Abstract
Academic scholarship on modern Indian theatre exploded in the last decade. A spate of scholarly volumes, especially those in English, was published within a few years, months even, of each other. They sought to capture and define the nature and parameters of its practice. They grappled with questions of tradition, modernity, colonialism, and its legacy realism. They probed the relation of the State to the various forms of cultural expression its boundaries engendered. And they adopted various methodologies in their troubling of standard historiographies of the field. One clear consensus still emerges from all these careful reports - there is no one Indian theatre. It is a phenomenon perforce multiple, myriad, and unexpected. It has many theatres, many languages, many influences, many economies, many and uneven modernities.
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Notes and references
The prestige and recognition NSD graduates, for example, enjoy in films cmrently does not stem from their work or training in theatre. In the 1980s, with a few prominent TV serials there was a strong crossover, whereas now the state effort at supporting stars of the future seems to have little yield.
Iam deliberately avoiding a strictly postmodernist deconstructionist approach as much of the material here, