, while everything about those people is di,erent (11). Seva suspects Nath of manipulating Jyotis emotions to expiate his own inherited Brahman guilt, while it is clear to her that Arun is an unsuitable man whose upbringing will prevent him from ctting in here, in this home (25). In the relationship between Jyoti and Arun, then, home becomes the predetermined symbol of a di,erence that Tendulkar expresses not in abstract cultural or ideological terms but through the juxtaposition of two basic human necessities: food and shelter. In Aruns mind Jyotis middle-class home is always and only the alienating opposite of his familys one-room hut and shared village toilet; the exquisiteness of Brahman cuisine, only a reminder that his tongue is accustomed to rotting handouts and the besh of dead animals. His crst visit to the Deolalikars bat places home in a perspective that completely disturbs the accepted notions of secure space:
arun: These huge homes can swallow human beings anytime, like crocodiles. jyoti: I cant understand anything about you at all. Some people have a fear of thieves, some of hooligans, some of ghosts. But how can anyone be afraid of a house? On the contrary, in a home one feels safe. arun: I feel safe on the street. The more crowded the street, the more carefree I am. But the moment I cnd myself alone inside four walls of cement and concrete, I feel a knot of fear in my stomach. I feel that I should run out into a crowd immediately. (14)
As Aruns character turns more ugly and exploitative after marriage, it becomes clear that Tendulkars portrait of the Dalit writer does not seek
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to explain how literature has become instrumental in organising and mobilising Dalits for asserting their rights and dignity, or how writing serves as a tool of identity formation and consciousness-raising (Shah, 34). Rather, Aruns identity as a writer is subsumed by his visceral hostility toward the Deolalikars self-assured domesticity and by his desire to claim a communal past and present that is incomprehensible to them. Naths painful reassessment of Arun similarly resists a political interpretation and appears instead as a politician fathers desperate attempt to regain control over his private domain. After he agrees to praise Arun in public while his daughter lies in a nursing home, he is overcome by a repugnance that, ironically, can be expressed only in the castist language of purity and pollution. I felt as though just his being here had polluted this living room, this house, this whole day. Seva, I feel like taking a bath. Wash everything . . . this furniture, this whole place! It has all become polluted, its all clthy. What a man I have got mixed up with, what a man! (51). It is possible to see Naths outburst simplistically as an antiDalit statementas a reactionary suggestion that the twice-born man abhors the untouchable because of the insurmountable lowness of the latters character. But in Tendulkars representation Nath is even more culpable in this moment of disillusionment than Arun. Arun is haunted by ancestral memory and has learned cynically to manipulate the progressive politics of his region to his writerly advantage, but he baunts his power, not his victimhood, and does not misrepresent his nature. Nath, however, deliberately misreads Arun because of his fantasy of radicalism within the home and clings to the idea of Jyotis marriage as a very precious experiment even after she has openly professed her unhappiness (36). The two women are also at fault, but for other reasons. Seva insists that the politics of the world has no place in the home at all and disregards the complex emotional bond that does develop between Jyoti and Arun, because she can see the ill-treatment of Jyoti only as Aruns revenge against the upper castes. Jyoti, in turn, holds herself to a standard of conduct that is meaningless in Aruns world, and at the end she makes an absolute but futile commitment to a man who has brutalized her in marriage. As suggested earlier, these collisions in Kanyadaan are not thinly veiled generalizations about the sociology, psychology, and politics of caste, but the price particular human beings pay for a sociopolitically determined idealism. As the material symbol of, and the unchanging setting for, interpersonal conbicts, the space of the privileged (though politically progressive) home thus takes on multiple meanings in the course of the action
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for the viewer even more than for the reader (see cg. 14). All the real experiences in the play, such as Jyotis premarital a,air with Arun, her abusive marriage, and Naths public humiliation by Arun, take place o,stage; the places associated with themthe one-room village hut of Aruns childhood or Jyotis clthy room in the slumare repeatedly invoked but never shown. Instead of being the proactive, radical, authentically Indian space that Nath envisions, his living room turns gradually into a place of impotent reaction, ine,ective rationalization, and grief. However hard the older Deolalikars try to embrace the people, their home also remains replete with signs of their ritual superiority and socioeconomic advantage. Naths obsession with the symbolic signiccance of Jyotis marriage thus becomes increasingly unjust and hypocritical because the audience watches her, not him, being unhoused by it. Once Jyoti has realized that her life with Arun will not work until she has remade herself in his imageuncannily repeating the injunction in the Manusmritishe renounces the source of her older identity: I am not of this house, I am nothing to any one of you (60). Devastated by Jyotis attack on his untested assumptions about the power of love to redeem debased men, Nath pleads with her to visit him again, but she has arrived at a moment of cnality.
jyoti: (Decisively) No. The moment I come here I dont want to have anything to do with my own world. I want to shut my eyes against the truth I have come to see rather late in life, and become placidly blind again. And from now on, that world of mine is where I have to wake up. (After a pause) Where I have to die. . . . I am not Jyoti Yadunath Deolalikar, but Jyoti Arun Athavale, a Maharin! I dont use the word Dalit because I dont like it. I am not a Dalit, I am a Maharin! Just as there is a Maharani [queen], I am a Maharin! Dont touch me. Dont let even my shadow fall on you. Otherwise my misery might blacken all your happy values! (63)
This is not a realistic but a dialectical moment, when an unfolding argument reaches an anticipated conclusion. What makes the moment more remarkable is the simultaneity with which it invokes Manus ancient text, the modern symbology of home, and contemporary caste politics in Maharashtra. Having abdicated his responsibility in the male exchange of kanyadaan, Nath loses not only his paternal authority but the right to love and protect his daughter. This reversal of rolesin which Jyoti lays down the conditions of her future liferewrites the text
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of Manu while marking a radical moment in the contemporary treatment of gender. But if Jyoti makes a heroic departure, the real place of victimage is the home she is going to, not the home she has left. Among the few protagonists in contemporary Indian theatre, male or female, who assert their will in order to alter their condition, Jyoti stands apart because she chooses a worse life, not a better one. In Tendulkars view, the unaccommodated quality of this life is also a mark of the disjunction between progressive politics and the actuality of oppression, which measures the failure of even the most committed resistance and reform to a,ect real social change. The distinctiveness of his drama of ideas approach appears more clearly in comparison with Elkunchwars Wada chirebandianother play by a Marathi playwright that contends with the familial and sociopolitical dimensions of caste in Maharashtra within the concnes of home. Death in (and of) the House: The Politics of Caste, Land, and Family in Mahesh Elkunchwars Wada chirebandi The noun wada literally means mansion; in addition to wealth, it connotes propriety, self-suciency, and authority. Chirebandi is an adjective that means solid, hewn from stone. Relating the play W ada chirebandi to his own family origins in his 1985 Theatre Academy address, Mahesh Elkunchwar describes the deteriorating Brahman wada as a postcolonial site where an unusable past meets an intolerable present, and from which the only escape is departure: The collapse of the wada [as an institution] did not a,ect us, because all of us left home early. (Only one of my brothers remained behind by arrangement.) But all around me I watched the other wadas crumbling and people being crushed under them. In the period after independence, I could see very clearly the slow, agonizing death of Brahman families, especially in the villages. This process is not yet over (Natyapravas, 89). This image of home suggests a remarkably close real-life enactment of the problem of place that Una Chaudhuri describes as the geopathological basis of modern realist drama. In Elkunchwars play the condition of victimage encompasses four generations of the Deshpande family, which include the ninety-year-old matriarch Dadi, her son, Venkatesh (Tatyaji, whose death is the occasion for the family gathering), Tatyajis wife, Aai, their children, Bhaskar (married to Vahini), Sudhir (married to Anjali), Prabha, and Chandu (both unmarried), and Bhaskars teenage children, Parag and Ranju. With the
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exception of Sudhir, who has lived in Bombay for twenty years, all the other members of the family continue to inhabit the wada while regarding it as the decning problem in their lives. But just as father-son relations in the play are counter-oedipal in nature, there is no escape from home through departure, nor is departure conceived as heroic. Elkunchwars cctional characters do not (cannot) make the choice that he did in his own life. Home is both setting and subject in W ada chirebandi, and its failure is material as well as ideological. As a structure that provides the Deshpande family with its physical environment and the theatre audience with a visual frame, the ancient and respectable but dilapidated mansion is the obsessive center of family discourse and a constant source of anxiety. Elkunchwars stage directions (followed faithfully in Vijaya Mehtas 1985 Kalavaibhav production) batten and contract the mansion into a few contiguous, simultaneously visible rectangular spaces that erase the distinction between the outside (a courtyard and a veranda) and the inside (a central room and two bedrooms). Instead of the citiced living room where self-aware individuals debate their fate (as in Tendulkars Kanyadaan), Elkunchwars realism presents bare boors on which his characters sit or sprawl, broken furniture, dirty rugs, and bedrooms that allow conjugal intimacy as well as family dialogue. The carefully created impression of more rooms further behind the main stage set then fulclls several important purposes (W ada, 1). With the telling exception of Dadi and Aai, the plays characters emerge from, and disappear into, these invisible spaces with clockwork regularity, using the visible space mainly to voice their frustrations, resentments, and recriminations. The circumscribed stage set is also the apt material equivalent of their paltry existence and petty dialoguea perfect measure of how their lives have shrunk in relation to the signs of old splendor that lurk just beyond the audiences celd of vision. The irony deepens as the characters reveal that the unseen mass of the mansion is their paramount problem: it is largely uninhabitable, consumes scarce resources in the present, and exacts relentless labor from the women in the family and also from Chandu, a feminized male who toils like a beast of burden within the house (58). Throughout the play a number of visual-verbal motifsthe absence of electricity, the shape of a tractor sunk into the front yard, the rats who seem to have gnawed holes into the whole mansion (50), and the dust that falls unpredictably from the ceilingkeep the bizarre ecology of home, and the helplessness of its inhabitants, in the foreground. As an ideological construct, the wada embodies the alliance between
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caste and land that the zamindari system of land ownership, institutionalized by the British, maintained from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. By giving permanent, heritable, and transferable property rights to zamindars (landowners) who were traditionally high-caste Brahmans and Kshatriyas (warriors), Lord Cornwalliss Permanent Settlement Act of 1793 instituted patterns of caste ascendancy throughout British India that were not challenged seriously until the post-independence abolition of zamindari by separate legislative acts in the various states during the 1950s. Elkunchwars choice of the caste name Deshpande itself is deeply resonant in this context: what is now a family name in modern Maharashtrian nomenclature was earlier a hereditary title in the countryside, given to a Brahman who served as the head of a village or small rural region for revenue collection and administration. As landowning Brahmans in the Vidarbha region of the 1970s, the Deshpandes have thus witnessed the dissolution of the colonial partnership between high ritual status and economic-political power but are unable to adapt either to the altered culture of the village or to the new agricultural technologies. Their failure is displaced onto home as a place of burdensome cxity: as Bhaskar complains to Sudhir, The times have changed, but the economy of this house has stayed exactly the same (44). Although the family is a closed circle (no outsider actually appears in the play), its conduct is dictated by the village communitys presumed memory of the honor and prestige of the Deshpandes. Such a state of entrapment involves the psychosociology of caste as well as the politics of land, both of which appear in Elkunchwars play as crucial determinants of sociocultural and economic identity. The transformation of home into antihomea place of oppression, resentment, and anxiety rather than nurture and supportis mainly the result of inbexible attitudes to caste within the wada. With patriarchal legitimation and rather timid matriarchal support, Bhaskar has adopted the position that his claims of ritual purity and supremacy ought to remain unchallenged despite the loss of economic and political power. Because the play is set during the thirteen-day ritual mourning period for Tatyaji, the semiotics of caste is fully in evidence in the text, but even more so in performance. The death of the father imposes rituals of puriccation, penance, and gift giving that are among the most dicult disciplines of Brahman dharma (law, duty), especially for the eldest son. In both the Kalavaibhav and the National School of Drama productions of the play (May and December 1985), Bhaskar appeared with the shaved head, cleanshaven face, traditional white cotton clothes, and ash-smeared forehead
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that would mark him as the male heir and chief mourner, making his callow behavior all the more unseemly. As the visitor from the city, bearded (in the Kalavaibhav production) and in ordinary Western dress, Sudhir then becomes the natural spokesman against taboo and ritual, especially when the prospect of ritually feeding the entire village on the thirteenth day of mourning threatens to deprive the family of its last few acres of land. But the lives closest to Elkunchwars image of slow strangulation within the wada are those of Prabha and Chandu, Bhaskars unmarried middle-aged siblings, who were tragically denied higher education and modern occupations because such independence would have compromised the familys prestige. This complex application of religious and cultural codes to individual subjects in Elkunchwars dramatic cction connects remarkably well with recent debates among sociologists and anthropologists over the two dominant views of caste: the essentialist approach, which stresses the subordination of power to ritual status, and the instrumentalist approach, which considers the modiccation of hierarchical relations by modern factors such as property status, political power, education, and occupation (see Dumont; Searle-Chatterjee and Sharma, 124, 4971). In keeping with the social history of the region, the problem of caste in the play is also inseparable from the politics of land. The rise of Brahmans as a ruling class under the Peshwa rulers of Pune in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries positioned them against the Marathas, members of the Kshatriya caste who had emerged as the rural elite during the reign of Shivaji, the late seventeenth-century warrior-king. The Deshpandes position as traditional Brahman landowners in Dharangaon is therefore an inherently embattled one. The anti-Brahman, anticaste, and land reform movements in Maharashtra have been among the strongest in twentieth-century India, creating a powerful awareness within the state about the problems of untouchability and dispossession, but also mobilizing a form of reverse discrimination against the upper castes. As in Tendulkars Kanyadaan, caste politics in Elkunchwars play evokes the powerful late-colonial and postcolonial critique of caste by Ambedkar, the former untouchable who became instrumental to the constitutional abolition of untouchability. Nagpur, where Ambedkar led the mass conversion of 200,000 Mahars to Buddhism in 1956, is the largest city in the Vidarbha region where Elkunchwars play is set. When Bhaskar blames the Brahman haters in the village and the city for the loss of his patrimony (44), he is rationalizing his failures as a cultivator, landowner, and manager of family a,airs, but he is also invokingespecially for a Marathi
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audiencethis long- and short-term cultural history of the state. In addition, the Vidarbha and Marathwada regions have had a strong farmers movement that seeks to transform the political and cultural economy of the countryside. As Gail Omvedt reminds us, such a movement is no longer about sharecroppers or poor peasants cghting their landlords; it involves independent commodity producers, peasants caught up in the throes of market production, dependent on the state and capital for their inputs of fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, electricity and water and for the purchase of their products (1001). As cultivators, the castes that have been low in the inherited ritual hierarchy have become economically empowered as well as politically enfranchised in recent decades. For a contemporary Indian audience, therefore, the high-toned helplessness of the Deshpandes in W ada chirebandi concrms that their obsolete methods of cultivation have failed in a cercely competitive agrarian economy, while their pride of birth has become irrelevant in an entrepreneurial culture. The problems of caste and land are thus most pertinent to the familys relations with the outside world. Bhaskars adversarial relationship with Sudhir and Anjali, the Bombay couple, recasts the problem within the house as a tension between village and city and between the cultures of two regions within Maharashtra, Vidarbha and Konkan. Sudhirs migration to the metropolis twenty years earlier for the sake of better professional prospects was part of the urban pull that has left only the dregs in the village and has ruined the youngest generation of Deshpandes, turning Parag into an alcoholic and Ranju into a self-centered fantasist. What Sudhir has actually fashioned for himself in Bombay is a dicult, goal-oriented, lower-middle-class existence in a two-room bat, but for his village relations his life has all the romance of freedom and self-suciency. Sudhirs journey from the wada to his city bat replicates on a smaller scale the geographical, material, psychological, and cultural displacements of diasporafrom periphery to center, from plenty to scarcity, from community to isolation, and from constraining tradition to ambiguous freedom. Predictably, he feels the same kind of nostalgia for home and the desire for eventual return that members of a diaspora feel for the homeland. That is why he refuses to jeopardize the old family house for the sake of Tatyajis funeral expenses: Its because of this house, because it calls to us so strongly, that we come running. If this goes, then our home will be gone (45). Sudhirs Bombay-born Konkani wife, Anjali, is in contrast, a liminal cgure who was ostracized by the family for years because of her di,erent
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cultural background. In the course of the play, the politics of family become polarized around the geopolitical terms Varhad (the vernacular Marathi name for Vidarbha that the family uses) and Konkan (the coastal strip between the Deccan plateau and the Arabian Sea), with the Varhadis being associated with ritual superiority, ancestral pride, tradition, generosity, innocence, and warmth, but also with wastefulness and impotence, and the Konkanis with a self-centered modernity, territoriality, coldness, and cunning, but also with beauty, intelligence, and success. A major feature of the original Marathi play, fully communicable in performance, is the di,erence of speech between Anjali and the Deshpande family, with Sudhir suspended between the registers of the city and the country; regrettably, this is a dimension which could not be accommodated in the [English] translation (Bandyopadhyay, ix). Anjali cnds it irritating that her husband should begin talking like the locals whenever he visits home, while Sudhir teases her about her unresponsiveness to the sweetness of the Varhadi language (52). The family resents Anjalis indi,erence to its many troubles, but the ambivalence of belonging/not belonging and the insidious power of place emerge at the end when she unknowingly lapses into local forms of speech. The various thematic strands in the playcaste and land, tradition and modernity, wealth and impoverishmentcome together in the symbolism of two antithetical objects, the tractor sunk into the ground in the Deshpandes front yard and the family gold (in the form of the womens jewelry) that Bhaskar has concealed from everyone else within the house. Although both objects are useless in the present, their potential for use has reference to past failures and future possibilities. The tractor (mentioned frequently, but not actually shown on stage) is a ruined artifact of technology, something Bhaskar could not control even though his familys well-being depended on it. Its condition is exactly like that of the decrepit mansion; in a parody of myth, Vahini compares it to the ceremonial bull, Nandi, who guards Shivas temple, and symbolizes a divinity that the Deshpandes desire by virtue of their ritual status. In practice, the tractor is a daily menace to family members, causing injury to several of them in the dark. The gold is an inert but real form of wealth that, unlike everything else around it, has remained unchanged in appearance and that has appreciated unimaginably in value. It is also much more than just gold. In the plays most theatrical scene (6465), the only moment when the feminine tradition within the mansion asserts itself, Vahini puts on all the gold ornaments at night at her husbands urging and feels transformed by the ghostly touch of the female ancestors who
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have passed down the heirlooms over a century. Conversely, as a saleable commodity, the gold represents the only hope of a new life somewhere else for Aai, Prabha, and Chandu. But Aai also has the moral sense to recognize that this wealth, although a feminine possession, was created by the labor of generations of peasants, and the Deshpandes have no real claim to it. The symbolism of these two objects, the tractor and the gold, reaches a parallel culmination when they become the cnal agents of dynastic collapse. A cut sustained in the dark against the tractor causes gangrene in Chandus leg, bringing him close to amputation, if not death; Ranju steals the gold and elopes to Bombay with her English tutor in the hope of fulclling her fantasies of movie stardom. In a pathetic attempt to preserve the family honor, Bhaskar refuses to report the loss to the police and sells the remaining acres of family land at a throwaway price to meet the obligatory expense of Tatyajis last rites. Filled with the dead and the dying (Tatyaji, Dadi, Aai, Prabha, Chandu), the decaying structure of the house is all that is left at the end, though in a moment of overdetermined irony, Vahini invites Anjali and Sudhir to return whenever they wish to, because it is still their home. Home under Siege: The Politics of Religion and Community in Cyrus Mistrys Doongaji House In Wada chirebandi, the mansions inhabitants maintain an oppositional relation to home as physical and ideological space even as they submit to its codes: if only they could get away, they would cnd a better life somewhere else. In contrast, Cyrus Mistrys Doongaji House, written originally in English, creates a relationship of identity between home and its occupants because there is nowhere else to go, and together they are paradigmatic of the minority Parsi community negotiating majority Hindu culture in metropolitan Bombay. Mistrys meticulous description of the stage set in the printed text of the play establishes this dual frame. The living room of the Pochkhanawalla family is colored by a faint, yellowish hue of mouldiness and dust, and its curious articles of furniture in various stages of disuse and decay . . . create the e,ect of a few decades of cluttered accumulation and, above all, of impoverishment (viii). The three-storied building itself, evoked through cracked walls, exposed sca,olding, and glimpses of the street, shows alarming signs of age and degeneration at the beginning and collapses with the arrival of the crst monsoon rains, killing its oldest resident and displacing all the others.
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Mistry adds that an imaginative set designer may ignore his very naturalistic description and try to achieve the same overall e,ect by using somewhat more abstract means (viii). But in either case, unlike Elkunchwars wada, the exclusively Parsi residential building in a ghettoized neighborhood in Bombay is not so much a subject in itself as a cgure for the collective alienation of Parsis in a city they had dominated throughout the colonial period. This homology between decaying structures and the state of the community seems to be commonplace. Tanya M. Luhrmanns recent ethnographic account of Parsis begins with a vignette of Fort House, the central Bombay residence of Sir Jamshetji Jeejeebhoy, a wealthy Parsi businessman who became the crst Indian baronet: gutted by cre and abandoned by commerce, the facade is an icon of a community in decline (Luhrmann, 1). The narrative of Parsi ascent and decline can be understood only with reference to the communitys unique, millennium-long history in India. As Zoroastrians who had bed persecution after the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, Parsis remained concentrated in the state of Gujarat, especially around the port of Surat, for several hundred years. They began a fateful association with the port city of Bombay in the seventeenth century as principal shipbuilders for the British East India Company. Over the next two centuries, Parsis contributed more than any other Indian community to Bombays development as Indias leading colonial port and cnancial center, gradually acquiring control of a large portion of the citys industry, banking, business, and trade, while also gaining prominence in the professions of law, medicine, and education. A diasporic community thus transformed itself into a colonial elite by identifying thoroughly with British colonial culture and enterprise, in which the community found a concrmation of its own exceptional character. Luhrmann comments that under colonial rule, the attributes of the good Parsi became hierarchized, in part through the adoption of hierarchized British self-description: like the British colonizer, the good Parsi was more truthful, more pure, more charitable, more progressive, more rational, and more masculine than the Hindu-of-the-masses (16). The di,erences of race and religion from the Indian majority, which had always set the Parsis apart, now became the basis of the immigrants arguments for their racial and religious superiority to the natives, leading to an emphasis on endogamy and eugenics. In the late colonial period, this sense of separation from the rest of Indian society also meant a voluntary detachment on the part of most Parsis from the dominant HinduMuslim polarities of Indian history, culture, and politics.
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The principal diculty that the Indian Parsi community faces in the postcolonial period is that its attitudes of racial, religious, and cultural exclusiveness have continued into the present without the colonial contexts that provisionally sustained them. Having identiced themselves with the symbolic discourse of colonial authority for more than a century, Parsis have been trapped, as it were, by a colonial world view that has not yet (for Parsis in India, at any rate) adjusted to the change in power of the postcolonial era (Luhrmann, 17). The thousand-year history of the Parsis in western India has therefore been foreshortened into a colonial/postcolonial opposition because Parsi memory itself seems to circulate only within the boundaries of colonial-era glory and postcolonial disempowerment. The problem of a minority community not being able to cnd a place for itself in a new nation also suggests a similarity between the Parsis and other postcolonial ethnoreligious minorities, such as the Tunisian Jews described by Albert Memmi: The religious state of nations being what it is, and nations being what they are, the Jew cnds himself, in a certain measure, outside of the national community. . . . I feel more or less set apart from that life of communal nationality; I cannot live spontaneously the nationality modern law grants me (when it does grant it). . . . Whether I like it or not, the history of the country in which I live is, to me, a borrowed history (Portrait, 19697). Although Parsis continue to be unusually prominent in the life of communal nationality, a community that demographically represents about one-sixth of one percent of the total Indian population has inevitably experienced a revision of roles in a heterogeneous society. Ironically, the obscurity of Cyrus Mistry as a playwright and the unusually precarious existence of Doongaji House in both print and performance seem to replicate in the world of theatre the problem of Parsi marginalization in the wider Indian world. This play is Mistrys only published work for the stagehis other writing consists of cction, screenplays, and journalism, while a second play (The Legacy of Rage) has remained unpublished. The manuscript of Doongaji House won the Sultan Padamsee Award for the best new English play from Bombays Theatre Group in 1978, but the play did not achieve production until 1990 and appeared in print only in 1991 through the generosity of a well-wisher. The 1990 production was also by a virtually unknown group called Stage Two, and the venue was not a conventional theatre but the auditorium of the Alliance Franaise in Bombay. In an understated publishers note to the play, Adil Jussawalla commented that the various reasons for the delay
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in production, if brought to light and scrutinized, would provide an accurate picture of the conditions in which the English language theatre has functioned during the last cfteen years or so. The obstacles in the way of getting an original play such as this one performed are many and are often extremely dicult to overcome (Cyrus Mistry, v). Exacerbated by Mistrys linguistic medium, this dismal stage history embodies the inbuilt obsolescence of the Parsi play in English in the metropolitan culture of Bombay, which is now dominated by Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi-language theatres. The only production of the play in translation, in fact, was Chetan Datars Marathi version for Awishkar in 2000. The scant exposure on stage also suggests that the proper context for Mistrys play is not so much drama (in English or any other language) but the literature of Parsi self-representation that includes the poetry of Keki Daruwalla, Adil Jussawalla, and Kersi Katrak; the cction of Rohinton Mistry (Cyruss younger brother) and Bapsi Sidhwa (a Pakistani writer); and the poetry and drama of Gieve Patel. Such a contextualization, however, does not circumvent the historical irony that a play by a Parsi author about the life of Parsis in post-independence India has not found success in a theatrical tradition that had its modern beginnings in the Parsi theatre of the colonial period. Motivated by the impulse to memorialize a community in crisis, Mistry incorporates the constitutive features of Parsi identity with ethnographic thoroughness in Doongaji House. The aging protagonist Hormusji Pochkhanawalla displays the eccentric combination of Zoroastrian orthodoxy, colonialist nostalgia, and evident poverty that has created the stereotype of the crazy Parsi bawaji (old man). He in turn regards his two sons as irresponsible, weak-willed young men of the type that the community holds largely responsible for its rapid decline: the older one, Rusi, has emigrated to Canada, and the younger, Fali, is an alcoholic bookie. Because both sons have also violated the rules of endogamyRusi marrying a Canadian and Fali a Christian woman employed as a nannyHormusji considers them guilty of miscegenation and feels that the blood has been polluted (20). This paternalistic outrage is ironic because, following the loss of his family business thirty years earlier, Hormusji has lived o, the labor of two women, his wife, Piroja, and his daughter, Avan, whose salary supports the household. The atmosphere of disuse and decay in the Pochkhanawallas three-room bat completes the community procle of once elegant but now forgotten lives, exposed to the outside world in all their oddity when the building collapses and brings in outsiders for the crst time:
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purveyor . . . What a house this is! By God! I didnt know such places existed. Its a museum piece. A zoo! Such samples Ive met today . . . one better than the other. This house should have been certiced unct for habitation years ago! (58)
Mistrys most important tool for evoking the quality of Parsi life is language. The native language of Bombay Parsis is a dialect of Gujarati called Parsi-Gujarati, though a substantial number of them choose to be monolingual in English. Mistry uses a Gujarati-inbected English that places the speakers simultaneously in the two worlds of their experience. In the medium of this language, Hormusjis childhood memories of sacred kashti prayers and the Parsi Towers of Silence (funeral sites) can coexist with memories of classical western music, family silver, French confectionary, imported liquor, and games of rummy. Both his Zoroastrianism and his deep-rooted Europhilia become credible. In addition, the dialect has the political e,ect of separating the tribe from the majority languages of the city, standard Gujarati and Marathi. Mirrored in language, the colonial/postcolonial dialectic that occupies present-day Parsis assumes a highly personalized form in Hormusjis consciousness because he regards political independence as simply an event that reversed his communitys relation to the majority Hindu culture. In a double-edged critique that implicates both minority and majority attitudes, Mistry concnes Hormusji to a posture of immobilizing rage that cnds relief in fantasies of domination and violence. His most vivid memory, for instance, is of the Prince of Waless visit to Bombay in 1921, when Parsis proclaimed their loyalty to the British Crown by attending celebrations that were boycotted by Indian nationalists. Hormusji recalls the event as a Parsi triumph because the community overcame its Hindu opponents in the riots that left cfty-three people dead. For him, the end of colonialism was therefore the end of personal and community power, as well as civility and culture, and Hindu dominance in the present is an illegitimate usurpation of colonial authority. You dont understand these people, Piroja . . . Theyve got completely out of hand. They think it is their Raj now. . . . Sometimes I just feel like taking a horsewhip and baying them! . . . But those days are gone. The Parsis of old are all gone. This is a generation of schoolgirls (10). The absence of such colonialist regret in Wada chirebandi points to the fundamental di,erence between Hindu and Parsi perceptions of colonial culture. Upper-caste zamindars were also privileged during the colonial period, but that does not lead the Deshpandes in Elkunchwars play to regard colonialism itself as an era
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of privilege. This disparity merely emphasizes the extent to which the Parsis comprador status in the colonial regime depended on their sense of racial and religious di,erence. The present exacerbates Hormusjis contempt and hatred for the majority Hindu population because Mistry also incorporates in his play the political developments that have launched a new phase in the history of communal relations in Bombay. Since its inception in 1968, the Shiv Sena (the Army of Shiva), a militant and fundamentalist Hindu organization, has argued for greater control of Bombays economy and politics by sons of the soil and has expressed its larger territorial ambitions in the slogan Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians. Based on language and caste, the Senas chauvinism is directed against all outsidersHindus from South India, Muslims, Christians, and secular left-wing activists. But it is particularly infuriating to the Parsis because of their deep involvement in the history and development of the city of Bombay. The point is not whether Parsis are speciccally targeted by the Senas politics, but that Hindu fundamentalism alienates, frightens, and angers this once-powerful minority, and that its writers regard communal di,erences as the decning condition of Parsi life. In these respects, Cyrus Mistrys play is closely intertextual with Such a Long Journey (1991) and Family Matters (2002), two novels by his younger brother, Rohinton Mistry, that also o,er the same family- and community-centered narrative with a Parsi building at its core. In addition, the Parsi-Hindu antagonism is a version of the more deadly enmity between Hindus and Muslims, which forms a backdrop of violence in Doongaji House, as it does in Rohinton Mistrys novels. Aside from the language riots of the early 1950s between Gujarati and Marathi speakers in Bombay (which eventually led to the formation of the state of Maharashtra from territories belonging to the Bombay Presidency and two other states of British India, Gujarat and the Central Provinces), the city of Bombay had avoided serious civic confrontation until the communal riots of January 1993, which happened in the wake of the Babri Masjid episode in Ayodhya. The atmosphere of frustration, fear, and violence in Doongaji House (written in 1978) is thus all the more remarkablean early foreshadowing of a postcolonial politics that has deliberately, and tragically, manipulated religious and communal di,erence. Home, Gender, and Nation Written in two di,erent languages (Marathi and English) over a sevenyear period, set in di,erent locations in the state of Maharashtra, and
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linked to radically unequal stage histories, the three plays discussed above reveal unexpected connections across languages, classes, and regions despite the speciccity of their respective narratives. W ada chirebandi and Doongaji House are postcolonial texts in that the crises they enact are rooted in colonial history and the dynamics of decolonization. In terms of a recent decnition of the features of postcolonial drama, they represent acts that respond to the experience of imperialism, whether directly or indirectly (Gilbert and Tompkins, 11). Although the communities they invoke have little in common, both plays paradoxically equate colonialism with socioeconomic ascendancy, and political independence with a loss of ancestral privilege that leaves the post-independence generations sapped of energy and immobilized by frustration. They also approach gender and nationhood in ways that coincide with current emphases in postcolonial theory. In both plays the destruction of home results from the anachronistic impositions of an ine,ective or corrupt male will embodied by Tatyaji and Bhaskar in W ada chirebandi and Hormusji in Doongaji Housethat complements the e,ete gestures of rebellion among the younger males (Sudhir, Parag, Fali). Both also show the patriarchal order as being easily undermined by a subversive female will that deconstructs the identity between female virtue and family honor (Ranjus bight to Bombay in W ada chirebandi) or a liberated female will that rejects male authority (Avans departure from home at the end of Doongaji House). Women are the more resourceful and resilient gender, whether they resort to cautious territoriality (Vahini, Anjali, Avan) or o,er sympathetic community (Prabha, Aai, Piroja). Furthermore, the critique of patriarchy in both plays extends to the nation as a male conceptionthe analogy is between home as a male possession and material construct (something deliberately put together) and the nation as an imagined community. The disintegration of the home points to a fundamental conceptual baw which destroys the nation. In Elkunchwars play, the mansion is said to be on the verge of collapse because there is no upkeep (22), but it cannot be kept up because it is so largethe very grandeur of the conception makes the edicce unsustainable. Likewise, Hormusji wonders at the end of Mistrys play why the owner did not use a sturdier stone, a faster cement, when [he] decided to raise this house (62), a lament that applies both to the Parsi community and the nation, which now appears to be an under-imagined or perhaps unimaginable community. These are conscious allegories of the crisis of secular nationhood in India, which is an important referent in the postcolonial theorizing of the nation. The dense stage history of
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Wada chirebandi (see chapter 3), which has conferred a classic quality on Elkunchwars drama of home, society, and the nation, suggests that his portrait of inexorable social and moral collapse touches a nerve in numerous Indian venues, especially when it is adapted to various regional cultures through translation. The enactment of the same crisis in Doongaji House reinforces the signiccance of such narratives in a manner that renders the plays obscurity in print and performance more or less irrelevant. In comparison with the retrospective, elegiac mood of these two plays, Tendulkars Kanyadaan pulsates with a modernizing energy that is committed to reform, progress, and emancipation. Nath Deolalikar, the enlightened nationalist, represents not orthodoxy and stasis but iconoclasm and change. His self-consciously antipatriarchal stance also seems to separate him decisively from his counterparts, Tatyaji and Hormusji. As father and husband, Nath takes pride in not imposing his will on his family, and as a politician he appears to harbor public motives that are not patently coercive or corrupt. However, Tendulkars preoccupation with the father-daughter relationship and the clash of male and female wills (which are both subsidiary interests in the plays of Elkunchwar and Mistry) indicates his interest in testing the premises of modernity. The disastrous consequences of Naths attempt to treat his home as a microcosm of the nation impose a limit on progressive agendas and enforce the idea that home and the world are not interchangeable. Naths selfabsolving view of Jyotis marriage as an act of free will on her part also appears disingenuous because the cnal confrontation between them reveals that her choice was guided by a devotion to his ideas. Jyoti, in turn, embodies a female will that breaks free of parental constraints and becomes fully autonomous in the course of the play, capable of challenging and dissolving family bonds. This unqualiced superiority makes her a radically modern cgure in comparison with Prabha, Ranju, and Avan, even when her freedom is exercised in self-destructive, not selfaggrandizing ways. Complicating this familiar gender conbict in Kanyadaan is the ancient, culturally ingrained idea of paternal responsibility toward the daughter, which Nath violates unwittingly but irreversibly. It is therefore appropriate that he should trigger, and be sole witness to, the symbolic collapse of the social edicce at the end of this play, unlike the larger groups of characters who witness the passing of their world in the other two plays. The modest stage success of Kanyadaan in comparison with Wada chirebandi does show that its narrative lacks the same universal sweep and is less easily adaptable to the culture of other regions in
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India. Where Elkunchwars realism is sometimes hard to separate from the texture of real life itself, Tendulkars realism also highlights the element of discussion and does not mandate a credible relation between argument and actuality. Both authorial approaches lead, however, to the same outcome, though for opposite reasons: in the plays of Elkunchwar and Mistry home becomes an unmanageable place, while in Tendulkars play it becomes repugnant because of its very manageability. With home as cctional setting and family relationships as the testing ground, all three plays move outward from private experience into the public issues of caste, class, gender, ethnicity, and material survival that are rapidly redecning the middle-class urban present in India.
chapter 9
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Antirealism, Gender, and Contemporary Folk Theatre
Traditional Indian Theatre and the Status of Folk Forms In the theoretical and polemical discourses that have elaborated contemporary Indian theatres encounter with tradition since the 1960s, the notion of tradition usually encapsulates the full range of indigenous modes of drama, theatre, and performance that emerged diachronically over two millennia but have assumed a synchronous existence in the present. Hence the term traditional Indian theatre signices, in the singular or as a mass noun, the secular and classical Sanskrit drama of Kalidasa, Bhasa, and Shudraka; postclassical North Indian religious forms, such as ramlila and raslila; classically derived balletic forms, such as kathakali and kudiyattam (Kerala); regional folk forms, such as yakshagana (Karnataka) and bhavai (Gujarat); and intermediary popular forms, such as nautanki (Uttar Pradesh), tamasha (Maharashtra), and jatra (Bengal). As suggested earlier, such promiscuity of signiccation is essential for maintaining the near-Manichaean and resolutely ahistorical opposition between Indian tradition and Western modernity. In nativist, revivalist, or culturalnationalist perspectives, all indigenous forms that predate colonialism or lie outside the sphere of European norms are valorized as natural, organic, and transcendent, whereas the products of Western inbuence are dismissed as articcial, derivative, and trivial. Moreover, such monolithic constructions of an always redemptive Indian tradition are justiced in these perspectives by reference to the cultural continuity, formal
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interconnectedness, and aesthetic unity of so-called traditional forms all qualities that supposedly manifest themselves unproblematically in the present. Writing in defense of the theatre of roots in 1985, after two decades of intense experimentation by Indian playwrights, directors, and performers in the contemporary use of traditional forms, Suresh Awasthi thus asserts that never before during the last one century and more was theatre practised in such diversiced form, and at the same time with such unity in essential theatrical values (Defence, 85). In practice, however, the repository of tradition has been neither as inclusive nor as eclectic as such arguments suggest. Most of the critical and creative engagement with indigenous forms in the post-independence period has come to center on the folk performance genres popular in various rural regions throughout the country because the category of folk brings into play the most complex range of ideological, political, sociocultural, and aesthetic polarities in contemporary India. In one major scheme of polarization, the term folk complements and opposes the term classical on a continuum that decnes the two dominant Indian modes of cultural transmission and preservation, whether the object in question is language, literary form, dance, music, the plastic and visual arts, ritual, performance, or everyday life. The classical/folk duality in turn corresponds to a series of binaries in which the crst term is implicitly privileged in relation to the secondmetropolitan/provincial, elite/popular, sophisticated/crude, urban/rural, and written/oral. In a second scheme of polarization, folk forms embody the culture of the village rather than that of the city at an ideological moment when the sociocultural disjunctions and economic inequalities between these two domains have become persistent national problems. Commenting on the unfortunate dichotomy between urban and rural life . . . [which] is expressed in disparities in economic standards, services, educational levels and cultural developments, Badal Sircar links the historical development of the Indian city with colonial interests and that of the village with a traditional indigenous culture that even colonialism could not destroy (Third Theatre, 1). The city-village relation in India thus becomes (perhaps unintentionally) a version of Raymond Williamss analysis of unequal city-country relations in the feudal and industrial West, conferring the same priority on the village as a materially exploited but culturally resilient space (see Williams, 4654). With specicc reference to theatre, this ideological conception of the village creates its own oppositions. The energy and vitality of folk performance genres appear all the more remarkable in view of the subservient
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socioeconomic position of the village in the modern period, while the sophisticated cultural forms of the city seem self-indulgent and lifeless. In terms of aesthetic form, the essentially stylized, antimodern, antirealistic, open-air, environmental qualities of folk performance constitute a form of total theatre antithetical to the seemingly regimented products of the enclosed proscenium stage. Similarly, as the participant in a compensatory collective ritual that fulclls the needs of the community, the rural spectator stands in signal contrast to the isolated urban theatregoer in a darkened auditorium. The political conception of folk theatre as a peoples theatre evokes in part the European Enlightenment decnition of folk as the people. But in India it also points to the popular appeal of village forms, their potential for subversive social meaning, and their connection with various forms of populist street theatre. The folk repertoire thus appears as a historical legacy as well as a powerful resource in the present. The contemporary cultural and political potential of folk forms crst came into view during the 1940s, when the Indian Peoples Theatre Association based its program for a cultural awakening of the masses of India on a revitalization of the countrys traditional arts and rich cultural heritage. The IPTAs traditionalism was the crst major modern reaction against two deeply entrenched colonial practices: a century-long denigration of corrupt indigenous forms by the colonial and Indian urban elite and the thorough commercialization of urban proscenium theatre by bourgeois Parsi entrepreneurs. Folk theatre thus answered the need for noncommercial forms that were already familiar and appealing to the people and that could become the basis of meaningful sociopolitical cctions about their lives. By speaking to both kinds of oppressed folk urban industrial workers and peasants caught in preindustrial agrarian economiesfolk forms could also attempt to bridge the problematic urban-rural divide and sustain a mass theatre movement of the kind envisioned by the IPTA. Malini Bhattacharya notes that the call to resuscitate folk culture was not a purely revivalist slogan, but embodies the strategy of promoting a vigorous exchange between di,erent existing forms of entertainment, and of being the cultural forum where urban and rural sections of the struggling people might communicate (Bengal, 7). In theory, the premodernity of folk forms could make the IPTAs political message of opposition to fascism, imperialism, and capitalism accessible to mass audiences in both cities and villages. In actuality, because most IPTA functionaries were politicized urban theatre workers, such intermediary forms as tamasha and powada in
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Maharashtra and jatra in Bengal became the most important folk genres in the associations radical repertoire. The IPTA also achieved its greatest successes with plays in the naturalistic and propagandist modes, such as Nabanna, Zubeida, Pathhan, Roar China, Yeh kis ka khoon hai? and You Made Me a Communist. The political playwright G. P. Deshpande dismisses the IPTAs fetish of folk as a sign of middle-class sentimentalism masquerading as socialist realism (Fetish, 49). But the movements historical role in decning the culture of the people as the basis of theatre in the new nation remains unassailable. As Sudhi Pradhan argues, all the major political parties in the 1940s were interested in populist cultural forms, but mere anti-communism could not lead them further. It was left to the Marxists to disclose the potency of the art forms that are close to the people, their immense possibilities, their untapped source of strength and thereby the opening of the magic door to mass mobilisation (1: xiv). In the half-century since the decline of the IPTA as a nationwide theatre movement, numerous other developments have secured a role for folk culture and performance in contemporary theatre that goes far beyond the specicc political objectives of the 1940s. To begin with, the incremental engagement with folk materials on the part of theatre workers over the course of these decades is quantitatively remarkable for its scale, and qualitatively signiccant for having shaped several major post-independence careers. In the crst category there are playwrightdirectors Habib Tanvir, Chandrashekhar Kambar, K. N. Panikkar, and Ratan Thiyam, whose theatre has been devoted either largely or exclusively to the practice of folk and traditional forms and represents, in aggregate, the most thorough exploration of the resources of tradition. Populated by earthy rural characters and imprinted with the pressures and divisions of village life, the plays of Tanvir and Kambar represent the low end of this spectrum of experimentation (in terms of theme and e,ect, not artistic quality); more or less comparable to the Mahabharata plays discussed earlier, the numerous productions of Panikkar and Thiyam represent the high end. In keeping with the localized nature of folk culture, each of these practitioners has also become strongly associated with the forms and language of a specicc region: Tanvir with the tribals of the Chhattisgarh area in central India, Kambar with the bayalata form of north Karnataka, Panikkar with the folk and classical traditions of coastal Kerala, and Thiyam with the Meitei tribal culture of Manipur. The second important category consists of playwrights like Girish Karnad and Vijay Tendulkar and directors like B. V. Karanth and Vijaya
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Mehta who do not limit themselves to folk materials but practice a variety of theatrical modes. However, they have produced pathbreaking work during the last three decades by employing folk narratives and conventions in specicc plays. Thus, among the classics of post-independence antirealist practice, Karnads Hayavadana draws on a twelfth-century folktale and rebexively employs the conventions of the yakshagana folk form of Karnataka, which both B. V. Karanth and Vijaya Mehta incorporated into their respective productions of 1973. Karnads Naga-mandala incorporates two separate Kannada folktales but does not follow any particular folk form; instead, it gives inanimate objects (such as the bames in village lamps) human representation, includes dance and music, and makes extensive use of mime to dispel the illusion of realist action. Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal relies extensively on the tamasha and dashavatar forms of Maharashtra for its corrosive cctionalization of late eighteenth-century Maratha history. In addition to the production of Hayavadana mentioned above, Karanths productions of Chadrashekhar Kambars Jokumaraswami (in the bayalata form) and Barnam vana (a yakshagana version of Macbeth) are among his most celebrated. Mehtas well-known productions of Brechts Caucasian Chalk Circle (as Ajab nyaya vartulacha) and The Good Woman of Setzuan (as Devajine karuna keli ) also employ the conventions of tamasha. In addition to these examples of new and experimental work by established practitioners, there are at least two other means by which folk forms have proliferated on the contemporary stage. Convinced of the value of the theatrical experience they provide, some directors have redeveloped and re-presented well-known older folk plays, such as the Gujarati Jasma odan, directed by Shanta Gandhi for the National School of Drama in 1968 (cg. 11); Rasiklal Parekhs Mena gurjari, directed in the Malvi language by Bharat Dave for the NSD Repertory Company in 198081; and the Rajasthani Amar Singh Rathore. Pursuing a performancecentered form of intertextuality (discussed further in chapter 10), other directors have presented a large number of Sanskrit and European plays in what Nemichandra Jain calls the new [folk] idiom in theatre. Shudrakas Mrichchhakatika in Habib Tanvirs vernacular Chhattisgarhi version (as Mitti ki gadi ), Nikolai Gogols The Inspector General in the nautanki style of Uttar Pradesh (as Ala afsar), and Brechts The Threepenny Opera in the tamasha style of Maharashtra (as Teen paishacha tamasha) exemplify this trend. As a result of increased interest in indigenous styles of performance, the category of folk itself has expanded in two ways: in one direction, it now includes virtually all indigenous forms except classical
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Sanskrit theatre, and, in the other, it has brought lesser-known folk forms such as the bhand-pather of Kashmir, the naqal of Punjab, the swang of Rajasthan, the nach of Madhya Pradesh, and the kathakatha of Bengal actively into the repertoire of theatrical experiments (cg. 15). This explosive increase in formal experimentation at the level of practice coexists with a determined bureaucratic e,ort to generate and sustain interest in folk forms through various forms of patronage and conservation. During the drama seminar of 1956, the only folk genre discussed at length (by Shanta Gandhi and other participants) was the bhavai form of Gujarat, although the individual presentations on theatre in Karnataka, Kerala, Manipur, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, and Tamil Nadu contained short asides on existing folk traditions. In an ironic echo of the IPTAs platform, the seminars formal recommendations to the Sangeet Natak Akademi (recorded in the academys Report for 195358) included the opinion that the regeneration of the Indian theatre can only be possible by revitalising the traditional folk forms so as to narrow the gulf between the dramatic forms that have developed during the last hundred years and the survivals from the past. The Seminar recommends that
Fig. 15. Rupa ji receives a mortal blow from Raja Siddharaj. Scene from Jasma odan, directed by Shanta Gandhi, NSD Repertory Company, New Delhi, 1968. Courtesy of the NSD Repertory Company.
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adequate steps be taken not only for the careful and scienticc study of the folk drama in di,erent parts of India but also for preventing their decay and disappearance and for giving them recognition and new life (31). Over the next cfteen years, the scholar-critic Suresh Awasthi took the initiative in organizing institutional events where the resources of folk culture became the subject of focused debate. As secretary of the Bharatiya Natya Sangh (Indian Theatre Guild), he organized a national seminar on Contemporary Playwriting and Play Production in 1961; his own presentation dealt with the question of traditional theatre and its relevance for contemporary theatre work (Defence, 86). To his dismay, in the modernist climate of that decade, Awasthi was dubbed a revivalist and reactionary by practitioners of the colonial theatre and reporters of theatre events. They maintained that traditional theatre had no relevance for contemporary work . . . [and] spoke as prophets of the doom of traditional theatre (Defence, 86). In 1971 (exactly ten years later), as secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, Awasthi organized a National Roundtable on the Contemporary Relevance of Traditional Theatre, whose participants included the most important playwrights, directors, and theatre critics of the time.1 The proceedings of this seminar were published in a special issue of the Akademis journal, Sangeet Natak (no. 21, JulySeptember 1971). From 1965 to 1975, Awasthi also managed a program of sponsored traditional performances, festivals and exhibitions in Delhi and other centres, which in his own words met initially with disapproval and indi,erence but gradually acquired the character of a movement (86). The Akademis Scheme of Assistance to Young Theatre Workers who were interested in experimenting with traditional forms (198494) was very much in the same line of state patronage, sponsoring four regional and one national festival every year for a decade. In 1985, the journal Sangeet Natak published a special double issue on the subject of the Traditional Idiom in Contemporary Theatre (nos. 77 78), guest-edited by Nemichandra Jain, with Awasthi as a principal contributor. With the exception of Shanta Gandhi, G. Shankara Pillai, and Awasthi himself, this discussion shifted the debate over tradition to a new generation of playwrights and directors, once more with the overall conclusion that after more than a century of almost barren attempts at playwriting and staging after Western models, our theatre seems at last ready to reject this imitative pursuit and to venture into its own distinctive, indigenous territory ( Jain, Some Notes, 9).2 This forty-year programmatic e,ort is marked by circular reasoning critics of Indian theatre must pay serious attention to traditional forms
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because they constitute the basis of extensive and increasingly signiccant practice, but the extent and signiccance of the practice are in large measure determined by state patronage and bureaucratically sponsored debate. Notwithstanding the faulty logic, the extensive engagement with antirealistic, nonurban forms has unquestionably reoriented contemporary thinking about theatre, producing revised conceptions of the dramatic text, the text-performance and author-audience relations, the cgure of the performer, performance spaces, staging conventions, and the varied locations of theatre. The mythic, ritualistic, and primal narratives of folk culture o,er a refreshing counterbalance to the textures of urban existence, and a succession of major plays that transcend exoticism and mysticcation have introduced a unique energy into the celd of representation. At the same time, folk forms have refocused attention on the problematic relation of rural and urban in India as cultural and political spaces, subjects of theatrical representation, and sites for the creation and consumption of theatre. Some playwrights deliberating seriously on the use of folk conventions have also arrived at their own radical conclusions about the relationship between folk and classical traditions in Indian culture. In theatre, the binary of great and little traditions has dissolved into a recognition of complementarity, leading a playwright like Karnad to argue that there is no di,erence between the theatre conventions of classical drama and those of folk drama. The principles that govern their dramatic aesthetics are the same (CIT, 80). Habib Tanvir gives the same argument a historical dimension by asserting that the classical structure in art is nothing but a terse crystallization of the folk structure in art (Indian Experiment, 9). The theory and practice of folk forms in contemporary Indian theatre is therefore a subject that demands critical procedures adequate to its complexity. In chapter 5 I discussed the ideological e,ect of traditionalist positions in erasing the historicity and particularity of postindependence theatre as a diverse body of work. In this chapter I approach theatre based on folk forms as a celd of contemporary practicenot the most signiccant, and certainly not the only signiccant form of theatre in the present, as some proponents claim, but one that is important enough to be rescued from spurious claims about authenticity on the one hand, and charges of mere fetishism and revivalism on the other. Two clariccations are necessary, however, if we are to see this critical object as in itself it really is. First, contemporary plays that employ folk narratives and performance conventions are texts and performance events of a qualitatively di,erent kind from folk theatre in its
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own agrarian setting, however primitive and folksy they may appear. In fact, the relation between these two forms underscores the problems of a continuing disjunction between rural and urban culture and a consequent separation of form from contentproblems that should be confronted, not avoided. Second, the encounter with tradition among playwrights, directors, and performers is not a uniform phenomenon; it takes on varied forms according to the individual practitioners background, location, training, and objectives. Like the nation itself, folk culture in India is diverse: those who draw on it for theatrical purposes are not recuperating an undi,erentiated cultural essence but using premodern cultural matter of various kinds to create a variety of distinctive stage vehicles in the present. The most viable approach to contemporary folk theatre, therefore, appears to lie in the particulars of practice. Numerous commentators have emphasized, indeed overemphasized, the ideological function of the folk aesthetic in an anticolonial, anti-Western, antirealistic theatrical program. But as G. P. Deshpande notes, few have asked why serious urban playwrights have turned to folk materials, and what e,ects and meanings the indigenous forms communicate (Fetish, 50). In the next two sections, I take up the relation between folk theatre and its urban reconcgurations, as well as the problems inherent in this exchange. In subsequent sections, I outline the distinctive interventions folk plays have made in the contemporary politics of gender and culture and use this thematic framework for the discussion of three iconic worksGirish Karnads Hayavadana (1971), Chandrashekhar Kambars Jokumaraswami (1972), and Habib Tanvirs Charandas chor (1974). Folk Theatre and Urban Folk Theatre The intertextual and interdependent nature of folk genres has been a major methodological concern among anthropologists of South Asia since the 1980s. As an expressive form integral to village culture, theatre occupies a prominent place on the perceived continuum of genres. A. K. Ramanujan suggests that we should view folktale and myth, grandmothers tale and bardic narratives, ritual and theater, nonliterate traditions and literate ones as complementary, context-sensitive parts of one system (Two Realms, 42). In this system, theatre relates to the other components in two distinctive ways. If the genres of cultural performance are ranged according to their akam (interior, private) and puram (exterior, public) qualities, folk theatre appears as the most elaborate
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public genre, and hence the end-point of the continuum . . . As we move toward the puram end, the props which give the bard a public presence increase. . . . These accompaniments attain their fullest development in the village theater: a prepared stage, lighting, makeup, costume, many actors, and a stage manager, often a script (4647). Among the public genres of folk performance theatre is also most closely related to ritual, which is religious rather than aesthetic in intent, but still serves as the model for theatrical performance. These anthropological perspectives encapsulate many of the arguments theatre practitioners have made about the communal, ecological, and ritual qualities of folk theatre. The views of two commentators who focus respectively on the archetypal and psychosexual qualities of this theatre are especially interesting. Taking up the relation of ritual to drama, G. Shankara Pillai observes that ritualistic forms are intended to create the consciousness of latent cosmic power and hence are based on myths which have deep roots in the religious sensibility of a community. Theatre plots are superimposed on these strong ritual structures to attract, hold and enchant the community they are raised for. This mix of myth and ritual and theatre might vary in di,erent forms but the total structure is quite di,erent from the structure of a piece intended to entertain the masses (Pillai, 43). The form, moreover, is inseparable from its functions. Pillai insists that a ritualistic form cannot be taken apart because each form is in character a composite whole, and has unbreakable ties with the locality, its ecology, its myths, their social implications. The theatre in these forms cannot be isolated: and if isolated it will lose its life force immediately, like a bower plucked o, a tree (43). Folk performance, therefore, has to be grasped simultaneously at all three instrumental levelsthose of myth, ritual, and theatre. Chandrashekhar Kambar, one of the most important contemporary practitioners of folk-based theatre, also emphasizes the participatory and liberatory qualities of the form. If the aspect of ritual participation separates folk theatre from mere entertainment, it also serves as a source of graticcation and release, although di,erently from popular urban forms. Kambar explains that in a society where the quality of living is one of sanctioned inhibition, of suppressed drives, emotional or sexual, the realm of entertainment itself assumes a total and microcosmic charactermicrocosmic in the sense that entertainment then rebects all the creative urges and needs in the world outside (Folk Theatre, xii). Giving priority to the religious elements in folk theatre, Kambar contrasts the fragmentation of cultural forms in a secularized society with
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the holistic nature of theatrical performance in folk culture: A Londoner cnds his dance, song, drama and religion at di,erent places. A man from my village looks for all these things together (Folk Theatre, xiii). The collective occasions for this periodic release are also determined by the natural cycle of events in an agrarian community. As a form that embodies the shared myth of the community, not the experience of individuals (Kaul, 23), folk theatre does its work not by surprising its audience but by retreading predictable ground on certain predetermined occasions. Pillai and Kambars descriptions of folk theatre do not, however, extend in an unmodiced form either to their own plays in the folk style or to those of Habib Tanvir, Girish Karnad, K. N. Panikkar, and Ratan Thiyam. Although these authors occupy varying positions of proximity and distance from the folk cultures they represent, their plays are uniformly not in themselves the products of folk culture. As the countercritique of traditionalism in chapter 5 indicated, the plays represent, rather, the complex and decidedly modern theatrical means by which the matter of village life is transported to, and performed in, the city. The di,erence lies not merely in the mediation of premodern forms by a contemporary sensibility but in the qualitatively di,erent conditions of production, circulation, and reception. In principle, a play modeled on folk performance may seem to employ conventions antithetical to those of a modern proscenium playa plot rooted in myth, folklore, or ritual; nonproscenium staging; an antirealistic structure accommodating music, dance, and stylized movement; and dramatized characters who present the action and address the audience directly. But in practice, most such plays employ urban performers, use the same theatrical spaces as does realist theatre, and cater to the same audience that patronizes all the other forms of urban performance, including clm and television. The theatrical experience these plays o,er is unquestionably di,erent; the sociocultural contexts of that experience are not. Only in exceptional cases, such as Tanvirs Naya Theatre and the work of the Heggodu-based group Ninasam, does the performance of folk materials actually involve folk performers and rural locations. The full-length stage vehicles that have emerged from experimental work with folk forms in India should therefore be decned as urban folk drama and distinguished in multiple ways from folk theatre per se. First, the serious urban folk plays are mainly products of individual authorship in a culture in which the recognition of the playwright as author invests even quintessentially theatrical work with literary qualities. Karnads Hayavadana and Naga-mandala and Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal
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are signal examples of this process. Critics have approached these works as literary artifacts; placed them within the authors respective careers as signaling important new phases in artistic development; analyzed them with reference to genre, authorial intention, and audience response; and invested them with considerable cultural capital. The same is largely true of the performance texts of Kambar, Panikkar, and Thiyam. Because Indian theatrical culture has placed a premium on tradition and authenticity, plays such as Jokumaraswami, Charandas chor, Thiyams Chakravyuha, and Panikkars Mahabharata sequence are performances of high cultural value, and urban practitioners of folk genres are among the most widely honored cgures in contemporary Indian theatre. Although in the Indian context such prestige translates more into symbolic than real capital, it does place the authors and their work at the other extreme from the anonymities of folk performance. Second, the urban folk plays belong as much to the culture of textuality and print as to the culture of performance. A. K. Ramanujan and Stuart H. Blackburn note that even when they are written, narratives in premodern traditions are still . . . usually orally delivered (told, recited, sung, or intoned) and aurally received. It is not the art of writing but the technology of printing that e,ectively transforms folk or classical traditions. The real contrast, then, is not oral/written but oral-written/printed (Introduction, 26). This real contrast decnes the relation of rural to urban folk theatre despite e,orts by some critics to enhance the performative dimension of urban folk theatre by contrasting it with the textuality of urban realist drama. Suresh Awasthi argues:
In realistic theatre the number of staging signs is kept as low as possible, and their impact minimized in order to preserve the integrity of the verbal signs. In the stylized new theatre, the impact of staging signs is maximized and their number multiplied. It is because of this that while the reading time of plays like Urubhangam, Madhyama Vyayoga, and Karna-Bhar [all plays by Bhasa, revived by K. N. Panikkar] is thirty to forty minutes, their performing time is nearly two hours. The di,erence in the reading-performingtime ratios of the stylized and realistic theatre is the most obvious feature of the former. (Defence, 89)
However, the crucial di,erence between essential orality and print textuality lies not in the measure by which a performance text exceeds a written text but in the fact that the written text underlying the performance exists in print, independent of performance. Although its primary
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visibility is at the level of performance, urban folk drama enters the domain of print as a necessary e,ect of the conditions of contemporary authorship and acquires all the important attributes of printed drama discussed in chapter 3. It circulates in the original language of composition as well as in multiple languages through translation, as a text and on the stage. Moreover, in radical distinction from folk theatre itself, urban folk drama is a transportable entity: while folk theatre always belongs to a specicc region, language, ecological cycle, and participating community, the urban folk drama can be detached from all these particularities and performed (in the original language or in translation) anywhere an audience is available. Of course, urban folk plays are not texts of the same kind as realist social and political plays, nor does their textuality cancel the improvisatory, mixed, and unscripted qualities of performance. However, they are without question texts, increasingly embedded in the culture of print rather than that of oral-aural communication. In fact, their availability as texts becomes a measure of their increased visibility, signiccance, and value, because it turns them into objects of reading, pedagogy, and criticism. Finally, the mediations of authorship, intentionality, and textuality imply that urban folk theatre is not a replication of folk performance but an autonomous form with its own aesthetic, cultural, and political objectives in relation to a predominantly urban audience. The idea that a playwright or director must bring a contemporary sensibility to bear on folk forms has been central to the discourse of tradition since the 1940s to be transformative, folk forms must speak powerfully to, and have relevance for, their immediate audience. The incompatibility between rural subject matter and the urban sites of performance therefore places a great deal of responsibility on the playwright or director, who must renegotiate every feature of folk theatreform, content, style, language, and staging conventionsto ensure its success in nonfolk locations. The Problems of Urban Folk Theatre These paradoxical qualities of urban folk theatre collectively denote a syncretic practice that is inherently problematic because of the fusion of traditional materials with modern expectations and contexts. Two issues have proved to be particularly intractable for practitioners and critics in India: the disjunction between urban and rural spheres of experience has worsened despite the e,orts to bridge the gap through cultural performance, and as a result, the form of urban folk theatre is often detachable
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from its content. In an overpopulated, rapidly developing nation with a large middle class (by Indian socioeconomic standards), up-to-date forms of professional and technological education, and a heavy commitment to industrialization, urban life decnes the conditions of existence for the majority of theatregoing audiences. As Mohan Rakeshs comment (quoted in chapter 8) about the limitations of the village as a literary subject suggests, playwrights incline toward realism and urban experience precisely because these qualities have a compelling relation to both the authors and the audiences reality. By the same token, the antimodern aesthetic of urban folk theatre contradicts (as it tries to counteract) the direction that the nation itself has taken as a political, economic, and cultural entity, giving folk forms an unavoidable aura of exoticism on the urban stage and creating an often unbridgeable gap between the spectator and the spectacle. G. P. Deshpande describes the newly found love for the classic and the folk among urban practitioners as a sign of the search for roots by an alienated middle class and compares folk forms with bedtime stories that [put] you to sleep with the complacent belief that you have done your duty by Indian culture and towards the other Indian people (Fetish, 49). In Rajinder Naths view, traditional forms can express straightforward elemental, unambiguous stories, but when it comes to expressing the ambiguous and complex reality of modern life they somehow fail (27). A lifelong resident of Calcutta, Mohit Chattopadhyay expresses sentiments shared by numerous other urban authors (playwrights, novelists, poets) when he acknowledges an estrangement between me in this city and the rituals which are still being observed is some tribal area. In the past, there were links between the city and the village, there were common areas of communication. Today, when we adopt a theme or a technique from, say, Western Europe, or from a tribal area in our country, although the latter may seem to be geographically nearer, in our experiences both can be equidistant (CIT, 31). Taking up the specicc issue of theatre, Rustom Bharucha states bluntly that in the absence of sustained interactions between urban and rural theatre workers at intra/inter-regional levels, the dichotomies of development remain as stark as ever, with the city continuing to live o, the human and ecological resources of rural communities (House, 41). These reservations on the part of Indian practitioners coincide remarkably with the critique of traditionalism by major contemporary authors in postcolonial Africa. Femi Osocsan, the Nigerian playwright-director, argues that the artist lives in history, and the truth is simply that the momentum of history can no longer be sublimated by the old processes of traditional rite (74).
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Similarly, Ngugi wa Thiongo objects to the fallacious confusion of culture with irrelevant traditionalismit is not possible either to lift traditional structures and cultures intact into modern Africa or to somehow maintain colonial, economic, and other social institutions and graft on them an African culture (12). In African cultures as in India, the traditional is disjunct from the modern, and past and present are alike subject to history. Closely related to the problem of the urban audiences alienation from village culture is the problem of the sociology of the village forms themselves. During the drama seminar of 1956, several participants interested in folk performance genres had already commented on the danger that the countrys emergent culture of development posed for them. The director Shanta Gandhi, the principal post-independence exponent of bhavai, talked about the imminent extinction of folk drama in various regions, and the deteriorated stage of bhavai in Gujaratcaused in part by nineteenth century puritanism, but mostly by negligence and poverty in the present (Proceedings, 105). J. C. Mathur found sucient reason to believe that community culture and tradition are completely broken down and shattered in most of the regions of this sub-continent (Proceedings, 12223). Ebrahim Alkazi was considerably more forceful in arguing against the belief that artistic experimentation with folk forms like bhavai would restore them to their once glorious existence:
That is an illusion. The community of the Bhavai artists and their audiences themselves and the whole structure of the countryside have undergone such a transformation that most of the old tunes are likely to be repelled by the people themselves as bad tunes giving out false notes. The folks will decide what they would have as entertainments. We have no right to interfere. But we can certainly take . . . our own arts to them [and] improve them by adopting what we may cnd good in folk forms. We must not confuse the two distinct issues which have emerged out of . . . this rather lengthy discussion. (Proceedings, 122)
Thirty years later, the cultural e,ects of socioeconomic change are clearly evident. K. N. Panikkar comments in a 1989 interview that his village childhood was full of communal events, such as singing mendicants, performances at the temple, agricultural festivals, and open-air dancing, but he adds that nowadays if you go to my village you wont cnd any such art forms (CIT, 58). Mahesh Elkunchwar, the most vocal contemporary realist, agrees with this perception of the collapse of village culture but
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complicates the authorial issues further by dissociating himself from the very forms that should have come naturally to him.
I personally found the form of folk theatre unusable, because what I had to say was so harsh and stark that I felt it would drown in the festive atmosphere of song, dance, and color in folk drama. Besides, there is always the question of the relevance of folk drama today. The rural culture that gave birth to this art form is now nearly defunct. If the thread that links village life and folk art is now weak and even broken, how can my urban sensibility, shaped largely by Western ideas, relate to this art form? . . . I also feel no nostalgia for this art form. Maybe because Im from the village. But people in rural areas have easily accepted the contradictions that arise when old ways disappear and new ways come in, when the old and the new get mixed up in hodgepodge ways. People in the cities su,er from undue anxiety about these things. (Natyapravas, 9192)
Elkunchwar therefore questions the attribution of true experimentalism and authentic Indianness to such plays as Hayavadana and Ghashiram kotwal, which in his opinion imposed folk forms articcially on mythic and historical material (cg. 16). In a bolder generalization, he dismisses all forms of [urban] folk theatre as instances of artistic kleptomania and signs of a revivalism that deliberately overlooks the collapse of the rural structure and the irreversible change in village traditions (Elkunchwar, Interview, 1, 2). Bharucha similarly dismisses the theatre of roots as a conceptually bankrupt construct which is neither linked suciently to the contexts of folk and traditional disciplines . . . nor capable of inventing new models of theatre more rooted in the immediacies of the present (House, 41). Elkunchwars comments underscore two further problems. All the attention lavished on folk forms in theatre theory and practice during the last four decades has not led to any signiccant regeneration of the forms in their own environment, because the vitality of folk culture depends on sociocultural and economic conditions to which the aesthetic debate over theatrical forms is largely irrelevant. As Osocsan notes in the comparable context of Nigeria, the comprehensive repertory of myth and ritual . . . whose seasonal re-enactments helped to restore harmony in the race, face the prospect of attrition in the contemporary intellectual climate. And the bux of social transformation stays unrelieved in the crisis of ritual (72). There is, in addition, the issue of the connection between folk forms and premodern modes of socioeconomic organization in India.
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Badal Sircar feels that in spite of the popularity of the traditional and folk theatres in the villages, the ideas and the themes treated remain mostly stagnant and sterile, unconnected with their own problems of emancipationsocial, economic, and cultural (Third Theatre, 3). Similarly, the well-known theatre activist Safdar Hashmi acknowledges the necessity of counteracting the destructive e,ects of colonialism on traditional Indian culture but identices a problem: if you work with the traditional form, along comes the traditional content with its superstition, backwardness, obscurantism, and its promotion of feudal structures (qtd. in Van Erven, 141). Indian anthropologists, sociologists, and political economists alike recognize that the simultaneous disappearance of feudalism and its art forms may be the necessary price of positive social change because, like other cultural phenomena, folk traditions respond to historical shifts, and any attempts to arrest such change would contradict historical process. By the same logic, it would be an anachronistic move for theatre workers to try to preserve cultural traditions that are no longer socially sustainable. Given the precarious existence of folk forms in their own environment and the continuing cultural abyss between village and city, it is the
Fig. 16. The patron god of performance and the Brahmans of Pune. Opening scene from Vijay Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal, directed by Jabbar Patel for Theatre Academy (Pune), Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival, New Delhi, 1989. Courtesy of Sangeet Natak Akademi.
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use of folk rather than sophisticated forms by urban practitioners that has come to be seen as superccial, exploitative, and sterile, in direct and paradoxical contradiction of its professed objectives. The director M. K. Raina feels that the urban theatre worker has picked up the product, but has ignored aspects of its genesisits history, its anthropology, its religion and, therefore, its link with the past (Raina, 29). A more pervasive problem is the pursuit of naive, antirealistic forms as an end in itself, with no correlation to content. According to Shanta Gandhi, director of the bhavai classic Jasma odan, in the search for a new theatre semiotic, folk forms can be raided merely for production styles, but unless this trend is more securely tied up with the writing of new plays rebecting the contemporary ethos, the current enthusiasm for going back to our roots may fade out as most fashions do (14). Or, as G. Shankara Pillai complains, theatre practitioners have begun to graft folk performance elements arbitrarily onto contemporary subject matter in the belief that they are creating an exemplary syncresis. Like Deshpande, Pillai considers it important to ask why urban practitioners are using traditional forms, and this leads to other troubling questions. Has the chosen form an immediate and demanding connection with the theme we have to communicate to an audience of modern sensibilities? Are we creating a new myth for twentieth-century society, claiming it demands a ritualistic form of expression, a new pattern of theatre? My emphasis here is on the spontaneous urgency of the whole thing, the natural demand of the subject matter on the playwright and director (Pillai, 45). In actuality, while the practice of imposing folk forms on incongruous subject matter is widely in evidence, the plays that exemplify the strengths of urban folk drama have invariably fused antirealistic nonurban forms with narratives that do attempt to resituate myths in the here and now. Form and Content in Urban Folk Theatre The problems inherent in the genre of urban folk theatre puncture the redemptive role some cultural critics have assigned to it in an anti-Western, postcolonial practice. But they also underscore the importance of individual authors and directors who have negotiated these diculties, creating not only successful but iconic works that seriously expand our sense of the possibilities of dramatic composition and theatrical representation. Such plays as Karnads Hayavadana, Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal, Kambars Jokumaraswami, and Tanvirs Charandas chor establish radically new relations between the textual and the performative, the traditional
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and the contemporary. While adhering to the representational conventions of a ritualistic form, each play develops a serious psychological or sociopolitical thematic that explores the continuing resonance of myth and ritual in the changed sociopolitical circumstances of the present. The use of folk forms in complex vehicles of this kind is not a fetishistic call for a close, unnegotiable particularity or for some mystical, unsoiled pristinism; rather, as Wole Soyinka notes, it is a reinstatement of values authentic to . . . society, modiced only by the demands of a contemporary world (qtd. in Olaniyan, 487). The quantity and diversity of urban folk drama produced in India since the 1960s by a range of practitioners is impressive and too extensive for a detailed enumeration; the analysis of method and meaning in a few strong plays can reveal how these fully realized contemporary classics were fashioned from unsophisticated folk materials. In the following readings I focus on two issues in particularthe playwrights self-conscious manipulation of the folk conventions of presentation and the centrality of gender issues in their representation. The structure of (largely anonymous) folk drama usually consists of the interplay between an outer rhetorical frame, containing the sutradhar (literally, puppet master) and one or two ancillary characters, and a dramatized inner narrative. The rebexive frames in Hayavadana and Jokumaraswami place the individual authors crmly outside the narratives, whatever their own actual proximity to folk culture (Karnad is a self-professed city dweller; Kambar is a folk person by background, but also a scholar with a doctoral degree who has spent most of his adult life in Bangalore). The frames also enable the playwrights to locate the performance (as distinct from the narrative of the inner play) in the historical and political present, and hence to create an ironic disjunction between the premodern narrative of the inner play and the postcolonial positioning of the outer. In its totality, the play then acquires an ineluctable contemporaneity. The primacy of women characters in all three plays establishes an equally unmistakable correlation between gender and genre. In realist contemporary drama, the urban textual constructs of such male playwrights as Mohan Rakesh, Vijay Tendulkar, the early Badal Sircar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Jaywant Dalvi, and Mahesh Dattani have come to be associated with the aesthetic of modernity, the institution of patriarchy, the mode of social realism, the structure of the well-made play, and the socioeconomic condition of nuclear or extended families in urban or semiurban locations. The plays discussed in chapter 8 suggest that the experience of women characters in this environment is overwhelmingly
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that of oppression, marginalization, exploitation, violence, and even death. In their various domestic and social roles women may be strong or weak, vocal or silent, liberated or repressed, complicit or resistant, conformist or subversive, generous or self-seekingbut in their totality the urban and quasi-urban worlds are frustrating, disappointing, or seriously destructive. In discussions of gender, Indian theatre critics usually contrast this body of male-authored texts with the modes of feminist performance developed by such directors as Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, Saonli Mitra, Usha Ganguli, Anuradha Kapur, and Anamika Haksar, among others. Placing womens experience at the center of their practice, these activist professionals have revised the concepts of plot, character, time, place, and meaning to recreate theatre as an open-ended process rather than a cnished product. As fully indigenized forms of feminist representation, their works also have in common the e,ect of destabilizing textuality, modernity, and patriarchy. Considered in conjunction, these two major varieties of male/female theatre o,er a range of other binary oppositionstext/performance, product/process, close/open, realist/antirealist, complicit/resistantthat seem to encapsulate gender issues quite fully. The narratives of urban folk theatre constitute, however, a third important site for the representation of women in contemporary Indian theatre, displaying some distinctive qualities that are absent in the other two forms. The essential basis of di,erence is not the gender of the author, which continues to be exclusively male (Karnad, Kambar, Tanvir, Panikkar, Thiyam), but the qualitatively di,erent attitudes to gender that emerge within the plays when male authors move out of the urban social-realist mode into the antimodern, antirealistic, charismatic realm of folk culture. In this respect, theatre parallels the revisionary moves within South Asian folklore studies to recognize folkloric production as inevitably political, gender ideology as a basic resource in the making of all kinds of cultural meanings, and women as occupying the center stage of this work (Appadurai et al., Gender, Genre, 8, 5). Ramanujan describes womens tales as a counter-system, whether women are the tellers or the subjects of narrative. Commenting on womens expressive genres in rural North India, Gloria Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold stress that the performance of song and story provides a privileged arena for womens subversive speech (193), and that women were not the unquestioning bearers of tradition . . . they subtly but articulately challenged tradition at every turn (xxvi). One way to grasp the subversive potential of apparently conformist gender roles, they suggest, is to recognize that tradition and resistance are seldom antithetical, that each culture harbors
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within itself critiques of its most authoritative pronouncements; and . . . while such critiques frequently take the form of such ostensibly traditional forms of speech as proverbs, songs, and folktales, they enter at the same time into the realm of the political, as they are deployed in the construction and reconstruction of identities and social worlds in which relations of power are deeply implicated (Raheja and Gold, 193). New readings of folklore as well as its contemporary appropriations in theatre, therefore, support the reinscription of gender as a central concern in urban folk drama. This quality of the genre has remained obscure because the dominant tendency is to regard folk theatre as a colorful, celebratory, and unconventional spectacle that o,ers a temporary release from lifes conbicts rather than serving as another image of them. The assimilation of folk theatre to the rhetoric of cultural regeneration also obscures the fact that in its contemporary versions it usually subverts structures of authority and destabilizes the status quo. When such a form gives women a central role, it becomes part of the larger cultural repository of attitudes to gender and should receive due critical attention. Such plays as Hayavadana, Jokumaraswami, and Charandas chor are important contributions to the dialogue on gender because they embody several principles largely absent in realist drama. First, women in these works are objects of desire as well as desiring subjects, and they want something other than what society has ordained for them. The very presence of such desire violates the norms of feminine behavior and disturbs established notions of propriety. Second, women succeed in their quest because of the interchangeability of male partners. The proscribed object of desire magically replaces the husband in these plays, usually in the form of the husband. Because the men can stand in for each other, there is no unique male self to which the woman owes cdelitya notion that questions the principle of male proprietorship and hence undermines a basic premise of patriarchy. Third, while realist drama emphasizes and often romanticizes the maternal role, folk narratives stress the feminine, but not necessarily the maternal. Or, to put it di,erently, fertility and motherhood are important in folk plays but can be detached from the constraints of marital cdelity. The women in all three plays, self-possessed and vocal, want men they cannot legitimately have; each one accomplishes her desire, but only provisionally, and, like the queen bee, destroys her male partner (lover or husband) in the process. The ideology of urban folk drama thus manifests itself most conspicuously in the treatment of femininity, sexuality, desire, and power: although the challenge to patriarchy is not absolute, women in folk drama cnd the means of exercising an
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ambivalent freedom within its constraints, unlike their urban counterparts in Rakeshs Adhe adhure or Vijay Tendulkars Shantata! court chalu ahe. The presence of these subversive thematic elements, and their accommodation within a variety of folk structures in the respective plays of Karnad, Kambar, and Tanvir, are my principal focus in the remainder of this chapter. Desire, Ambivalence, Identity: Girish Karnads Hayavadana In the Authors Introduction to a collection of his plays in English translation, Karnad places his groundbreaking experimental practice in Hayavadana (1971) within the trajectory of his own development and the inescapably urban contexts of his playwriting. After exploring the genres of mythic-existentialist and historical drama in his crst two plays, Yayati (1961) and Tughlaq (1964), he wanted to begin again and turned to traditional forms, not to cnd and reuse forms that had worked successfully in some other cultural context, [but] to discover whether there was a structure of expectationsand conventionsabout entertainment underlying these forms from which one could learn (TP, 11). Karnad has a self-confessed predilection for taking on any form if (but only if ) it serves his authorial purposes, and the endless arguments about the revitalizing e,ects of traditional forms prompted him to inquire what playwrights like him, basically city dwellers, [were] to do with this stream[.] What did the entire paraphernalia of theatrical devices, halfcurtains, masks, improvisation, music, and mime mean? I remember that the idea of my play Hayavadana started crystallizing in my head right in the middle of an argument with B. V. Karanth . . . about the meaning of masks in Indian theatre and theatres relationship to music (TP, 12). The story about switched heads in the twelfth-century Sanskrit collection, the Kathasaritasagara, interested him initially because of the possibilities it o,ered for the use of masks on stage. However, refracted through Thomas Manns philosophical novella The Transposed Heads, Karnads distinctive view of femininity, and a rebexive double frame, the traditional conventions underwent a process of defamiliarization in Hayavadana that marked a revolutionary moment on the urban Indian stage and created a unique intellectual and theatrical excitement throughout the decade of the 1970s. The plays credentials were impeccable and its timing fortuitous. Karnads deliberate change of direction as a playwright after the success of
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Yayati and Tughlaq was signaled by the prestigious Homi Bhabha Fellowship, which he held from 197072 for creative work in folk theatre, and his participation in the 1971 National Roundtable organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Hayavadana thus appeared during one of the most intense periods of rebection on the theatrical potential and contemporary relevance of indigenous theatre forms among Indian practitioners, and it was the crst work to translate theory into notable practice. In 1972 it won both the annual Sangeet Natak Akademi award and the Kamaladevi Award of the Bharatiya Natya Sangh for best Indian play. During the same year, in a rare transposition of languages, it received three major productions, not in the original Kannada (which would have been the obvious medium) but in Hindi, under the direction of Satyadev Dubey for Theatre Group in Bombay, Rajinder Nath for Anamika in Calcutta, and B. V. Karanth (who had also composed the music) for Dishantar in Delhi. Undertaken simultaneously by three directors with a preference for important new plays, these productions pointed to the intense interest Hayavadana had generated within an engaged, experimentally oriented national theatre community. Karanths Kannada production for the Bangalore-based group Benaka followed in 1973, the same year that Vijaya Mehta directed Hayavadana in Marathi in Bombay, incorporating elements of the tamasha form. Karanth and Mehta also emerged as the plays most ambitious and persistent directors. Karanth revived his Hindi version for Darpan (Lucknow) in 1974 and for the Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal (Bhopal) in 1982; he undertook the Kannada version again for the Nehru Centenary Festival in 1989, and a new English version for the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Australia. In 1984 Mehta also took the play to the Deutsches Nationaltheater, Weimar, for a German production with German actors. With this succession of major productions virtually complete by 1990, Hayavadana is still one of Karnads most frequently performed plays, having found an enduring popularity with amateur urban theatre groups, college drama societies, and even audiences in the Indian diaspora.3 In keeping with Karnads exploratory approach, the outstanding quality of Hayavadana as urban folk drama is that it joins the structure and conventions of yakshagana folk performance (stock characters, music, dance, masks, talking dolls, etc.) with a core narrative that poses philosophical riddles about the nature of identity and reality. To interpret the folk elements on the page and in performance, we have to consider the complex intertextual relation between the plays premodern and modern sources and their successive transformation by Karnads present objectives. In
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the Kathasaritasagara, the story of The Heads That Got Switched contains a simple riddle posed by the captive phantom spirit, Vetala, to his captor, King Vikramaditya. The washerman Dhavala falls in love with Madanasundari while performing rituals at a lake sacred to the goddess Parvati, marries her without impediment because she belongs to his own caste, and settles down to a happy married life. Madanasundaris brother visits them after some time, and all three begin a journey back to her parents home. In the city of Shobhavati, Dhavala discovers the great temple of Parvati and decides on the spur of the moment to sacricce himself to the goddess in order to achieve salvation. His (nameless) brother-inlaw discovers him and, overcome by grief, cuts o, his own head. When Madanasundari discovers their decapitated bodies, she resolves to end her life by hanging herself. Moved by her plight, Parvati intervenes and grants her a boon: the men will come back to life if she reattaches their heads to their bodies. In her excitement and joy Madanasundari switches the heads, so that the man with her husbands head acquires her brothers body, and vice versa. The resulting problem of true identity has an unambiguous solution in this version: The one with her husbands head is her husband because the head rules the limbs and personal identity depends on the head (Sattar, 219). In the mythic genealogy of caste, crst o,ered in the Purusha-sukta in the Rg-veda (book 10, hymn 90) around 1000 b.c., Brahmans emerged from Purushas head, and the supremacy of that part of the body is so crmly established in the subsequent Hindu tradition that it overrides the implications of incest in the twelfth-century narrative. Thomas Manns philosophical elaboration of this story in The Transposed Heads (1940) is a fully developed parable about conjugality, proscribed desire, and an accidental disruption of identity that can be resolved only by death. Shridaman and Nanda are well-born young men whose friendship represents a perfect complementarity of opposites. Shridaman is cerebral, delicate, and sensitive; Nanda is visceral, strong, and emotionally crude. Both men unwittingly witness the dazzling nakedness of Sita at a village pond as she is preparing to take a bath. But when Shridaman proclaims a desperate passion for her, Nanda suppresses his own feelings and uses his acquaintance with her father to arrange the match. The marriage begins to disintegrate quickly, however, because of an intense physical attraction between Sita and Nanda. In Manns version, the husband beheads himself in Parvatis temple out of jealousy and despair; the friend follows suit out of guilt and fear; and the pregnant wife prepares to die in order to avoid ignominy for herself and her child.
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After the accident of transposition, a holy ascetic grants Sita to the new Shridaman by using the same logic that appears in the folktale, but in Manns text the supremacy of the head is both sustained and challenged far beyond the moment of crisis. The new bodies of the two men change inexorably until they are compatible with the heads once again; but the original bodies also exert their own subversive power and change the heads indecnably. Shridamans once-recned face comes to rebect Nandas crudity, while Nandas crude features take on Shridamans recnement. Sita, to whom the man with the husband-head and friend-body had given full enjoyment of the pleasures of sense for a time, cnds herself yearning once again for the man with the friend-head and husband-body, because now he represents the ideal fusion of qualities. She returns to Nanda in the forest with her four-year-old son (who is really the child of his body), but with the foreknowledge of impending doom. Shridaman and Nanda kill each other, and Sita commits sati on their funeral pyre, leaving her precocious son behind to keep alive the memory of her strange sacricce. The story of Devadatta (the well-begotten one), Kapila (the dark one), and Padmini (the lotus woman) in Karnads Hayavadana follows elements of characterization and the order of events in Manns novella closely enough to be considered in some respects a deorientalized, contemporary Indian theatrical version of it. The plays originality lies in the rebexive frames Karnad constructs for the story and in the thematic force of its representation of femininity, desire, and identity in and for the present, independent of its sources. Karnads crst radical move is to multiply the contexts in which the problem of incongruity, as symbolized by the disjunction between head and body, appears. In the human world of Devadatta and Kapila, transposition o,ers a symbolic but temporary resolution to the problem of mind/body dualism (cg. 17). For a brief period of time, Devadatta-Kapila possesses the ideal mind as well as the ideal body, while the other hybrid being, Kapila-Devadatta, is deccient in both respects. But when each mans body reverts to its original qualities, the problem of dualism returns, and the human condition appears as essentially one of disunity and imperfection. Devadatta and Kapila do represent irreconcilable opposites: two men who were perfectly complementary and inseparable when they were separate become mortal enemies when they are forcibly joined together. Padminis self-serving mistake therefore begins a violent struggle within and between these three characters that ends only with the destruction of their lives. Karnad di,uses this human tragedy by placing it alongside two other realms of experiencethe divine and the animal. Like many folk plays,
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Hayavadana begins with the worship of Ganesha, the elephant-headed, potbellied son of Shiva and Parvati who is the patron deity of folk theatre, the remover of obstacles (vighneshwar), and the god of all auspicious beginnings, despite his comical appearance. Even the masked actor who impersonates Ganesha onstage assumes his divinity for the duration of the performance, and neither the anomalous head of the deity nor its representation in a stage mask betokens conbict or violence. In contrast, Hayavadana, the horse-headed man who gives the play its title, lacks any vestige of divinity and appears painfully suspended between the animal and human worlds. Hayavadanas mixed-up self is not the result of an accidental transpositionlike the Minotaur, he was born that way because his mother, a beautiful and willful princess (not unlike the queen Pasiphae), insisted on marrying an Arab stallion rather than one of her numerous male suitors. Unlike the god, Hayavadana cannot endure to remain mixed up; unlike the humans, he does not possess an earlier self that can reassert itself. But as in the human world, the head determines identity, even if that means the triumph of the animal over the human:
Fig. 17. What a good mix / No more tricks / Is this one that / Or that one this? Ravi Mankani as Devadatta, Uday Mhaiskar as Kapila, and Rekha Kalekar as Padmini in Girish Karnads Hayavadana, directed by Vijaya Mehta, Goa Hindu Association, Bombay, 1973. Courtesy of Girish Karnad.
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Hayavadana achieves wholeness by relinquishing his human characteristics and turning completely into a horse. This triple perspective on disrupted selves puts into practice Karnads belief that the various conventions of Indian folk theatre create e,ects similar to those associated with Brechts notion of complex seeing. As Karnad puts it, the chorus, the masks, the seemingly unrelated comic episodes, the mixing of human and nonhuman worlds permit the simultaneous presentation of alternative points of view, of alternative attitudes to the central problem (TP, 14). The second level of complication in Hayavadana involves the authors self-conscious manipulation of the structure of folk performance. While the action of folk theatre moves between a frame and the inner play, in Hayavadana there are two outer frames, both belonging to the historical present, which intersect unpredictably with each other and with the action of the inner play. The crst frame consists of the bhagavata (the conventional sutradhar cgure who presents, mediates, and interprets the action of the inner play), a female chorus, and two male actors. Karnad represents them, however, not merely as characters in a folk performance but as performers in a provincial troupe preparing to enact the story of Padmini and her two husbands for a contemporary audience. Just as the action of the inner play is about to begin, the performance is disrupted by the appearance of Hayavadana, the talking horse who wants a solution to his own predicament. The disruption forces the characters of folk drama to revert to their real personae as actors, and the performance of Padminis story begins only after the bhagavata has persuaded Hayavadana to leave and seek divine intervention for the solution of his problem. Similarly, the end of Padminis story is not the end of the play: the two framing narratives continue until Hayavadana, who now reappears as a horse with a human voice, has lostas he wants tothis last human attribute. The inner and outer plays converge in two other ways as well. Hayavadana achieves wholeness by appealing to Kali, the same goddess whose temple is the scene of Padminis crisis, and, as a playful horse at the end, he brings Padminis orphan son the precious gift of laughter. The conventional folk structure of a play-within-a-play is therefore yoked in Hayavadana to a rebexive rehearsal format, whose function is to subject the decning conventions of folk performance to ironic scrutiny. The worship of Ganesha in this play does not forestall, as it should by the conventions of mythology and folklore, the impediment (vighna) that Hayavadana represents. Hayavadanas antics on stage also put the entire paraphernalia of folk performance to parodic use. He tries unsuccessfully
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to conceal himself behind the traditional half-curtain, the yavanika; the bhagavata mistakes his horses head for a mask and tries to pull it o,; instead of the choric songs appropriate to folk theatre, Hayavadana sings the Indian national anthem and mocks the Indian national character; and he objects strenuously when the bhagavata tries to explain his appearance as the curse of some holy sage or pure woman whom he may have o,ended. Although the causality of karma operates in the worlds of folklore, epic myth, and legend, it does not apply to Hayavadanahis curse lies in his lineage, not his own actions. In further ironic contrast to this problematic, rebexive, topical frame, the inner play uses the conventions of folk theatre conventionally. Following Karnads printed directions, in early productions the actors playing the roles of Devadatta and Kapila wore masks so that the narrative of transposition would have a visual parallelin later versions they merely switch clothes. The halfcurtain also appears throughout the performance as a versatile stage prop, connecting Padminis marriage and adultery, for instance, with her ritual sati. Karnad thus invents a structure in which the use of folk conventions is ironic and rebexive as well as expedient and natural, and where the action occupies at once the mythic realm of folk culture and the historical present. Karnads inventive frames produce a new dramatic synthesis that recontextualizes the story of the transposed heads and separates it from its sources. But how e,ective is this synthesis on the stage? Karanths 1989 production for the Nehru Festival (recorded by the Sangeet Natak Akademi) revealed several respects in which the plays scintillating text did not produce a comparable experience in performance. Textually, the inner story of Padmini-Devadatta-Kapila has no intrinsic relation to the outer frames, but it connects with them at the level of ideas. In the Karanth production, despite the linkages provided by the bhagavata, the various strands of the action appeared disjunct, and the intrusions of the man-horse Hayavadana seemed arbitrary, not natural. The presence of live musicians, usually a vibrant aspect of urban folk drama, was surprisingly muted, and the music itself consisted in recned urban melodies more than earthy folk numbers. Although the stock characters who signify communal participation in the text were present on the stage throughout, they sat on the sidelines in static, segregated groups, only occasionally joining in the action. The presentation of Padminis marital crisis was more realistic than stylized, and the dialogue often resembled the bickerings of a discontented small-town couple. The thematic connections that make Hayavadana an absorbing play on the page did not
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emerge strongly enough on the stage for the live audience: the performance came across as an intellectual exercise on the part of an urban literary playwright determined to break new ground. Regardless of the overall theatrical impact, however, the core narrative of the play resonates in present dramatic and cultural contexts because it gives primacy to women in the psychosexual relations of marriage and creates a space for the expression, even the fulcllment, of amoral female desire within the constraints of patriarchy. The crst capricious female described in the play is Hayavadanas mother, who had insisted on choosing an Arab stallion of celestial origin as her husband at her swayamvar (the ancient Hindu custom of allowing women to select their own mate at a courtly gathering) and had refused to continue the marriage when, after some years, her equine husband regained his proper celestial form. Such an exercise of autonomy by women in mythic antiquity is radically at odds with the patriarchal control of marriage in the modern world: Padmini marries the wrong person because her match is negotiated exclusively by men, and she cnds no escape from her unsatisfactory union. The female chorus that appears brieby to separate the outer from the inner play complicates gender issues further by questioning the principle of monogamy: Why should love stick to the sap of a single body? When the stem is drunk with the thick yearning of the many-petalled, manybowered lantana, why should it be tied down to the relation of a single bower? (TP, 82). These opening messages set the scene adequately for the extended (melo)drama of Padminis marriage, which follows an unusual logic. Padmini is childish but whole; it is the men who represent a mind/body dualism that she cannot accept. So she remains herself, while the men are dismembered and magically re-membered (through her mistake) to give her, for a time, what she desires: Fabulous bodyfabulous brainfabulous Devadatta (113). Excluded from this moment of triumph, the man who now has Kapilas undesirable head and Devadattas undesirable body complains that it is not right for Padmini to just go and live with a man whos not her husband, and that her fancy cannot be allowed to provide the solution to their problembut it does. The exchange of men also takes place in a way that is morally problematic but socially unobjectionable. The still respectable Padmini continues to enjoy the privileges of marriage and motherhood, and the subversion of patriarchy is all the more e,ective because there is no open challenge to it. The ambivalence of Padminis position in the triangular relationships, however, appears in her many challenges to masculinity and male
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friendship, which create frictions contradicting her apparent power. She dominates both men in a shrill, shallow way (caught perfectly by the actress in the 1989 Karanth production) and resents any sign that their mutual bond might override their interest in her. The mens double suicide in Kalis temple and the fatal confrontation at the end are, in Padminis view, selcsh acts that exclude and betray her. Ironically, in the temple she was the one who had brought the men back to life, but as her life unravels again she deliberately brings on the cnal crisis by sending Devadatta on a journey and returning to Kapila in the forest. For the men at the end, cghting in part against their own bodies, there are no grounds for friendship now. No question of mercy. We must cght like lions and kill like cobras (130). In the upside-down, antipatriarchal world of the Sanskrit folktale as retold by Mann and Karnad in the twentieth century, the men kill themselves twice for the sake of the woman, though according to Padmini the cnal victory belongs to Devadatta and Kapilashe neither wins not loses (126). In her last speech over their bodies she acknowledges her role in destroying their fellowship, but also accepts her eventual irrelevance as a woman. If Id said, Yes, Ill live with you both, perhaps they would have been alive yet. But I couldnt say it. I couldnt say Yes. No, Kapila, no, DevadattaI know it in my blood you couldnt have lived together. You would have had to share not only me but your bodies as well. Because you knew death you died in each others arms. You could only have lived ripping each other to pieces. I had to drive you to death. You forgave each other, but againleft me out (13031). In Karnads modern fable about marriage, conjugal passion dissipates inevitably into disappointment and creates the desire for other unions, however hard the individual male self may try to preserve its ideal nature. Women do not have the power to prevent this downward slide, but they do have agency in the drama of discontent. Land, Women, and Male Possession: Chandrashekhar Kambars Jokumaraswami As another decnitive work in the 1970s sequence of experimental urban folk plays, Chandrashekhar Kambars Jokumaraswami stands in a revealing relation of sameness and di,erence to Karnads Hayavadana. It appeared a year later (1972), and in the same language (Kannada), but portrayed the folk culture of a di,erent rural region of Karnataka (the north) and drew on a di,erent genre of folk performance (bayalata). The play had its early stagings in Kannada, with B. V. Karanth again assuming
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a prominent role: he directed the crst production for the Pratima Natak Mandali (Bangalore) in 1972, cast Karnad as Gowda and Kambar as the sutradhar, and played the role of Himmela himself. Translated into Hindi as Aur tota bola (And the Parrot Said), Jokumaraswami then appeared under Satyadev Dubeys direction in Bombay in 1979 (for Theatre Unit as well as Awishkar) and under Rajinder Naths direction in Delhi in 1980 (for the SRC Repertory Company). Under the auspices of Ninasam (Heggodu), Kambar himself directed the version performed during the Nehru Centenary Festival in 1989 and played the role of the sutradhar once again. The Kannada revivals of the play have been associated almost exclusively with Kambar and Karanth, mainly in locations within the state of Karnataka; there have also been performances in Punjabi, Tamil, and Gujarati, in such cities as Calcutta, Chandigarh, Madras, and Ahmedabad. Like Hayavadana, from the beginning Jokumaraswami has been a showpiece of the brilliant theatre a,orded by rural forms of performance and ritual; unlike Karnads work, it posits an integral relationship between author and subject matter and uncovers di,erent strategies of authorial mediation between a folk event and its theatrical representation in postcolonial times. Karnad states this di,erence succinctly when he notes that unlike most Indian playwrights writing today, Chandrashekhar Kambar does not come from an urban background. As he was born and brought up in the country, there is no self-consciousness in his use of Bayalata, a secular folk form of his region (Karnad, TP, 15). Kambar himself accepts the identity of a folk person simply because I honestly cannot be anything else, and claims a solidarity with my people that has the same political force as urban forms of Left populism (Folk Theatre, xi). As a playwright and director, he has used this position in two ways: to advance a systematic theory of folk theatre, and to stress the intrinsic qualities of folk performance in relation to, rather than as co-opted by, urban theatre. In Kambars conception, folk theatre is a vibrant, quasireligious, artistic, communal, often overly decorative or di,use, formulaic, convention-bound but improvisatory mode of performance that fulclls the expressive needs of a stable and organic society. He asserts that a folk play is found in its authentic and only form in performance and not in any other form as in the literary play, and that its various componentsmusic, dialogue, dance or gestureare not discrete elements but mutually dependent and reinforcing (Traditional Theatre, 26). But Kambars response to the crucial question of what relevance folk theatre has for the modern literary dramatist consists mainly in an enumeration
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of di,erences between rural and urban artists, and between the needs and equipment of the urban middle class . . . [and] those of rural society (27). The strategies that transform folk performance into an urban genre are thus not decnable in advance but have to be inferred from the particulars of a given play. From this viewpoint, Jokumaraswami presents not a cerebral synthesis of diverse textual and theatrical elements but a rebexive structure in which all the vital components are focused on the multiple meanings of an annual folk ritual. The title of the play invokes a fertility god celebrated in north Karnataka villages every year on Jokumara hunnive, the full-moon night during the late monsoon month of Bhadrapada (August September). The playwrights explanatory note about the event evokes a phallic ritual that is low in terms of caste and class associations, unselfconscious in its celebration of male sexuality, and primal in its symbolism:
Women belonging to the castes of csherman, washerman and lime-maker make phallus-shaped idols of Jokumaraswami out of wet clay. Applying butter to the phallus tip, they place the idols in baskets. Packing each idol crmly into an erect position with neem (margosa) leaves, they carry the baskets on their heads and go from house to house singing songs in praise of Jokumaraswami. . . . There is an ancient myth behind all these stories, a myth which is relevant to the play. It goes somewhat like this: Jokumaraswami, the son of Shiva, takes birth on earth as the son of Ditnadevi. From the second day after his birth till the sixth he seduces all the women of the village. On the seventh day the angry cuckolds of the village kill him with ritual cruelty. Wherever his blood falls, the earth turns green and fertile. ( Jokumaraswami, xiv)
This story of the violation of patriarchal norms, the ecological identity of women, and the ritual sacricce of the priapic male informs both the outer and inner plays in Jokumaraswami. The outer rhetorical frame consists of the sutradhar (master of ceremonies and counterpart of the bhagavata), Himmela (his sidekick), and Mela (a male chorus). The inner play centers around Gowda, a boorish and sexually impotent village landowner; his childless wife, Gowdathi; and the peasant Basanna, who is engaged in an ongoing struggle with Gowda over land rights. In a last desperate e,ort to become a mother, Gowdathi o,ers ritual worship to Jokumaraswami on the day of his festival and tries to feed Gowda a ritual meal that would counteract his impotence. Because of a substitution
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she does not know about, Basanna consumes the meal and then becomes her lover. When Gowda learns about the a,air and Gowdathis pregnancy, his henchmen ambush Basanna and shoot him dead. Like Karnad, but through a simpler structure that juxtaposes the communal presence with dramatic dialogue between characters, Kambar also uses the conventions of folk theatre rebexively, for parodic and satiric e,ect, by questioning the very appropriateness of the subject of performance. The play begins, for instance, on a bare stage with a single raised platform; eleven characters (musicians and actors) collectively set up the ritual occasion as well as the broad narrative through song. Immediately following this prelude, however, Himmela debates the propriety of worshipping Jokumaraswami instead of the traditional presiding deity of folk performance, Ganesha. As the sutradhar narrates Jokumaras exploits as an indiscriminate seducer of women, Himmela takes on the role of censor and insists that such an obscene god poses a big risk at a digniced community gathering. He inserts euphemisms into the sutradhars sexually explicit descriptions and urges the use of poetry rather than prose as a less dangerous narrative medium for the gods exploits. The sutradhar in turn is committed to Jokumaraswami as subject because this god stands for youth, beauty, renewal, and the fundamental human urge toward procreation. As a result, the divine object of worship is an illegitimate deity who is also the problematic subject of the play; the opening dialogue simultaneously questions and performs the ritual propitiation that ensures success for the participatory event of theatre. The symbolic presence of Jokumaraswami establishes the subversion of all forms of patriarchal control as the plays dominant message. In keeping with this objective, Kambar situates the action of both outer and inner plays unambiguously in the present and meshes ritual deeply with the rural politics of land, caste, and gender. In Karnads view, by working out the psychological, social, and political implications of the concept of virility, the play brings out the ambiguous nature of the very fertility rite it had set out to celebrate (TP, 16). The basic dramatic principle is that of systematic opposition between the two principal males, with Basanna appearing as a type of the fertility god Jokumaraswami and Gowda as the antitype. Gowda oppresses both women and peasants but is impotent as husband, lover, and cultivator; Basanna is powerless but virile and rebellious, a natural hero among women as well as men. This antagonism manifests itself in performance as a radical di,erence of physique and manner: the corpulent Gowda appears with exaggerated makeup, comically heavy sideburns, and a gang of four henchmen dressed
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in black who sing all their dialogue; Basanna wears ordinary peasant dress, stands alone, and speaks prose. The absorption of myth into everyday reality appears further in the deiccation of Gowdas musketthe object that enforces his unjust poweras the god Dum Dum. The god of ritual thus becomes the ironic counterpoint to the antigod created by modern forms of organized oppression: while Jokumaraswami creates life, the musket god reduces living human beings to ash and a whi, of smoke (9). As a phallic object and a euphemism for the male sexual organ, the gun also symbolizes weakness masquerading as strength. So Basanna has nothing but contempt for both of Gowdas weapons, while the victims he shoots with his own gun, he claims, dont die, they litter (26). Translated into real-life terms by Basannas unambiguous decance, the mythic and ritualistic polarities of life and death connect the play to present-day power struggles in the agrarian South. Caught between the antithetical males, Gowdathi inhabits a world that is at once more conventional and more violently radical than the one inhabited by Padmini. As the neglected wife of an abusive village headman, Gowdathi is strongly circumscribed by patriarchy, and her overwhelming desire for a child is essentially feminine and conformist. As she explains pleadingly to her husband (while really addressing Basanna), You are . . . a man and you dont need children or a home. You feel you can go on like a lone owl. I am a woman. How can I live without children? (34). With advice from the village women, Gowdathi also begins the fulcllment of her quest legitimately enoughby feeding her husband a dish of the snake gourd symbolic of Jokumaraswami, she hopes to accomplish through the magic of ritual what ten years of marriage have failed to bring about. Her desire becomes subversive, however, because its legitimate object (the husband) is both unavailable and incapable. The symbolic exchange of bodiesthe substitution of lover for husbandalso comes about because of Gowdas cowardice. Instead of confronting Basanna in the devils celd, as he had threatened, Gowda sends his henchmen in his place and escapes to the prostitute Sharis house. Once Basanna has consumed the meal intended for Gowda, he functions simultaneously as the ritual agent who has to fulcll the purpose of the god inside his body, the rebellious peasant, and the socially inferior lover who can give an abandoned wife what she wants. The ritual, therefore, is both real and a convenient cction serving the ends of sexual and social resistance. There is no attempt in Jokumaraswami, however, to excuse adultery by appealing to ritual compulsions or the accident of substitution. Gowdathi yields to Basanna in full knowledge of the transgressive nature
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of her act because her needs as a woman override the social and sexual taboos, and her womanliness makes her stronger in every respect, not weaker. Kambar also develops a complex dual symbolism around Gowdathi to draw her fully into the rural politics of land and class. As the mature woman desiring motherhood, she symbolizes the fertile earth that can only be husbanded by the strong male. Gowda pretends to be a sexual predator who has not left any land in this village untouched (14), but his impotence merely underscores his illegitimate control over the land that Basanna, Basannas father, and others of their caste and class have cultivated with great labor. As the mistreated wife, Gowdathi also symbolizes the social groups her husband has dispossessed. Her union with Basanna is doubly appropriate because they are both victims of oppression, determined to avenge themselves against the same oppressor. Kambars 1989 production of Jokumaraswami at the Nehru Festival caught the mutuality and sexual force of this relationship brilliantly, especially in the courtship scene where the delicate, radiant Gowdathi joined hands and danced with a lover who had submitted entirely to her aura. Following such a declaration of independence, the murder of Basanna by Gowda and his men takes on multiple meaningsit marks the ritual death of the fertility god, the socially sanctioned punishment of the illicit lover by the licit husband, and the destruction of a politicized but powerless peasantry by the ruthless landlord class. But in no case does death prevent regenerationBasannas child lives on inside Gowdathi, the husband has to accept his humiliation at the lovers hands, and the earth continues to be fruitful because of the peasants labor. Femininity becomes the generative principle in the natural as well as social worlds. At another political level of signiccation that is even more visible in performance, Jokumaraswami creates a community of women across social and moral divisions. In the opening musical sequence male and female performers stand separately, facing each other. In the dramatic action, all the women in the playGowdathi, the prostitute Shari, the young village girl Ningi, and the servants Shivi and Bassistand united against the overbearing yet grotesquely comic cgure of Gowda. As the wife, Gowdathi has to plead abjectly with him about her needs, whereas Shari and Ningi abuse him openly, even though he has kept Shari for years and has o,ered the same secure future to Ningi. Ningi deliberately passes over Gowda in favor of Gurya, another landless peasant whose spirit Gowda has tried to break repeatedly. In a central scene that starkly violates caste and class boundaries, Gowdathi arrives at Sharis home to
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plead with this beloved whore, whore my mother to relinquish Jokumaraswami to her because like you, Im a woman (21). What follows is a very long scene (in performance) of female bonding, with Gowdathi, Shivi, Bassi, and Shari dancing around the central image of Jokumaraswami. Shari initially wants to propitiate the god herself so that she may retain a few male customers as she grows older. But her contempt for Gowda and empathy for Gowdathi overcome this self-interest, and she fulclls the role of surrogate mother to her social and sexual rival even though that increases her own prospects of a lonely and impoverished future. The two women outside the sphere of direct male control the virgin Ningi and the whore Shariare thus embodiments of selfpossessed femininity in the play because they have a gritty decance that the wife, or even a rebellious peasant like Basanna, cannot match. More than Basannas masculinity (which hastens his death), it is this sisterhood of sympathetic women that seems to ensure a secure future for Gowdathi and her child. Ascetic Men, Sovereign Women: Habib Tanvirs Charandas chor In comparison with both Hayavadana and Jokumaraswami, Tanvirs Charandas chor illustrates the bexibility of structure and content that the category of urban folk drama allows. The play does not follow any specicc folk narrative or ritual, and it does not contain the conventional outer frame in which a sutradhar or bhagavata presents the inner action to the audience. Instead, Charandas is a syncretic and largely oral text assembled piecemeal to suit the specicc needs and talents of Tanvirs company of tribal performers from the Chhattisgarh region. It was also the crst play by Tanvir to be performed entirely by the tribal actors in their own dialect, making it a turning point in the playwrights careerboth because it excluded urban actors and because it introduced Chhattisgarhi (usually marginalized as a regional dialect of Hindi) as the language for a contemporary play. The core narrative belongs to a Rajasthani folktale that Tanvir crst heard from the folklorist Vijaydan Detha about an unusual thief who took a vow always to speak the truth and sacricced his life to that cause. He then combined that story with the activities of a regional sect called the Satnamis (literally, those bearing the name of truth), who worship truth as the highest form of divinity. The Satnamis are broadly aligned with the nirguna philosophical and theological tradition and have a prominent presence in Chhattisgarh, along with the similar community
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of the followers of Kabir. The structure and content of the play emerged gradually in the improvisatory workshops and rehearsals of the illiterate tribal performers, who created the dialogue they would be most comfortable with. Tanvir wrote some of the songs himself and commissioned two poets from the regionSwarna Kumar Sahu and Gangaram Seeket to create the rest. Like Kambar, Tanvir also accommodated within his premodern narrative the forms of oppression and corruption that belong in the Indian political present. From this eclectic fusion of folklore, postclassical religious thought and practice, regional music and dance forms, improvised dialogue, and topical political allusion emerged a stunningly successful stage vehicle that has had a continuous performance record in India and abroad since 1974, winning (among other honors) the Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh International Drama Festival in 1982.4 As a folk play actually performed by folk players, Charandas chor evokes village culture even more vividly and authentically than Hayavadana and Jokumaraswami, especially in the abundant individual and collective singing and dancing that punctuates and sometimes constitutes the action. As a deliberately assembled text, the play proceeds not through the dual outer/inner structure of formalized folk performance but through the conjuncture of disparate structural elements and a succession of episodes held together by the central cgure of Charandas. Act 1 creates an overwhelmingly male world, using an episodic structure to establish Charandass mercurial personae as amoral thief, trickster, disciple of a truth-seeking guru, and protector of the oppressed. In the brisk stage business of this act Charandas is banked by two antithetical male cguresthe foolish havaldar (constable), who is a type of defunct authority, and the Satnami guru, a charismatic yet ambivalent male ideal. Dressed in a policemans khaki uniform and carrying a nightstick, the constable is the stock gull who provides vicarious release for the villagers pentup emotions against the governmental machinery of law and order. Belonging to an older world of ascetic discipline (symbolized by his white robes and beads), the religious guru imposes his own code of conduct and makes uncompromising demands on a succession of dysfunctional malesa thief, a drunk, a gambler, a drug addictwho stumble across his path. But he succeeds in reforming no one except Charandas and seems to be motivated largely by a callow interest in guru-dakshina, the disciples traditional material tribute to his master. In performance, the e,ective delineation of this male world depends on the di,erentiation of the three main cgures from the ragtag company of men as well as the crowds of villagers and dancers surrounding them.
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In contrast with the relative anonymity of performers in urban folk drama, the actors in these three roles have therefore gained unusual celebrity Madan Lal and Govind Ram as Charandas, Thakur Ram as the guru, and in an act of superb self-parody, Habib Tanvir himself as the havaldar. The comedic and political e,ect of the thief-constable rivalry also depends on the spectators willingness to suspend disbelief and see Charandas as ubiquitous but uncatchable, even when he is face to face with his nemesis; the occasions when he eludes the constable by posing as a cripple and as the god Hanuman represent climactic moments of physical comedy on the stage. Charandass comic energy, however, is moderated by the audiences gradual recognition of his contrarinesshe steals for survival, but cnds himself unable to rob a helpless woman or a hungry peasant; he is devout but steals even the image of the deity from a temple; he takes an unshakable vow of truth before the Satnami guru but describes theft as the dharma he cannot relinquish; he follows an antisocial profession but after a time turns it to the cause of social justice. Predictably, Charandas is the agent who disrupts this carnivalesque male domain: when he takes a solemn vow before the guru never to lie and attaches several unnecessarily fantastic oaths to that resolve, the guru-chela (masterdisciple) relationship turns into an inexorable bond and sets him on a collision course with the female world of act 2. Act 2 of Charandas chor is doubly unusual in that it grants women both sexual and political power but portrays the male and female worlds as fundamentally incompatible because of the clash between male chastity and a predatory female sexuality. Beautiful, unmarried, and autocratic, the rani exercises her authority e,ortlessly over a feudal kingdom the antithesis to the disorderly society of act 1in which feminized men defer to her authority while fulclling the conventional roles of minister, treasurer, priest, soldier, and so on. Charandas erupts into this world of reversed gender roles because he wants to reach the pinnacle of his career as a thief and bout the ranis authority at the same time by committing a symbolic theft from her treasury. Hereafter the encounter between Charandas and the rani deviates in almost every respect from the usual logic of transgressive unions in folk narratives. He succeeds in arousing her interest and then her passion as she comes to regard him as an exceptional (unsubstitutable) male rather than as an imperfect mate who needs to be supplanted (cg. 18). This unexpected capitulation leads her to abdicate her own nature in two ways: she shows a willingness to revert to the usual role of the submissive lover and wife and her embarrassment at her passion creates the desire to conceal her emotions
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from her male courtiers and subjects. She then encounters frustration rather than fulcllment in her quest, not because Charandas is indi,erent toward her, but because his idiosyncratic oaths stand in the way: the woman desires but is not desired in turn because of the irrationality of male codes. Perhaps the most enduring image from the plays early productions is that of a splendidly dressed Fida Bai as the rani, looking in perplexity at Govind Ram in peasant dress as he prepares to refuse the food she has o,ered him on a gold platter. Charandass transgression becomes more serious when the rani o,ers marriage, because even the female servant at court considers it unimaginable that any man would refuse a queen.
servant: How can any man not agree to such a thing? When you ordered him in front of everyone to do certain things he did not agree. . . . Now when you say a thing like this in private, how can he possibly not accept it? He will decnitely accept it. He will not refuse a thing like this. (Charandas, 74)
But not only does Charandas refuse the queens hand, he wants to announce his refusal to the world because he cannot lie. Signiccantly, throughout the period of brief but intense courtship Charandas addresses the queen as rani daidai is a term of respect for an older woman, but also the word for midwife. At the point of no return, as the rani reverts from paramour to queen, from the feminine back to the masculine role, she can restore order and her own self-respect only by destroying Charandas. Like Basanna, Charandas is thus a sacriccial victim, but he dies for wanting to guard his chastity in the face of female desire, not for the sin of sexual transgression. In this contest between a fellowship of ascetic males and the sovereign authority of women, patriarchy becomes curiously irrelevant. The critic C. N. Ramachandran has argued that the structures of sophisticated literature are analogous to social structures, while those of folk literature oppose and rejectsymbolically at leastexisting social structures (Ramachandran, 21). The rigid formalism of Indian elite (urban, realist) theatre, he contends, analogously rebects the acceptance and endorsement of a rigidly structured society on the basis of caste/ class in which every members rights and duties are cxed (21). The constitutive features of folk theatre, embodied variously by the three plays discussed in this chapter, counteract such rigidity and conformity in every respect. The improvisatory nature of the performance implies a
Fig. 18. The ascetic thief and the sovereign queen. Govind Ram as Charandas and Fida Bai as the rani in Habib Tanvirs Charandas chor, directed by Habib Tanvir, Naya Theatre, New Delhi, 1974. Courtesy of Habib Tanvir.
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rejection of textual authority, analogous to the rejection of social and political codes. The absence of a linear coherent structure challenges notions of hierarchy and order. Antirealistic representation, along with the framing device that always gives utterance to the present voice of the community, makes the illusion/reality distinction superbuous. The inclusion of music and dance indicate a community-centered rather than an individual-centered consciousness. The entire form is a symbolic gesture of protest and a rejection of authority, unlike elite theatre, which does not allow the violation of established tenets. This view of folk theatre as a resistant form deepens the paradox that folk cultures in India are a product of premodern modes of socioeconomic organization and undergo inevitable atrophy as the rural regions adapt to modern urbanization, industrialization, and development. Kambar comments that in the region of north Karnataka to which he belongs, even today [people] live largely governed by feudal values and have structures and textures of living which belong to other, previous times (Folk Theatre, xi). By representing these textures, he suggests, the playwright or poet may heighten social awareness and bring about a measure of social change. For Kambar, however, art is also a means of delving into the collective unconscious, of discovering structures, tones, myths and symbols which are so fundamental and hence so powerful, that issues like contemporaneity do not feature where [the artist] functions (xi). Certainly, folk theatre and its urban derivations cannot have the transparent contemporaneity of realist forms set in the urban present. But in their resistance to authority, folk-based formshowever primal their appeal in other respectsmount a sociopolitical critique that is thoroughly accessible to the urban spectator, and the clear hand of an author self-consciously shaping his material for urban consumption enhances this accessibility. The element of critique is most evident in Jokumaraswami and Charandas chor, which are closer to village experience than Karnads multilayered Hayavadana. Kambar attacks the premodern social structure, making a very Brechtian statement about the rights of the peasants to the land on which they work virtually as serfs for an absentee landlord (Karnad, TP, 16). But he also taps into the deep structures of psychic and sexual experience in Jokumaraswami by translating premodern antagonisms into a real and symbolic opposition between virility and impotence. In the ritualistic structure of the resulting stage vehicle, the audiences understanding of successful resistance has to accommodate the sacriccial death of the hero. Similarly, in Charandas chor Tanvir embeds his folk
Alternative Stages
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narrative in a recognizably contemporary world of social inequality and political corruption. The social meanings of act 1 of the play coexist with the mythic and psychosexual meanings of act 2, placed on an equal footing by a bare stage that can signify any place. The ranis feudal kingdom coexists with a recognizably modern political world in which a landowner hoards grain in a village full of starving peasants, and mere battery is enough to distract a minister while Charandas robs the queens treasury. The singular story of Charandas belongs to folklore and myth, but the character created by Tanvir and his company of performers does not. Finally, the versatility of the urban folk form is evident in all three playsit provides a theatrical experience antithetical to that of the realist drama of urban domesticity but does not relinquish its hold on the social and political problems particular to its locations. With respect to gender, however, the di,erences from urban realist drama are striking and signiccant. In the world of folk culture, women have the power to speak, act, and control the fate of men. They are the prize objects for which men willingly or unwillingly sacricce themselves. Whatever the audiences aesthetic and ideological leanings, contemporary Indian practice o,ers compelling reasons to deexoticize folk theatre and attend to the ways in which it participates in the politics of gender, class, and community in the present.
chapter 10
#
Intertexts and Countertexts
Canonical Counter-Discourse and Postcolonial Indian Theatre One of the most inbuential and controversial recent debates in postcolonial studies has centered on the relations of dependency and opposition between postcolonial writing and dominant Western forms of textuality. The generalized form of this argument, presented by Ashcroft, Griths, and Tin in The Empire Writes Back (1989), maintains that the act of writing texts of any kind in post-colonial areas is subject to the political, imaginative, and social control involved in the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and that such writing is therefore inescapably syncretic, regardless of the language of composition (29). More deterministically, Stephen Slemon claims that all postcolonial literary writing is a form of cultural criticism and cultural critique . . . and an inherently dialectical intervention in the hegemonic production of cultural meaning (14). This approach places particular emphasis on postcolonial texts that write back or write against canonical Western texts in which colonial cultures are presented according to the dictates of anterior, canonical, and speciccally European narrative patterns (Slemon, 10). Slemon describes such colonialist acts of cultural appropriation, as well as the postcolonial subversions of these acts, as essentially allegorical, because in both cases one signifying system is read in terms of another.
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The horizon of cguration upon which a large number of post-colonial literary texts seek to act is this precgurative discourse of colonialism, whose dominant mode of representation is that of allegory. And thus allegory, in a dialectical sense, becomes an especially charged site for the discursive manifestations for what is at heart a cultural form of struggle. Allegory . . . becomes a site upon which post-colonial cultures seek to contest and subvert colonialist appropriation through the production of a literary, and speciccally anti-imperialist, cgurative opposition or textual counterdiscourse. (11)
Helen Tin takes a very similar position when she argues that postcolonial literatures and cultures are constituted in counter-discursive rather than homologous practices and that their subversion of the European cctional record is a form of canonical counter-discourse (18). In postcolonial Anglophone literatures, counterdiscursive texts have tended to cluster in particular around three works that chart the psychohistory of colonialism from the early modern to the modern period Shakespeares The Tempest (1611), Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness (1902). All three have been described as paradigmatic colonial texts and classic cctions of the colonial encounter, revealing in essence the processes of domination, exploitation, and brutalization that mark Europes colonization of the Other. In his study of the psychology of colonization, O. Mannoni even treats the Prospero-Caliban and Crusoe-Friday relationships as paradigmatic examples of the master-slave dialectic in a colonial context, characterized by mutual hatred (in The Tempest) or cooperation (in Robinson Crusoe), but postulated on the colonizers unquestioned racial, intellectual, and moral superiority (see Mannoni 97109). Postcolonial reinscriptions of these texts have understandably focused, then, on subverting the cognitive and thematic codes of colonialist appropriation. Comparing Canadian, Australian, and Caribbean versions of The Tempest, Diana Brydon notes that such Canadian-English authors as G. D. Roberts, Margaret Lawrence, and Phyllis Gottlieb have feminized Shakespeares male-centered fable of colonial experience, choosing Miranda rather than Caliban as the complex cgure of postcolonial self-recognition, knowledge, and power (Brydon, Re-writing, 7784 passim). Allan Gardiner argues that J. M. Coetzees Dusklands and Foe systematically subvert the canonical formulation of the colonial encounter in Robinson Crusoe (174). Dusklands resituates Crusoes imperial domain in a nameless empire that signices the twilight of all empires; Foe disrupts the apparent
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harmony of the Crusoe-Friday partnership by introducing a female narrator and implicates the cctionalized author (De)Foe himself in the brutal silencing of the slave. Heart of Darkness is commonly regarded as a powerfully anticolonial text, but Brydon argues that such novels as Margaret Atwoods Surfacing and Patrick Whites A Fringe of Leaves question its organizing structures in other ways. Both Atwood and White write women into a misogynist text and are concerned not so much with the dissolution of a civilized personality as with the dissolution of Western metaphysical concepts of personality per se (Brydon, Thematic Ancestor, 389, 392). In his trenchant critique of Conrads novella, Chinua Achebe goes much further: he attacks the Wests preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind, and he describes Conrad as a thoroughgoing racist who dehumanizes Africa and Africans in exact conformity with white racist attitudes (257). In all these instances, such terms as displacement, subversion, tension, critique, resistance, and misreading most nearly characterize the process of substitution by which authors on the periphery dismantle the hegemonic colonial text and reconstruct it as the subaltern postcolonial text. Despite its theoretical currency and explanatory power, however, the concept of canonical counterdiscourse o,ers at best a partial view of postcolonial textual and cultural politics. As Mishra and Hodge have pointed out, a broad and somewhat depoliticized category like counterdiscourse reduces the post-colonial . . . to a purely textual phenomenon, as if power is simply a matter of discourse and it is only through discourse that counter-claims might be made (278). Indeed, because of its close association with English literary studies, postcolonial theory not only privileges but delimits the textual by interpreting colonial relations through literary texts alone. . . . The meaning of discourse shrinks to text, and from there to literary text, and from there to texts written in English because that is the corpus most familiar to the critics (Loomba, 9596). The emphasis on writing back also places inordinate signiccance on the continued relationship of the (postcolonial) periphery to the (imperial) center through the medium of a European language (mainly English), and marginalizes those forms of writing and performance that are non-Europhone and not concerned primarily with the colonial experience. The many-voiced discourse of the non-English unconscious (Mishra and Hodge, 279) is obscured by a totalizing Eurocentrism. The counterdiscursive approach has similar limitations even within the specicc context of literary relations. First, colonialist discourse, which
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Slemon decnes as a system of signifying practices that produces, naturalizes, and mobilizes the hieracrchical power structures of the imperial enterprise, does not encompass all forms of textuality and textual exchange in postcolonial writing, nor can the term postcolonial usefully cover all the culture a,ected by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day (Slemon, 6; Ashcroft et al., 2). As the literary histories of various Asian and African former colonies readily reveal, the assimilation of European literary genres and the activities of imitation and translation are crucial to the modernization of colonial and postcolonial literatures, and these processes are too complex and reciprocal to be reduced merely to signs of hegemonic control. Second, canonical texts may themselves be subversive rather than hegemonic, particularly when they belong to the low mimetic modes of irony and satire. King Lear, Gullivers Travels, and The W aste Land are canonical but cannot be proclaimed as hegemonic unless we dissolve modal di,erences between literary texts altogether. Indeed, the subversions of postcolonial writing are often practiced through, not against, canonical texts that are already deeply subversive. Salman Rushdies novel Midnights Children (1980) is written through Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy (1759), Gunter Grasss The Tin Drum (1962), and Garca Mrquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), among other works; Mustapha Maturas play, The Playboy of the West Indies (1988), is written through J. M. Synges The Playboy of the Western World (1907); and Octavio Pazs condensed epic, The Petrifying Petriced (1976) is written through Eliots The W aste Land (1922). Third, the counterdiscursive, subversive impulse in postcolonial writing is not directed exclusively along centrifugal lines toward colonial and neocolonial practices; it is also directed inward, toward the failures of ostensibly independent postcolonial societies. As argued earlier, postcolonial self-conceptions are heroic as well as satiric; they consist in selfpraise as well as self-criticism. Rushdies Midnights Children and Shame (1983), Soyinkas Madmen and Specialists (1971), and Achebes Anthills of the Savannah (1987) are all self-rebexive critiques of political and social malformations in a third-world nation that follow the colonizers withdrawal from the former colony. To argue that these works are nevertheless contained by colonialist discourse is to deny fundamental historical change, and to speciously deprive postcolonial cultures of complexity, agency, and power. I argue in this chapter that, as a multilingual celd of performance, contemporary Indian theatre is especially resistant to the Eurocentric, hierarchical, and textually driven model of literary relations o,ered by
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the concept of canonical counterdiscourse, and that the concept must undergo substantial modiccation to become consistent with the actual textual and performative functions of appropriation. The textual celd of theatre in India is permeated by classical, premodern, modern, and contemporary intertexts, both Indian and Western, which signal the emergence of one play from another and, occasionally, of a play from some other form of literary narrative. The multifarious assimilation of Western as well as non-Western drama has also diversiced and consolidated an emergent theatrical culture by introducing into it nonindigenous narratives and textual practices, because Indian playwrights usually write through (rather than against) the canonical text and regard such writing as a legitimate exercise of authorship. However, there is nothing distinctively postcolonial about these forms of intertextual exchange. The practices of translation, adaptation, and outright appropriation are equally visible and formative in Indian theatre on both sides of the historical divide of 1947, and in both instances they involve canonical Anglo-European as well as classical Indian plays. The di,erence between colonial and postcolonial practice in this respect is one of degree, not of kind. Furthermore, some recent intertexts are plainly counterhegemonic in intention, but many others are antinationalist rather than anticolonial: a canonical Western text may thus enable a critique not of the imperium but of the sovereign nation, usually in its incarnation as a coercive nation-state. In the Indian context, therefore, we have to retheorize the relation between new plays and their precursorsWestern and Indian, dramatic and nondramaticin terms mindful of the historicity and cultural reciprocity of the exchange. In the following sections I discuss the relevance of the concepts and processes of translation, transculturation, and intertextuality to the various forms of rewriting in contemporary theatre. I use the seminal example of Bertolt Brecht to chart the multifaceted assimilation of a Western playwright into post-independence theatre theory, drama, and performance. I then trace a theatrical line of descent that, when explored fully in the Indian context, establishes unexpected relations between canonical Western plays and their Indian intertexts, as well as between Indian plays and their analogues elsewhere in the postcolonial world. The genealogical connections between John Gays The Beggars Opera (1728) and Bertolt Brechts The Threepenny Opera (1928) are well established in criticism, as are the connections between both works and the critique of totalitarianism in a play like Vaclav Havels Beggars Opera (1972) or the critique of the postcolonial nation in a play like Wole Soyinkas Opera Wonyosi (1977). I connect the plays of Gay, Brecht, and
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Soyinka to the Marathi playwright P. L. Deshpandes Teen paishacha tamasha (The Three-Paisa Entertainment, 1978) and use these correspondences to explore the enabling political functions of Brechtian inbuences and other thematic relations in the specicc case of Deshpandes play. These links between two European playwrights, a contemporary African playwright, and an Indian-language author are not arbitrary critical assertionsrather, they point to the formation of an extraordinary theatrical cluster across historical periods, cultures, and languages, and to the unexpected cosmopolitanism of non-Europhone theatre. Translation, Transculturation, Intertextuality There are three major, partly overlapping forms of transcultural textual exchange in contemporary Indian theatre. The crst of these is translation, the simplest process by which Indian and Western, classical and modern plays enter the contemporary theatrical repertoire in India. What Roman Jakobson calls interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language. . . . [that] substitutes messages in one language not for separate code-units but for entire messages in some other language. . . . Thus translation involves two equivalent messages in two di,erent codes (Linguistic Aspects, 146). This equivalence is possible because of the kinship of languagesthe measure in which languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express (Benjamin, Task, 74). But translation also involves the hierarchical relation of cultures in history. Hugo Friedrich notes that to the Romans, translation from the Greek meant indiscriminate appropriation or transformation in order to mold the foreign into the linguistic structures of ones own culture with the clear assumption that the linguistic structures of Greek were inferior to those of Latin (On the Art of Translation, 12). During the Renaissance, however, the purpose of translation [became] to go beyond the appropriation of content to a releasing of those linguistic and aesthetic energies that heretofore had existed only as pure possibility in ones own language and had never been materialized before (13). Through translation, the vernacular literatures of Europe acquired, and were enriched by, narratives that would not otherwise have entered them. During the colonial period in India, translations of Shakespeare and Kalidasa into multiple modern subcontinental languages were the principal means by which an emergent and ambivalent urban theatre culture
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consolidated itself, but after independence the sphere of translation has expanded enormously. If we take Hindi as the target language, for instance, among the older Indian plays, Mohan Rakesh has translated Kalidasas Abhijnana Shakuntalam and Shudrakas Mrichchhakatika, and Hazari Prasad Dwivedi has rendered several plays by Rabindranath Tagore. The large celd of classic Western plays in translation includes Harivansh Rai Bachchans King Lear; Rangeya Raghavs Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth; and Raghuvir Sahays Macbeth and Othello. From modern Western drama, Rajendra Yadav has translated Anton Chekhovs The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, and Three Sisters; J. N. Kaushal, Ibsens An Enemy of the People, Brechts Mother Courage, Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman, and William Saroyans The Cave Dwellers; and Sahay, three modern Hungarian plays, including Istvan Orkenys Totek. These are translations by playwrights, poets, and critics who are major contemporary Indian authors in their own right; the total body of Western drama rendered into the Indian languages by lesser known (if not anonymous) translators now includes the classical Greek playwrights (Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides); Spanish, French, and Italian Renaissance and neoclassical authors (Caldern, Molire, Corneille, Racine, Beaumarchais, Goldoni); nineteenth-century Europeans (Bchner, Edmond Rostand); and the full range of modern European and American playwrights, especially Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Gogol, Gorky, Shaw, Pirandello, Lorca, ONeill, Anouilh, Williams, Miller, Beckett, Stoppard, and Dario Fo (see appendix 8). A major stimulus for the translation of world drama into a single Indian language has been the National School of Dramas controversial policy of performing Western as well as Indian plays mainly in Hindi, which has created an impressive archive of works over four decades of productions and in-house publications.1 The same process is repeated throughout the country in other languages and locations, although on a smaller scale, because of the ongoing literary and theatrical interest in foreign drama. In keeping with the principle of linguistic equivalence, all these translations carry across a text from one set of linguistic codes to another but leave the cultural codes of the original more or less intact. More frequently, however, the activity of translation systematically substitutes the cultural codes of the original with those of the modern Indian language of translation and becomes intercultural rather than interlingual. The resulting text is usually called an adaptation, but, properly speaking, it is the product of a process of transculturation that carries a text across from one historical-cultural register to another and
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assimilates canonical Western and Indian texts to the modern Indian languages and contemporary experience. Borrowing their conceptual vocabulary from Sanskrit, such languages as Hindi and Marathi di,erentiate anuvad (translation-in-general) into bhashantar (a conscientious rendering of the language or verbal texture of the original) and rupantar (a systematic transformation that changes the appearance of the original, so that it does not seem alien or alienating in the target language). The process of appropriation visible in a transcultural adaptation (a rupantar) renders a foreign text intelligible in the cultural codes of its Indian audience, and the urge toward such rewriting is more strongly visible in drama and theatre than in the other literary genres. It is much more dicult to cnd an interlingual translation (a bhashantar) of a British, American, French, German, or Russian play than it is to cnd translations of prose cction and poetry from these same literatures, regardless of the historical period in question. In short, the public and performative aspects of drama as a medium seem to demand, in the modern Indian context, that a spectacle be accessible in the immediate cultural language of the spectator. There are several conceptual positions outside those of postcolonial theory and counterdiscourse that can place this process of substitution in perspective. At one level, it approximates John Drydens concept of imitation (as distinct from paraphrase and metaphrase), where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion; and taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the groundwork, as he pleases (Translation, 17). Frank Kermodes discussion of the transmission of the Western classic o,ers other pertinent concepts, especially those of accommodation, translatione, and renovation. As an alternative to the methodologies of philology and historiography, accommodation is any method by which the old document may be induced to signify what it cannot be said to have expressly stated, while translationes become transitions from a past to a present system of beliefs, language, generic expectations, and renovations become very specicc attempts to establish the relevance of a document which has had a good chance of losing it (Kermode, 40, 11718).2 Structuralist poetics o,ers perhaps the most rigorous view of the interdependence of literary works, decning the text as a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture (Barthes, 146), and attending to what Jonathan Culler calls the complex vraisemblance of specicc intertextualities, where one work takes another as its basis or point of departure
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and must be assimilated in relation to it (140). Because intertextuality can be viewed as primarily a function of interpretation, and theories of intertextuality tend to be Eurocentric, it is important to emphasize both the intentional and intercultural nature of this textual exchange. John Frows argument, that the intertext is not a real and causative source but a theoretical construct formed by and serving the purposes of a reading, does not apply to the cultural translation of Western plays in India (46). Similarly, in Barthes view of the text as a cultural palimpsest, culture appears to be a singular, self-sucient category, whereas the Indian plays register the unpredictable movement of texts across national cultures and conbate so-called Western and non-Western forms of textuality. Regardless of their theoretical origins, all of these concepts underscore the continuity of the process of literary renewal in times, places, and languages more or less di,erent from the original conditions of composition of a given work. During the colonial period, Shakespeare was again the only Western playwright to undergo such large-scale accommodation (speciccally, rupantar) within Indian theatre, but now the celd has widened to include Molire (cg. 19), Gogol, Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, and above all, Brecht.3 Given the plurality of theatre languages in India, a single source play, such as Brechts The Caucasian Chalk Circle or Shakespeares King Lear, can become the core of a singular archive by generating multiple indigenized versions, all of which bear a family resemblance to each other (see appendix 8). It is also important to note that the pervasive intertextuality of post-independence theatre subjects the Indian dramatic heritage to the same process of reinscription. Classical Sanskrit playwrights, such as Kalidasa, Bhasa, Bhavabhuti, and Shudraka, are performed in the original and in translation, but Habib Tanvirs Mitti ki gadi (1958) and Duryodhana (1979), respectively, deconstruct the canonical text of Shudrakas Mrichchhakatika and Bhasas Urubhangam as e,ectively as Deshpandes Teen paishacha tamasha (1977) works through and against The Threepenny Opera. We might even argue that the primary objective of the controversial traditionalist impulse in urban Indian theatre is to interpellate the text of contemporary experience with the preexisting text of classical aesthetics, the Western dramatic canon, or indigenous performance genres. The strongest argument, however, against a totalizing counterdiscursivity would be that, in post-independence Indian theatre, the primary locus of transculturation is not text but performance. The data available for approximately ninety Euro-American plays performed between 1952 and 2001 (displayed in appendix 8) identify a director and theatre group
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for every production, but specicc translators or adaptors for only cftyeight plays; in seven instances, the translator is the same as the director, and only three of the adapted versions have appeared in print as selfcontained works. Clearly, the intertexts are scripts for performance developed by directors, not texts for reading, and they constitute an extraordinary record of the reappearance of Euro-American dramatic monuments at some distance from their metropolitan origins. Following independence in 1947, for some time such directorial initiatives were crucial to the development of a stable performance culture. As Badal Sircar acknowledges pragmatically, productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Brecht, Sartre, Ionesco, and others allowed serious theatre groups (such as Bohurupee and Nandikar in Calcutta or Theatre Unit in Bombay) to sustain a repertory during the 1950s and 1960s, when new original Indian plays were still scarce. During the following two decades, the transcultural merged
Fig. 19. Muslim gentlemen ponder the schooling of women. Scene from Molires The School for Wives, adapted by Balraj Pandit and the cast, directed by Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Company, New Delhi, 1976. Courtesy of the NSD Repertory Company.
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with the intercultural, as major Western directors took on independent or collaborative indigenized productions of a selective portion of the Western canon. Outside Peter Brooks Mahabharata and the workshops of Grotowski and Barba, theatrical interculturalism is best embodied in such productions as Fritz Bennewitzs The Threepenny Opera (1970), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (with Ebrahim Alkazi and Vijaya Mehta, 1972 and 1974), Mr. Puntilla and His Man Matti (1979), Galileo (1983), Hamlet, King Lear, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Othello (with Ebrahim Alkazi, 1983), and The Tempest (1990); Carl Webers Caucasian Chalk Circle (1968); Richard Schechners Mother Courage (1981) and The Cherry Orchard (1983); Shozo Satos Ibaragi; and Egil Kipstes Cyrano de Bergerac (1984). In the 1990s, intertextual performance has evolved into the sign of a voluntary and accommodating cosmopolitanism, moving beyond Shakespeare, Molire, and Brecht to such plays as Chinghiz Aitmatovs Fujiyama (1991), Anouilhs Traveller without Luggage (1991), Lorcas The House of Bernarda Alba (1992), and Dario Fos Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1993), Archangels Dont Play Pinball (1996), and Comedy of Terrors (1998). Most of these productions have also been in Hindi, Indias main transregional language, and hence an excellent target language for transculturations. The primacy of performance is underscored further by the most inventive aspect of intertextual representation: the cross-fertilization of Western textual modes with Indian classical, traditional, folk, and intermediary performance genres, which indigenizes the text as well as the style of presentation. For instance, there are Bengali or Hindi or Marathi versions of Shakespeares major works, as there are Bengali, Marathi, and Tamil versions of Franz Xaver Kroetzs Request Concert. But there are also rupantars that recompose Shakespeare in Indian performance styles: B. V. Karanths Barnam vana (1979) employs the yakshagana folk form of Karnataka for Macbeth, Habib Tanvirs Basant ritu ka sapna (1993) casts A Midsummer Nights Dream in the Chhattisgarhi folk style, and the Kalamandalam in Kerala, the premier school of kathakali training in India, has produced King Lear and Othello in the kathakali style. Similarly, Gogols The Inspector General and Molires The Bourgeois Gentleman (1998) have been rendered in the nautanki style of Uttar Pradesh. The impulse behind such performances is not so much to deconstruct as to multiply the hegemonic text and accommodate it not only to the culture of the nation but of each culturally distinct region. The result, as appendix 8 indicates, is the extraordinary and pervasive, but in no way constraining, presence of world theatre in the multilingual urban performance culture of contemporary India.
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A third variety of intertextuality in Indian theatre involves the reconcguration of preexisting, usually self-sucient prose narrativesshort stories, novels, or folktalesas drama. The practice takes two principal forms: the adaptation of stories for the stage, where the oral or printed text of the original narrative is turned into a playscript for conventional staging; and the more intriguing theatre of stories (kahani ka rangmanch), which retains the order of words in the original text and reenacts them with minimal theatrical intervention. Since the 1960s, the crst practice (in some respects as old as theatre itself ) has been centered in Delhi and has brought major works of Indian and world cction to the stage, with Hindi as the predominant language of composition and/or translation. It thus has a narrowness in terms of language and region that is unusual in the Indian context. The modern and contemporary Indian authors taken up for this type of adaptation include Rabindranath Tagore, Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto, Dharamvir Bharati, Pandit Anandkumar, Harishankar Parsai, Chanakya Sen, Mannu Bhandari, and Nirmal Varma. The foreign works include Lu Xuns The True Story of Ah Q, Franz Kafkas The Trial, Akutagawa Ryunosukes Rashomon, and Gabriel Garca Mrquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude in Hindi, and Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart in Kannada (see appendix 9). Nearly all the productions have been under the auspices of the NSD Repertory Company and the Shri Ram Centre Repertory Company, with Rajinder Nath, Bhanu Bharati, Mohan Maharshi, M. K. Raina, Ranjit Kapoor, Amal Allana, and B. M. Shah as directors. For some practitioners, this method extends the limits of theatre and asserts (in yet another form) the directors autonomy in developing vehicles for the stage. M. K. Raina, for instance, explains the urge toward the dramatic adaptation of prose cction as an expression of the directors impatience with a sparse theatrical celd: People say there are no good scripts in Hindi after Mohan Rakesh. But as a director I cant wait for a script to be written. I need to do plays. I would rather choose a short story or a novel and develop my own script. But how can a playwright emerge when there is no model of Hindi theatre for him to write for? (qtd. in Kalidas 45). Critics of this crossfertilization of genres, however, regard it as parasitical, antitheatrical, and a sign of second-rate authorshipa spurious attempt to compensate for the actual poverty of drama in Hindi. The focus on canonical prose authors in Hindi and the appropriation of canonical prose writers in other languages for theatre predominantly in Hindi also indicate a measure of linguistic-cultural chauvinism. The reenactment of prose cctions in the theatre feeds on the prestige of the original authors, renders them
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mostly into one language, and extends their visibility through another, more public medium. All these aspects of the cction-theatre intertextual relation become much more problematic and controversial in the theatre of stories, a genre theorized and practiced for nearly thirty years by D. R. Ankur, a longtime member and present director of the National School of Drama. The purpose of kahani ka rangmanch is to explore how a story can retain its essential qualities and yet be converted into a theatrical experience. Hence, it presents the text of a story on stage as theatricalized narrative and dialogue, but without the conventional paraphernalia of sets, costumes, makeup, lighting, music, and seamless dramatic characterization. The actors perform multiple functions: they narrate the authors words, assume a character temporarily to perform dialogue already contained within the story, address the audience, and speak in their own voices. Over two decades, mainly through student productions at NSD, Ankur has developed an open-ended sequence called Katha collage (Collage of Stories), each part of which consists of an eclectic program of short plays dramatizing narratives from various languages and cultures (as of summer 2001, twelve such sequences had been performed at the school). The principal justiccation for the experiment is that it brings the storytelling tradition to the stage in an entirely new form, poses a unique challenge for actors, and creates a new kind of theatrical experience for the audience. Re-presentation on stage also ostensibly completes prose cctions by bringing out their latent theatrical qualities and often brings attention to stories that had remained obscure in print. Predictably, the form has invited the same criticism as the more conventional adaptations of prose cction for the stageaudiences cnd its devices repetitive, tedious, and undramatic, and regard the actors work as nonacting. Ankurs arguments about the cction-theatre relation appear particularly specious: there is no compelling need for theatre either to rescue the short story form or to complete it through stage enactment. Because of its very scale, however, kahani ka rangmanch represents a distinctive form of intertextuality in the theatre and functions as one more medium for exploring theatres connection with other genres. Thus, in the textual and performative celds of post-independence theatre, ancient, premodern, and modern, Indian and Western, dramatic and narrative works coexist, interpenetrate, and speak through each other. Although Shakespeare and Brecht have been the dominant foreign inbuences, given the prevalence of translation, adaptation, and transcultural
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appropriation the Indian and Western canons in their entirety are, in e,ect, the intertexts for contemporary dramatic production. The process of narrative appropriation and renewal to which these examples point has three main features. First, the cultural translation of a literary or performance text is distinctly di,erent from linguistic translation because the translators purpose is to create a cction parallel to, but substantially di,erent from, the original cction. Second, the transmission is usually transhistorical and translingual as well as transcultural, and it involves specicc texts. Third, the imitator recreates not individual details in the original but an overall cction that appears to have compelling potential for his or her own time and culture. The e,ect of such strategic appropriations is precisely the opposite of othering, a concept to which Gayatri Spivak has given wide critical currency. To modify a statement by Stephen Slemon, if othering is the projection of ones own systemic codes onto the vacant or uninscribed territory of the other, the act of transcultural appropriation is the projection of ones own systemic codes onto the full or already inscribed territory of the other. Although the trajectory of appropriation is reversed, the result is the same in both cases: the other is transformed into a set of codes that can be recuperated by reference to ones own system of cultural recognition (Slemon, 7). The postcolonial intertext is fully embedded in its immediate linguistic and political contexts, and it is fully intelligible in the particular cultural language of its audience; it is both a version of the Western original(s) and a self-sucient performance vehicle in its own right. This simultaneity of reference is evident both in the large-scale dissemination of Brechts work in post-independence theatre, and the particular ways in which the late twentieth-century versions of The Threepenny Opera connect with their sources in Brecht and Gay. Brecht, Epic Theatre, and the Politics of Appropriation Brecht stands in the same seminal relation to late twentieth-century Indian theatre as Shakespeare did to the nineteenth century, with two important di,erences: the German playwrights inbuence as a theorist of theatre equals (if it does not outweigh) the exemplary force of his practice, and the dissemination of his work has taken place largely outside the ambit of popular and commercial urban theatre. I do not know of any other country, Satyabrata Chaudhuri observes, where the literati
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have ever made one dramatist the epitome, test, and symbol of progressive culture as we Indians have done with Bertolt Brecht, and the signs of Brechts singular inbuence are widely evident (Brecht). In Bengal, a state where IPTA activists, street theatre groups, and radical playwrightdirectors, such as Utpal Dutt and Badal Sircar, have sustained one of the strongest political theatre movements in the country, Brechts plays are performed more frequently than those of native son and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, leading Rustom Bharucha to give separate attention to the phenomenon of Brecht in Bengal in his study of political theatre in the region (see Bharucha, Rehearsals, 191201). An impressive number of leading national and international directors, including Ebrahim Alkazi, Vijaya Mehta, Fritz Bennewitz, Carl Weber, Richard Schechner, B. V. Karanth, Rudraprasad Sengupta, and Jabbar Patel have lectured on Brecht, publicized his methods, and undertaken major productions of his plays around the country (see appendix 8). At the National School of Drama in New Delhi, professional productions of Brechts plays have outnumbered those of any other foreign playwright, and an active program of lectures, workshops, exhibits, and publications has armed his primacy in the curriculum.4 Habib Tanvir, Vijaya Mehta, Hasmukh Baradi, P. L. Deshpande, and Amal Allana are among the theatre professionals who have visited the Berliner Ensemble at crucial times in their respective careers, experienced the theatre of Brecht at crst hand, and assessed its relevance to Indian contexts. The intensity and rebexive energy of this engagement with a Western playwright are starkly at odds with the assumptions of counter-discursivity, and although the rewriting of Brecht in India is marked by contradiction, the impulses underlying it are not primarily oppositional. Some reasons for Brechts uncommon prestige are inherent in the nature of his theories; others are specicc to theatre in post-independence India. His systematic separation of epic theatre from the older dramatic theatre o,ers the most comprehensive, internally consistent twentiethcentury program for political representation, predicated on a materialist rather than idealist understanding of history, antirealist staging, nonlinear narrative progression, and an appeal to reason and action rather than emotional catharsis in the spectator. The subject of Brechts playsthe content that prescribes the formis always the dialectic of social relations and historical processes. As Walter Benjamin explains, the starting point for Brechtian epic theatre is the attempt to introduce fundamental change into the relationships between the stage and the public, text and performance, producers and actors.
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For its public, the stage is no longer the planks which signify the world (in other words, a magic circle), but a convenient public exhibition area. For its stage, the public is no longer a collection of hypnotized test subjects, but an assembly of interested persons whose demands it must signify. For its text, the performance is no longer a virtuoso interpretation, but its rigorous control. For its performance, the text is no longer a basis of that performance, but a grid on which, in the form of new formulations, the gains of that performance are marked. For its actor, the producer no longer gives him instructions about e,ects, but theses for comment. For its producer, the actor is no longer a mime who must embody a role, but a functionary who has to make an inventory of it. (Benjamin, Understanding, 2)
The power of this theory lies in the thoroughness of its revisionism, and Indian theatre practitioners have paid it serious attention because there is no indigenous theory of political theatre that is comparable in scope. It is not that Indian drama lacks non-Brechtian forms of political expression, or that the qualities and conditions of Brechtian theatre can (or should) be replicated in India: the street theatre of Safdar Hashmi, the Third Theatre of Badal Sircar, the revolutionary jatra theatre of Utpal Dutt, and the Chhattisgarhi folk theatre of Habib Tanvir are all major alternative forms of committed theatre. But Brecht continues to provide the primary theoretical justiccation for a politically instructive, socially responsible, and formally innovative theatre. To engage with him, either directly or through the devices of imitation and accommodation (rupantar), is still to engage with the most complex textual and performative vehicles of political meaning in modern and contemporary theatre. This is as true in the West as it is in India. Christopher J. McCullough notes that Brecht bourished in the subsidized national theatres in England between 1933 and the late 1970s, and his theory and practice have measurably inbuenced left-wing radical theatre from the pre-war Unity Theatre through to contemporary companies such as 7:84 (122). Eugne Van Ervens study of radical peoples theatre in Europe and the United States shows that Brechts anti-illusionist techniques, particularly his use of music and his distancing of audience, continue to be inbuential in avant garde populist theatre today. In India, Brecht also contributes in two important and specicc ways to the elaborate cultural e,ort to develop a distinctly Indian theatre. His rejection of the dominant Aristotelian traditions of Western drama (formalism, organicism, mimeticism) lends canonical authority to the critique of Western theatrical models in India, and the antirealistic, gestural,
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discontinuous style of his plays facilitates their assimilation to a range of traditional Indian performance genres. Underlying both moves is the perceptionreported frequently in Indian discussions as a pleasant coincidencethat Brechts theories of epic theatre and the alienation e,ect evolved from his interest in Eastern theatre traditions, and he is therefore a particularly valuable model in the quest for the modernity of tradition in India. As Brecht himself notes, the epic theatre is not all that new because its expository character and its emphasis on virtuosity bring it close to the old Asiatic theatre (Willett, 75). Nissar Allana observes that after independence, when the meaning of culture and tradition needed to be interpreted in a modern context, in evolving a new identity, Brechts use of elements that already existed in the folk theatre tradition brought about a wider awareness of the possibility that such elements could become part of the modern idiom in the Indian context. . . . In India there was already an awareness of the importance of discovering a link with tradition, and Brechts theatre soon became exceedingly relevant (Allana, 23). Indeed, Tanvir reports that after a year of training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, the experience of watching Brechts plays at the Berliner Ensemble in the mid1950s impelled him to think seriously about Indian theatre traditions and e,ected his return to indigenous performance forms at a formative stage in his career. Notwithstanding the prestige of Brechts epic theatre in theory, the most active area of interchange between him and Indian practitioners has therefore been the absorption of his work into the presentational styles of various indigenous genres, and the cultural speciccs of Indian languages (cg. 20). The major productions of Brecht in post-independence India recorded in appendix 10 cover three decades, nine languages, eight theatrically important geographical regions, and cfteen directors of note, three of them from the West. (This is a selective listthe 1993 Tribute to Bertolt Brecht lists eighty-cve productions of twenty-two separate plays from 1962 to 1993.) The individual productions also stand in two distinct relations to the original plays. Carl Webers Caucasian Chalk Circle in Hindi (1968), Kumar Roys Galileo in Bengali (1980), and C. R. Jambes Puntila in Kannada (1990) represent the process of linguistic and cultural translation from German into an Indian language and its accompanying contexts. In contrast, Fritz Bennewitzs production of The Threepenny Opera in the swang style of Uttar Pradesh (1970), Vijaya Mehtas Marathi versions of The Good Woman of Setzuan and The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the tamasha and dashavatar styles (1972 and 1974), M. K. Rainas Punjabi
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folk version of The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1976), Tanvirs Chhattigarhi folk version of Good Woman (1978), P. L. Deshpandes tamasha version of The Threepenny Opera (1978), and B. V. Karanths Bundelkhandi folk version of Caucasian Chalk Circle (1983) represent a transformative indigenization at the level of both word and action. The Brecht text and the traditional Indian presentational form stand in a symbiotic relation to each other: the text politicizes the form in a new way; the form subjects the text to a complex new process of naturalization. As Bennewitz observed of Karanths 1983 production, because of the strength of the Bundelkhandi dialect, powerful acting, and e,ective stage music, medium and play challenge[d] and change[d] each other to something new and unique (Bennewitz, Interviewed). Similarly, Bennewitz felt that, in his collaborative production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle with Vijaya Mehta, Mehtas talent allowed the successful integration of Brechts play into Marathi folk theatre: both the play and the medium faced a creative mutual challenge, but the result was a genuine Indian play which in the following years inspired quite a few similar successful experiments by Indian directors in other parts of the country (Interviewed).
Fig. 20. Brecht indigenized: the gods in quest of a good person. Scene from Sejuvan nagarada sadhvi, a Kannada production of The Good Woman of Setzuan. Translated by K. V. Subbanna, directed by Fritz Bennewitz, Ninasam Tirugata, Heggodu, 1989. Courtesy of Akshara K. V.
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Performed mainly for middle-class urban audiences, these multilayered productions are credited with reorienting folk and intermediary forms in important new directions and bringing together intracultural and intercultural experiments with tradition.5 In a 1976 review essay, for instance, Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni compares Mehtas The Good Woman of Setzuan with a production of Vijay Tendulkars original play Ghashiram kotwal and describes both as good examples of the synthesis of folk and bourgeois forms (Nadkarni, Search). Signiccantly, the distinction between indigenous and foreign vanishes at this point in the critics mind, and Brecht becomes exemplary of the new Indian theatre. The dominant impulse within the Brecht movement has thus been toward an indigenization that makes the politics and aesthetics of his theatre widely accessible to Indian audiences. Conversely, the resistance to Brecht comes from those who cnd the politics and the dramaturgy equally alien to Indian conditions, and Brechts theoretical positions more useful than his staging techniques. According to Bharucha, Utpal Dutt has argued very persuasively that Brechts theater does not fulcll the expectations and needs of the working class in Bengal. . . . The revolutionary theater of Bengal has to cnd its models in jatra and the historical plays of Girish Chandra Ghosh, not in the plays of Bertolt Brecht (Rehearsals, 120). Badal Sircar also rejects the naturalistic theatre and the proscenium stage in his Third Theatre, but he stresses the intimacy of the theatre experience rather than Brechtian alienation and argues that the appeal of an art form is principally, if not solely, through emotion, and not through intellect (Changing Language, 26). Sircars group Satabdi did take up Brecht oncein Gondi, a Bengali version of The Caucasian Chalk Circlenot because we wanted to do a Brecht play, but because I found that play to be Indian and contemporary (Voyages, 33). But as director he used the actors bodies to create all set elements, excluded irrelevant particulars such as the prologue and the singing chorus, and even eliminated music for the songs in order to enforce his stark message about peasant rights in the Bengal countryside. Even more trenchant criticism, however, comes from those who see the Indianized versions of Brecht as depoliticized exhibitions. Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni described Mehtas Good Woman of Setzuan as the work of a director who had approached Brecht solely as a formal exercise without a compelling interest in his radical politics (Search). Arun Naik criticized both of Mehtas Marathi productions as un-Brechtian, non-Marxist interpretations from a director who adheres to the Stanislavsky method of acting and therefore stands at the opposite end from Brecht (Brechtian Experiment). Of Nandikars
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productions of The Threepenny Opera and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Bharucha notes that if the group had distorted Brecht in order to illuminate the social and political conditions of India, one would want to examine its theater with greater respect. Unfortunately, its productions fail to engage in any dialectic with the political turmoil of Bengal and the life in the streets of Calcutta (Rehearsals, 197). G. P. Deshpande concludes that our Brechtian practitioners have not added anything to Brecht or to the Indian theatrical tradition (CIT, 110). The censure in these comments is aimed not at Brecht but at the Indian (mis)interpreters who reduce his work to a meaningless spectacle, and squander the opportunity for serious political intervention. As a play and a production from the 1970s, P. L. Deshpandes Teen paishacha tamasha is entangled in this complex process of exchange in which Brechtian politics and nonrealistic staging methods must be reconciled with the demands of a particular Indian linguistic medium and performance contexts. At the same time, the Marathi play is part of a coherent thematic exchange that reaches back through twentieth-century Germany to early eighteenth-century London. As my analysis in the following sections shows, the critique of corrupt structures of authority moves from Gay to Brecht, and from Brecht to Soyinka and Deshpande, with the unconscious relationship between the two postcolonial playwrights being just as signiccant as their conscious pursuit of Brecht as a model. The Genealogy of Beggary: Gay, Brecht, Soyinka The Source-Texts of Gay and Brecht The continuing appeal of John Gays The Beggars Opera for postcolonial authors is in some respects a remarkable anomaly because the socialpolitical formations in Gays play hardly share the characteristics of the modern secular nation that had evolved into the postcolonial state in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet Gays conceptions of human character, behavior, and social organization appear almost instinctively to have created a versatile grid for representations of power and powerlessness in various social and political dispensations. Historically, Gay views the decay of aristocratic codes and the emergence of the bourgeois ethic of proct and self-interest as an irreversible move toward a debased morality (later called social Darwinism) in which the purpose of social evolution and organization is to maximize the possibilities of exploitation: the more organized and interdependent society is, the more successfully human beings can express their rapacious instincts. As Lockit, the keeper
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of Newgate prison, observes, Of all animals of prey, man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his neighbour, and yet we herd together. Peachum is my companion, my friend. According to the custom of the world, indeed, he may quote thousands of precedents for cheating me. And shall not I make use of the privilege of friendship to make him a return? (61). The verbal and moral ironies of The Beggars Opera also appear irreducible because Gay employs two radical strategies in representing dialogue and character. Rhetorically, he casts his subversive propositions as commonplace, normative truths that every character can utter with the same aphoristic concdence. Murder is thus as fashionable a crime as a man can be guilty of (11), and the comfortable state of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wifes spirits (24). Gay also practices an early version of Brechtian estrangement in The Beggars Opera by undermining the Aristotelian notion of character as a stable essence (ethos) that is expressed in action. Peachum and Lockit are one character split into two, as are Polly and Lucy. Macheath is a single character with a dozen contradictory roles, including those of pastoral lover, predatory male, polygamist, and Christ on the cross. The highwaymen and the prostitutes are collective parodies of courage and gentility, and in their respective scenes they are again rhetorically indistinguishable from each other. Character in Gays play is thus systematically separated from speech, and speech from action, placing maximum emphasis on the subversive force of the utterance, not on the identity of the speaker or the setting. The Beggars Opera is also the crst major English play to represent politics as a secularized sphere of action, devoid equally of the charisma of kingship and the sanctity of religion. In Gays topical satire of the 1720s, criminality becomes a natural analogue for politics, instituting an identiccation that resonates particularly strongly in the mechanisms of the postcolonial police state. Recent Foucauldian readings of the play have also shown that it is deeply embedded in the eighteenth-century cult of the underworld and the public spectacle of death, both controlled by institutional structures that approach the absurd in their casual cruelties. As John Bender notes, The Beggars Opera was considered subversive not because it exposed authority to temporary ridicule . . . but because it depicted all existing authority as permanently corrupted by self-interest (88). Newgate prison, Bender argues, is the literal seat of justice and order: the thing itself, a foundational institution of authority, one of the most ancient symbols of governmental power in civic life (99). By representing punishment as just another form of business within the prison,
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and the guardians of order as the most successful criminals, the play celebrates the end of a just social order. With corrosive irony, it also eliminates the possibility of resistance to injustice: oppression is the necessary condition of human life, and oblivion the only antidote to misery. The connection between Gay and Brecht is best framed by a comment from Sergei Tretyakov: The plot [of The Threepenny Opera] is taken from an English melodrama; Brecht provided the ironic poison strewn through the story (Witt, 75). Gays analysis of class antagonisms is cultural and moral rather than materialist: he attacks the materialism of the bourgeois ethic by playing it o, against the antimaterialism of the highwaymens aristocratic code and the romantic-pastoral utopias of Polly and Lucy. In The Threepenny Opera, Brecht overrules these contrasts in favor of a consistent, explicit critique of class. In his notes to the Opera, he states that the play deals with bourgeois conceptions, not only as content by representing them, but also by the way in which they are presented. It is a sort of summary of what the spectator in the theatre wishes to see of life (Threepenny Opera, 97). The most important feature of this presentation is the literalization of the theatre through the projection of scene titles on boards, which intersperse performed action with formulated thoughts. The lessons that are implicit in Gays ironies are thus explicit in Brechts literalized epic theatre, where the spectator must rebect on the action with detachment instead of reacting with uncritical sympathy. Peachum is no longer a patron of criminals but proprietor of an Establishment for Beggars that combats human callousness by commodifying misery, and the e,ect of his manipulations is shattering rather than repellent (100). Macheath, according to Brecht, is a bourgeois phenomenon (101), distinguished from the bourgeois only in that he is not cowardly. Thus, while in The Beggars Opera Peachum and Macheath represent the polarities of courtly and bourgeois values, in The Threepenny Opera they are still enemies but stand for the same thing. Further, Brecht replaces Lockit with Tiger Brown, the chief of police whose friendship with Macheath shows that Macheath subverts the social order only for business purposes but is otherwise quite anxious to preserve it. The same bourgeois aspirations underlie the transformations of Polly into a hard-nosed businesswoman and of Macheaths men into respectable stockholders. The delicate pastoralism of the Polly-Macheath romance and the decant courage of Macheaths gang in Gays text are also absent in Brechts version. The only character e,ectively excluded from irony in The Threepenny Opera is Jenny Diver, whom Brecht develops as a quasitragic symbol of the exploitable primitive materialism of sex.
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The reappearance of the Gay-Brecht model of political critique in the mid-1970s in two geographically disjunct postcolonial locations (Nigeria and India), and two dissimilar languages (English and Marathi), is an event that extends the afterlife of the Western plays in unprecedented ways. Broadly speaking, Gays unstable ironies and specicc satiric targets seem more compatible with the antinationalist cctions of Opera Wonyosi and Teen paishacha tamasha than Brechts generalized ideological critique. Both Soyinka and Deshpande follow Brechts structural modiccations of The Beggars Opera closely and often echo his dialogue but reject streamlined materialist explanations in favor of disorderly, satiric-humanist conceptions of postcolonial politics, culture, and character. Opera Wonyosi (1977) was written during the postcivil war phase in Nigeria, when a succession of military coups had destroyed the prospect of a return to democracy, and the military regime had instituted public executions of criminals as a desperate measure against the collapse of civic order. Soyinka directed the crst production at the Arts Theatre, University of Ibadan, and noted in his foreword to the published text that some of the African tyrants evoked in the play had already met with rough political justice. Interestingly, the play is set not in Nigeria but the imaginary Nigerian colony of New Ikoyi in the Central African Republic at the time of the coronation of Emperor Jean-Bdel Bokassa in 1977. The foreign setting enables Soyinka to view the Nigerian national character from the outside and to portray, without one redeeming feature, the crime-ridden oil-boom Nigerian society of the 1970s. Teen paishacha tamasha (1978) is set in Bombay and evokes the squalor of the Indian metropolis as well as the period of Emergency rule imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from June 1975 to March 1977. During the Emergency, Gandhi assumed absolute executive powers and suspended fundamental constitutional rights, giving the nation a short-lived but deeply demoralizing taste of authoritarian rule. The play was completed in the middle of this uncertain time but reached the stage only in 1978 in a Theatre Academy production, with Jabbar Patel as director and Bhaskar Chandavarkar as principal composer. Both Opera Wonyosi and Teen paishacha tamasha deal, then, with the eruption of arbitrary power structures and fascist tendencies within a democratic postcolony where a corrupt native elite has superseded colonialism. The details of the attack vary according to time and place, but the rebexive antinationalist critique in each play demonstrates a remarkable (if unconscious) identity in the malformations of the postcolonial nation-state and o,ers new perspectives on the relation between postcolonial texts and the Western canon.
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Opera Wonyosi as Postcolonial Intertext A play like Opera Wonyosi, which follows not one but two Western models, appears to exemplify the counterdiscursive impulse and reinforce the criticism Soyinka has faced since the beginning of his career: that of privileging Euromodernism and universality over Africanism and authenticity. Tejumola Olaniyan notes that the charge of derivativeness is in fact leveled against African-Caribbean drama and theatre at large, raising the issue of whether the postcolonial space is capable of any originality, whether the postcolonial is really not doomed to perpetual and mindless apery (485). Soyinkas response is to assert that his own creative inspiration . . . inbuences my critical response to the creation of other cultures and validates selective eclecticism as the right of every productive being, scientist or artist (Neo-Tarzanism, 44). In Opera Wonyosi, Soyinka speaks through and swerves away from the signature ironies of the two authors he calls his collaborators in three notable ways: he approaches the political sphere outside the ritualistic and mythic matrix that had sustained his major plays until the mid-1970s; rewrites the beggars opera (that is, the opera of Gays beggar-author) as the beggars opera (the opera of a whole nation begging for a slice of the action); and uses nation rather than class as the primary category of political analysis. The plays title brings these strains togetherthe beggarly appearance of wonyosi, a notoriously expensive imported lace fabric, becomes symbolic of the tattered state of the nation and its citizens. In its broader relation to its models the play baunts not only the intertexture of words but the uncanny interchangeability of events, because every form of criminality and misfortune in the Gay-Brecht texts has a more sensational real-life equivalent in postcolonial Central Africa and Nigeria. The Nigerian civil war of 196770 has created the same problem in Opera Wonyosi that Peachum complains about at the beginning of The Threepenny Opera: that it is impossible to arouse lasting pity in human beings. The public executions of armed robbers at the Bar Beach in Lagos, which Nigerians treat as occasions for family picnics, have replaced the spectacle of hanging in Gays play. As a criminal Mack pales beside Folksy Boksy (Bokassa), who ordered the murder of rebellious schoolchildren, and who fantasizes in the play about stomping on the childrens heads with hobnailed boots. Pollys business ventures tie into specicc scandals of government mismanagement and private monopolies in Nigeria, such as those involving Igbeti marble and the Cement Bonanza. The coronations of George II (in Gay) and Queen Victoria (in Brecht) lead
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into the coronation of Emperor Bokassa, who has decided to abandon any pretense at democratization, and to propel a colonial society straight back into Napoleonic imperialism. Soyinkas focus on the Nigerian nation as a manifest rather than imagined community is a deliberate and politically signiccant move because it overrides the recent national memories of civil war and secession. In fact, the emergence of the expatriate Nigerian colony of New Ikoyi in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, indicates that the nation is cohesive enough to cross geopolitical borders and reconstitute itself microcosmically, retaining all its constitutive features. The colony enhances the sense of a national identity, because all the Nigerians in New Ikoyi are political or politically signiccant representatives of their country: in the police (Tiger Brown), the army (Colonel Moses), the business establishments (Mack, Polly, and the gang), and on the streets (Anikuras beggars, who are powerful enough to disrupt Bokassas coronation). The indisputable genius of the nation, however, cnds expression mainly in repugnant acts. In Opera Wonyosi Soyinka portrays two societies in the delicate early stages of decolonization and nation formation, only to show that the national character is already irredeemably corrupt. As Mack and Pollys Song of The Ruling Passion states, Corruption is the oil that greases/ The national wheels and smoothes the creases/Of the body politic (58), making it imperative for art to expose, rebect, indeed magnify the decadent, rotted underbelly of a society that has lost its direction (iii). Beside this unfolding drama of the nation, Soyinka views the classbased materialist explanations for the malaise of postcolonial societies as pseudoscienticc and escapist. In his foreword to Opera Wonyosi, he reminds the African neo-Marxists who had lamented the lack of a solid class perspective in the play that the crimes committed by a powerdrunk soldiery against a cowed and defenseless people, resulting in a further mutual brutalization down the scale of power . . . hit every man, woman and child, irrespective of class as they stepped out into the street for work, school, or other acts of daily amnesia (iii). More important, the formation of postcolonial institutions of power (such as the army, the police, and the bureaucracy) does not necessarily occur along class lines. The new superclass in Bangui and New Ikoyi consists of ambitious upstarts who wear khaki and brass, the uniform symbols of state-sanctioned brutality, and oppress members of their own and other classes indiscriminately. Determined to arouse collective shame and guilt in his Nigerian audience over such oppression, Soyinka refuses to accept the irrational claim that a work of social criticism must submerge an expression of moral
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disgust for the anodyne of correct class analysis (v), and he directs his moral disgust at the entire nation, not only for its own corruptions but for the corruptions it defends in others. This entire line of antimaterialist argument underscores Soyinkas ideological distance from Brecht and his proximity to Gay. The critique of nationhood and national character in Opera Wonyosi is coextensive with the critique of postcolonialism, directed at not one but two recently liberated nation-states. The crst political model is the Central African Republic, the former French colony where the transition from colonialism to postcoloniality has meant, in Macks words, a move from the bad old days to the worse new days (21). The countrys native leader Bokassa, caricatured as Boky, represents what Abdul R. JanMohamed calls the hegemonic (or neocolonial) phase of colonialism, which begins at the moment of independence and leads the natives [to] accept a version of the colonizers entire system of values, attitudes, morality, institutions, and, more important, mode of production (62). With brilliant originality Boky has decided to revert to an African(ist) imperial model and to cast himself as a black Napoleon who is an imperialist as well as a progressive Marxist. In fact, he is a monstrous parody of colonial paternalism, a loving Papa Emperor who tramples wayward schoolchildren to death because it is his fatherly duty to take the lead in my own person in administering the necessary corrective measures (28). The overall lunatic confusion of political structures in the Central African Republic emerges in Colonel Mosess solemn proclamation that the reform of the present reactionary and colonial legal system inherited from the French must proceed in consonance with the forward-looking spirit of a modern imperial age (66). The second model of neocolonialism is New Ikoyi, the expatriate colony that keeps up the old home culture in the Central African Republic, in exact mimicry of Western cultural imperialism in the colonies. Colonization is, after all, a kind of expatriation. Chief Anikura boasts to Ahmad that in New Ikoyi the Nigerians try to retain all the living styles we had at home, down to the naming of the streets. The rest of Bangui is shared with the foreignersthe natives that isa rather unsophisticated lot if I may say so (5). The expression of colonialist attitudes is only partly parodic, because Nigerians dominate military, civic, and economic life in Bangui on the same scale as any colonial power and ought really to have been booted out as undesirable aliens. In all the power conbicts in the play, except for the mad antics of Boky, the native or civilian Central African voice is completely silent, and the civilians lack of resistance is very gratifying
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to the new preservers of national order. New Ikoyi is therefore to the postcolonial Central African Empire what France was to the colonial Central African Republic, showing that power is power whatever the name, and colonial-style hegemonic relations are easily replicated among third-world nations. Teen paishacha tamasha , the Theatre of Illusion, and the Politics of Fear P. L. Deshpandes reinscription of Gay and Brecht, Teen paishacha tamasha (1978), transforms its Western models more thoroughly than Soyinkas Opera Wonyosi because it is bound to a radically di,erent language-world (that of Marathi rather than English), a fully developed Indian-language textual and performative tradition, and the socioeconomic environment of a third-world megapolis. It was the third in a sequence of major Indian versions of The Threepenny Opera that appeared during the most intense decade of metropolitan interest in Brecht (ca. 196878). Ajitesh Banerjis Bengali Teen poyshar pala had been performed in Calcutta in 1969, and Fritz Bennewitz had directed Surekha Sikris Urdu version, Teen take ka swang, in the swang folk style at the National School of Drama in 1970. Audiences embraced Banerjis production, but critics objected to its reduction of Brecht to wild fun, while Bennewitz concluded that his production had made no impact on the Indian theatre as such since it had an imported approach in the scenic realisation (Bennewitz, Interviewed). As an established satirist who had watched Brechts plays in performance at the Berliner Ensemble and produced a very successful musical Marathi version of Shaws Pygmalion, Deshpande was perhaps better situated than either of his predecessors to rework the Opera for Indian audiences. His preface to the published text of the play, informed by his Berlin experience, is a short but serious rebection on the qualities that playwrights ought to emulate in Brecht regardless of their ideological leanings. In Deshpandes view, Brechts theatre is antiaesthetic and didactic, and its essential subject is the dehumanizing e,ect of the pursuit of money and power; but his concern with the neglected and exploited underclass cnds expression in an exhilaratingly playful musical theatre. In his own play, Deshpande incorporates some of the presentational features of tamasha (literally, spectacle or entertainment), the vibrant musical form popular in Maharashtra, which he describes as closely related to the Brechtian opera in that both combine the potential for social critique with vigorous entertainment.
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Brecht, the tamasha form, the eclectic juxtaposition of musical styles, and political satire did in fact decne the critical parameters for the plays initial reception in 1978. The topical connection to the Emergency through the twin Brechtian themes of corruption and repression brought the play instant attention, but the real controversy curiously centered around Deshpandes literary and popular models. According to Nadkarni, antipathy towards Brecht had been simmering in Marathi theatre circles ever since Vijaya Mehtas two productions of Brechts plays in 197274. The Pune production of Teen paishacha tamasha in June 1978 opened to a phenomenally hostile press that questioned both Deshpandes and Jabbar Patels cdelity to Brecht (Nadkarni, Brecht). The tamasha elements of the performance were seen as equally superccial. The play opened with the nandi and gaan, the religious invocations traditional to the tamasha form, but then switched to a fourfold musical scheme as a mode of character di,erentiation. The Peachums adhered to natya sangeet, the well-established style of commercial Marathi stage music; Polly and Lucy moved between sentimental geet (song) and childrens nonsense verse; the prostitutes used the courtly Urdu ghazal and semiclassical traditions; and armed with electric guitars, Macheath and his gang sang disco and pop (Nandu Bhende, who played Macheath, had distinguished himself as Judas in a recent Bombay production of Andrew Lloyd Webbers rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar). The play fared better in Bombay, a city more accustomed to Brecht in Marathi, while in Delhi (the nations capital and a Hindi-speaking region), audiences were far more enthusiastic about the parody of the Emergency and far less disturbed by the musical potpourri that had o,ended Marathi viewers. Sponsored by the cultural wing of the West German Embassy, the Delhi production also carried the stamp of ocial approval. In the theatre, the varied exuberance of Teen paishacha tamasha can (and perhaps did) outpace its didacticism, without neutralizing the political message altogether. Strains of Brechts ironic poison, however, appear in the words behind the music and in the dense satiric commentary Deshpande develops simultaneously around the issues of politics, religion, gender, spectatorship, and theatrical form, while remaining within the boundaries of the Brechtian text. Like Soyinka, Deshpande is concerned with nation and citizenship, but his approach to the political is through the particulars of profession, caste, class, and Hindu religious practice. Each of these elements is also communicable in performance through the semiotics of dress, ornament, mannerism, intonation, gesture, and physical movement. In this multilayered representation, four
380
Genres in Context
satiric targets stand out in particularthe manipulative nature of the theatre of illusion; the criminalization of politics; the simultaneous failure of citizenship and spectatorship; and the translation of secular spheres, such as commerce and politics, into religious discourse. Deshpande satirizes the conventions of bourgeois realistic theatre through a sustained analogy between begging and acting that does not have a parallel in either Brecht or Soyinka. The counterparts of Mr. and Mrs. Peachum, Janardan and Anumami Panchpatre, were reportedly professional actors before they became the proprietors of the Bhikshekari Prashikshan Kendra, or Training School for Beggars, and Panchpatre claims that his experience as an actor has been invaluable in training his personnel. The beggars in his center are consummate performers who lose themselves in their roles, like the ideal actors of realistic theatre, and their purpose is to arouse pity through a controlled tragic display so that the spectator may achieve a purgation of such emotions, and ensure his or her emotional well-being. The beggars drama is therefore an enactment of Aristotelian mimesis and catharsis. But because they are not real cripples, their act is a deception, and the emotion they arouse is counterfeit because it mistakes an imitation for the real thing. At this Platonic moment in Deshpandes argument, all imitations appear to be intrinsically dishonest. Panchpatre clinches the argument against realism by defending the deception. If the audience is willing to take an actor for a king to experience aesthetic pleasure, why should it not take an actor for a beggar to experience the pleasures of charity and compassion? Why should someone who plays a beggar to perfection not be admired as much as someone who plays a king? The Brechtian answer is that both representations are bawed because they elicit the wrong responses. In Deshpandes play, the beggars training school becomes an analogue for the theatre of illusion, and both succeed by preying on the credulity of the audience. In performance, the device of actors playing former actors and beggars who are putting on an act also plays up the rebexive concern with theatre. Deshpande makes several other arguments about spectatorship that are bound up with the political, civic, and religious satire of Teen paishacha tamasha. With the event of the Emergency as his immediate referent, Deshpande launches a multipronged attack on politics and nationhood that feeds on a pervasive public sentiment in contemporary India: that the debased realities of political and national life are all the more intolerable because in theory Indian society still adheres to highly idealized notions of these spheres of action (a sentiment absent in Opera Wonyosi ).
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For instance, the bureaucratic culture that the play mocks through the cgures of Janardan Panchpatre (Peachum), Tiger Bhandare (Tiger Brown), and Malan (Polly) is synonymous with bribery and corruption, but it still seeks legitimation by invoking the Gandhian conception of politics and public service as selbess disciplines. Similarly, the criminal excesses of Captain Ankush (Macheath) and Panchpatre are cast parodically in the languages of Hindu myth, ritual, and worship, which emphasize compassion and the purity of body and soul. Most speciccally, the play recreates the experience of the Emergency (which in June 1975 transformed the nation almost overnight into a police state) as the work of semidivine or divine forces entirely beyond the audiences reach. The pivotal character who manages these multiple ironic discourses is the sutradhar, or master of ceremonies, a mediating cgure common to classical Sanskrit drama and the tamasha form. Graham Holderness argues that the critique of ideology has entailed more than anything else a politics of form. . . . Since ideology is rooted in the structures of culture and in artistic forms, the pressing and priority task is to expose structure and form, to open cultural artefacts up to investigation and challenge (9). In Teen paishacha tamasha this investigative function and the consequent critique of ideology belong almost exclusively to the sutradhar, who practices what Brecht calls literalization by presenting, commenting on, and interpreting the plays action, and who controls the theatrical spectacle more completely than his counterparts in Brecht and Soyinka. Deshpande is close to Gay and Soyinka in maintaining that the parodic bureaucratization of criminal activity is the strongest sign of the disintegration of civic order, and the argument has optimum resonance in a nation with a large, corrupt, and notoriously complacent neocolonial bureaucracy. Even the plays title points ironically to corruption as the sine qua non of representation: the sutradhar announces at the beginning that of the three paisas (the Indian monetary equivalent of pennies) that give the play its name, the crst two will support dancing and singing, but the third will go into the pocket of a passing policeman so that the tamasha itself may continue. Panchpatre conducts begging and prostitution as highly organized businessesindeed, as the only truly secular activities in a society that valorizes secular nationhood. When, in an early scene, Baban (Filch) complains to Panchpatre about being beaten up for begging without a permit, Panchpatre lays down the rules in unambiguous ocialese:
Look around you carefully. This is the city of Bombay. We have divided this great territory into fourteen districts. Now if anyone wants to beg at any
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Genres in Context
street corner in one of these fourteen districts, he has to pay the appropriate fee and obtain a permit authorized by Janardan Jagannath Panchpatre and Company. If we dont bring this kind of business discipline into our society, any unqualiced hoodlum will think he can start up a begging business. So, you have to crst pay three rupees for your Temporary Permit. Then well give you a Learners Licence for Begging, which youll have to renew every week. (2021)
Panchpatre and Ankush also represent two opposed strategies for illegitimate social control. Ankush, described as an unsheathed knife, is a fugitive underworld boss prone to intimidation and physical violence. Panchpatre is a respectable businessman and, more important, a social safety valve, because he is able to contain the revolutionary impulses of the underclass through sheer coercion and persuasion. He understands that the rich give birth to poverty, but dont like to look at their illegitimate o,spring (73), and that the spectacle of poverty, homelessness, and misery is not palatable to the leaders of a democracy. Hence his mere threat of arranging a grotesque procession of naked beggars, cripples, and invalids during the presidential visit to Bombay has the desired e,ect of bringing about Ankushs arrest. The experience of the Emergencywhich is the immediate political context of Teen paishacha tamashashifts attention away from the antithetical social roles of Ankush and Panchpatre onto the political maneuvering of Tiger Bhandare, Malan, and the sutradhars rhetorical appeals to the audience. The suspension of constitutional rights and the large number of secret arrests during the Emergency had given the already menacing cgure of the policeman an entirely new dimension in Indian political and public life. The sutradhar therefore emphasizes the predatory connotations of police chief Tiger Bhandares nickname and reacts with exaggerated terror whenever Bhandare and his men appear. The complicity of spies and informants during the Emergency also gives new meaning to Bhandares betrayal of his old friend, Ankush. Malans transformation belongs more to the performative than the textual dimension. In the 1978 productions, when the men in Ankushs gang objected that running a business like theirs was not a womans work, Malan (played by Vandana Pandit) strong-armed them into admitting that only a woman could carry on such a business (4950). Following this scene, Malan began to mimic the physical appearance and mannerisms of Indira Gandhi, with the distinctive white streak in the hair and the habit of covering her head demurely with the end of her sari. Her metamorphosis and her
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draconian control over the gang became a satiric reenactment of the Emergency. The most complex allusions to the nationwide epidemic of fear during the Emergency, however, surface in the sutradhars urgent metatheatrical appeals to the audience to refrain from responding to the spectacle of the tamasha (Deshpandes theatrical work as well as the play-withinthe-play). For Brecht the audience is, in Walter Benjamins words, an assembly of interested persons whose demands [the stage] must signify (Understanding, 2). For the sutradhar the audience is a nonpresence, not only estranged from the action but alternately endangered and bored by it. His crst injunction to them, for example, is to shut their eyes and sit quietly if they wish to survive the experience of encountering Ankush. Indeed, the only safe course of action in the underworld of Teen paishacha tamasha is not to exercise ones senses at all. The spectators must hear the tamasha with closed ears, watch it with closed eyes, and speak about it with a mute tongue. If, by some mischance, the spectators do learn something from the experience, they should be wise and forget the lesson before they leave the theatre. This is in fact the sutradhars parting plea to the audience. These terse oxymorons set up multiple resonances in the course of the play. John Cage has decned theatre as something which engages both the eye and the ear. The two public senses are seeing and hearing; the senses of taste, touch, and odor are more proper to intimate non-public situations (Kirby and Schechner, 50). According to Cage, this simple decnition allows one to view even everyday life as theatre. By asking the viewers to suspend their senses, the sutradhar is ironically repudiating all notions of participation, whether of the Aristotelian or Brechtian kind, and denying any instructive role to the theatre. The three senses on which he concentrates also evoke a famous cgure in Indian political mythology: Mahatma Gandhis parable of the three monkeys who respectively see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Deshpande turns the Gandhian association on its head, because his monkeylike spectators must be blind, dumb, and mute in the presence of evil so that they may protect themselves. This is exactly contrary to the Gandhian practice of militant nonviolence, which actively opposes evil at the risk of self-destruction. By imposing passivity and silence on the audience, Deshpandes play becomes, like Opera Wonyosi, another antinationalist spectacle in which the nation passively endures its corrupt leadership and enacts its own impotence. However, what complicates Deshpandes text enormously in comparison with Soyinkas is that in India, social and political practices are neither
384
Genres in Context
modern nor secular: they continue to derive their legitimacy from inherited religious and social structures that powerfully inbuence daily life. Deshpandes particular target in Teen paishacha tamasha is the system of Hindu rituals, beliefs, and practices associated with the worship of Lord Vishnu, the god of preservation (rather than creation or destruction) in the so-called Hindu trinity. The source of the religious element is partly the tamasha form, which begins with a song in praise of Ganapati (Ganesh), and in the gaulan segment, which usually shows Krishna dallying with the gopis of Mathura. But in Teen paishacha tamasha religion is all pervasive and performs the same function that the principle of selfinterest does in the plays of Gay, Brecht, and Soyinkait sanctices all forms of injustice, exploitation, hedonism, dishonesty, and failure. Two examples will suce to make this point. At the beginning of the play, Malan appears as the innocent who wants to transform the stable (where Ankush has already married several women) into a mangal karyalaya, or auspicious wedding hall, where a fugitive priest can recite the traditional mangalashtaka wedding ceremony. As Malan assumes the leadership of the gang, she changes from kumari (virgin) and srimati (wife) into Durga Bhavani, the destructive mother-goddess incarnation of Parvati, the consort of Lord Shiva. The topical political implications of such feminine empowerment are deeply ironic, because the analogy with Durga was crucial to the apotheosis of Indira Gandhi during the Emergency and the early 1980s. It placed her on a plane beyond logic and reason, where she was no longer vulnerable to charges of unconstitutional politics. Malans political transformation (which is really a debasement) is thus concrmed and legitimized at the religious-mythic level. As husband and gangster, Ankush is similarly suspended between mundane and sacred identities. In prison he invokes Hindu symbols of marriage, such as the mangalasutra (an auspicious necklace that designates a womans married state) and kumkum (the red powder worn on the forehead by married women), as well as the powerful rhetoric of pativrata dharma (the wifes duty to her husband), to convince his two quarreling wives that they must help him escape. The irony of the transforming power of religion climaxes in the cnal scene, in which a prison warden named Narayan saves Ankush after hearing the story of the devotee Ajamil. Ajamil remembered his son Narayan in his moment of crisis and was saved by Vishnu because Vishnu thought Ajamil had called out to him. What Ankush narrates, however, is not a mythic text but the plot of a cheap Bombay potboiler in which Ajamil is also betrayed by a woman, sentenced to hang, and rescued at the last minute. Even the characters in
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the story are memorable to him because they are played by his favorite clm stars. Taking up his cue, the warder transforms himself into Vishnu, but not before he has negotiated weekly payments from Ankush for his services. In Gay, Macheath earns a last-minute reprieve because the opera form will not tolerate a tragic ending; in Brecht, because the spectacle of Macheaths execution would draw the crowds away from the Queens coronation. In Deshpande, Ankush escapes because the sutradhar does not want to thrust the grotesque spectacle of an execution on his peaceloving audience; he wants to pander to his countrymens unqualiced belief in the miraculous power of gods names, even though he knows that the gods would not come running to save a dispossessed man. Through the institution of caste, religion also o,ers an alternative perspective on the audiences disengagement from the action of the play. Throughout the play, the sutradhar addresses the audience as sabhya streepurush (civilized ladies and gentlemen) and sabhya grahastha (civilized householders), and sometimes uses the formal Sanskrit term prekshaka (spectators) for them. Such terms as sabhya and grahastha are indicators of caste as well as class, with caste as an even more pervasive, e,ective form of social division than class in the Hindu scheme of separation. Deshpandes civilized, upper-caste, domesticated spectators thus cannot identify aesthetically or socially with the beggars, gangsters, prostitutes, and criminals who make up the milieu of the tamasha, nor can they endure low and painful displays: they are literally as well as a,ectively alienated from the action. In the political perspective, the viewers should not respond to the tamasha for the sake of their own safety; in the religiocultural perspective, they cannot respond because of the innately hierarchical relations of caste. This elevation is both a literalization and a reversal of Brechtian estrangement, because the absence of emotional identiccation between audience and actor does not produce rational understanding, only incomprehension. The irony is particularly acute because most tamasha performers traditionally belong to four low castes and subcastes of rural Maharashtrathe Kolhati, Mahar, Mang, and Bhatuand religious reformers had begun to use the tamasha form to attack the caste system as long ago as the late nineteenth century. From the antibourgeois critique of The Beggars Opera to the anticaste critique of Teen paishacha tamasha is an elaborate, transforming passage, but one that may support a cnal generalization. If the Prospero-Caliban and Crusoe-Friday relationships are paradigmatic of the colonial dialectic, the Peachum-Macheath-Polly-Tiger Brown quartet as represented by Soyinka and Deshpande is paradigmatic of the postcolonial condition.
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Genres in Context
The representation of social exploitation, institutionalized crime, bureaucratic corruption, and coarsened femininity in this aggregation of characters forms a culturally transportable theatrical complex that expresses the social and political failures of the postcolonial third world remarkably well. The permanent contribution of Gays play to its various rupantars (or transculturations) is to show that the failures of social and political institutions can be brilliantly represented through the resources of comic, rather than tragic, irony. As a corrosive political work connected to a transcultural sequence of earlier plays, P. L. Deshpandes Teen paishacha tamasha can serve at the end of this study as emblematic of the larger celd of post-independence theatre. As a historically distinct formation, this celd depends on the powerful urge among playwrights to make it new: to theorize and practice modes of representation that dissociate their work from that of colonial-era precursors. But even at its most original, Indian theatre contains powerful elements of repetition, echo, and recursiveness. The narrative sources of much contemporary dramamyth, history, legend, and folklorerepresent preexisting texts that the playwrights reinscribe with the meanings they can sustain in the present. Dharamvir Bharatis Andha yug and Ratan Thiyams Chakravyuha rewrite the Mahabharata; Mohan Rakeshs Ashadh ka ek din, Girish Karnads Tughlaq, and Vijay Tendulkars Ghashiram kotwal recast narratives inherited from specicc periods of classical, premodern, and early colonial Indian history; Girish Karnads Hayavadana and Chandrashekhar Kambars Jokumaraswami rework familiar folktales. Similarly, the revival of classical, traditional, and folk performance genres accommodates an older aesthetic to postmodern contexts. In one perspective, only the action of contemporary social-realist plays is entirely an authorial inventionan imaginative but verisimilar representation of urban life as it can exist only in the historical present. The specicc intertextualities that connect Deshpande with Gay and Brecht or Habib Tanvirs Mitti ki gadi with Shudrakas classic Mrichchhakatika are thus only the most recognizable forms of the interdependences that pervade contemporary theatre. The internationalism of Deshpandes play is similarly the overt sign of a quality that has characterized modern Indian theatre as a wholethe contexts of this theatre have been, and continue to be, at once regional, national, and international. The transformative inbuence of Western literary genres and movements on Indian-language literatures is a central event in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian literary history, creating for these literatures much of their narrative of modernity. Furthermore, in a
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large measure modern Indian theatre owes its origins to the inbuence of Western theatrical forms and dramatic canons.6 The successive chapters in this study have demonstrated that the constitutive features of postindependence drama do not allow any clear line of separation between the native and the foreign, the national and the transnational. This is as true of such concepts and processes as authorship, textuality, production, and reception as it is of such thematic loci as history, myth, home, family, society, politics, and tradition. For example, Bharatis reworking of epic myth in Andha yug and Sircars meditation on history in Baki itihas use particular Indian narratives to engage with both the national past and universal experience at the midpoint of the twentieth century. Despite their localized settings, Elkunchwars W ada chirebandi and Mistrys Doongaji House stand on a continuum with the geopathic discourse that Una Chaudhuri ascribes to modern Western drama. They also display the same ambivalence toward home that has shaped modernist narratives of loss and renunciation (in such early and late twentieth-century authors as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansceld, V. S. Naipaul, Stuart Hall, and Jamaica Kincaid), qualifying the power of home as a real and imagined place in modern experience. The recovery of these national and transnational contexts of major postcolonial Indian-language plays depends on translation, comparison, commentary, and analysis, which in turn call for a strategic collaboration among Indian studies, Commonwealth and area studies, and postcolonial studies, not to mention drama, theatre, and performance studies. We must also recognize that the object of recovery is marked not by hybridity but by cultural ambidexterity, which is an equal or commensurate facility in two or more cultural systems concurrently (Dharwadker, Print Culture, 123). New theoretical perspectives and critical procedures of this sort are necessary if nonWestern, non-Anglophone theatre is to participate fully in the processes of canon formation, reception, and interpretation.
Appendixes
appendix 1
The Program of the Nehru Shatabdi Natya Samaroh (Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival), New Delhi, 317 September 1989
Performance Date 3 September 4 September Author and Play (Composition Date) Utpal Dutt, Kallol (1965) Chandrashekhar Kambar, Jokumaraswami (1972) Mohit Chattopadhyay, Guinea Pig (1971) Bijon Bhattacharya, Nabanna (1944) Bhasa, Urubhangam (ca. 2nd4th cent.) Mohan Rakesh, Adhe adhure (1969) Girish Karnad, Hayavadana (1971) Dharamvir Bharati, Andha yug (1954) Govind Deshpande, Uddhwasta dharmashala (1974) Adya Rangacharya, Suno Janmejaya (1960) Ratan Thiyam, Chakravyuha (1984) Composition/ Production Language Bengali/Bengali Kannada/Kannada Director, Group, and Location Utpal Dutt, Peoples Little Theatre, Calcutta Chandrashekhar Kambar, Ninasam, Heggodu Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan, Delhi Kumar Roy, Bohurupee, Calcutta K. N. Panikkar, Sopanam, Trivandrum Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik, Calcutta B. V. Karanth, Mitravrinda, Mysore Satyadev Dubey, Samvardhan/Arpana, Bombay Shreeram Lagoo, Roopwedh, Bombay B. M. Shah, Kala Mandir, Gwalior
5 September 6 September 7 September 8 September 9 September 10 September
Bengali/Hindi Bengali/Bengali Sanskrit/Sanskrit Hindi/Hindi Kannada/Kannada Hindi/Hindi
11 September
Marathi/Marathi
12 September 13 September
Kannada/Hindi
Manipuri/Manipuri Ratan Thiyam, Chorus Repertory Theatre, Imphal Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy, Pune Pravin Joshi, Pravin Joshi Theatre, Bombay Vijaya Mehta, Kala Vaibhav, Bombay Habib Tanvir, Naya Theatre, Delhi
14 September 15 September 16 September 17 September
Vijay Tendulkar, Marathi/Marathi Ghashiram kotwal (1973) Madhu Rye, Kumarni agashi (1974) Mahesh Elkunchwar, Wada chirebandi (1985) Habib Tanvir, Agra bazaar (1954) Gujarati/Gujarati Marathi/Marathi Urdu/Urdu
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appendix 2
Major Indian Playwrights and Plays, 19502004
The arrangement of authors and languages is roughly chronological, not alphabetical. Languages are listed in the approximate order in which major playwrights began to write in them. Within each language, playwrights and plays are listed in chronological order.
Hindi mohan rakesh (delhi), 192572

Ashadh ka ek din (A Day in Early Autumn, 1958) Lahron ke rajhans (Royal Swans on the Waves, 1963) Adhe adhure (The Uncnished, 1969)
dharamvir bharati (allahabad, bombay), 1926 97

Andha yug (Blind Epoch, 1954) Nadi pyasi thi (The River Was Parched; one-act plays, 1988)
Chhattisgarhi, Urdu, Hindi habib tanvir (delhi, raipur, bhopal), 1925

Agra bazaar (1954) Mitti ki gadi (The Clay Cart, 1958; adapt. of Shudrakas Mrichhakatika, Sanskrit, ca. 5th century) Mudrarakshasa (Signet Ring of Rakshasa, 1964; adapt. of Vishakhadattas Mudrarakshasa, Sanskrit, ca. 6th9th century) Gaon ka naam sasural (The Name of the Village Is Sasural, 1973) Charandas chor (Charan Das the Thief, 1974) Bahadur Kalarin (Brave Kalarin, 1978) Hirma ki amar kahani (Immortal Tale of Hirma, 1985) Dekh rahe hain nain (Eyes Are Watching, 1993) Zahreeli hava (Poisoned Air, 2003; trans. of Rahul Varmas Bhopal, 2001)
Bengali badal sircar (calcutta), 1925

Baro pishima (Elder Aunt, 1959) Ebong Indrajit (And Indrajit, 1962) Sara rattir (All Night, 1963) Baki itihas (The Rest of History, 1965) Tringsha shatabdi (Thirtieth Century, 1966) Pagla ghoda (Mad Horse, 1967) Shesh nei (Theres No End, 1969) Sagina Mahato (1970) Abu Hosain (1971) Ballabhpurer rupkatha (The Fairy Tale of Ballabhpur, 1972) Spartacus (1972)
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Appendix 2
Michhil (Procession, 1974) Rupkathar kelenkari (Scandal in Fairyland, 1974) Bhoma (1976) Hattamalar oparey (Beyond the Land of Hattamala, 1977) Bashi khabar (Stale News, 1979)
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utpal dutt (calcutta), 1929 93

Angar (Embers, 1959) Kallol (Ocean Song, 1965) Din badaler pala (Song of Changing Times, 1967; poster play) Teer (The Arrow, 1967) Manusher adhikarey (Rights of Man, 1968) Ribe (1969) Suryashikar (Hunting the Sun, 1971) Tiner talwar (Tin Sword, 1971) Barricade (1972) Tota (The Bullet, 1973; staged as Mahabidroh [Great Rebellion], 1985) Duswapner nagari (Nightmare City, 1974)
mohit chattopadhyay (calcutta), 1934

Kanthanalite surya (Sun in the Windpipe, 1963) Mrityu sambad (Dialogue of Death, 1965) Nilranger ghoda (Blue Horse, 1966) Chandralok agnikanda (Fire on the Moon, 1967) Captain Hurara (1972) Rajrakto (Royal Blood, 1972) Alibaba (1974) Oka uri katha (adaptation of Prechands Kafan [The Shroud], 1978) Nona jal (Salt Water, n.d.) Mr. Right, n.d.
Marathi vijay tendulkar (bombay), 1928

Shrimant (Man of Means, 1955) Manoos navache bet (An Island Named Man, 1958) Mee jinkalo mee haralo (I Won, I Lost, 1963) Shantata! court chalu ahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session, 1967) Ashi pakhare yeti (So the Birds Come, 1970) Gidhade (Vultures, 1970) Sakharam binder (Sakharam the Book Binder, 1972) Ghashiram kotwal (Constable Ghashiram, 1972) Baby (1975) Pahije jatiche (Wanted: Someone from the Right Caste, 1976) Kamala (1981) Mitrachi goshthha (The Story of Friends, 1982) Kanyadaan (Gift of a Daughter, 1983) Kutri (Dogs, 2002)
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Appendixes
g. p. deshpande (delhi, pune), 1938

Uddhwasta dharmashala (The Ruined Sanctuary, 1974) Ek vajoon gela ahe (Its Past One OClock, 1983) Andhar yatra (Journey in Darkness, 1987) Chanakya Vishnugupta (1988) Raaste (Roads, 1994) Shevatcha dees (Last Day, 1999)
mahesh elkunchwar (nagpur, bombay), 1939

Sultan (1967) Holi (1969) Raktapushpa (Petals of Blood, 1972) Garbo (1973) V asanakand (Episode of Lust, 1973) Party (1976) W ada chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion, 1985) Pratibimb (Rebection, 1987) Atmakatha (Autobiography, 1988) Yugant (Trilogy consisting of Wada chirebandi, Magna talyakathi [Pond], Yugant [The End of an Age], 1994) W asansi jeernani (Tattered Clothes, 1996) Dharmaputra (Godson, 1997) Sonata (2002)
satish alekar (pune), 1949

Jhulta pul (Swaying Bridge, 1969) Miki ani memsahib (Mickey and the Lady, 1973) Mahanirvan (The Great Departure, 1974) Mahapur (Flood, 1975) Begum Barve (Madam Barve, 1979) Shanivar, ravivar (Saturday, Sunday, 1982) Pralay (Flood, 1985) Dustra Samna (Second Confrontation, 1987) Atireki (Terrorist, 1989) Pidhijat (Dynasts, 2002)
Kannada chandrashekhar kambar (bangalore), 1938

Sangyabalya (1966) Rishyashringa (1971) Jokumaraswami (1972) Jaisidanayaka (Long Live Siddhanayak, 1975) Harakeya kuri (Sacriccial Lamb, 1981) Samba-shiva prahasana (Samba Shiva: A Farce, 1985) Siri sampige (1986) Bepputakkadi Bolesankara (Shankara the Simpleton, 1987)
Appendix 2
Tukrana kanasu (Tukras Dream, 1992) Mahamayi (Supreme Mother, 1999)
395
girish karnad (bangalore), 1938

Yayati (1961) Tughlaq (1964) Hayavadana (Horse Head, 1971) Anjumallige (Driven Snow, 1977) Hittina hunja (Dough Rooster, 1980) Naga-mandala (Circle of Serpents, 1988) Tal-danda (Death by Decapitation, 1990) Agni mattu male (The Fire and the Rain, 1994) Tipu Sultan kanda kanasu (Dreams of Tipu Sultan, 2000) Bali (The Sacricce, 2002)
Malayalam k. n. panikkar (trivandrum) 1928

Madhyam vyayog (1978) Pashu gayatri (1979) Suryasthanam (Domain of the Sun, 1979) Karimkutty (1983) Karnabharam (The Burden of Karna, 1984) Ottayan (The Lone Tusker, 1985) Koyma (The Right to Rule, 1986) Urubhangam (The Shattered Thigh, 1987)
Manipuri ratan thiyam (imphal), 1946

Shanarembi chaisra (1976) Uchek Langmeidong (1978) Urubhangam (The Shattered Thigh, 1981) Imphal Imphal (1982) Chakravyuha (Battle Formation, 1984) Lengshonnei (adaptation of Sophocles, Antigone, 1986) Karnabharam (The Burden of Karna, 1991) Hiroshima (based on Badal Sircars Tringsha shatabdi, 1994) Uttar priyadarshi (The Final Beatitude, 1999) Ritasamhara (A Gathering of Seasons, 2003)
English mahesh dattani (bangalore), 1958

Where Theres a Will (1988) Dance Like a Man (1989)
396
Appendixes
Tara (1990) Bravely Fought the Queen (1991) Final Solutions (1993) Do the Needful (1997) On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998) Seven Steps around the Fire (1999)
appendix 3
Major Indian Theatre Directors, 19502004
Languages of productions and groups or institutions with which directors have been aliated are listed; some dates are approximate.
ebrahim alkazi (english, hindi, hindustani)

Theatre Group, Bombay (195054) Theatre Unit, Bombay (195462) National School of Drama, New Delhi (director, 196277) National School of Drama Repertory Company, New Delhi (director, 196477)
neelam man singh chowdhry (punjabi, hindi)

The Company, Chandigarh (1984)
mahesh dattani (english)

Playpen, Bangalore (1984)
arvind deshpande (marathi)

Rangayan, Bombay (195564) Awishkar, Bombay (197187)
satyadev dubey (hindi, urdu, marathi, gujarati, english)

Theatre Unit, Bombay (1962)
utpal dutt (bengali, english)

Shakespeareana (with Geo,rey Kendall) (194749) IPTA, Calcutta (195051) Little Theatre Group, Calcutta (195970) Peoples Little Theatre, Calcutta (197193)
usha ganguli (hindi)

Rangakarmee, Calcutta (1976)
shyamanand jalan (hindi, bengali)

Anamika, Calcutta (195572) Padatik, Calcutta (1972)
b. v. karanth (kannada, hindi, sanskrit, and other languages)

Various groups, Bangalore, Varanasi, and Delhi (ca. 196077) National School of Drama, New Delhi (director, 197781) Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal, Bhopal (director, 198286) Rangayan, Mysore (director, 198995)
vijaya mehta (marathi, hindi, sanskrit)

Rangayan, Bombay (1955) National Centre for the Performing Arts, Bombay (director, 1997)
397
398
Appendixes
shombhu mitra (bengali)

IPTA, Calcutta (194344) Bohurupee, Calcutta (194979)
rajinder nath (hindi)

Abhiyan, New Delhi (1967)
alyque padamsee (english, hindi)

Theatre Group, Bombay (1952)
k. n. panikkar (malayalam, sanskrit)

Sopanam, Trivandrum (1965)
jabbar patel (marathi)

Theatre Academy, Pune (1973)
badal sircar (bengali)

Satabdi, Calcutta (1967)
k. v. subbanna (kannada)
Ninasam, Heggodu (1949)
habib tanvir (hindi, chattisgarhi, urdu, english)

IPTA, Bombay (194554) Hindustani Theatre, Delhi (195859) Naya Theatre, Delhi (1959) Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal, Bhopal (director, 199698)
ratan thiyam (manipuri)

Chorus Repertory Theatre, Imphal (1976) National School of Drama, New Delhi (director, 198688)
appendix 4
Key Productions of Some Major Post-Independence Plays
Authors and their plays are listed in alphabetical order; productions are listed chronologically. Production Language Location and Date
Director and Group
Dharamvir Bharati andha yug (hindi)

Hindi Hindi Hindi Bengali Hindi Hindi Marathi Manipuri Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Manipuri Marathi Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD/NSD Repertory Ajitesh Banerji, Abhinetri Sangh Mohan Maharshi, Triveni Club Ravi Baswani, Sandhya/Nepathya Kamlakar Sontakke, Theatre Department, Aurangabad University Ratan Thiyam, NSD M. K. Raina, NSD Repertory Bansi Kaul, Madhya Pradesh Satyadev Dubey, Arpana Ramgopal Bajaj, NSD Repertory Mohan Maharshi, Theatre Lab Arvind Gaur, Asmita Ratan Thiyam, Chorus Repertory Theatre Kamlakar Sontakke, Sangeet Kala Kendra Bombay, 1962 Calcutta, 1964 Delhi, 1964, 1967, 1974 Calcutta, 1970 Mauritius, 1973 Delhi, 1974 Aurangabad, 1974 Imphal, 1974, 1984 Delhi, 1977, 1986 Rangmandal, Bhopal, 1983 Delhi, 1989 Delhi, 1992 Chandigarh, 1992 Delhi, 1994 Imphal, 1994, 1996 Bombay, 1997
Bijon Bhattacharya nabanna (bengali)

Bengali Bengali Shombhu Mitra, IPTA Kumar Roy, Bohurupee Calcutta and other venues, 194344 Delhi, 1989
G. P. Deshpande uddhwasta dharmashala (marathi)

Marathi Hindi Hindi Shreeram Lagoo, Roopwedh Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Bombay, 1974 Delhi, 1977, 1978, 1984 Calcutta, 1982
399
400
Appendixes
Mahesh Elkunchwar wada chirebandi (marathi)

Marathi Hindi Hindi Bengali Marathi Vijaya Mehta, Kalavaibhav Satyadev Dubey, NSD Repertory Vijaya Mehta, Kalavaibhav Sohag Sen, Ensemble Vijaya Mehta, Kalavaibhav Bombay, 1985 Delhi, 1985 Bombay, 1985 Calcutta, 1989 Delhi, 1989
Girish Karnad hayavadana (kannada)

Hindi Hindi Hindi Kannada Marathi Hindi Hindi German Kannada Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit B. V. Karanth, Dishantar Rajinder Nath, Anamika B. V. Karanth, Benaka Vijaya Mehta, Rangayan B. V. Karanth, Darpan B. V. Karanth, BB Rangmandal Vijaya Mehta, Deutsches Nationaltheater B. V. Karanth, Mitravrinda Bombay, 1972 Delhi, 1972 Calcutta, 1972 Bangalore, 1973 Bombay, 1973 Lucknow, 1974 Bhopal, 1982 Weimar, 1984 Delhi, 1989
tal-danda (kannada)
Hindi Kannada Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory C. R. Jambe, Ninasam Tirugata Delhi, 1992 Heggodu, 1992
tughlaq (kannada)
Kannada Urdu Urdu English Marathi Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Marathi B. V. Karanth, Kannada Bharati Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Om Shivpuri, NSD Repertory Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Arvind Deshpande, Awishkar Om Shivpuri, Dishantar Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Bangalore, 1966 Bombay [1966] Delhi, 1966 Bombay, 1970 Bombay, 1971 Delhi, 1972 Delhi, 1972 Delhi, 1974 London, 1982 Bombay, 1989
yayati (kannada)
Hindi Marathi Bengali Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Kumar Roy, Bohurupee Bombay, 1967 Bombay, 197071 Bombay, 1989
C. T. Khanolkar ek shoonya bajirao (marathi)

Marathi Hindi Vijaya Mehta, Rangayan Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan Bombay, 1966 Delhi, 1968
Appendix 4
401
Mohan Rakesh adhe adhure (hindi)

Hindi Hindi Marathi Hindi Konkani Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Om Shivpuri, Dishantar Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Shyamanand Jalan, Anamika Amol Palekar Rajinder Nath, Sangeet Kala Mandir Amal Allana, NSD Repertory Mohan Maharshi, Theatre Department, Punjab University Alakhanandan, BB Rangmandal Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Satyadev Dubey, Awishkar Delhi, 1969 Bombay, 1969 Bombay, 1970 Calcutta, 1970 Bombay, 1971 Calcutta, 1974 Delhi, 1976 Chandigarh, 1981 Bhopal, 1983 Calcutta, 1984 Bombay, 1991
ashadh ka ek din (hindi)

Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi English Hindi English English Hindi Hindi Hindi Kannada Hindi Shyamanand Jalan , Anamika Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Mohan Maharshi, Amateur Artists Assoc. Joy Michael, Mary Washington College Mohan Maharshi, Yatrik Faisal Alkazi, Ruchika Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Om Shivpuri, Dishantar Amal Allana, Studio 1 Rajinder Nath, SRC Repertory Akshara K. V., Ninasam Tirugata Ramgopal Bajaj, NSD Repertory Calcutta, 1960 Delhi, 1962 Bombay, 1964 Jaipur, 1968 Virginia, 1968 Delhi, 1971 Delhi, 1971 Bombay, 1972 Delhi, 1973 Delhi, 1981 Delhi, 1983 Heggodu, 1991 Delhi, 1992
lahron ke rajhans (hindi)

Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Shyamanand Jalan, Anamika Om Shivpuri, NSD Rajinder Nath, Dishantar Faisal Alkazi, Ruchika Kirti Jain, NSD, Delhi Calcutta, 1966 Delhi, 1967 Delhi, 1973 Delhi, 1981 [unavailable]
Badal Sircar baki itihas (bengali)

Bengali Hindi Hindi Marathi Hindi Shombhu Mitra, Bohurupee Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Arvind Deshpande, Rangayan S. Ebotombi, NSD Calcutta, 1967 Delhi, 1968 Delhi, 1968 Bombay [1969] Delhi, 1981
402
Appendixes
evam indrajit (bengali)

Bengali Hindi Hindi Kannada Hindi Shombhu Mitra, Bohurupee Shyamanand Jalan, Anamika Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit B. V. Karanth, Shaka Shylusharu B. V. Karanth, NSD Calcutta, 1965 Calcutta, 1968 Bombay, 1972 Bangalore, 1972 Delhi, 1979
pagla ghoda (bengali)

Bengali Hindi Marathi Hindi Hindi Hindi Shombhu Mitra, Bohurupee Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Rajinder Nath, SRC Repertory Satyadev Dubey, NSD Repertory Calcutta, 1971 Bombay, 1971 Bombay, 1971 Calcutta, 1971 Delhi, 1980 Delhi, 1988
Vijay Tendulkar ghashiram kotwal (marathi)

Marathi Hindi Hindi Hindi Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan B. V. Karanth, BB Rangmandal Rajinder Nath, NSD Repertory Pune, 1973 Delhi, 1973 Bhopal, 1981 Delhi, 1993, 2000
sakharam binder (marathi)

Hindi Hindi Hindi Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Rajinder Nath, SRC Repertory Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan Calcutta, 1973, 1991 Delhi, 1984 Delhi, 2000
shantata! court chalu ahe (marathi)

Marathi Hindi Kannada Marathi Bengali Hindi Hindi Arvind Deshpande, Rangayan B. V. Karanth, Dishantar B. V. Karanth, Kalakunja Arvind Deshpande, Awishkar Shombhu Mitra, Bohurupee Sudhir Kulkarni, NSD Repertory Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Bombay, 1967 Delhi, 1969 Bangalore, 196970 Bombay, 1971 Calcutta, 1971 Delhi, 1978 Calcutta, 2001
appendix 5
Productions, Mainly in Hindi, by Three Contemporary Directors
The following entries document the directing work of three leading metropolitan cgures who have given priority to new plays in Hindi and new Indian-language plays in Hindi translation since the late 1950s. Each director is most closely associated with productions in Hindi and with one or two theatre groups in his base city, but each has also worked with other groups and directors. Dubey and Jalan have directed plays in languages other than Hindi as well (the entries provide the additional information wherever applicable). The principal translators of contemporary Indian plays into Hindi are discussed in the section on Multilingualism, Translation, and Circulation in chapter 3.
Satyadev Dubey Theatre Unit, Bombay (Mumbai)

Productions are in Hindi unless otherwise noted.
contemporary indian
Gyandev Agnihotri, Shuturmurg (1968). Dharamvir Bharati, Andha yug (1962). , Sangmarmar par ek raat (one-act play, [date unavailable]). G. P. Deshpande, Andhar yatra (Marathi, 1987; in Marathi for Awishkar, 1988). , Chanakya Vishnugupta (NSD, 1988). , Raaste (NSD Repertory, 1995). Mahesh Elkunchwar, Garbo, as Aur ek Garbo (1974). , Raktapushpa (Marathi, 1981; as Arakta kshan, 1981). , Wada chirebandi, as Virasat (NSD Repertory, 1985). , Pratibimb (Marathi and Hindi, 1987; in Marathi for Awishkar, 1988). Chandrashekhar Kambar, Jokumaraswami, as Aur tota bola (Theatre Unit and Awishkar, 1979). Girish Karnad, Yayati (Hindi, 1967; Marathi, 197071). , Hayavadana (1972). , Tughlaq (Urdu, [1966]; Marathi, 1989). Mohan Rakesh, Ashadh ka ek din (1964). , Adhe adhure (Hindi, for Awishkar, 1969; Marathi, 1970). Adya Rangacharya, Suno Janmejaya (1966). Badal Sircar, Ballabhpurer roopkatha (in Marathi, as V allabhpurachi dantakatha, 1969). , Evam Indrajit (1970). , Pagla ghoda (Marathi and Hindi, 1971; in Hindi for NSD Repertory, 1988). Vijay Tendulkar, Sakharam binder (1973). , Baby (Hindi, 1976; Gujarati, 1973). Nirmal Verma, Teen ekant (1985).
modern western
Edward Bond, The Fool, as Abe bewaqoof (1978). Albert Camus, Cross Purposes (English, 1962).
403
404
Appendixes
Miro Gavran, An Actor Dies, But . . .A Tale of Two Actors, adapt. Satyadev Dubey (Awishkar and Theatre Unit, 2004). Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, as Pret (1966). Luigi Pirandello, Right You Are If You Think You Are, as Sacchai kya hai (1960). Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, as Band darwaze (1965). George Bernard Shaw, Don Juan in Hell (English, Aditi and Theatre Unit, 1983). , Village Wooing (English, 1986).
Shyamanand Jalan Anamika and Padatik, Calcutta (Kolkata)

modern indian
Rabindranath Tagore, Ghare baire, as Ghar aur bahar (Anamika, 1961). , Kshudito pashan (Sanskriti Sagar, Calcutta, 1987).
contemporary indian
Gyandev Agnihotri, Shuturmurg (Anamika, 1967). Dharamvir Bharati, Sangmarmar par ek raat (one-act play, Anamika, 1956). , Nadi pyasi thi (one-act play, Anamika, 1957). G. P. Deshpande, Uddhwasta dharmashala (1982). Mahesh Elkunchwar, Pratibimb, dir. Satyadev Dubey (Padatik, 1987). Girish Karnad, Hayavadana, dir. Rajinder Nath (1972). , Tughlaq (in Bengali; Bangla Natamanch Pratishthha Samiti, 1972). Mahasweta Devi, Hazar churashir ma, as Hazar chaurasi ki ma (1978). Mohan Rakesh, Ashadh ka ek din (Anamika, 1960). , Lahron ke rajhans (Anamika, 1966). , Adhe adhure (Anamika, 1970; Padatik, 1983). Badal Sircar, Evam Indrajit (Anamika, 1968). , Pagla ghoda (1971). Vijay Tendulkar, Ashi pakhare yeti, as Panchhi aise ate hain (Anamika, 1972; Padatik, 1981). , Gidhade, as Giddha (Padatik, 1973). , Sakharam binder (Anamika, 1973; Padatik, 1991). , Kanyadaan (Padatik, 1987). , Shantata! court chalu ahe, as Khamosh! adalat jari hai (Padatik, 2001).
classical indian
Kalidasa, Abhijnana Shakuntalam, as Shakuntala (Padatik, 1980).
classical and modern western

Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan, as Setzuan ki bhali aurat (Padatik, 1977). Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, as Janata ka shatru (Anamika, 1959; Padatik, 1985). Molire, The Bourgeois Gentleman, as Kawwa chala hans ki chaal, with Ranjit Kapoor (Padatik, 1980).
Appendix 5
405
, The School for Wives, as Biwiyon ka madarsa, with Pawan Maskhara (Padatik, 1982). William Shakespeare, King Lear, as Raja Lear, dir. Fritz Bennewitz (1988).
Rajinder Nath Abhiyan and Shri Ram Centre Repertory Company, New Delhi
All productions are in Hindi.
contemporary indian
Satish Alekar, Mahanirvan (1976). Dharamvir Bharati, Suraj ka satwan ghoda (NSD, 1975). Mohit Chattopadhyay, Rajrakto, as Guinea Pig (1972, 1989; Padatik [Calcutta], 1973). , Alibaba (1975). , Nona jal, as Khara pani (1987). G. P. Deshpande, Uddhwasta dharmashala (1977, 1978, 1984). , Andhar yatra, as Chakravyuha (1991). Chandrashekhar Kambar, Jokumaraswami, as Tota bola (SRC Repertory, 1980). , Harakeya kuri, as Bali ka bakra (SRC Repertory, 1984). , Mahamai (NSD Repertory, 2000). Girish Karnad, Hayavadana (Anamika [Calcutta], 1972). , Naga-mandala (1991). C. T. Khanolkar, Ek shoonya Bajirao (1968). Mahasweta Devi, Hazaar churashir ma, as Hazar chaurasi ki ma (1978). Debashish Majumdar, Tamrapatra (1981). , Ishavasyam idam sarvam, as Havai maharaj (1984). , Asamapta (1987). , Swapna santati (1993). , Raanga mati, as Lal mati (1999). Manoj Mitra, Sajano bagan, as Bagiya Banchha Ram ki (1981). , Do panchhi and Sanjh ke tare (SRC Repertory, 1987). , Galpo hekim sahib, as Kissa hakeem sahib ka (1995). , Bhalo basha, as Saiyyan beiman (1998). Rajiv Naik, Sathecha kai karaicha? as Is kambakhat Sathe ka kya karen? (2002). Mrinal Pande, Chor nikal ke bhaga (SRC Repertory, 1984). Mohan Rakesh, Lahron ke rajhans (Dishantar, 1973). , Adhe adhure (Sangeet Kala Mandir [Calcutta], 1974). , Pair tale ki zamin (1974). , Ashadh ka ek din (SRC Repertory, 1983) . Madhu Rye, Koipan ek phoolnu nam bolo to, as Kisi ek phool ka naam lo (1970). Bhisham Sahni, Hanush (1977). Partap Sharma, Power Play, as Ek hi thaili ke . . . (SRC Repertory, 1986). Badal Sircar, Baki itihas (1968). , Sara rattir, as Sari raat (1970). , Pagla ghoda (1969; SRC Repertory, 1980). , Tringsha shatabdi, as Teeswin sadi (1998). , Kabi kahini, as Kavi kahani (Bhartendu Natya Academy [Lucknow], 1998). Vijay Tendulkar, Ashi pakhare yeti, as Panchhi aise ate hain (1971).
406
Appendixes
, Ghashiram kotwal (1973; NSD Repertory, 1993, 2000). , Pahije jatiche, as Jat hi poochho sadhu ki (1978, 1996, 2003). , Anji (SRC Repertory, 1981). , Kamala (1982). , Mitrachi goshttha, as Meeta ki kahani (1984). , Sakharam binder (SRC Repertory, 1984; Abhiyan, 2000). , Kanyadaan (1985). , Niyaticha bailala, as Hatteri kismat (1992). , Safar (1993). Nirmal Varma, Doosri duniya and Kavve aur kala pani (SRC Repertory, 1987). , Raat ka reporter (2003). Surendra Verma, Ek dooni ek (SRC Repertory, 1985).
classical western
Aristophanes, Lysistrata (1977).
appendix 6
Productions by Ten Contemporary Directors and Theatre Groups
The following entries document the work of major directors with the theatre groups that have been most important and formative in their careers. Some of these directors, however, have worked with more than one group or company, and most groups have had more than one principal director. To maintain accuracy in the production data, I have therefore speciced other groups and directors wherever applicable. Whenever available, I have also included the name of the translator of a play. Two groups of directors whose work belongs in this category are listed elsewhere: Satyadev Dubey, Shyamanand Jalan, and Rajinder Nath appear as the principal directors of new Indian plays in Hindi in appendix 5; the playwright-directors Habib Tanvir, Utpal Dutt, Badal Sircar, K. N. Panikkar, Ratan Thiyam, and Mahesh Dattani appear with other major playwrights in appendix 2. The directors are listed approximately in order of their emergence on the national level.
Shombhu Mitra Bohurupee, Calcutta (Kolkata)

All productions are in Bengali.
modern indian
Rabindranath Tagore, Char adhyay (1951). , Raktakarabi (1954). , Dakghar, dir. Tripti Mitra (1957). , Visarjan (1961). , Raja (1964). , Ghare baire, dir. Tripti Mitra (1974). , Malini, dir. Kumar Roy (1976).
contemporary indian
Bijon Bhattacharya, Jabanabandi (IPTA, 1944). , Nabanna (with Bijon Bhattacharya for IPTA, 1944; Bohurupee, 1948; dir. Kumar Roy, 1989). Girish Karnad, Yayati, dir. Kumar Roy (1988). Tulsi Lahiri, Chhenra taar (1950). , Chauryananda, dir. Kumar Roy (1956). Manoj Mitra, Rajdarshan, dir. Kumar Roy (1982). Badal Sircar, Evam Indrajit (1965). , Baki itihas (1967). , Pagla ghoda (1971). Vijay Tendulkar, Shantata! court chalu ahe, as Chop! adalat cholchhe (1971).
classical indian
Shudraka, Mrichchhakatika, dir. Kumar Roy (1979).
407
408
Appendixes

Jean Anouilh, Lalouette, as Aguner pakhi, dir. Kumar Roy (1984). Bertolt Brecht, Galileo, dir. Kumar Roy and Fritz Bennewitz (1980). Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, as Dashachakra (1952). , A Dolls House, as Putul khela (1958). Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, as Raja Oedipus (1964).
Ebrahim Alkazi National School of Drama Repertory Company, New Delhi

Productions are in Hindi or Urdu unless otherwise noted.
contemporary indian
Dharamvir Bharati, Andha yug (1964, 1967, 1974). Balwant Gargi, Sultan Razia (1972). Vasant Kanetkar, Raigarhala jevha jag yete, as Jag uthha raigarh (1977). Girish Karnad, Tughlaq (1972, 1974, 1982). , Tal-danda, as Rakt-kalyan (1992). Laxmi Narayan Lal, Suryamukh (1972). Mohan Rakesh, Ashadh ka ek din (NSD, 1962). Badal Sircar, Tringsha shatabdi, as Hiroshima (1971).

Jean Anouilh, Antigone (1967). Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1967). George Bchner, Dantons Death (1973). Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters (1967). T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (in English for Theatre Unit, 1955). Euripides, Medea (in English for Theatre Unit, 1960). , The Trojan Women, as Troy ki auratein (1966). Federico Garca Lorca, House of Bernarda Alba, as Din ke andhere (1992). Molire, The Miser, as Kanjoos (1965, 1979). , The School for Wives, as Biwiyon ka madarsa (1976). John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (1974, 1975). William Shakespeare, King Lear (1964). , Othello (1969). , Julius Caesar (1992). Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (in English for Theatre Unit, 1954). , Antigone (in English for Theatre Unit, 1957). August Strindberg, The Father (1964).
Vijaya Mehta Rangayan, Bombay (Mumbai)

Productions are in Marathi unless otherwise noted.
contemporary indian
Anil Barwe, Hamidabaichi kothi (1976). Jaywant Dalvi, Sandhya chhaya (Goa Hindu Association, 1973).
Appendix 6
409
, Barrister (1977). , Savitri (1981). P. L. Deshpande, Tuze ahe tuzapashi (1956). Mahesh Elkunchwar, Holi (1970). , Ek mhataryacha khoon (1970). , Sultan (1970). , Yatnaghar (1970). , Garbo (1973). , Raktapushpa (1981). , Wada chirebandi (Marathi and Hindi, 1985; Marathi, 1989). Girish Karnad, Hayavadana (Marathi, 1973; in German for Deutsches Nationaltheatre, Weimar, 1984). , Naga-mandala (1991; in German for the Festival of India, Berlin, 1992). C. T. Khanolkar, Ek shunya Bajirao (1966). Vijay Tendulkar, Shrimant (1956). , Ajagar ani gandharva (1962). , Mee jinkalo mee harlo (1963). , Shantata! court chalu ahe, dir. Arvind Deshpande (1967).
classical indian
Kalidasa, Shakuntalam (Marathi, 1979; in German for Leipzig Theatre, 1980; Hindi, 1985). Vishakhadatta, Mudrarakshasa (1975); Deutsches Nationaltheatre, Weimar, 1976).

Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan, as Devajine karuna keli, trans. Vyankatesh Madgulkar (1972). , The Caucasian Chalk Circle, as Ajab nyaya vartulacha, with Fritz Bennewitz, trans. C. T. Khanolkar (Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh, 1974; Brecht Festival, Berlin, 1974). Eugne Ionesco, Chairs, as Khurchya (1962).
Arvind Deshpande Awishkar, Bombay (Mumbai)

Productions are in Marathi unless otherwise noted.
modern indian
Rabindranath Tagore, Dakghar, dir. Sulabha Deshpande (1987).
contemporary indian
Mahesh Elkunchwar, Yuganta (trilogy consisting of W ada chirebandi, Magna talyakathi, and Yuganta), dir. Chandrakant Kulkarni (1994). , Yatnaghar, dir. Chetan Datar (2001). Chandrashekhar Kambar, Jokumaraswami, in Hindi as Aur tota bola, trans. Vasant Dev, dir. Satyadev Dubey (1979). Girish Karnad, Tughlaq, trans. Vijay Tendulkar (1971). C. T. Khanolkar, Shrirang premrang (1973). , Sage soyare, dir. Ajit Bhagat (1983).
410
Appendixes
Debashish Majumdar, Tamrapatra, trans. Arvind Deshpande, dir. Sulabha Deshpande (1981). Cyrus Mistry, Doongaji House, trans. Sucharita Apte and Kartik Mukherjee, dir. Chetan Datar (2000). Rajiv Naik, Matichya gadyanche parakaran, dir. Ajit Bhure (1989). , Chhoti chhoti baaten, trans. and dir. Satyadev Dubey (1993). Mohan Rakesh, Adhe adhure, in Hindi, dir. Satyadev Dubey (1970, 1991). , Chhatriyan, in Hindi, dir. Jayadev Hattangady (1976). Makarand Sathe, Roman samrajyachi padjhad, dir. Ajit Bhagat (1987). , V adhdivas, dir. Ajit Bhagat (1987). , Saplekarancha mul, dir. Ajit Bhagat (1993). Badal Sircar, Baki itihas, (Rangayan [1969]). , Sara rattir, in Marathi as Sari ratra, trans. P. L. Deshpande, dir. Sulabha Deshpande (1972). , Abu Hasan, trans. Arun Kakde, dir. Jayadev Hattangady (1977). Vijay Tendulkar, Shantata! court chalu ahe (1971). , Pahije jatiche (1976). , Char diwas, dir. Sulabha Deshpande (1988). , Baby, dir. Chetan Datar (1992); in Hindi, trans. Vasant Dev, dir. Chetan Datar (2000). , Festival of twenty plays, various directors (1992). , Safar, dir. Sulabha Deshpande (1992). Achyut Vaze, Lagla tar ghoda (1981).

Euripides, Medea, trans. Sadanand Rege, dir. Jayadev Hattangady (1983). Dario Fo, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, as Eka rajkiya kaidyacha apghati mrityu, trans. Maya Pandit, dir. Vijay Kulkarni (1993). Franz Xaver Kroetz, Request Concert, as Apli awad, trans. and dir. Rustom Bharucha (1986). Federico Garca Lorca, Yerma, as Changuna, trans. Arati Havaldar, dir. Jayadev Hattangady (1974). Luigi Pirandello, Right You Are If You Think You Are, as Apula thhavo na sandita, trans. Shriram Khandekar, dir. Vihang Nayak (1978). Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in Marathi as Gaurai, trans. Vyankatesh Madgulkar, dir. Asha Dandvate (1975).
Alyque Padamsee Theatre Group, Bombay (Mumbai)

Productions are in English unless noted otherwise.
contemporary indian
Gurcharan Das, Mira (1972). Mahesh Dattani, Tara (1991). , Final Solutions (1994). Girish Karnad, Tughlaq (1970). Alyque Padamsee, Bandra Saturday Night (1961).
Appendix 6
, Trial Balloon (theatre pieces, 1968). and Louis Banks, Roshni (1995). Zarina Sayani and Freny Bhownagiri, Bedroom (1967). Rifat Shamim, Shayad aap bhi hansen (Hindi, 1958). Partap Sharma, A Touch of Brightness (1961). , The Word (1966). , Begum Sumroo (1997). Ema Vatchaghandy, Asylum (1966).
411
classical, modern, and contemporary western

Edward Albee, The Death of Bessie Smith (1962). , The Zoo Story (1962). Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden (1993). Bob Fosse, Cabaret, as Kabaret, adapt. Alyque Padamsee (1988). Jean Giraudoux, The Madwoman of Chaillot (1962). Leonard Girshe, Butterflies Are Free (1992). Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1953). Ernest Hemingway, The Killers (1951). Robinson Je,ers, Medea (1971). Arthur Kopit, O Dad, Poor Dad, Mamas Hung You in the Closet and Im Feeling So Sad (1968). Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus (1952). Arthur Miller, All My Sons (1959; in Hindi as Sara sansar apna parivar, 1962). , A View from the Bridge (1960). , The Crucible (1963). Eugene ONeill, Long Days Journey into Night (1959). Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party (1973). William Saroyan, Hello out There (1962). William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (1954). , Julius Caesar (Radio production, 1962). , Othello (1963). , Hamlet (1964). George Bernard Shaw, Candida (1955). Irwin Shaw, Bury the Dead (1968). Sam Shepard, Suicide in B Flat (1987). Neil Simon, The Odd Couple (1998). Sophocles, Antigone (1952). August Strindberg, Miss Julie (1990). Andrew Lloyd Webber. Evita, adapt. Alyque Padamsee (1999). Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade (1969). Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (1953). Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in Hindi as Shishon ke khilone (1957).
B. V. Karanth Various Groups in Different Locations

Productions are in Hindi unless otherwise noted. Performance groups, by location are Bangalore: Adarsh Film Institute, Benaka, Kalakunja, Karnataka Teachers Workshop,
412
Appendixes
Nataranga, Natya Sangh, Pratima Natak Mandali, Pratima Ranga, Sahitya Kala Sangh, Samudaya, Shaka Shylusharu; Bhopal: Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal, Kala Parishad, Madhya Pradesh (M.P.) Rangmandal; Heggodu: Ninasam; Hyderabad: Surabhi; Mysore: Mitravrinda, Rangayan; New Delhi: Dishantar, Kannada Bharati, National School of Drama, Ravindra Bharati.
modern indian
Bharatendu Harishchandra, Andher nagari chaupat raja (NSD, 1978). , Vidyasundar (NSD, 1979). Jaishankar Prasad, Chandragupta (Nagari Natak Mandali [Varanasi], 1972). , Vishakh (M. P. Rangmandal, 1982). , Skandagupta (M. P. Rangmandal, 1984). D. L. Roy, Shahjahan (NSD, 1978). , Bheeshma (Telugu, Surabhi [Hyderabad], 1996).
contemporary indian
Dharamvir Bharati, Andha yug, trans. Siddhalinga Pattanashetty (Kannada, M.G. Memorial College [Udupi], 1973). Girish Karnad, Tughlaq (Kannada, Kannada Bharati, 1966). , Hayavadana (Hindi, Dishantar, 1972; Kannada, Benaka,1973; Hindi, Darpan [Lucknow], 1974; Hindi, M.P. Rangmandal, 1982; Kannada, Mitravrinda [Delhi], 1989; English, National Institute of Dramatic Arts, Australia). , Hittina hunja (Kannada, Natya Sangh, 1985; Mitravrinda, 1991). Chandrashekhar Kambar, Jokumaraswami (Kannada, Pratima Natak Mandali, 1972). , Narcissus (Kannada, Pratima Ranga, 1974). , Rishyashringa (Kannada, Nataranga, 1985). P. Lankesh, Siddhate (Kannada, Ravindra Bharati, 1965). , Sankranti (Kannada, Pratima Natak Mandali, 1972). Mohan Rakesh, Chhatriyan (Kala Parishad, 1974). Adya Rangacharya, Rang bharat (Kannada, Kannada Bharati, 1965; Rangayan, 1993). , Kelu Janmejaya (Kannada, Shaka Shylusharu, 1968); in Hindi as Suno Janmejaya, trans. N. C. Jain (NSD, 1980). Badal Sircar, Pagla ghoda, in Kannada as Huchchu kudre (Bangalore, 1971). , Evam Indrajit (Kannada, Sahitya Kala Sangh, 1972); in Hindi as Amal, Vimal, and Kamal, adapt. Balraj Pandit (NSD, 1980). Habib Tanvir, Charandas chor, in Kannada as Chor Charan das (Samudaya, 1981). Vijay Tendulkar, Shantata! Court chalu ahe, in Kannada as Saddu bicharane nadiatahid (Kalakunja, 196970); in Hindi as Khamosh! Adalat zari hai (Dishantar, 1969). , Ghashiram kotwal, trans. Vasant Dev (M.P. Rangmandal, 1982). Surendra Varma, Chhote saiyad bade saiyad (NSD Repertory, 1980).
classical indian
Bhasa, Pancharatram (Malayalam, Calicut University [Trichur], 1987). , Avimaraka, trans. B. V. Karanth (NSD, 1994). Bodhayen Kavi, Bhagavadajjukiyam (Sanskrit, NSD, 1978). Kalidasa, Abhijnana Shakuntalam, trans. Adya Rangacharya (Kannada, Kalidasa Samaroh [Ujjain], 1971).
Appendix 6
, Malavikagnimitram, trans. Madan Soni (Bundeli, M.P. Rangmandal, 1982). , Agnivarna, based on Raghuvansha (Rangayan, 1997). , Vikramorvashiyam, trans. Induja Awasthi (NSD, 1997). Shudraka, Mrichchhakatika, in Malvi as Gara ki gadi, trans. Harish Nigam (M.P. Rangmandal, 1984). Vishakhadatta, Mudrarakshasa, trans. Bhartendu Harishchandra (NSD, 1980).
413
classical and modern western and non-western

Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon, in Hindi as Matia burj, trans. Ramesh Chandra Shah (M.P. Rangmandal, 1982); in Kannada as Diddibaagilu (Adarsh Film Institute, 1985). Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan, in Telugu as Bastidevata Yadamma (Surabhi [Hyderabad], 1998). , The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in Bundelkhandi as Insaf ke ghera (BB Rangmandal, 1983). Euripides, Medea (Kannada, Ninasam, 1996). Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, in Kannada as Pret, trans. Adya Rangacharya (Bangalore, 1971). Molire, The Bourgeois Gentleman, in Kannada as Samanyanu sahebnadaddu (Karnataka Teachers Workshop, 1968). Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, in Kannada as Natakaran shodh dalli aaru patragur, trans. Adya Rangacharya (Shaka Shylusharu, 1971). William Shakespeare, Macbeth, as Barnam vana, adapt. Raghuvir Sahay (NSD Repertory, 1979). , King Lear in Hindi as Pagla raja teen betiyan (Kala Parishad, 1977); in Kannada, Karnataka Teachers Workshop (1988). George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, in Kannada as Jeevada gombe (Bangalore, 1971); in Kannada as Hu hudugi (Bangalore, 1998). Sophocles, Oedipus, trans. P. Lankesh (Kannada, Pratima Natak Mandali, 1972).
Jabbar Patel Theatre Academy, Pune

All productions are in Marathi.
contemporary indian
Satish Alekar, Miki ani memsahib, dir. Satish Alekar (1973). , Mahanirvan, dir. Satish Alekar (1974). , Mahapur, dir. Mohan Gokhale (1975). , Begum Barve, dir. Satish Alekar (1979). , Shanivar ravivar, dir. Satish Alekar (1982). , Pralay, dir. Satish Alekar (1985). , Atireki, dir. Satish Alekar (1990). Mahesh Elkunchwar, Kshitijaparyant Samudra, dir. Mahesh Elkunchwar (1996). Arun Sadhu, Padgham (1985). Makarand Sathe, Saplekaranche mul, dir. Samar Nakhate (1989). , Thhombya, dir. Makarand Sathe (1997). Vijay Tendulkar, Ashi pakhare yeti (1969, for Progressive Dramatic Association).
414
Appendixes
, Ghashiram kotwal (1973). , Bhau Murarrao, dir. Mohan Gokhale (1976). , Mi jinkalo mi haralo, dir. Shrirang Godbole (1992).
modern western
Edward Albee, The Zoo Story (1974). Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, as Teen paishacha tamasha, adapt. P. L. Deshpande (1978). Henrik Ibsen, A Dolls House, trans. Meena Deshpande, dir. Dilip Mangalvedhekar (1980). Anthony Sha,er, Sleuth, as Khelia, trans. Rajaram Humne (1976).
K. V. Subbanna and Akshara K. V. Ninasam Tirugata, Heggodu

All productions are in Kannada.
modern indian
D. L. Roy, Shahjahan, dir. K. V. Subbanna (1953); trans. B. Puttaswamaiah, dir. K. G. Krishnamurthy (1996). Rabindranath Tagore, Raktakarabi, as Kempu kanagile, trans. K. V. Subbanna, dir. C. R. Jambe (1999).
contemporary indian
Mahesh Elkunchwar, Wada chirebandi, as Chirebandi wade, trans. Maruti Shanbag, dir. C. R. Jambe (1998). Chandrashekhar Kambar, Sangya balya, dir. K. V. Subbanna (1974). , Samba shiva prahasana, dir. Akshara K. V. (1985). , Alibaba dir. K. G. Krishnamurthy (1986, 1987). , Siri sampige (1986; SRC [New Delhi], 1986). , Bepputakkadi bholeshankara, dir. K. G. Krishnamurthy (1988). , Jokumaraswami, dir. Chandrashekhar Kambar (1989). , Tukrana kanasu, dir. Akshara K. V. (1991). Girish Karnad, Tughlaq, dir. C. R. Jambe (1989). , Tal-danda, dir. C. R. Jambe (1992). , Agni mattu male, dir. Venkatraman Aithal (1995). Kuvempu, Shmashana kurukshetram, dir. Akshara K. V. (2000). Prasanna, Ondu loka kathe, dir. Prasanna (1977). Mohan Rakesh, Ashadh ka ek din, as Ashadad ondudina, trans. S. Pattanashetty, dir. Akshara K. V. (1990). Vijay Tendulkar, Ghashiram kotwal, dir. K. V. Subbanna (1976).
classical indian
Bhasa, Bhasa bharata, adapt. L. Gundappa, dir. C. R. Jambe (1991). , Swapnavasavadatam, as Swapna nataka, adapt. Kirtinath Kurtkoti, dir. Akshara K. V. (1993). , Pratimanatakam, as Pratima natak, trans. and dir. S. Raghunandan (1995).
Appendix 6
415
Kalidasa, Lok Shakuntala, adapt. K. V. Subbanna, dir. C. R. Jambe (1985). Mahendra Vikram Varman, Bhagavadajjukyam, trans. K. V. Subbanna, dir. K. N. Panikkar (2000). Shudraka, Mrichhakatika, as Mannina Bandi, trans. B. Govindachar, dir. Atul Tiwari (1986). Vishakhadatta, Mudrarakshasa, as Chanakya prapancha, adapt. K. V. Subbanna, dir. C. R. Jambe (1988).
classical and modern western and non-western

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, as Kappu jana kempu neralu (Black People and Red Shadows), adapt. and dir. K.V. Subbanna (1983). Jean Anouilh, Antigone, trans. G. N. Ranganath Rao, dir. N. Premchand (1998). Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, as Moorukasina sangeetanataka, trans. K. V. Subbanna, dir. Akshara K. V. (1986). , The Good Woman of Setzuan, as Sezuan nagarada sadhwi, trans. K. V. Subbanna, dir. Fritz Bennewitz (1989). , Herr Puntila and his Man Matti, as Puntila, trans. Jaswant Jadhav, dir. C. R. Jambe (1990). Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, as Moovaru akkatangiyaru, trans. Vaidehi, dir. C. R. Jambe (2000). Friedrich Drrenmatt, The Visit, as Kanakagamana, adapt. Raghu Sopheena, dir. Jayatirtha Joshi (1994). Euripides, Medea, trans. K. Marulasiddapa, dir. B. V. Karanth (1996). Dario Fo, Archangels Dont Play Pinball, as Jujubidevara jugariyata, trans. K. T. Gatti, dir. Suresh Anagalli (1999). Nikolai Gogol, The Inspector General, as Sahebaru baruttare, adapt. K. V. Subbanna, dir. Akshara K. V. (1983, 1989). Molire, The Bourgeois Gentleman, as Mamamooshi, adapt. K. V. Subbanna, dir. Ekbal Ahmed (1995). William Shakespeare, Hamlet, dir. K. V. Subbanna (1984). , Macbeth, trans. Ramchandra Deva, dir. Akshara K. V. (1987). , King Lear, as Lear maharaja, trans. H. S. Shivaprakash, dir. S. Raghunandan (1988). , Much Ado About Nothing, as Dham dhum suntaragali, adapt. Vaidehi, dir. K. G. Krishnamurthy (1989). , A Midsummer Nights Dream, as Habbada hanneradane ratri, trans. N. S. L. Bhatta, dir. Fritz Bennewitz (1991). , Timon of Athens, as Athensina arthavanta, trans. K. V. Subbanna, dir. C. R. Jambe (1993).
Usha Ganguli Rangakarmee, Calcutta (Kolkata).

contemporary indian
Mannu Bhandari, Mahabhoj (1984). Vijay Dalvi, Maiyyat (1997).
416
Appendixes
Swadesh Dipak, Court martial (1991). Mahesh Elkunchwar, Holi (1989). Usha Ganguli, Kashipur ka Kashiram (1990). , Khoj (1994). , Antar-yatra (2002). Safdar Hashmi, Apaharan bhaichare ka (1989). Shaafat Khan, Shobha-yatra (2001). Mahasweta Devi, Rudali (1993). , Mukti (Bengali, 1999). Ratnakar Matkari, Lok katha (1987). Jyoti Mhapsekar, Beti aayee (1996). Kashinath Singh, Kashinama (2003).

Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage, as Himmat mai, adapt. Neelabh (1998). Maxim Gorki, The Mother, as Ma, dir. M. K. Raina [n.d.] Henrik Ibsen, A Dolls House, as Gudiya ghar dir. Tripti Mitra (1981). Franz Xaver Kroetz, Request Concert, in Bengali as Anurodher asar, dir. Rustom Bharucha and Samuel Lutgenhorst (1986). Arnold Wesker, Roots, as Parichay, dir. Rudra Prasad Sengupta (1978).
Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry The Company, Chandigarh

Productions are in Punjabi unless otherwise noted.
contemporary indian
Jaywant Dalvi, Barrister, in Hindi (BB Rangmandal [1981]). Girish Karnad, Naga-mandala (1989; First International Festival of Theatre, Tashkent, 1989). Ratnakar Matkari, Lok-katha, in Hindi (BB Rangmandal [1982]). Surjit Patar, Kitchen katha (based on Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate and Isabel Allende, Aphrodite, 1999; Singapore Arts Festival, 2001; Japan International Festival, Tokyo and Kyoto, 2002; Laokoon Festival, Hamburg, 2002; Dubai Festival of Theatre, 2003; tour of Pakistan, 2004). , A Packet of Seeds (commissioned for Trespass, a multinational theatre project, by the BBC, 2003). , Sibbo in Supermarket (based on Moira Crosbie Lovells Supermarket Soliloquy, 2003). Raja Bhartrihari (based on Dhani Ram Chatraks collection of the poetry of Bhartrihari [1993]).

Jean Giraudoux, The Madwoman of Chaillot, as Shahar mere di pagal aurat, adapt. Surjit Patar (1995; Festival DAvignon, 1995; London International Festival of Theatre, 1995). Doris Lessing, An Unposted Love Letter, trans. Surjit Patar (2002).
Appendix 6
417
Federico Garca Lorca, Yerma, adapt. Surjit Patar (1991; Festival of Perth, 1999; Multi-Arts Festival, Canberra, 1999; London International Festival of Theatre, 2003; Tricycle Theatre, London, 2003; tour of Bradford, Nottingham, Manchester, and Cambridge, 2003). Molire, The Miser, in Hindi as Bichhu (Bhopal, [1980]). Jean Racine, Phaedra, as Fida, adapt. Surjit Patar (1997). Jean-Paul Sartre, The Respectable Prostitute, in Hindi as Benam zindagi (BB Rangmandal, 1980).
appendix 7
Modern Urban Transmissions of the Mahabharata: The Principal Genres
Titles not originally in English have been translated.
Textual scholarship and translation postcolonial

Bhandarkar Institute Critical Edition (191870) P. Lal, The Mahabharata (196880) J. A. B. van Buitenen, ed., The Mahabharata (1973)
Critical interpretation colonial

M. Monier-Williams, Indian Epic Poetry (1863)
postcolonial
P. Lal, Vyasas Mahabharata: Creative Insights (1992)
Philosophical commentary colonial

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Secret of the Gita (1915) Aurobindo Ghose, Vyasa and V almiki (pub. 1956) Vivekananda, The Ramayana and the Mahabharata (pub. 1977)
postcolonial
Vinoba Bhave, Steadfast Wisdom (1966) Iravati Karve, Yuganta (1969) Buddhadeva Bose, The Book of Yudhishthira (1974)
Popular retellings colonial

Flora Annie Steele, A Tale of Indian Heroes (n.d.) Annie Besant, The Story of the Great War (1899) Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Great Epics of Ancient India (1900) C. Rajagopalachari, The Bhagavad-gita: Abridged and Explained (1936)
postcolonial
C. Rajagopalachari, The Mahabharata (1950) C. Rajagopalachari, The Bhagavad-gita (1963) R. K. Narayan, Gods, Demons, and Others (1964) Shanta Rameshwar Rao, The Mahabharata (1968) William Buck, The Mahabharata (1973)
418
Appendix 7
419
R. K. Narayan, The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic (1978) R. K. Narayan, The Mahabharata (1987)
Literary intertexts colonial

Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Sermista (1859) Krishnaji P. Khadilkar, The Slaying of Kichaka (1907) Rabindranath Tagore, Chitra (1914) Subramania Bharati, Panchalis Vow (1912) K. P. Khadilkar, Draupadi: A Musical Play (1928)
postcolonial
Dharamvir Bharati, Andha yug (1954) Maithili Sharan Gupta, The Slaying of Jayadratha (1959) Girish Karnad, Yayati (1961) V. S. Khandekar, Yayati [1965] K. Sacchidanandan, Kurukshetra (1970) K. N. Panikkar, Mahabharata trilogy (19781987) S. L. Bhairappa, Parva (1979) Shyam Benegal, Kalyug (clm, 1980) Ratan Thiyam, Mahabharata trilogy (19811991) Jean-Claude Carrire and Peter Brook, The Mahabharata (1987) Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel (1989) Girish Karnad, The Fire and the Rain (1994)
Popular performance colonial

Narayana Prasad Betab, Mahabharata (1913) Radheyshyam Kathavachak, Brave Abhimanyu (1916) Radheshyam Kathavachak, The Marriage of Draupadi (1935) Kurukshetra (Gubbi Veeranna Company, Karnataka) Anonymous, The Slaying of Jayadratha
postcolonial
B. R. Chopra, Mahabharata (52-part TV serial, 1989) Mahabharata (group of mythological clms)
appendix 8
The Euro-American Intertexts of Post-Independence Drama and Theatre
Author and Play Language and Indian Title (Translator/Adaptor)
chinghiz aitmatov and kaltai mohammejanov

Fujiyama Hindi, Fujiyama
edward albee
The Death of Bessie Smith The Zoo Story English English Marathi
jean anouilh
Antigone Lalouette Traveller without Luggage Episode in an Authors Life Hindustani Kannada (G. N. Ranganath) Bengali, Aguner pakhi Hindustani, Ek musacr be-asbab (Ranjit Kapoor) Hindustani, Surajmukhi aur Hamlet
aristophanes
Lysistrata Hindustani
beaumarchais
The Barber of Seville Hindustani, Kya karega kazi ( J. N. Kaushal)
samuel beckett
W aiting for Godot Hindustani (Krishna Dwivedi and Virender Sharma)
edward bond
The Fool Hindustani, Abe bewaqoof (V. K. Sharma and others)
volker braun
The Great Peace Hindi, Mahashanti (Ramgopal Bajaj)
bertolt brecht
The Caucasian Chalk Circle Hindustani, Insaf ka ghera Marathi, Ajab nyaya vartulacha (C. T. Khanaolkar)
Bengali, Kharir gondi
420
Appendix 8
421
Director and Theatre Group
Location and Date
Prasanna, NSD Repertory
Delhi, 1991
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy
Bombay, 1962 Bombay, 1962 Pune, 1974
Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory N. Premchand Rao, Ninasam Tirugata Kumar Roy, Bohurupee Ranjit Kapoor, NSD Repertory Ranjit Kapoor, NSD Repertory
Delhi, 1967 Hegodu, 1998 Calcutta, 1984 Delhi, 1991 Delhi, 1991
Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan
Delhi, 1977
Barry John, SRC Repertory
[1987]
Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory
Delhi, 1967
Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Barry John et al., NSD Repertory
Bombay, 1978 Delhi, 1979
Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Repertory
Delhi, 1990
Ebrahim Alkazi and Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Vijaya Mehta and F. Bennewitz, Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh Rudraprasad Sengupta, Nandikar
Delhi, 1972 Bombay, 1974; Deutsches Nationaltheater, Weimar, 1984 Calcutta, 1978
422
Appendixes
Language and Indian Title (Translator/Adaptor) Bengali, Gondi (Badal Sircar) Bundelkhandi, Insaf ka ghera Hindi Hindi
Author and Play
The Exception and the Rule Galileo
The Good Woman of Setzuan
Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti Mother Courage
The Resistible Rise ofArturo Ui Threepenny Opera
Bengali English Marathi, Devajine karuna keli (Vyankatesh Madgulkar) Hindi, Setzuan ki bhali aurat Chhattisgarhi, Sajapur ki Shantibai Hindi Telugu, Bastidevata Yadamma Kannada, Sezuan nagarada sadhwi (K. V. Subbanna) Hindi, Chopra kamal naukar jamal (Anil Chaudhury) Kannada, Puntila ( Jaswant Jadhav) Hindi Hindi, Himmat mai Hindi, Himmat mai (Neelabh) Hindi, Tamancha Khan ki ghazab dastan (Niaz Haider and Shama Zaidi) Bengali, Tin poyshar pala Urdu, Teen take ka swang (Surekha Sikri) Marathi, Teen paishacha tamasha (P. L. Deshpande) Kannada, Moorukasina sangeetanataka (K.V. Subbanna)
georg buchner
Dantons Death Hindi ( J. N. Kaushal)
anton chekhov
The Cherry Orchard Uncle V anya Three Sisters Hindi, Cherry ka bagicha (Rajendra Yadav) Urdu (Anwar Azeem) Kannada, Moovaru Akkatangiyaru (Vaidehi)
ariel dorfman
Death and the Maiden English
friedrich drrenmatt
The Visit Kannada, Kanakagamana (Raghu Sopheena)
Appendix 8
423
Director and Theatre Group Badal Sircar B. V. Karanth, BB Rangmandal Rudraprasad Sengupta, NSD Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Fritz Bennewitz, BB Rangmandal Fritz Bennewitz, Ninasam Tirugata Fritz Bennewitz and Kumar Roy, Bohurupee Habib Tanvir, Naya Theatre Vijaya Mehta, Rangayan Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Habib Tanvir, Naya Theatre Amal Allana, NSD B. V. Karanth, Surabhi Fritz Bennewitz, Ninasam Tirugata Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Repertory C. R. Jambe, Ninasam Tirugata Richard Schechner Amal Allana, Theatre and TV Associates Usha Ganguli, Rangakarmee Bansi Kaul, NSD Repertory Ajitesh Banerji, Nandikar Fritz Bennewitz and Amal Allana, NSD Repertory Fritz Bennewitz and Amal Allana, BB Rangmandal Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy Akshara K.V., Ninasam Tirugata
Location and Date Satabdi, Calcutta, and other venues, 1978 Bhopal, 1983 Delhi, 1982 Delhi, 1983 Bhopal Heggodu Calcutta, 1980 Delhi, 1962 Bombay, 1972 Calcutta, 1977 Delhi, 1978 Delhi, 1984 Hyderabad, 1998 Heggodu, 1989 Delhi, 1979 Heggodu, 1990 1981 Delhi, 1993 Calcutta, 1998 Delhi, 1995 Calcutta, 1969 Delhi, 1970 Bhopal Pune, 1978 Heggodu, 1986
Delhi, 1973
Richard Schechner, NSD Repertory Manohar Singh and K. K. Raina, NSD Repertory C. R. Jambe, Ninasam Tirugata
Delhi, 1983 Delhi, 1979 Heoggodu, 2000
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group
Bombay, 1993
Jayatirtha Joshi, Ninasam Tirugata
Heggodu, 1994
424
Appendixes
Language and Indian Title (Translator/Adaptor)
Author and Play
euripides
Medea The Trojan Women Marathi Kannada Hindustani ( J. N. Kaushal)
dario fo
Accidental Death of an Anarchist Archangels Dont Play Pinball Comedy of Terrors Marathi, Eka rajkiya kaidyacha apghati mrityu (Maya Pandit) Hindi, Bade na khelen chhote khel Kannada, Jujubidevara jugariyata (K. T. Gatti) Hindi (Ranjit Kapoor)
jean giraudoux
The Madwoman of Chaillot English Punjabi, Sheher mere di pagal aurat (Surjit Patar)
nicolai gogol
The Inspector General Hindustani, Ala afasar Kannada, Sahebaru baruttare (K. V. Subbanna)
carlo goldoni
The Servant of Two Masters Hindi, Naukar shaitan malik hairan (V. K. Sharma)
oliver goldsmith
She Stoops to Conquer English
maxim gorky
Enemies The Mother Hindi, Dushman (Safdar Hashmi) Ibaragi Hindi, Ma
henrik ibsen
A Dolls House Enemy of the People Bengali, Putul khela Hindi, Gudia ghar Bengali, Dashachakra Hindi, Janata ka Shatru Hindi, Pret Kannada, Pret (Adya Rangacharya)
Ghosts
eugene ionesco
Chairs The Lesson Marathi, Khurchya Hindi (R. K. Braroo)
Appendix 8
425
Location and Date
Jayadev Hattangady, Awishkar B. V. Karanth, Ninasam Tirugata Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory
Bombay, 1983 Heggodu, 1996 Delhi, 1966
Vijay Kulkarni, Awishkar Robin Das, NSD Repertory Suresh Anagalli, Ninasam Tirugata Ranjit Kapoor, SRC Repertory
Bombay, 1993 Delhi, 1996 Heggodu, 1999 Delhi, 1998
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, The Company Abhinet Akshara K. V., Ninasam Tirugata
Bombay, 1962 Chandigarh, 1995
Lucknow, 1980 Heggodu, 1983, 1989
B. M. Shah, NSD Repertory
Delhi, 1985
Bombay, 1953
Habib Tanvir, NSD Repertory Shozo Sato, NSD M. K. Raina, Rangakarmee
Delhi, 1989 Delhi, 1972 Calcutta
Shombhu Mitra, Bohurupee Tripti Mitrai, Rangakarmee Shombhu Mitra, Bohurupee Shyamanand Jalan, Anamika Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit B. V. Karanth
Calcutta, 1958 Calcutta, 1981 Calcutta, 1952 Calcutta, 1959 Calcutta, 1985 Bombay, 1966 Bangalore, 1971
Vijaya Mehta, Rangayan Bhanu Bharati, NSD Repertory
426
Appendixes
Author and Play
robinson jeffers
Medea English
arthur kopit
O Dad, Poor Dad . . . English
franz xaver kroetz

Request Concert Marathi, Apli awad Bengali, Anurodher asar Tamil
federico garca lorca

The House of Bernarda Alba Yerma English Hindi, Din ke andhere Marathi, Changuna Punjabi (Surjit Patar)
christopher marlowe
Dr. Faustus English
arthur miller
All My Sons The Crucible Death of a Salesman A View from the Bridge English Hindi, Sara sansar apna parivar English Hindi, Ek sapne ki maut ( J. N. Kaushal) English English
molire
The Bourgeois Gentleman Urdu, Mirza Shohrat Beg (Habib Tanvir) Kannada, Samanyanu sahebnadaddu Hindustani, Kawwa chala hans ki chaal Kannada, Mamamooshi (K. V. Subbanna) Hindustani, Desi murga vilayati chaal (B. M. Vajpeyi) Hindi (Chittranjan Tripathy) Hindi, Sarkar pyade lal ki amar kahani (Swanand Kirkire) Hindustani, Kanjoos (Hazrat Awara) Hindi, Bichhu Hindustani, Biwiyon ka madarsa (Balraj Pandit)
Capitol Express Don Juan The Miser School for Wives
istvan orkeny
Totek Hindi, Priyatam tote (Raghuvir Sahay)
Appendix 8
427
Location and Date
Bombay, 1971
Bombay, 1968
Rustom Bharucha, Awishkar Rustom Bharucha and Samuel Lutgenhorst Rustom Bharucha
Bombay, 1986 Calcutta, 1986 Madras, 1987
Ebrahim Alkazi, Theatre Group Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Jayadev Hattangady, Awishkar Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, The Company
Bombay [1954] Delhi, 1992 Bombay, 1974 Chandigarh, 1991
Bombay, 1952
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group J. N. Kaushal, SRC Repertory Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Girish Karnad, Madras Players
Bombay, 1959 Bombay, 1961 Bombay, 1963 Delhi, 1982 Bombay, 1960 Madras, 1967
Habib Tanvir, Naya Theatre B. V. Karanth, Karnataka Teachers Workshop Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Ekbal Ahmad, Ninasam Tirugata Rajesh Tiwari, SRC Repertory Chittranjan Tripathy, SRC Repertory Prasad Vanarase, SRC Repertory Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry Ebrahim Alkazi et al., NSD Repertory Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Ekbal Ahmed, Ninasam Tirugata
Delhi, 1960 Bangalore, 1968 Calcutta, 1980 Heggodu, 1995 Delhi, 1998 Delhi, 2001 Delhi, 1999 Delhi, 1965 Bhopal, 1980 Delhi, 1976 Calcutta, 1982 Heggodu, 1995
Manohar Singh, NSD Repertory
Delhi, 1983
428
Appendixes
Author and Play
eugene oneill
Long Days Journey into Night Marco Millions English Hindi, Karori Marco (Govind Namdev and others)
john osborne
Look Back in Anger Hindi (Nadira Zaheer)
harold pinter
The Birthday Party English
luigi pirandello
Right You Are If You Think So Six Characters in Search of an Author Hindi Kannada, Natakaran shodh dalli aaru patragur (Adya Rangacharya) Hindi, Natakakar ki khoj mein chha charitra (Usha Ganguli)
jean racine
Phaedra Punjabi, Fida
edmond rostand
Cyrano de Bergerac Urdu, Aftab Faizabadi
william saroyan
Hello Out There The Cave Dwellers English Hindi, Panah gaah ( J. N. Kaushal)
jean-paul sartre
No Exit The Respectable Prostitute Hindi, Band darwaze English Hindi
anthony shaffer
Sleuth Marathi, Khelia (Rajaram Humne)
shakespeare
Hamlet English Hindi Kannada English Urdu
Julius Caesar
Appendix 8
429
Location and Date
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Rodney Marriot, NSD Repertory
Delhi, 1974
Bombay, 1973
Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit B. V. Karanth, Shaka Shylusharu Rudraprasad Sengupta, NSD Repertory
Bombay, 1960 Bangalore, 1971 Delhi, 1981
Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, The Company
Chandigarh, 1997
Egil Kipste, NSD Repertory
Delhi, 1984
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group J. N. Kaushal, NSD Repertory
Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Ebrahim Alkazi, Theatre Group Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, BB Rangmandal
Bombay, 1965 Bombay [1954] Bhopal, 1980
Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy
Pune and other venues, 1976
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Fritz Bennewitz, NSD K. V. Subbanna, Ninasam Tirugata Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory
Bombay, 1964 Delhi Heggodu, 1984 Bombay, 1962 Delhi, 1992
430
Appendixes
Language and Indian Title (Translator/Adaptor) Urdu (Majnoon Gorakhpuri) Hindi, Pagal raja teen betiyan Hindi Kannada Kannada, Lear Maharaja (H. S. Shivaprakash) Hindi, Raja Lear Hind, Barnam vana Kannada (Ramchandra Deva) Hindi Hindi, Bagro basant hai Kannada, Habbada hanneradane ratri (N. S. L. Bhatta) Hindi, Basant ritu ka sapna Kannada, Dham dham suntaragali (Vaidehi) English Urdu (Sajjad Zaheer) Hindi (Raghuvir Sahay) English Hindi (Amitabh Srivastava) Kannada, Athensina arthavanta (K. V. Subbanna)
Author and Play King Lear
Macbeth A Midsummer Nights Dream
Much Ado about Nothing Othello
The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens
george bernard shaw

Candida Don Juan in Hell Pygmalion English Hindi Hindustani, Azhar ka khwab (Qudsia Zaidi) Kannada, Hu hudugi
irwin shaw
Bury the Dead English
sam shepard
Suicide in B Flat English
neil simon
The Odd Couple World of Chekhov English Hindustani, Chekhov ki duniya
sophocles
Antigone Oedipus Rex English Bengali, Raja Oedipus Marathi, Oedipus Kannada, Oedipus (P. Lankesh)
august strindberg
The Father Miss Julie Hindi (Mohan Maharshi) English
Appendix 8
431
Director and Theatre Group Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory B. V. Karanth, Kala Parishad Fritz Bennewitz, BB Rangmandal B. V. Karanth, Kannada Teachers Workshop S. Raghunandan, Ninasam Tirugata Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik B. V. Karanth, NSD Repertory Akshara K. V., Ninasam Tirugata Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Bansi Kaul, NSD Fritz Bennewitz, Ninasam Tirugata Habib Tanvir, Naya Theatre K. G. Krishnamurthy, Ninasam Tirugata Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Fritz Bennewitz (with Ebrahim Alkazi), NSD Repertory Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Fritz Bennewitz, SRC Repertory C. R. Jambe
Location and Date Delhi, 1964 Bhopal, 1977 Bhopal, 1986 Bangalore, 1988 Heggodu, 1988 Calcutta, 1988 Delhi, 1979 Heggodu, 1987 Delhi Delhi Heggodu, 1991 Delhi, 1993 Heggodu, 1989 Bombay, 1963 Delhi, 1969 Delhi, 1983 Bombay, 1954 Delhi, 1990 Heggodu, 1993
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Bhanu Bharati, NSD Repertory B. V. Karanth
Bombay, 1955 Bombay, 1983 Delhi, 1988 Bangalore, 1998
Bombay, 1968
Bombay, 1987
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Ranjit Kapoor, SRC Repertory
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Shombhu Mitra, Bohurupee Vijaya Mehta, Rangayan B. V. Karanth, Pratima Natak Mandali
Bombay, 1952 Calcutta, 1964 Bombay, 1954 Bangalore, 1972
Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group
Delhi, 1964 Bombay, 1990
432
Appendixes
Author and Play
peter weiss
Marat/Sade English
arnold wesker
Roots Hindi, Parichay
oscar wilde
An Ideal Husband English
tennessee williams
The Glass Menagerie A Streetcar Named Desire Hindi, Shishon ke khilone Marathi, Gaurai (Vyankatesh Madgulkar)
Appendix 8
433
Location and Date
Bombay, 1969
Usha Ganguli, Rangakarmee
Calcutta [1978]
Bombay, 1953
Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Asha Dandavate, Awishkar
Bombay, 1957 Bombay, 1975
appendix 9
Prose Narratives on the Stage
Author and Work Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Rashomon Pandit Anandkumar, Begam ka takia Mannu Bhandari, Mahabhoj Dharamvir Bharati, Kanupriya , Band gali ka akhri makan Bhanu Bharati, Japanese folktale Franz Kafka, The Trial Kalhana, Rajtarangini Lu Xun, The True Story of Ah Q Mahasweta Devi, Hajar churashir ma , Rudali , Mukti Saadat Hasan Manto, Five stories , Khol do Mohan Rakesh, selected stories Harishankar Parsai, Lanka vijay ke baad Premchand, Godan Chanakya Sen, Mukhya mantri Krishna Sobti, Mitron marjani Jaishankar Sudari, Autobiography S. H. Vatsyayan, Apne apne ajnabi Nirmal Varma, Teen ekant , Doosri duniya and Kavve aur kala pani , Subah ki sair and Zindagi yahan wahan Kashmiri Lal Zakir, Karmanwali Language and Translated Title Kannada (Kappu jana kempu neralu) Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi (Katha kahi ek jale ped ne) Hindustani ( Joseph ka muquddama) Hindi (Nagar-udas) Hindi (Chandrama Singh urf Chamku) Hindi (Hazar chaurasi ki ma) Hindi (Rudali ) Bengali Hindi (Manto ba-qalam khud ) Hindi Hindi (Kahaniyan) Hindi Hindi (Hori ) Hindi Hindi Hindi (Sundari ) Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi Hindi
note: Katha collage is an ongoing series of short stories presented in the theatre, directed by D. R. Ankur, NSD, Delhi, 1975.
434
Appendix 9
435
Adaptor/Director K. V. Subbanna B. V. Karanth Ranjit Kapoor Amal Allana Nikhilesh Sharma D. R. Ankur Bhanu Bharati Mohan Maharshi Gaurishankar Raina / Mushtaq Kak Bhanu Bharati various Usha Ganguli Usha Ganguli Mushtaq Kak Maya Rao D. R. Ankur Rajinder Nath G. Kumara Varma Ranjit Kapoor B. M. Shah Anuradha Kapur D. R. Ankur D. R. Ankur Satyadev Dubey Rajinder Nath Dinesh Khanna M. K. Raina
Theatre Group, Location, and Date Ninasam, Heggodu, 1983 MP Rangmandal, Bhopal, 1982 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1977 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1982 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1994 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1996 SRC, Delhi, 1998 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1989 SRC Repertory, Delhi, 2001 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1985 various, 1973 Rangkarmee, Calcutta, 1993 Rangakarmee, Calcutta, 1999 SRC Repertory, Delhi, 2002 Delhi NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1992 SRC Repertory, Delhi, 1993 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1968 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1978 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1988 NSD, Delhi, 1998 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1989 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1975 Theatre Unit, Bombay, 1985 SRC Repertory, Delhi, 1987 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1989 NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1990
appendix 10
Brecht Intertexts in Post-Independence Indian Theatre
Language and Indian Title (Translator/Adaptor) Director, Group, Location (Date)
The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Hindi, Khadia ka ghera (Razia Sajjad Zaheer) Hindi, Insaf ka ghera Marathi, Ajab nyaya vartulacha (C. T. Khanolkar) Carl Weber, NSD Repertory, Delhi (1968) Ebrahim Alkazi and Fritz Bennewitz, NSD, Delhi (1972) Vijaya Mehta and Fritz Bennewitz, Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh, Bombay (1974); Deutsches Nationaltheatre, Weimar (1984) M. K. Raina, Punjab Repertory Theatre, Chandigarh (1976) Rudraprasad Sengupta, Nandikar, Calcutta (1978) Badal Sircar, Satabdi, Calcutta and other venues (1978) B. V. Karanth, BB Rangmandal, Bhopal (1983)
Punjabi Bengali, Kharir gondi Bengali, Gondi (Badal Sircar) Bundelkhandi, Insaf ka ghera
The Exception and the Rule

Hindi Rudraprasad Sengupta, NSD, Delhi (1982)
Galileo
Hindi Fritz Bennewitz, NSD, Delhi (1983); BB Rangmandal; Bhopal (n.d.); Ninasam Tirugata; Heggodu (n.d.) Fritz Bennewitz and Kumar Roy, Bohurupee, Calcutta (1980)
Bengali
The Good Woman of Setzuan

English Marathi, Devajine karuna keli (Vyankatesh Madgulkar) Hindi Chhattisgarhi, Sajapur ki Shantibai Hindi Kannada, Sezuan nagarada sadhwi (K. V. Subbanna) Telugu, Bastidevata Yadamma Habib Tanvir, Naya Theatre, Delhi (1962) Vijaya Mehta, Rangayan, Bombay (1972) Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik, Calcutta (1977) Habib Tanvir, Naya Theatre, Delhi (1978) Amal Allana, NSD, Delhi (1984) Fritz Bennewitz, Ninasam Tirugata, Heggodu (1989) B. V. Karanth, Surabhi, Hyderabad (1998)
436
Appendix 10
437
Herr Puntila and His Man Matti

Hindi, Chopra kamal naukar jamal (Anil Chowdhry) Kannada, Puntila ( Jaswant Jadhav) Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Repertory, Delhi (1979) C. R. Jambe, Ninasam Tirugata, Heggodu (1990)
Mother Courage
Hindi Hindi, Himmat mai Hindi, Himmat mai (Neelabh) R. Schechner (1981) Amal Allana, Theatre and T.V. Associates, Delhi (1993) Usha Ganguli, Rangakarmee, Calcutta (1998)
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Hindi, Tamancha Khan ki ghazab dastan (Niaz Haider and Shama Zaidi) Bansi Kaul, NSD Repertory, Delhi (1995)
Threepenny Opera
Bengali, Tin poyshar pala Urdu, Teen take ka swang (Surekha Sikri) Ajitesh Banerji, Nandikar, Calcutta (1969) Fritz Bennewitz and Amal Allana, NSD Repertory, Delhi (1970); BB Rangmandal (n.d.) Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy, Pune (1978) Akshara K. V., Ninasam Tirugata, Heggodu (1986)
Marathi, Teen paishacha tamasha (P. L. Deshpande) Kannada, Moorukasina sangeetana taka (K. V. Subbanna)
notes
2. The Formation of a New National Canon 1. Throughout his introduction to Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (2003), Sheldon Pollock emphasizes that literature creates places as much as it is created by them, and that the nation is one of these creations: region and nation and civilizational area are no more natural kinds than are literature and history. . . . [L]iterature may have produced Bengal and India and South Asia as much as South Asia and India and Bengal have produced literature; . . . literary representations can conceptually organize space, and the dissemination of literary texts can turn that space into a lived reality, as much as space and lived realities condition conceptual organization and dissemination (27). This is an important corrective because categories and conceptions that literature itself helps to produce are typically presupposed to be conditions of its historical development (10). The literary history of India is a case in point because none of those writers actually producing Indian literature knew that there was a singular Indian literature. It is the nation state alone that knows, if only obscurely; or more accurately, it knows, if only tacitly, that it must produce what it is empowered to embody and defend (10). Pollocks arguments further complicate my argument that postcolonial cultural forms are strongly linked to the ideas of nation and the new national traditions. 3. Authorship, Textuality, and Multilingualism 1. See Bhattacharya, Shadow over Stage, 233560, for descriptions of the plays censored or suppressed by the British colonial government, and Solomon for a detailed account of the suppression of Khadilkars Kichaka vadh. 2. Shombhu Mitra established his group, Bohurupee, and his own reputation as a director, with landmark productions of six Tagore plays between 1951 and 439
440
Notes
1964. B. V. Karanth directed plays by Jaishankar Prasad and Bharatendu Harishchandra in Varanasi, at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, and at the Bharat Bhavan Rangamandal in Bhopal. See appendix 6 for specicc information about these productions. Other directors of plays by Prasad include Shanta Gandhi, D. R. Ankur, and Ramgopal Bajaj, all of the National School of Drama. 3. Among the plays by Elkunchwar well known to theatre audiences in Marathi are Sultan (1967), Holi (1969), Raktapushpa (1972), Rudravarsha (1972), Garbo (1973), V asanakand (1973), Party (1976), Yatnaghar (1977), Wada chirebandi (1985, expanded into the trilogy Yuganta in 1994), Pratibimb (1987), and Atmakatha (1988). In its New Indian Playwrights series, Seagull Books, Calcutta, simultaneously published English translations of cve of these plays in 1989. Party was translated by Ashish Rajadhyaksha; Pratibimb and Raktapushpa were translated as Rebection and Petals of Blood, respectively, by Shanta Gokhale and published in a single volume titled Two Plays; Atmakatha was translated as Autobiography by Pratima Kulkarni; and W ada chirebandi was translated as Old Stone Mansion by Kamal Sanyal. In 2004, Seagull also published Gokhales translation of Yuganta as The Wada Trilogy. 4. The Rashtriya Hindi Natya Samaroha (National Hindi Drama Festival), held in Bhopal from 17 October 1980, provides an insight into the strategic erasure of the di,erence between Hindi drama and drama in Hindi translation. The plays at the festival included the NSD Repertory Companys Mukhya mantri, translated from Bengali; Abhiyans Jat hi poochho sadhu ki, translated from Tendulkars Marathi Pahije jatiche; Abhinets Ala afsar, translated from Gogols Russian The Inspector General; Majmas Uddhwasta dharmashala, translated from G. P. Deshpandes Marathi play of the same title; Padatiks Hazaar chaurasi ki ma, translated from Mahasweta Devis Bengali Hajar churashir ma; and Darpans Katha nandan ki, translated from Indira Parthasarathys Tamil Nandan kathai. None of these plays was thus written originally in Hindi. 4. Production and Reception: Directors, Audiences, and the Mass Media 1. An important variation within this pattern of audience attachment to theatre groups is the e,ort by a small number of directors to create support for theatre in a language other than the majority language of a city or region. The most notable initiatives of this kind involve the major transregional language, Hindi, and the most successful examples are those of Shyamanand Jalan and Usha Ganguli in Calcutta and Satyadev Dubey in Bombay. Jalan has been the key cgure in the development of Hindi theatre in Calcutta since the 1950s; he explains his choice of the minority language as a necessary consequence of his love of theatre and his commitment to Hindi, his mother tongue. This enterprise has its disadvantages in terms of ocial patronage because Hindi theatre in Bengal is not readily supported by either the central or the state government; hence Jalans support comes from the wealthy and established
Notes
441
immigrant Hindi-speaking business community in Calcutta. His boldness, however, is evident in that he was the very crst director to stage Rakeshs Hindi classic, Ashadh ke ek din, in Bengali-speaking Calcutta in 1960, although the play had been written in Delhi, the metropolis of the Hindi belt. The case of English presents further complications in the majority/minority language issue. Because of its power and prestige as a link language in India and its association with the middle and upper classes, English makes up in visibility what it lacks in numbers in comparison with Hindi and such regional languages as Marathi and Bengali. There are also major and minor theatre professionals throughout the country who work largely or exclusively in EnglishAsif Currimbhoy, Gurcharan Das, Partap Sharma, Gieve Patel, Cyrus Mistry, and Mahesh Dattani among playwrights, and Alyque Padamsee, Joy Michael, Barry John, Arjun Sajnani, and Lillette Dubey among directors. With Dattani, Michael, John, and Dubey as vocal advocates, these practitioners have tried to sustain a movement focused on original Indian-English theatre and Western imports in metropolitan areas, but the results continue to be uneven. Despite the pervasive presence of English among the educated classes, English-language theatre continues to depend on a coterie (often elite) audience that can a,ord to pay higher ticket prices than audiences for vernacular theatre, but which is usually more attached to the linguistic medium than to the substance of a performance. Because few contemporary Indian plays are performed in English, Englishlanguage theatre is also far more dependent on foreign (especially Western) drama in terms of staging than Indian-language theatre. The charges of elitism, derivativeness, and irrelevance that continue to be leveled at English theatre in India are transferred to the audience, which is conceived of as a self-satisced coterie out of touch with the most signiccant developments in contemporary Indian theatre. The specicc regional and linguistic loyalties of the Indian audience are thus another unusual feature of spectatorship in the country, placing theatre in the two national-level languagesHindi and Englishin a special category, and further distinguishing English from all other Indian languages. 2. Satish Bahadur notes that clmed theatre was born during the era of silent clm to give the new upstart form cultural respectability and that several hundred major Western plays were clmed during the silent period. In India, many of the motion pictures produced by Madan Theatres, Ltd., were clmed versions of popular drama and they often featured the recording artists associated with the Corinthian and Alfred theatres (Hansen, Migration, 27). Agha Hashra Kashmiris version of Hamlet for the Parsi theatre, for instance, became Sohrab Modis clm Khoon ka khoon (1935); Sadhvi Mirabai, a major vehicle for the celebrated cross-dressing actor Bal Gandharva of Bombay, was turned into a rather unsuccessful clm. The metamorphoses of Agha Hasan Amanats enormously successful play, Inder sabha (1853) perhaps best chart the process of the transition from theatre to clm. The crst (silent) clmed version of the play was by Manilal Joshi of Kohinoor
442
Notes
Studios in Bombay in 1925. A few years later, Inder sabha became one of the crst motion pictures made with sound (1932), under the direction of Madans third son, J. J. Madan, and with cinematography by the Italian T. Marconi. The clm was 211 minutes long and contained seventy-one songs. There was a Tamil version for the screen in 1936, and another Hindi version in 1956 directed by Nanubhai Vakil, who remade silent clms based on Parsi theatre plays. None of these clms is part of the National Film Archive at the Film and Television Institute in Pune.
5. Orientalism, Cultural Nationalism, and the Erasure of the Present

1. Lvi comments in his introduction that Sanskrit drama can be read only with reference to the conventions of traditional dramaturgy codiced in a changeless Sanskrit poetics that was founded on the authority of a god and a saint . . . [and] respected as an article of faith (45). The prestige of Sanskrit drama thus depends on the cumulative perception that it was intimately connected to classical poetics, completely independent of the West, of high literary quality, accessible because of its verisimilitude, theoretically and philosophically complex, textually challenging, and far more amenable than other genres to historical reconstructions of authorship. Its popularity with orientalist scholars is only too understandable. 2. Interestingly, the one critical approach that takes a di,erent view of the colonial period is the one that regards Indian theatre as a single, continuous, and varied tradition spanning three millennia. Studies that adhere to this model employ four main historical divisions: the period of classical Sanskrit drama; postclassical developments in traditional, devotional, folk, and intermediary forms; the modern period of Western inbuence; and the period after independence. This long historical view places the problem of colonialism in an altogether di,erent perspective and creates a tolerance toward colonial developments that is strikingly contrary to the ideological critique of westernization. In his general introduction to Drama in Modern India, an Indian PEN publication of 1961, K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar observes that the e,ect of the Western impact was to awaken the dormant critical impulse in the country, to bring Indians face to face with new forms of life and literature, and to open the way for a fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas and forms of expression (4). The initial bood of translations and adaptations from Sanskrit and English drama led to intelligent imitations, and presently to experiments in the creative mingling of the two streams, the indigenous and the foreign (5). Javare Gowdas preface to Indian Drama: A Collection of Papers (1974) notes that the classical, folk, and Western traditions are now simultaneously available to the contemporary Indian playwright: The really creative writer can use all these three inbuences and make a distinctively Indian drama. This is the task . . . before the writers in India (Gowda, x). In another important respect, however, the inclusive historical approach has the same e,ect as the discourse of postcolonial anticolonialism: it views the last cve
Notes
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decades as an unformed expanse describable not as history, which began a very long time ago, but only as a series of trends or developments. 3. 1876 is the year of the instrument of colonial censorship, the Dramatic Performances Control Act. To place this act in perspective, one should note that no such measure was on the books in India, whereas in England the Stage Licensing Act had been passed in 1737. The British wanted to bring the situation in India up to par with England, with two additional intents: to prevent anti-British propaganda of any sort and to express their contempt for the quality of indigenous theatre. The idea of having plays read and licensed before they were performed (as in England) by some counterpart of the British Lord Chamberlain was rejected as unnecessary. The bill for prohibition was crst drawn up for Bengal and then raticed by the administrators of each British Indian state. The three plays that were instrumental in setting censorship in motion in 1876 were the anonymous Gaekwad-darpan, Chakar-darpan, and Gajadananda o yubaraj. The crst two were considered libelous, and the third disrespectful to the Prince of Wales. 4. Since the 1960s, Western scholarship has focused selectively but intensively on the premodern (or medieval) and modern literary traditions in about half a dozen Indian languages, resulting in major works of translation, interpretation, and commentary. A selective roster of scholars would include Gordon Roadarmel, Charlotte Vaudeville, Ronald Stuart McGreggor, John Stratton Hawley, Kathryn Hansen, Peter Gae,ke, Mark Jurgensmeyer, Karine Schomer, Linda Hess, Kenneth Bryant, David Rubin, and Philip Lutgendorf in Hindi; Edward C. Dimock, David Kopf, William Radice, and Clinton B. Seely in Bengali; Ian Raeside, Eleanor Zelliot, Philip Engblom, and Ann Feldhaus in Marathi; George L. Hart, David Shulman, and Norman Cutler in Tamil; David Shulman, Hank Heifetz, and Gene H. Rogair in Telugu; and Frances Pritchett and Carlo Coppola in Urdu. The work of these European and (predominantly) American scholars is closely interlinked with that of a few Indian scholars trained and domiciled in the West. Principal among these is A. K. Ramanujan, perhaps the only multidisciplinary scholar whose work in classical Tamil, medieval Kannada, and the modern Dravidian languages carries the same prestige as that of the postwar EuroAmerican classicists. Other expatriate Indian scholar-critics include V. Narayana Rao (Telugu), C. M. Naim and Muhammad Umar Memon (Urdu), Usha Saxena Nilsson (Hindi), and Vinay Dharwadker (Marathi, Hindi, and Indian-English). However, literary scholarship as a whole acquires a new context when we acknowledge that there is an unexpected continuity in orientalisms conception of itself as a body of scienticc discoveries about Indian reality and the development of modern Indology around the scienticc or empirical disciplines of linguistics, anthropology, folklore, religion, economics, political science, and history, rather than around literary studies. If the Western study of Indian literature is dominated by antiquity, the philological model, and a decnition of literature that includes religious and philosophical texts, in the study of the medieval and modern periods literature itself plays a distinctly secondary role
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to the human and social sciences. In the postwar period India has become far more crmly established in the Western academy as the subject of historiography, political theory, and anthropological study than as the site of literary and philosophical production. This is matched by the growth of social sciences in India, and the development of antiorientalist initiatives, such as the Subaltern Studies collective, which seeks to revise orientalist and neoorientalist historiography. 6. Myth, Ambivalence, and Evil 1. After about 600 b.c. the region of India witnessed the emergence of successive political formations that were subcontinental, and often imperial, in their territorial reach, and of powerful religious and cultural networks that functioned both within and outside the political sphere. As Bipan Chandra points out, the concepts of Bharata V arsha and Hindustan were a reality of Indian history (11). The pan-Indian political phenomena of the last two millennia include the Hindu, Islamic, and European empires. In the religious sphere, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity emerge (or arrive) successively but develop concurrently to o,er continuous competing traditions of doctrinal belief, social organization, and aesthetic practice. In terms of language and literature, Sanskrit stands in the same historical relation to the modern Indian languages as Greek and Latin do to the modern European vernaculars. Such epic texts as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagvad-gita circulate not only within but beyond the subcontinent. The classical Sanskrit-Hindu heritage, medieval traditions, such as bhakti and Sucsm, and the colonial/postcolonial parameters of modernity are very broad markers of the continuity of Indian civilization. 2. Vivekananda (18631902) represented India at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and became a celebrated spokesman for Vedantic Hinduism in the West. Tilak (18561920) was the crst nationalist leader to proclaim complete independence from British rule as every Indians birthright. Prasad (18901937) wrote his seven historical plays between 1921 and 1937, expressing a nostalgia for classical antiquity that was an important part of Hindu nationalist feeling in the militant 1920s. For other examples of nationalist texts in the heroic and satiric modes, see the following selections in Hay: Rammohun Roy (1535); Dayananda Saraswati (5261); M. G. Ranade (10212); Bankim Chandra Chatterji (13039); and Syed Ahmad Khan (18094). 3. Bhasas dates are characteristically uncertain: he is usually placed in the crst or second century a.d., although some critics have associated him with the Mauryan period in the fourth or third century b.c., while others have positioned him as late as the seventh century. He certainly preceded Kalidasa, who makes a reference to Bhasas established fame in the prologue to the play Malavikagnimitram, and he was acknowledged as a signiccant playwright in such later works as Bana Bhattas Harshacharita (seventh century), Dandins Avantisundarikatha
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(seventh century), and Jayadevas Prasanna Raghava (thirteenth century). According to A. N. D. Haksar, the critic Rajashekhara, author of the Kavya mimamsa, placed Bhasa even above Kalidasa in the hierarchy of classical playwrights (ii). However, until the early twentieth century, Bhasa was more a legendary name than an accessible literary presence because his plays were not known to have survived in manuscript or print. In 1909 T. Ganapati Sastri, a Sanskrit scholar based in Trivandrum, discovered a palm leaf manuscript ostensibly containing the Sanskrit text of a Bhasa play in Malayalam characters, with no explicit identiccation of the author. The research spurred by this discovery eventually yielded the texts of thirteen plays, which Sastri edited for the Trivandrum Sanskrit series between 1912 and 1923. Although Sastris attributions have been questioned periodically, the work of numerous later editors and commentators, including A. C. Woolner, C. R. Devadhar, M. R. Kale, K. P. A. Menon, and Haksar, has e,ectively established Bhasa as the earliest extant Sanskrit playwright. 4. Dronacharya trained both the Pandavas and the Kauravas in archery and the arts of war, and although he fought on the Kaurava side out of a sense of loyalty, he secretly favored the Pandavas, especially Arjuna. When the Pandavas approached him on the battleceld to ask how they might defeat him, he told them he would die only when the man of truth, Yudhishthhira, became capable of telling a lie. On the thirteenth day of battle, Bhima killed an elephant that had the same name as Dronas son and proclaimed that Ashwatthama has been killed. Drona confronted Yudhishthhira and asked him whether it was a man or an animal who had died, but Yudhishthhira equivocated and created the impression that the victim was Dronas son. Distracted by grief, Drona laid aside his weapons and was beheaded by Dhrishtadyumna, Draupadis brother. 5. About half the population in the state consists of Manipuri-speaking Hindus and ethnic Meitei, who are genetically Mongol and speak Tibeto-Burman languages but follow Hindu customs. The other half consists of indigenous hill tribes that also speak Tibeto-Burman languages but are socially and economically subordinate to the Hindu-Meitei groups. In the contemporary culture of the region the hegemonic institutions of Hinduism thus exist in tension with ethnic Meitei inbuences (which are especially powerful in theatre and other expressive forms), and the Hindu-Meitei population of the Manipur valley exists in tension with the hill tribes that often clash with each other. 7. The Ironic History of the Nation 1. In addition to the renewed signiccance of Kalidasas aesthetics and dramaturgy for a resurgent postcolonial theatre, there are symbolic celebrations of his primacy as literary author. The annual Kalidasa Festival at Ujjain (the modern name for Ujjayini) has become the occasion for signiccant experiments in classical and traditional theatrical forms, and the Kalidasa Samman is second only to the Jnanapith Award in the hierarchy of national literary awards.
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2. Leslie de Noronha described the Theatre Group production as a threehour historical epic spectacular that did full justice to the splendours of the [pre] Mughal Age, and Mr. Padamsees reputation of showmanship (Tughlaq). In Sajnanis production, G. N. Prashanth noted the intense use of lighting, the pre-Mughal feel of the stage, the markedly Islamic costumes, and a mix of the pre-Mughal and the modern moods in music (Misconstrued Monarch, 3). 3. The problems of national integrity and communal peace are so central to current Indian politics that documenting them would require a record of daily political events. For discussions of the issues addressed in this essay, see Kohli, Democracy and Discontent; Hardgrave on regionalism, communalism, and caste violence as sources of social unrest (2545); Weiner on the problems of maintaining democratic institutions in India (2137, 319330); Lall on the stormy politics of the post-Nehru period (190249); Je,rey and Akbar on the secessionist movements in the northern states of Punjab and Kashmir; and Das Gupta on ethnic politics in the northeastern state of Assam. The divisive sa,ronization of the Indian political and cultural spheres under the leadership of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) peaked during the 1990s but was checked (at least temporarily) by the defeat of the BJP government in the general elections of May 2004. 9. Alternative Stages: Antirealism, Gender, and Contemporary Folk Theatre 1. In alphabetical order, the roundtable participants were Ebrahim Alkazi, Suresh Awasthi, Sheila Bhatia, Romesh Chandra, Manoranjan Das, P. L. Deshpande, Satyadev Dubey, Utpal Dutt, Dina Gandhi, Shanta Gandhi, Balwant Gargi, Nemichandra Jain, B. V. Karanth, Girish Karnad, J. C. Mathur, G. Shankara Pillai, Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, Habib Tanvir, Vijay Tendulkar, and Kapila Vatsyayan. No other critical forum since 1971 has managed to assemble a comparable group of practitioners. 2. Again in alphabetical order, the contributors to this special issue were Lokendra Arambam, Suresh Awasthi, G. P. Deshpande, Shanta Gandhi, Nemichandra Jain, Chandrashekhar Kambar, Bansi Kaul, Vijaya Mehta, Manoj Mitra, Naa Muthuswami, Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, Rajinder Nath, K. N. Panikkar, G. Shankara Pillai, Kironmoy Raha, M. K. Raina, Rudraprasad Sengupta, and Shanta Serbjeet Singh. 3. Amateur groups that have recently performed Hayavadana for metropolitan audiences include Forum Three (Bangalore, September 2002), Theatricians (Calcutta, February 2003), and the Industrial Theatre Company (Bombay, January 2004). The Shakespeare Society at St. Stephens College, Delhi University, mounted a production in 1999 that was so successful that it played later at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi and also traveled to Calcutta. In the diaspora, the Singapore-based classical dancer Siri Rama has adapted Hayavadana into a dance drama; Sudipto Chatterjee directed it at Tufts University; Alter
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Ego, a New York group founded by Anurag Agrawal, performed it as their inaugural production in August 2003; and the Shunya Theatre group debuted it in Houston in January 2004. 4. Exact facts and cgures are hard to come by, but Anjum Katyal describes Charandas chor as Tanvirs most popular . . . most frequently performed and most widely travelled production. In the twenty years since its creation, the play has had hundreds of performances in scores of places in India and Europe (Tanvir, Charandas, 13). 10. Intertexts and Countertexts 1. NSD production records for the years 196281 show performances in Hindi of the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Molire, Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, Gogol, Chekhov, Gorki, Tolstoy, Synge, Pirandello, Brecht, Sartre, Camus, Bchner, Gerhart Hauptmann, David Mannowitz, Anouilh, Beckett, Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Stoppard, Fernando Arrabal, Lorca, Thornton Wilder, ONeill, Miller, Williams, Edward Albee, and Osborne. 2. The massive move in Indian theatre toward accommodation and Drydenesque imitation falls into perspective when we view it as an extension of the quest for narrative enrichment through translation. The Indian intertexts of major Western playwrights are thus products of the same process by which such ancient and modern authors as Plautus, Terence, and Molire are Englished (both linguistically and culturally) by such playwrights as William Wycherley, William Congreve, and Henry Fielding in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the third and tenth satires of Juvenal become, respectively, Samuel Johnsons poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes; Homers Odyssey becomes Joyces Ulysses; Sophocles Antigone becomes Jean Anouilhs Antigone; and, to change the medium, Shakespeares Macbeth and King Lear become Akira Kurosawas Throne of Blood and Ran. As one of the authors most extensively accommodated in contemporary Indian theatre, Brecht is particularly interesting because he is himself a notable imitator of earlier drama, producing versions of Shakespeares Coriolanus, Christopher Marlowes Edward II, Gays Beggars Opera, and Shaws Saint Joan, among others. 3. The major Indian-language productions of Brecht are discussed in the following section. Since the early 1950s, Ibsens A Dolls House, An Enemy of the People, and Ghosts have had such leading directors as Shombhu Mitra, Shyamanand Jalan, and Satyadev Dubey. Molires The Bourgeois Gentleman has been directed by Habib Tanvir, B. V. Karanth, and Jalan; The Miser by Ebrahim Alkazi; and The School for Wives by Alkazi, Jalan, and K. V. Subbanna. Of the ten Shakespeare plays to receive signiccant productions, Hamlet, King Lear, and A Midsummer Nights Dream have been performed most frequently, and their directors include Fritz Bennewitz, Alkazi, Tanvir, Alyque Padamsee, Subbanna, Karanth, Jalan, and Bansi Kaul. For detailed information about these productions, see appendix 10.1.
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4. At NSD the focus on Brecht was most intense, and the international collaborations most numerous, during Ebrahim Alkazis tenure as director (1962 77). In 1968 Carl Weber delivered a series of lectures on Brechtian drama in conjunction with his guest production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. In 1970 Fritz Bennewitz, director of the Berliner Ensemble, was invited to direct The Threepenny Opera and teach an eight-week course on Brecht at the school. In 1978, Bennewitz returned to deliver a series of three lectures on Brecht, and, in 1979, to direct excerpts from several Brecht plays under the title Brecht on Trial. In 1976, Richard Schechner gave an illustrated talk at NSD about his production of Mother Courage. Alkazi himself participated in a seminar on Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble in 1968; lectured on Brechts theatre of commitment at NSD in 1970; and attended a Modern World Theatre seminar in the GDR in 1978. In 1993, Alkazis daughter, Amal Allan, an NSD alumna, copublished a Tribute to Bertolt Brecht, which showcases Brechts plays in India and marks the occasion of her own production of Mother Courage (in Hindi as Himmat mai). 5. Kathryn Hansen notes that such intermediary theatres as jatra, tamasha, and nautanki bourish in industrialized, semiurban environments, belong to the public life of the community, employ professional personnel, and require careful social organization (Grounds for Play, 55). These forms are also important because of their relation to the process of modernization: they are traditional in form but secular in content, even if their subject is nominally religious. Recasting Brecht into intermediary forms brings them onto the mainstream urban stage in a novel way, setting up new social, cultural, and political resonances. Vijaya Mehtas two productions of 197274 are the best examples of the cultural visibility of these experiments. The text of Good Woman was translated by the noted Marathi novelist Vyankatesh Madgulkar; that of Caucasian Chalk Circle, by the precocious Marathi playwright C. T. Khanolkar. Bhaskar Chandavarkar, the leading composer of stage music in Marathi, prepared the music for both plays. The second play was also directed jointly by Mehta and Fritz Bennewitz and was revived a decade later at the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimarone of the few instances of such a high-procle international collaboration in the postindependence period. 6. According to Sisir Kumar Das, the most recent Indian historian of Indian literature, by the beginning of the twentieth century the English educated population, which continued to grow in size, made English literature (and a part of Western literatures through English) a part of its own literary universe. . . . Hence Indian literary historiography is as much concerned with romanticism and neo-classicism, as with art for arts sake or Victorian puritanism, the imagist or the symbolist movements. The dominance of English on modern Indian literatures was so complete that the nature of Indo-English literary relationships needs a much more detailed and comprehensive treatment (Das, 5455).
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index
(For various concordances of plays, playwrights, directors, theatre groups, and productions in the following modern Indian languages, see appendixes 110: Bengali, English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Punjabi, and Urdu.) Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad, 26, 31, 121 Abdel-Malek, Anouar, 219 Abhinavagupta, 226 Abhiyan theatre group. See Nath, Rajinder Achebe, Chinua, 354; Things Fall Apart, 99, 363 Addison, Joseph, 220 Aeschylus, 358 African literature, 146 Agrawal, Pratibha, 76, 77, 94 Agrawal, Vipin Kumar, 202 Ahmad, Aijaz, 12 Ahmad, Ekbal, 100 Aitmatov, Chinghiz: Fujiyama, 362 Akshara K. V., 100, 369 Alekar, Satish, 18, 50, 62, 68, 70, 72, 78, 83, 269, 273; Begum Barve, 77; Mahanirvan, 77; Pidhijat, 269 Alkazi, Ebrahim, 37, 43, 45, 51, 52, 79, 86, 87, 93, 94, 95, 9698, 100, 1012, 106, 108, 121, 187, 198, 223, 233, 237, 275, 324, 366; as director of NSD, 9697; directing work for NSD and NSD Repertory Company, 92, 93, 9698, 112, 199201, 202, 236, 245, 248, 259, 260, 261, 263, 361; directing work for Theatre Group and Theatre Unit, 87, 98, 101 Alkazi, Faisal, 233, 239, 241 Allana, Amal, 278, 363, 366 Allana, Nissar, 368 allegory, 224, 225, 35253 Allende, Isabel, 117 Amanat, Agha Hasan, 55, 44142n2 Amar Singh Rathore, 314 Ambedkar, B. R., 289, 298 Amrapurkar, Sadashiv, 288, 290 Anamika theatre group. See Jalan, Shyamanand Anand, Mulk Raj, 31, 38, 40, 41, 42 Anand, Satish, 187, 199 Anandavardhana, 226 Anandkumar, Pandit, 363 Ananthamurthy, U. R., 101, 247 Anderson, Benedict, 168 Ankur, D. R., 92, 364 Anouilh, Jean, 95, 160, 358, 362
463
464
Index
Barani, Zia-ud-din, 248, 249, 255; Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, 223, 246, 256, 257 Barba, Eugenio, 7, 85, 137, 154, 160, 161, 227, 362 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 86 Barthes, Roland, 359, 360 Bartholomew, Rati, 76 Basham, A. L., 147 Baswani, Ravi, 187, 198, 202 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 358 Beck, Julian, 85 Beckett, Samuel, 70, 358 Bedi, Kabir, 258, 259 Beiner, Ronald, 168 Bender, John, 372 Benegal, Shyam, 180 Benegal, Som, 5 Bengal famine, 25, 33, 34, 192 Bengal Renaissance, 143 Benjamin, Walter, 70, 119, 120, 122, 123, 220, 357, 36667, 383 Bennewitz, Fritz, 100, 362, 366, 368, 369, 378 Berliner Ensemble, 87, 366, 368, 378 Besant, Annie, 178 Betab, Narayan Prasad, 55, 86, 179 Bhaasi, Tooppil, 18, 31, 73 Bhabha, Homi K., 225, 251 Bhaduri, Sisir Kumar, 55, 57, 86 Bhairappa, S. L., 180 Bhandari, Mannu, 363 Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal, 109, 332 Bharata, 149 Bharati, Bhanu, 92, 98, 187, 363 Bharati, Dharamvir, 51, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67, 71, 73, 78, 89, 95, 111, 166, 180, 235, 243, 267, 363; Andha yug, 14, 48, 60, 79, 93, 97, 98, 159, 165, 167, 171, 185, 186203, 209, 211, 213, 214, 217, 224, 248, 386, 387; Manava mulya aur sahitya, 68, 193, 194, 196 Bharatiya Natya Sangh, 25, 32, 316, 332 Bharucha, Rustom, 6, 18, 22, 26, 140, 156, 161, 323, 325, 366, 370, 371 Bhasa, 47, 65, 67, 103, 105, 130, 211, 212, 310, 360, 44445n3; Karnabharam, 321;
anticolonialism, 4, 6, 21, 25, 134, 186, 19394; in modern Indian theatre, 2930, 35, 56, 67, 13639, 144, 179, 318 Anti-Fascist Writers and Artists Union, 70 antinationalism, 355, 356, 374, 37578, 383 antirealism, 3, 15, 38, 48, 6465, 102, 13738, 27172, 275, 366; of folk/urban folk theatre, 310, 312, 314, 317, 318, 327, 32930, 348, 350 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 146 Arambam, Lokendra, 73, 211 Aristophanes, 358 Aristotle, 103, 125, 149, 205, 367, 380, 383 Artaud, Antonin, 70, 137 Ashcroft, Bill, 12, 352, 355 Atwood, Margaret, 354 audience: approaches to, 88, 98101, 10919, 31213, 31920, 44041n1; of colonial theatre, 3; fragmentation of, 52, 108; rural, 99, 1001, 114, 121, 145, 312; urban, 1089, 111, 114, 115, 121, 141, 145, 322, 350, 44041n1; urbanrural split in, 5, 110, 114, 115, 123, 312, 323, 324 Augustus Caesar, 226 authorship: in colonial theatre, 5558; in post-independence theatre, 4, 14, 54, 5866, 8991, 11213, 387; relation to theatre theory, 59, 6671 Awasthi, Suresh, 37, 69, 138, 184, 240, 311, 316, 321 Awishkar theatre group, 62, 80, 91, 111, 245, 304, 340. See also Deshpande, Arvind; Dubey, Satyadev Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam, 252, 257 Babbar, Raj, 122, 202 Babri Masjid, 257, 306 Bachchan, Harivansh Rai, 358 Bajaj, Ramgopal, 76, 187 Banabhatta, 226 Bandyopadhyay, Samik, 78, 211, 216 Banerji, Ajitesh, 187, 378 Banceld, Chris, 10, 140 Baokar, Uttara, 278 Baradi, Hasmukh, 366
Index
Madhyama vyayogam, 321; Mahabharata plays of, 167, 18183, 184, 203, 217; Urubhangam, 46, 48, 2046, 207, 321, 360 Bhasa festivals, 204, 209 Bhatia, Nandi, 4, 36, 141, 144 Bhatia, Sheila, 26, 45 Bhattacharya, Bijon, 26, 95; Jabanbandi, 93; Nabanna, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 46, 48, 76, 87, 93 Bhattacharya, Malini, 30, 35, 312 Bhavabhuti, 67, 130, 360 Blackburn, Stuart H., 321 Boal, Augusto, 70, 85 Bodhayan Kavi: Bhagavadajjukiyam, 167 Bohurupee theatre group, 33, 43, 79, 361. See also Mitra, Shombhu Bokassa, Jean-Bedel, 374, 375, 377 Bose, Buddhadev, 180 Brecht, Bertolt, 15, 70, 86, 87, 95, 100, 116, 137, 220, 227, 282, 356, 360, 361, 364, 365, 36668, 383, 384; Caucasian Chalk Circle, 314, 360, 362, 368, 369, 370, 371; Galileo, 362, 368; Good Woman of Setzuan, 100, 112, 314, 368, 369, 370; Herr Puntilla and His Man Matti, 362, 368; indigenization of, 36871; inbuence of, 244, 36571, 37374, 448n4; Mother Courage, 358, 362; Threepenny Opera, 16, 100, 314, 356, 360, 362, 365, 368, 369, 371, 37374, 378, 379, 381, 384, 385, 386 Breckenridge, Carol, 127, 171 Brook, Peter, 7, 85, 137, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161; The Mahabharata, 177, 217, 195, 217, 362 Brydon, Diana, 353, 354 Bchner, Georg, 97, 358 Buck, William, 180 Cage, John, 383 Caldern de la Barca, Pedro, 358 Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, 8, 153 Camus, Albert, 70, 244, 274 canon formation, 3, 2425, 28, 4653, 7981; counterdiscourse, 12, 15, 71,
465
35254, 359, 366, 375; Eurocentrism of, 35455; limitations of, 35456, 36061 Carrire, Jean-Claude, 15960, 177, 195 caste system, 12, 278; politics of, 287, 28991, 297301, 341, 348, 385; scholarly approaches to, 298; as subject in drama, 287301, 309, 34144, 379; untouchables in, 287, 289 Chandavarkar, Bhaskar, 374 Chandra, Bipan, 170 Chandra, Ramesh, 41 Chandragupta II, 225 Chatterjee, Partha, 28 Chatterjee, Sudipto, 28, 142, 143, 144 Chatterji, Bankim Chandra, 28 Chatterji, Saumitra, 202 Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi, 32, 37, 41; on national theatre, 3234, 35 Chattopadhyay, Mohit, 18, 60, 61, 68, 70, 72, 76, 83, 272, 323; Guinea Pig, 47, 48, 76 Chaudhuri, K. N., 249 Chaudhuri, Satyabrata, 365 Chaudhuri, Una, 156, 281, 387 Chekhov, Anton, 272, 274; The Cherry Orchard, 360, 362; Three Sisters, 358; Uncle V anya, 358 Chin, Darryl, 156 Chitnis, Manavendra, 201 Chopra, B. R., 180 Chowdhry, Neelam Mansingh, 13, 51, 65, 94, 95, 102, 114, 275, 329; directing work for The Company, 91, 11719; Sheher mere di pagal aurat, 117; Yerma, 107, 117 Churchill, Caryl, 86 city: as site of modernity, 42, 197, 323; as subject of drama, 197, 24041, 26869, 302; theoretical defense of, 27273, 323 class: and audience, 3, 1089, 141, 144, 152, 275; and authorship, 146; as subject, 16, 269, 270, 271, 272, 275, 277, 278, 292, 309, 34145, 348, 37677, 379, 385 Clurman, Harold, 85 Cocteau, Jean, 160 Coetzee, J. M., 35354 colonial theatre, 24, 56, 58, 144; critique of, 26, 27, 28, 2930, 3840, 41, 44
466
Index
decolonization, 2, 5, 71, 127, 128, 138, 144, 146, 159, 307, 376 Defoe, Daniel, 35354 Deosthale, Arundhati, 78 Desai, Anang, 202, 260 Deshpande, Arvind, 51, 52, 62, 91, 94, 122, 275; directing work, 79, 93, 95, 223, 263 Deshpande, G. P., 13, 18, 52, 70, 72, 77, 78, 93, 269, 273, 327; Andhar yatra, 77, 269; Chanakya Vishnugupta, 166; Ek vajoon gela ahe, 269, 279; as playwright, 60, 61, 62, 83; on national theatre, 2324; as theorist, 13, 67, 68, 313, 318, 323, 371; Udhhwasta dharmashala, 48, 77, 269, 276, 279, 280 Deshpande, P. L., 16, 72, 92, 139, 366, 378; Teen paishacha tamasha, 16, 314, 357, 360, 369, 371, 374, 37887 Deshpande, Sudhanva, 32 Deshpande, Sulabha, 62, 91, 202, 276 Detha, Vijaydan, 345 Deutsches Nationaltheater, 332 Dev, Vasant, 76, 77, 94 Deval, G. B., 55 Dhananjay, 226 Dharwadker, Vinay, 55, 129, 13334, 147, 171, 387 Dhingra, Baldoon, 32, 37; on national theatre, 3234 Dishantar theatre group, 332. See also Shivpuri, Om Doniger, Wendy, 147 drama seminar of 1956, 13, 25, 2627, 28, 3745, 51, 56, 110, 136; critique of colonial theatre in, 3738, 3940, 44; critique of Western theatre in, 39, 42; objectives of, 2627; recommendations of, 4142, 4445, 75, 31516 Dramatic Performances Control Act, 4, 29, 44, 56, 144, 443n3 Dryden, John, 359 Dubey, Satyadev, 13, 52, 95, 112, 122, 223, 234, 275; directing work, 60, 79, 80, 93, 94, 95, 111, 187, 188, 223, 239, 245, 263, 332; on new Indian plays, 78; productions of Andha yug by, 187, 188, 199, 2012
colonialism: cultural e,ects of, 1, 3, 21, 28, 37, 132, 133, 143, 17273, 19394, 311, 353, 385; and postcolonialism, 11, 21, 37, 135 36, 13940, 303, 305, 307, 353, 356, 378 commercialism: of colonial theatre, 38, 40, 56, 86, 312; e,ect on literary drama, 40, 5658, 244; rejection of, 3840, 4344, 50, 52, 86 Commonwealth Arts Festival, 216 communalism, 25152, 25658, 26162, 306 Communist Party of India, 25, 32, 3536, 41 Company theatre group. See Chowdhry, Neelam Mansingh Conrad, Joseph, 353, 354 Corneille, Pierre, 358 Craig, Edward Gordon, 227 Crow, Brian, 10, 140 Culler, Jonathan, 35960 cultural nationalism, 2, 32, 67, 6970, 132, 13536, 14546, 14950, 173, 178, 227, 231; critique of Westernized modernity in, 42, 13539, 31011, 316 Currimbhoy, Asif, 82 Dalits, 287, 28994 Dalvi, Ajit, 81 Dalvi, Jaywant, 77, 273, 328; Sandhya chhaya, 276 Dandekar, R. N., 176 Dandin, 226 Daruwalla, Keki, 304 Das, Gurcharan, 73, 82 Das, Sisir Kumar, 133, 141 Dasgupta, Gautam, 156, 159 Dass, Inder, 43, 122 Datar, Chetan, 304 Dattani, Mahesh, 18, 51, 64, 68, 69, 71, 73, 82, 90, 93, 94, 95, 146, 268, 273, 275, 277, 282, 328; Bravely Fought the Queen, 269, 282; directing work, 64; on English as language of drama, 83; Tara, 269 Dave, Bharat, 314 Davis, Jack, 10 De Silva, Anil, 3536
Index
Dumont, Louis, 147 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, 60, 82, 143, 178 Dutt, Romesh Chandar, 178 Dutt, Utpal, 13, 18, 26, 49, 67, 68, 70, 72, 76, 77, 78, 86, 90, 122, 139, 211, 366; on audience, 114, 115, 119; directing work, 47, 50, 64, 87, 88, 94; on jatra theatre, 367, 370; Kallol, 48, 76, 88 dvapar yug, 176 Dwivedi, Hazari Prasad, 358 Ebotombi, Harokcham, 211 Ebotombi, S., 263 Edinburgh International Drama Festival, 346 Eisenstein, Sergei, 244 Eliot, T. S., 168, 282, 387; The Waste Land, 195, 197, 355 Elkunchwar, Mahesh, 13, 60, 61, 62, 63, 68, 69, 71, 77, 78, 95, 111, 112, 116, 268, 272, 282, 328, 440n3; Atmakatha, 77, 269, 275, 276; on audience, 112; on authorship, 89, 146; Garbo, 276; Raktapushpa, 79, 269; as theorist, 272, 27374; on urban folk theatre, 32425; W ada chirebandi, 15, 46, 49, 77, 79, 8081, 83, 269, 273, 276, 281, 285, 295301, 3079, 387; on wordy plays, 61, 89; Yuganta, 80, 269 Elliott, Henry, 249 Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 249 Emergency Rule in India, 255, 261, 374, 379, 38184 Ensley, Sarah K., 234 Erikson, Erik H., 253 Esquivel, Laura, 117 Euripides, 95, 97, 111, 190, 358 Ezekiel, Nissim, 82 feminist performance, 329 Fida Bai, 349 clm and other mass media; Indian audience for, 5, 53, 1089, 145, 180, 320; and theatre, 5, 14, 40, 51, 54, 6263, 107, 1089, 115, 11925, 143, 150, 151, 217, 238, 441n2
467
Fo, Dario, 70, 111, 358; Accidental Death of an Anarchist, 362; Archangels Dont Play Pinball, 362; Comedy of Terrors, 362 folk forms, 313; and classical forms, 31112, 31415, 317; conditions for survival of, 325; decline of, 324, 350; feudalism of, 326; qualities of, 31112, 317, 348 folk theatre, 15051, 159, 31031, 330; and folk culture, 3, 11, 15, 49, 71, 143, 149 50, 159, 270, 272, 31415, 317, 31820, 34041; as peoples theatre, 31213; signiccance of, 40, 42, 139, 146, 31218, 368, 386 Foucault, Michel, 218 Friedrich, Hugo, 357 Fugard, Athol, 10, 86 Gadkari, Ram Ganesh, 55, 275 Gandhi, Dina. See Pathak, Dina Gandhi, Indira, 215, 250, 251, 252, 255, 261, 374, 382, 384 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 81, 192, 193, 198, 240, 242, 250, 25253, 254, 257, 289, 381, 383 Gandhi, Rajiv, 251, 258 Gandhi, Sanjay, 252 Gandhi, Shanta, 45, 98, 167, 314, 315, 316, 324, 327 Ganesha, 335, 336, 342 Ganguli, Usha, 13, 51, 52, 94, 95, 122, 329; on audience, 114, 119; directing work, 93, 107, 11617 Garca Mrquez, Gabriel, 282, 355, 363 Gardiner, Allan, 353 Gargi, Balwant, 22, 95, 97 Garrick, David, 55 Gaur, Arvind, 111, 187 Gay, John, 356, 365, 37174, 377, 381, 384, 385, 386 Gellner, Ernest, 168 gender: in folk culture and urban folk theatre, 318, 32831, 33839, 34145, 34748, 351; in urban theatre, 11619, 23538, 27879, 28689, 29495, 3079, 32829 Ghatak, Ritwik, 31, 121
468
Ghose, Aurobindo, 176, 178 Ghose, Manmohan, 82 Ghosh, Girish Chandra, 55, 86, 224, 370 Ghoshal, S. N., 132 Gilbert, Helen, 9, 10, 11, 12 Giraudoux, Jean, 117 Goa Hindu Association theatre group, 335 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 227 Gogol, Nikolai, 358, 360; The Inspector General, 100, 314, 362 Gokhale, Shanta, 68, 78, 270 Gold, Ann Grodzins, 329 Goldman, Robert, 147 Goldoni, Carlo, 358 Gonda, Jan, 147 Gorky, Maxim, 70, 358, 362 Gottlieb, Phyllis, 353 Govind Ram, 347, 349 Gowda, H. H. Anniah, 6 Granville-Barker, Harley, 85 Grass, Gunter, 355 Griths, Gareth, 12, 352, 355 Grotowski, Jerzy, 65, 85, 137, 154, 161, 227, 362 Gubbi Veeranna Company, 179 Gupta, Rajendra, 187, 199 Gupta, Subhash, 290 Gupte, H. V., 39 Gurr, Andrew, 282
Index
Hein, Norvin, 7 Helgerson, Richard, 221 heroic and satiric discourses, 17273, 175, 181, 248, 355 Hill, Errol, 49 Hinduism, 148 history: and allegory, 224, 225; and cction, 21921, 222, 230, 23233; orientalist constructions of, 17172, 219; postcolonial approaches to, 174, 218, 219, 267; poststructuralist approaches to, 21819, 222; relation to nation, 219, 220, 22122, 267; as subject of drama, 3, 4, 11, 14, 16, 49, 67, 71, 143, 159, 165, 166, 171, 268, 269, 386, 387 history play, 22225, 230, 23233, 234, 24351, 262, 267. See also Karnad, Girish; Rakesh, Mohan Hobsbawm, Eric, 168 Hodge, Bob, 12, 354 Holderness, Graham, 381 home: and diaspora, 28485; as cgure for nation, 15, 281, 3078; as subject of drama, 26874, 28185, 29598, 301, 309, 387; typology of, 27681 Hutcheon, Linda, 12, 218, 219 hybridity, 134, 140, 143, 145, 151 Ibsen, Henrik, 31, 95, 116, 221, 272, 358, 360, 361 Inden, Ronald, 172 Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 69 Indian National Congress, 144 Indian National Theatre, 25, 32, 245, 288, 290 Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA), 13, 25, 27, 37, 38, 43, 4647, 51, 86, 31213, 315, 366; critique of colonial theatre by, 27, 28, 29, 35, 121, 312; decline of, 26, 35, 36, 41, 313; importance of folk forms in, 139, 31213; legacy of, 32, 35, 36, 86, 87, 236, 31216; as national theatre movement, 26, 30, 34, 110, 31213; objectives of, 26, 30, 35, 31213; principal plays of, 3031. See also drama seminar of 1956; Dutt, Utpal; Mitra, Shombhu; Tanvir, Habib
Habib, Irfan, 249 Haksar, Anamika, 329 Halbfass, Wilhelm, 147 Hall, Peter, 85 Hall, Stuart, 387 Hangal, A. K., 121 Hansen, Kathryn, 7, 39, 141, 142, 143, 15051 Hardy, Peter, 248 Harishchandra, Bhartendu, 40, 56, 67, 95, 141; as theorist, 57, 58 Hashmi, Safdar, 326, 367 Hattangady, Rohini, 122, 125, 202 Havel, Vaclav, 356 Hawley, John Stratton, 7 Hegel, G. W. F., 172
Index
Indian theatre: diversity of, 6, 18, 23, 26 28; Indianness of, 22, 23; multilingualism of, 1, 2, 8, 37; periodization in, 1, 5; problematic decnitions of, 2, 56, 7, 8, 2223, 126, 12732, 14849, 15153, 15461, 44243n2; as synonymous with Sanskrit theatre, 7, 12932; Western approaches to, 78, 126, 14761 Indian Theatre Guild. See Bharatiya Natya Sangh indigenous forms: akhyana (Gujarat), 185; bayalata (Karnataka), 313, 314, 340; bhand pather (Kashmir), 315; bhavai (Gujarat), 135, 310, 315, 324, 327; burrakatha (Andhra Pradesh), 31; chhau (Bihar and Orissa), 198; dashavatar (Maharashtra), 314, 368; harikatha (southern India), 185; jatra (Bengal), 31, 135, 310, 313; kalaripayattu (Kerala), 103, 207; kathakali (Kerala), 154, 183, 185, 198, 200, 310, 362; kathakatha (Bengal), 315; keertana (Maharashtra), 185; kudiyattam (Kerala), 183, 185, 198; mohini attam (Kerala), 103; nach (Madhya Pradesh), 315; naqal (Punjab), 315; nata-sankeertana (Manipur), 184; nautanki (Uttar Pradesh), 142, 15051, 310, 314, 362; odissi (Orissa), 154; ojhapali (Assam), 185; padayani (Kerala), 103; pala (Orissa), 185; pandavani (Madhya Pradesh), 185; powada (Maharashtra), 312; ramlila (northern India), 154, 157, 310; raslila (Uttar Pradesh), 310; sopana sangeetam (Kerala), 103; swang (Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh), 315, 378; tamasha (Maharashtra), 31, 135, 310, 312, 314, 332, 368, 378, 379, 382, 384, 385; terukkuttu (Tamil Nadu), 185; thang-ta (Manipur), 184, 198; theyyam (kerala), 103; wari-leeba (Manipur), 184, 185; yakshagana (Karnataka), 106, 185, 310, 314, 332, 362 Indonesian theatre, 157 industrialization, 145 Innes, C. L., 136 interculturalism, 78, 14, 132, 150, 15561, 362
469
intertextuality, 3, 11, 1516, 71, 9495, 314, 35665, 36871, 37586 Ionesco, Eugene, 91, 361 Irving, Henry, 55 Jafri, Ali Sardar, 31 Jain, Nemichandra, 5, 22, 37, 69, 76, 136, 137, 187, 234, 290, 314, 316 Jakobson, Roman, 357 Jalan, Shyamanand, 50, 62, 116, 122, 124, 276; directing work, 62, 79, 80, 93, 94, 95, 112, 223, 234, 245, 263, 275, 290 Jambe, C. R., 100, 368 Jameson, Fredric, 225 JanMohamed, Abdul A., 377 Jasma odan, 314, 315, 327 Jayadeva, 169 Jeejeebhoy, Jamsetji, 302 Jha, Vivekdutt, 233, 234, 235 Jinnah, M. A., 257 Jones, William, 7, 67, 127, 128, 129, 172, 226 Josalkar, Vasant, 260 Joshi, Dinkar, 81 Joshi, Pravin, 51 Joshi, Suhas, 276, 290 Joyce, James, 195, 282, 387 Jussawalla, Adil, 134, 303, 304 Kabir, 34546 Kabuki, 198, 200, 275 Kafka, Franz, 363 kahani ka rangmanch, 36364 Kalamandalam, 362 Kalamandir, 92 Kalavaibhav, 296, 29798 Kale, Narain, 40, 44, 56 Kalekar, Rekha, 335 Kalelkar, Kaka, 274 Kalidasa, 7, 56, 67, 95, 103, 147, 165, 169, 182, 222, 223, 226, 230, 23133; Abhijnana Shakuntalam, 7, 105, 128, 130, 154, 167, 226, 227, 231, 358; as canonical author, 75, 22527, 310; as cctionalized character, 22730, 235, 238, 240, 242; in orientalist criticism, 130, 222, 22627. See also Rakesh, Mohan Kalidasa Samaroh, 182, 204, 209
470
Index
Keith, A. B., 7, 128, 129, 130, 131 Kendall, Geo,rey, 87 Kendre, Waman, 92 Kermode, Frank, 359 Khadilkar, K. P., 55, 56, 71 Khan, Feroze, 81 Khandekar, V. S., 180 Khanna, Rajesh (Jatin), 202 Khanolkar, C. T., 70, 72, 77, 91, 111 Kher, Anupam, 202 King, Bruce, 1011, 21 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 198 Kinkaid, Jamaica, 387 Kipste, Egil, 362 Konow, Sten, 128, 129, 131, 132 Kroetz, Franz Xaver, 111, 362 Kruger, Loren, 221 Kuckreja, Arun, 245, 260 Kulkarni, Chandrakant, 81 Kurtkoti, Kirtinath, 243 Lagoo, Shreeram, 50, 62, 93, 94, 122, 275, 276, 280, 288, 290 Lal, Ananda, 6, 22, 57, 153 Lal, P., 180 Lane-Poole, Stanley, 249 Lawrence, Margaret, 353 Lvi, Sylvain, 67, 128, 129, 131, 14849 Lindenberger, Herbert, 221, 250 Little Theatre Group. See Dutt, Utpal Littlewood, Joan, 86, 270 Lloyd Webber, Andrew, 379 Lokendrajit, Soyam, 210, 211, 216 Loomba, Ania, 354 Lorca, Federico Garca, 95, 102, 111, 272, 274, 358; House of Bernarda Alba, 362; Yerma, 11718 Lovell, Moira Crosbie, 117 Lu Xun, 363 Luderitz, Vasudha Dalmia, 57, 67 Luhrmann, Tanya M., 302, 303 Lutze, Lothar, 15152 Machwe, Prabhakar, 38, 40, 55 Madan, Indranath, 197 Madan, J. F., 120, 121 Madan Lal, 347
Kalidasa Samman prize, 204 kaliyug, 176, 177, 192 Kambar, Chandrashekhar, 50, 51, 62, 63, 68, 69, 71, 73, 76, 77, 78, 83, 94, 111, 122, 145, 313, 321, 329, 331, 340, 346; as director, 90, 102, 340; on folk theatre, 31920, 34041, 350; Jokumaraswami, 15, 48, 145, 314, 318, 321, 327, 328, 330, 33945, 346, 350, 386 Kanetkar, Vasant, 77, 95, 274 Kanhailal, Heisnam, 73, 211, 212, 216 Kapoor, Prithviraj, 26, 121 Kapoor, Ranjit, 92, 95, 363 Kapur, Anuradha, 329 Karanth, B. V., 13, 52, 62, 94, 102, 117, 122, 138, 203, 31314, 331, 340, 362, 366; directing work, 79, 92, 93, 95, 100, 1067, 167, 223, 245, 275, 332, 337, 339, 340, 362, 369; as theorist, 1068 Karnad, Girish, 10, 13, 45, 52, 60, 61, 62, 63, 68, 69, 71, 73, 94, 95, 111, 122, 125, 166, 180, 224, 225, 263, 27172, 273, 31314, 320, 329, 331, 340, 342; Agni mattu mal, 166, 217; on audience, 11213; Hayavadana, 15, 48, 77, 79, 93, 107, 139, 145, 314, 318, 320, 325, 327, 328, 33039, 340, 345, 346, 350, 386; Nagamandala, 76, 77, 117, 314, 320; on Parsi theatre, 24445; Tal-danda, 100, 166, 171; as translator, 76, 8384; Tughlaq, 15, 63, 76, 77, 79, 93, 97, 98, 112, 113, 166, 171, 222, 22324, 236, 24362, 263, 267, 331, 332, 386; Yayati, 77, 79, 166, 171, 217, 244, 331, 332 Karve, Iravati, 180 Kashmiri, Agha Hashra, 55, 86 Katha Collage, 364 Kathasaritasagara, 331, 333 Kathavachak, Radheyshyam, 179 Katrak, Kersi, 304 Katyal, Anjum, 78 Katz, Ruth Cecily, 177, 178 Kaul, Bansi, 92, 187 Kaushal, J. N., 358 Kazan, Elia, 85 Kean, Charles, 85 Kedourie, Elie, 168
Index
Madhya Pradesh Rangmandal. See Karanth, B. V. Madras Players, 290 The Mahabharata, 7, 60, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 166, 169, 17478, 18081, 212, 265, 283, 313; in colonial theatre, 179, 224; modes of transmission, 169, 17886; as national epic, 175, 176, 186; in postindependence theatre, 14, 48, 16568, 181217. See also Bharati, Dharamvir; Panikkar, K. N.; Thiyam, Ratan Maharshi, Mohan, 92, 98, 187, 260, 363 Mahasweta Devi, 93, 269, 273; Hajar churashir ma, 122, 269, 27980; Mukti, 117; Rudali, 93, 107, 122 Mahendra Vikram Varman, 103; Bhagavadajjukam, 104, 167; Mattavilasam, 167 Majumdar, Debashish, 76, 111 Malina, Judith, 85 Mallinatha, 226 Mamet, David, 86 Mammata, 226 Mandanna, Ashok, 258 Mankani, Ravi, 335 Mann, Thomas, 331, 33334, 339 Mannoni, O., 353 Mansceld, Katherine, 387 Manto, Saadat Hasan, 363 Manusmriti, 28687 Marranca, Bonnie, 155, 156, 161 Marzban, Adi, 37 Mathur, J. C., 37, 40, 121, 123, 124, 324 Matkari, Ratnakar, 116 Matthew, Paul, 78 Matura, Mustapha, 49, 355 McCullough, Christpher J., 367 McRae, John, 277 media. See clm and other mass media Mehta, C. C., 37 Mehta, Vijaya, 13, 49, 50, 52, 89, 91, 92, 94, 112, 122, 276; as director of Brecht, 112, 362, 366, 368, 370, 379, 448n5; other directing work, 62, 79, 80, 93, 95, 167, 29697, 31314, 332, 335 Memmi, Albert, 303 Merchant, Sabira, 259 Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyeuich, 85
471
Mhaiskar, Uday, 335 Michael, Joy, 233, 234 Mill, James, 172 Miller, Arthur, 220, 228, 358 Miller, Barbara Stoller, 7, 147 Mishra, Vijay, 12, 354 Mistry, Cyrus, 15, 281, 3016, 307, 308, 309, 387 Mistry, Rohinton, 304, 306 Mitra, Dinbandhu, 28, 55; Nil-darpan, 56 Mitra, Manoj, 76, 273 Mitra, Saonli, 329 Mitra, Shombhu, 13, 26, 37, 40, 45, 47, 51, 52, 55, 8687, 94, 122, 138; on amateur and professional theatre, 43; directing work, 79, 87, 93, 95, 109, 111, 263; as interpreter, 111; relationship with IPTA, 30, 31, 35, 8687 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 85 modernity, 1, 11, 132, 14446, 18081, 19697, 25354, 28182, 324; colonial versus postcolonial, 135, 169, 175, 270; and colonialism, 37, 132, 133, 136; critiques of, 2, 4, 6, 15, 132, 13536, 146, 149; erasure of, 6, 7, 128, 14759; of Indian theatre, 24, 37, 54, 70, 146, 153, 18687, 227, 23436, 23839, 27071, 3089, 328, 351; and Western inbuence, 132, 133, 355, 38687 modernization, 145, 146, 150, 240, 284, 325, 355 Mokashi-Punekar, Shankar, 5 Molire, 95, 358, 360, 361, 362 Monier-Williams, M., 178 Moscow Art Theatre, 70 Muhammad bin Tughlaq, 223, 243, 246, 248, 249, 250, 255 Mujeeb, M., 39 Muller, Max, 128, 148, 178 multilingualism. See colonial theatre; Indian theatre; post-independence theatre myth, 159, 169, 172, 173; in colonial theatre, 4, 67, 71, 143; distinguished from history, 165, 174; in postindependence theatre, 3, 11, 14, 15, 16, 49, 16568, 171, 225, 268, 269, 31819,
472
327, 386, 387. See also Bharati, Dharamvir; The Mahabharata; Panikkar, K. N.; Thiyam, Ratan
Index
226, 252; in post-independence period, 2930, 42, 73 nationhood, 173, 307; and history, 169, 221; and literature and theatre, 1, 2, 221, 251, 307, 380; and secularism, 252, 25558 The Natyashastra, 56, 67, 69, 130, 183, 206, 207, 212, 216 Naya Theatre. See Tanvir, Habib Nehru, Jawaharlal, 27, 213, 240, 242, 243, 250, 252, 25354, 255, 257, 260, 262 Nehru Shatabdi Natya Samaroh, 13, 25, 27, 33, 4551, 80, 204, 209, 216, 280, 332, 337, 340, 344; program of, 4650, 88; relation to drama seminar of 1956, 4647, 49; as retrospective, 28, 45 Ngugi wa Thiongo, 324 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 197 Nigam, Santvana, 76, 77, 94 Ninasam, 50, 62, 9697, 98101, 320, 340, 369. See also Subbanna, K. V. nirguna tradition, 34546 Nizami, K. A., 249 Noh theatre, 154, 183 noncommercialism in theatre, 34, 43, 50, 58, 91, 92, 108, 111, 112, 121, 312 Odets, Cli,ord, 41 Olaniyan, Tejumola, 102, 375 Oldenberg, Hermann, 176 Omvedt, Gail, 299 ONeill, Eugene, 272 orientalist scholarship and criticism, 14755, 175, 226; approaches to Indian theatre in, 128, 14749, 151, 152; continuing inbuence of, 7, 12728, 44344n4; critiques of, 173, 219, 222; and Indian nationalism, 144, 171; and Indology, 8, 128, 132, 147, 226, 443 44n4; privileging of Sanskrit in, 7, 67, 12832, 142, 14749, 226 Orkeny, Istvan, 358 Osborne, John, 95, 270 Osocsan, Femi, 49, 323, 325 Padamsee, Alyque, 51, 52, 93, 94, 95, 122, 223, 233; directing work, 236, 245, 248
Nabokov, Vladimir, 282 Nadkarni, Dnyaneshwar, 370, 379 Nagar, Amritlal, 230 Nagpal, Kavita, 215 Naik, Arun, 370 Naik, M. K., 5 Naik, Rajiv, 111 Naipaul, V. S., 197, 387 Nandan, Kanhaiyalal, 234 Nandikar theatre group, 111, 204, 361, 370 Nandy, Subrata, 80, 83 Narayan, B. R., 77 Narayan, R. K., 180 Narayana Bhatta, 226 Nath, Rajinder, 62, 79, 80, 89, 94, 112, 273, 323; on audience, 11011; directing work, 48, 66, 92, 263, 290, 340, 332, 363; on new Indian plays, 78 nation: and allegory, 224, 225, 307; cultural antecedents of, 137, 16971, 17476, 222; and secularism, 170, 285, 307, 371; as subject in literature and theatre, 21, 22, 30, 37, 67, 17074, 19296, 21315, 217, 222, 239, 25058, 292, 3078, 37478, 379, 38184 National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), 92, 109, 245 National Institute of Dramatic Arts, 332 National School of Drama, 43, 44, 62, 78, 80, 87, 92, 99, 109, 124, 167, 204, 314, 364, 366, 378 National School of Drama Repertory Company, 92, 99, 198, 236, 245, 278, 297, 314, 315, 361, 363 national theatre concepts, 13, 2226, 30, 3235, 42, 45, 69, 73, 75, 128. See also Bharucha, Rustom; Chattopadyay, Kamaladevi; Deshpande, G. P.; Dhingra, Baldoon National Theatre Festival, 204, 209 nationalism, 16869, 17072; in colonial period, 28, 67, 173, 175, 186, 19395,
Index
Padatik. See Jalan, Shyamanand Padmanabhan, Manjula, 68 Pal, Mahendra, 202 Pal, Panu, 31 Palekar, Amol, 275, 276 Pali, 147 Pande, G. C., 177 Pandit, Balraj, 361 Pandit, Vandana, 382 Panigrahi, Sanjukta, 154 Panikkar, K. N., 49, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 78, 79, 90, 94, 100, 102, 106, 107, 108, 138, 167, 211, 225, 275, 313, 320, 321, 324, 329; directing work, 65, 103, 167; Karnabharam, 182, 183, 204; Madhyam vyayog, 167, 182, 183; Mahabharata plays of, 167, 180, 18184, 2034, 216, 217, 321; as theorist, 64, 1035; Urubhangam, 14, 48, 167, 182, 183, 204 10, 217 Parekh, Rasiklal, 314 Parsai, Harishankar, 363 Parsi community, 3016; as colonial elite, 3023 Parsi theatre, 3, 4, 5556, 141, 179, 244, 260, 304; critiques of, 3840, 43, 56, 312; relation to clm, 40, 86, 120 Parthasarathy, Indira, 18, 73 Partition, 19293 Patar, Surjit, 117 Patel, Gieve, 82, 304 Patel, Jabbar, 52, 93, 94, 95, 122, 366; directing work, 91, 275, 374, 379 Patel, Vallabhbhai, 257 Pathak, Dina (Gandhi), 26, 37, 40, 41, 121, 236 Patil, Anand, 5 patronage: importance of, 4, 52, 23839; state institutions of, 34, 44, 92, 98, 240, 241; of traditional forms, 69, 9394, 135, 142, 145, 31517 Paul, Rajinder, 45, 77, 245, 260, 261, 290 Paz, Octavio, 355 Peoples Little Theatre. See Dutt, Utpal performance, 2, 3, 4, 1617, 58, 59, 65, 92 95, 11719, 136, 145, 147, 152, 16667, 174, 36062; and modernity, 133,
473
13536; primacy in colonial theatre, 5556, 58, 67; and translation, 7879; urban forms of, 151, 18184, 32022 Permanent Settlement Act, 297 Perse, St.-John (Alexis Saint-Lger Lger), 195 Peters, Julie Stone, 143, 156 philology, 147 Phule, Jyotirao, 289 Pillai, G. Shankara, 316, 319, 320, 327 Pinter, Harold, 112 Pirandello, Luigi, 358 Piscator, Erwin, 70, 85 playwriting, 8993, 361 political drama, 4, 18, 2526, 3032, 48, 70, 87, 21116, 36667, 36971, 37380, 38286 Pollock, Sheldon, 21, 147, 439n1 postcolonial theory and criticism: anglocentrism and Eurocentrism of, 9, 10, 12; place of theatre in, 811, 143 postcolonialism, 1, 21, 71, 127, 251, 385 86; decnitions of, 1113, 35557; experience of, 1, 284, 285, 295, 303; and postmodernism, 218, 267; reduction of, 35255; relation to literature and theatre, 1, 911, 12, 21, 143, 3078, 327; restrictive decnitions of, 912, 35255 post-independence Indian theatre: canon-formation in, 3, 4, 13, 46; critical methodology for, 1116, 17; genres of, 3, 6, 11, 49, 61, 70, 94, 161, 169, 362, 364; marginality of, 2, 3; multilingualism of, 2, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 47, 71, 7275, 94, 362, 36869; as postcolonial formation, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1116, 51, 53, 54, 55, 71, 352, 387; relation to colonial theatre, 4, 11, 71; relation to mass media, 51, 53, 54, 82, 1089, 12125; relationship of languages in, 10, 12, 17, 47, 52, 7275, 8183; signiccance of director in, 8689, 9196, 11419, 363; status of English in, 1011, 12, 47, 8183, 304, 441n1 Pound, Ezra, 282 Pradhan, Sudhi, 30, 313 Pradhan, Sunila, 202
474
Index
61, 89; on dramatic authorship, 60, 240; on Hindi drama and theatre, 57, 23031; on history play, 23233; Lahron ke rajhans, 83, 93, 112, 166, 223, 230, 232, 236, 238; Sahitya aur sanskriti, 68, 271, 27273; as theorist, 6768, 23133, 271, 27273 Ramachandran, C. N., 348 Ramanujan, A. K., 175, 318, 321, 329 The Ramayana, 7, 154, 169, 180, 283 Ramnarayan, Gowri, 290 Rangacharya, Adya, 5, 22, 37, 50, 73, 77, 108; Kelu Janmejaya, 47, 48, 166, 217 Rangakarmee. See Ganguli, Usha Rangayan, 62, 91. See also Deshpande, Arvind; Mehta, Vijaya; Tendulkar, Vijay Rao, Raja, 173, 174 realism, 3, 15, 30, 34, 67, 69, 70, 71, 137, 143, 26876, 285, 309, 323; as antithetical to folk genres, 321, 323, 348; critique of, 380; Indian theories of, 26976; Indian versus Western, 282 84; marginality of women in, 307, 32829; as sign of modernity, 270, 271 Rg-veda, 333 Richards, Lloyd, 85 Richmond, Farley, 7, 15254 Ridgeway, William, 129 ritual, 31819, 34142 Roberts, G. D., 353 Roopwedh, 280 Rostand, Edmond, 358, 362 Rowe, Nicholas, 221 Roy, Benoy, 31 Roy, D. L., 56, 71, 141, 224 Roy, Dulal, 187 Roy, Kumar, 33, 50, 51, 368 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 87, 368 rupantar. See translation Rushdie, Salman: Midnights Children, 17374, 355; Mirrorwork, 242; Shame, 355 Rye, Madhu, 50, 73, 273; Koipan ek phoolnu nam bolo to, 77, 269; Kumarni agashi, 49, 77, 269 Ryonusuke, Akutagawa, 95
Prakrit, 147 Prasad, Jaishankar, 5657, 58, 60, 67, 71, 173, 224 Prasanna, 92, 259, 260, 261 Prashanth, G. N., 262 Pratima Natak Mandali, 340 precolonial and premodern forms and traditions, 2, 4, 37, 43, 48, 135, 140, 14546, 310, 318, 320, 325, 350 Premchand, 60 print culture: and dramatic authorship, 5556, 5859, 6164; emergence of, 55, 13334; and modernity, 13235; relation to drama and theatre, 4, 5, 8, 17, 51, 61, 63, 68, 145, 151, 311, 32022, 36061; and translation, 7378 Prithvi Theatre, 92, 111, 245, 263 Progressive Writers Association, 25, 70, 86 proscenium stage and staging, 31, 49, 93, 115, 14142, 248, 263, 268, 27376, 312; critique of, 3839, 64, 65, 69, 87, 123, 135; defense of, 27374 Puri, Amrish, 122, 202 Puri, Om, 122, 260 Quit India Movement, 192 Racine, Jean, 102, 117 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 26 Raghav, Rangeya, 358 Raghavabhatta, 226 Raghavan, V., 176 Raha, Kirnmoy, 5 Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, 329 Raina, M. K., 92, 198, 200, 202, 327, 363, 368 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 78 Rajagopalachari, C., 180 Rajamannar, P. V., 26, 38, 70 Rakesh, Mohan, 13, 60, 62, 63, 67, 71, 73, 77, 111, 166, 167, 224, 225, 263, 269, 273, 276, 282, 323, 328, 358, 363; Adhe adhure, 49, 63, 93, 110, 112, 269, 275, 277, 278, 282, 28384, 331; Ashadh ka ek din, 15, 63, 79, 93, 165, 167, 171, 222, 223, 22543, 246, 263, 267, 386; on directors role,
Index
Sacchidanandan, K., 180 Sagar, Ramanand, 180 Sahay, Raguvir, 107, 358 Sahni, Balraj, 38, 39, 40, 41, 121 Sahu, Swarna Kumar, 346 Said, Edward W., 219 St. Julian, George, 234 Sajnani, Arjun, 245, 248, 261, 262 Sane Guruji, 289 Sangeet Natak, 27, 316 Sangeet Natak Akademi, 25, 33, 44, 69, 75, 76, 92, 98, 109, 138, 204, 223, 240, 315, 316, 332, 337 Sanskrit drama, 137, 183, 310; canonization of, 12832, 14749, 442n1; relation to modern theatre, 4, 6, 7, 150, 381; revivals in post-independence theatre, 48, 95, 1035, 107, 167, 18284, 2039, 21112, 386; translation into modern Indian languages, 67, 75, 14243, 358 Sanskrit literature, 147; canonization of, 7, 12932, 142; classical period of, 147, 149 Sarabhai, Mallika, 161 Saraswati Samman, 291 Sarnaik, Arun, 258 Saroyan, William, 358 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 70, 274, 361 Sastri, Ganapati, 204, 44445n1 Satabdi. See Sircar, Badal Sathe, Makarand, 111 Satnamis, 345 Sato, Shozo, 362 Savarese, Nicola, 7 Saxe-Meiningen, George II, Duke of, 85 Schechner, Richard, 7, 65, 85, 137, 154, 155, 157, 161, 362, 366 Scheme of Assistance to Young Theatre Workers, 92, 9394 Schiller, Friedrich von, 227 Scott, Walter, 220 Seagull Foundation for the Arts, 78 Seeket, Gangaram, 346 Sen, Chanakya, 363 Sen, Mrinal, 121 Sen, Sohag, 80 Sen, Tapas, 114
475
Sengupta, Rudraprasad, 366 Sengupta, Sachin, 26, 38, 40, 41 Sethi, Rumina, 171, 173 Shah, B. M., 51, 363 Shah, Naseeruddin, 81, 122, 202, 260 Shakespeare, William, 56, 67, 95, 102, 220, 244, 272, 361, 362, 364, 365, 447n3; Hamlet, 358, 362; iconic status of, 75, 357, 360; Indian-language productions of, 97, 98, 100, 362; indigenization of, 107, 141, 360, 362; King Lear, 355, 358, 360, 362; A Midsummer Nights Dream, 362; Macbeth, 107, 358, 362; The Merchant of Venice, 358; Othello, 358, 362; The Tempest, 353, 362; translations of, 56, 35758 Shankar, Ravi, 26 Shankar, Sachin, 26 Sharma, P. R., 78 Sharma, Partap, 82, 95 Sharma, Tripurari, 92 Sharmalkar, T. K., 31 Shaw, George Bernard, 70, 227, 228, 358, 360 Shepard, Sam, 86 Shirwadker, V. V., 276 Shiv Sena, 306 Shivpuri, Om, 62, 98, 122, 202, 236, 237, 258, 259, 261, 275, 276; directing work, 91, 110, 111, 245 Shivpuri, Sudha (Sharma), 202, 236, 237, 259, 276 Shri Ram Centre for the Performing Arts, 92 Shri Ram Centre Repertory Company, 340, 363. See also Nath, Rajinder Shudraka, 67, 130, 167, 310; Mrichchhakatika, 167, 314, 358, 360, 386 Siddiqui, I. H., 249 Sidhwa, Bapsi, 304 Sikri, Surekha, 259, 278, 378 Singh, Manohar, 258, 259, 278 Sircar, Badal, 10, 13, 18, 45, 50, 51, 63, 64, 6566, 67, 70, 72, 78, 91, 93, 94, 95, 108, 111, 119, 146, 157, 225, 245, 269, 273, 275, 311, 328, 361; Baki itihas, 15, 65, 76, 93, 222, 224, 26367, 269, 276; directing
476
Index
Tandon, Sudhir, 25859 Taneja, Jaidev, 187, 195, 197 Tanvir, Habib, 13, 47, 49, 52, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 86, 90, 94, 107, 138, 145, 180, 272, 275, 313, 314, 320, 329, 331, 347, 362, 366; Agra bazar, 48, 87, 139; on audience, 114, 115, 119, 121; Charandas chor, 15, 76, 78, 112, 318, 321, 327, 330, 34548; directing work, 50, 64, 87, 115, 320, 34647; Duryodhana, 159, 167, 182, 184, 360; on folk forms, 13839, 272, 367, 368, 369; Mitti ki gadi, 314, 360, 386; as theorist, 102 Taranath, Rajeev, 78 Tendulkar, Priya, 290 Tendulkar, Sushama, 288, 290 Tendulkar, Vijay, 13, 51, 62, 63, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76, 77, 83, 89, 90, 91, 95, 111, 122, 245, 268, 270, 271, 273, 27779, 282, 31314, 328; on audience, 113; Ghashiram kotwal, 48, 76, 112, 113, 145, 166, 171, 275, 314, 320, 325, 327, 370, 386; Gidhade, 76, 113, 269, 276, 278, 282; Kamala, 77, 113, 269, 279, 290; Kanyadaan, 15, 77, 113, 269, 276, 279, 280, 283, 285, 28695, 296, 298, 308, 309; Sakharam Binder, 77, 113, 269, 27879, 290; Shantata! court chalu ahe, 77, 269, 276, 290, 331 Terayama, Shuji, 157 text and performance, 8, 16, 17, 5660, 6166, 90, 91, 93, 125, 147, 151, 225, 32022, 32728, 36062 Thakur, Dinesh, 263, 275, 290 Thakur Ram, 347 Thapar, Romesh, 255 Thapar, Romila, 249, 256 Tharoor, Shashi, 174 Theatre Academy, 62, 93, 273. See also Patel, Jabbar theatre anthropology, 7; critique of, 155; erasure of modernity in, 155; neoorientalism of, 150; reductive approach of, 15461 Theatre Group, 43, 234, 303. See also Alkazi, Ebrahim; Padamsee, Alyque
work, 91, 370; Ebong Indrajit (Evam Indrajit), 65, 76, 77, 224, 263, 269, 276; on folk forms, 326; Pagla ghoda, 93, 263, 269; Shesh nei, 65, 76, 224, 269; as theorist of Third Theatre, 65, 68, 70, 114 15, 123; Tringsha shatabdi (Hiroshima), 65, 66, 211 Slemon, Stephen, 355, 365 Smith, Anthony D., 168, 169, 170 Smith, Karen, 10 Smith, Vincent, 172, 249 Solomon, Rakesh, 4 Sommer, Doris, 173 Sondhi, Reeta, 259, 261 Sontakke, Kamlakar, 77, 187, 199, 202 Sopanam. See Panikkar, K. N. Sophocles, 95, 96, 102, 160, 211, 236, 358 Soyinka, Wole, 10, 49, 86, 102, 140, 328, 371, 381, 384; Madmen and Specialists, 355; Opera Wonyosi, 35657, 374, 37578, 383 Spivak, Gayatri, 170, 365 Srampickal, Jacob, 6 Srinivasa Iyengar, K. R., 176 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 85, 86, 370 Steele, Flora Annie, 178 Steiner, George, 160 Sterne, Lawrence: Tristram Shandy, 355 Stoppard, Tom, 70, 358 street theatre, 312 Strindberg, August, 95, 221, 272, 274, 358 Subaltern Studies, 219, 222 Subbanna, K. V., 52, 94, 96, 98101, 102, 104, 108, 119, 369; activities at Ninasam, 96, 98101, 114 Subhash, Jyoti, 77 Subhedar, Sunil, 22 Sultan Padamsee Award, 303 Sutherland, Efua, 49 Suzuki, Tadashi, 157, 198 Swann, Darius L., 7, 152 Swift, Jonathan, 355 Synge, J. M., 355 Tagore, Rabindranath, 60, 67, 95, 141, 143, 178, 193, 242, 358, 363, 366; as playwright, 27, 56, 57; as theorist, 5758
Index
theatre of roots, 138, 140, 311, 323, 325, 327 Theatre Unit, 340, 361. See also Alkazi, Ebrahim; Dubey, Satyadev theatres: Cornwallis, 57; Meghdoot, 98; Minerva, 86; National, 86, 141; Star, 57 Thiyam, Ratan, 49, 50, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 90, 94, 107, 108, 138, 145, 187, 198, 200, 211, 225, 275, 320, 321, 329; Chakravyuha, 14, 48, 78, 105, 122, 145, 159, 182, 183, 210, 21216, 217, 321, 386; directing work, 79, 105, 167; Karnabharam, 105, 182, 183, 212; Mahabharata plays of, 167, 180, 181, 18284, 21012, 217, 313; as theorist of theatre and performance, 102, 1056; Urubhangam, 182, 183, 212; Uttar Priyadarshi, 105, 211 Tin, Helen, 12, 352, 355 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 173 Tompkins, Joanne, 9, 10 tradition, 37, 69, 70, 104, 311; as basis of Indian culture, 42, 155; invention of, 140, 14546; and modernity, 4, 11, 138, 14950, 157, 158, 300, 310, 323, 328, 368; romance of, 15557 traditional Indian theatre and performance, 3839, 133, 18485; decnitions of, 31011; incorporation of, 15, 49, 6465, 1028, 14445, 159, 181, 18485, 198, 21516, 31215, 360; signiccance of, 2, 26, 30, 34, 42, 67, 69, 93, 102, 13639, 142, 144, 145, 204, 209, 272, 31112, 316; Western preoccupation with, 14759 traditionalism: critique of, 6, 69, 13646, 160, 233, 242, 317, 32327; as legacy of orientalism, 14749 translation: as basis of national theatre movement, 71, 75, 76, 8384; and canon-formation, 7880; English as target language of, 7778; forms of, 35659; Hindi as target language of, 7677, 8182, 358, 363, 440n4; intercultural (rupantar), 15, 35863, 365, 447n2; interlingual (bhashantar), 3, 5, 14, 54, 56, 7378, 143, 357; and
477
performance, 73, 7881; relationship of languages in, 8184; of Western drama, 11, 56, 143, 447n3 Tretyakov, Sergei, 31, 373 urban experience, 26875, 386 urban folk theatre, 3, 31231; centrality of gender in, 32831, 34145, 34748, 351; as distinct from folk theatre, 145, 31822; performance of the Mahabharata in, 18185; problems of, 32227; rebexivity of, 328, 33537, 34043. See also folk forms; folk theatre urban theatre, 3, 17, 29, 35, 38, 7273, 90, 94, 139, 14145, 15052, 166, 181, 275, 32829; critique of, 2930, 39 40, 13536, 13839, 150, 31112; urbanization, 145, 240, 28485, 299, 324, 350 urban versus rural, 45, 1012, 272, 273, 299, 31112, 317, 318, 320, 32223, 326 27, 341; in relation to theatre and audience, 5, 39, 42, 50, 110, 114, 115, 123, 137, 312, 323, 324 Vallabhadeva, 226 van Buitenen, J. A. B., 147, 178, 180 Van der Veer, Peter, 127, 149, 171 Van Erven, Eugne, 6, 367 Varadpande, M. L., 22 Varma, Bhagvati Charan, 230 Varma, Nirmal, 363 Varma, Sarojini, 77 Vatsyayan, Kapila, 69, 136, 137, 143 Vatsyayan, S. H., 211 Vaze, Achyut, 111, 245 Vaze, Madhav, 245 Vidyabinode, Kshirode Prasad, 55 village: critique of, 27273, 323; decline of, 299, 312, 32425; economic and cultural transformation of, 145, 240, 284, 29799, 324; as location for theatre, 1012, 115, 142, 150, 166, 272; representation of, 24041, 34145, 34651; as site of indigenous culture, 272, 31112, 34145, 34651
478
Virgil, 226 Vishakhadatta, 130, 167; Mudrarakshasa, 167 Viswanathan, Ashoke, 123 Vivekananda, Swami, 173, 178 Vyasa, 177, 190, 2045
Index
White, Hayden, 218, 219, 220 White, Patrick, 354 Williams, Raymond, 311 Williams, Tennessee, 111, 358 Wilson, August, 10 Wilson, H. H., 67, 128, 129, 130 Wilson, Robert, 85 Windish, Ernst, 130 Yadav, Rajendra, 358 Yarrow, Ralph, 8 Zaehner, R. C., 147 zamindari system, 297, 305 Zarrilli, Phillip, 7, 78, 103, 152 Zelliott, Eleanor, 289
Walcott, Derek, 10, 49, 86, 102 Wallace, John M., 225 Weber, Carl, 366, 368 Wells, Henry W., 147 Wesker, Arnold, 116 Western inbuences: in drama and theatre, 2, 3, 11, 15, 40, 42, 43, 67, 133, 13536, 14046, 14849, 273; in literature, 67, 13235, 143, 172, 38687, 448n6
Studies in Theatre History and Culture
Actors and American Culture, 18801920 by benjamin mcarthur The Age and Stage of George L. Fox, 18251877: An Expanded Edition by laurence senelick American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War Producing and Contesting Containment by bruce mcconachie Classical Greek Theatre: New Views of an Old Subject by clifford ashby Embodied Memory: The Theatre of George Tabori by anat feinberg Fangs of Malice: Hypocrisy, Sincerity, and Acting by matthew h. wikander Fantasies of Empire: The Empire Theatre of Varieties and the Licensing Controversy of 1894 by joseph donohue Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America by james s. moy
Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 18201870 by bruce a. mcconachie Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre by edward braun Modern Czech Theatre: Rebector and Conscience of a Nation by jarka m. burian Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies An Expanded Edition by mary z. maher Othello and Interpretive Traditions by edward pechter Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Nights Dream in the Theatre by gary jay williams The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics edited by sue-ellen case and janelle reinelt Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre by freddie rokem The Recurrence of Fate: Theatre and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia by spencer golub Rebecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 18401880 by jim davis and victor emel janow The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin by eli rozik Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production: Theatrical Events and Their Audiences by john tulloch
Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage by joel berkowitz The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective by erika fischer-lichte Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence edited by edward pechter Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947 by aparna bhargava dharwadker The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception by willmar sauter The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night and the Performance Editions by laurie e. osborne The Victorian Marionette Theatre by john mccormick Wandering Stars: Russian Emigr Theatre, 19051940 edited by laurence senelick Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories edited by s. e. wilmer

Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker Theatres of Independence Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 Studies Theatre Hist & Culture 2005

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Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker Theatres of Independence Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 Studies Theatre Hist & Culture 2005

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Theatres of Independence

Studies in Theatre History and Culture

university of iowa press, iowa city

For Vinay, Aneesha, and Sachin

Postcolonial Frames and the Subject of Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

The Formation of a New National Canon

Authorship, Textuality, and Multilingualism

Authorship, Textuality, and Multilingualism

Authorship, Theatre Theory, and the Textuality of Drama

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

Authorship, Textuality, and Multilingualism

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

Authorship, Textuality, and Multilingualism

The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

Authorship, Textuality, and Multilingualism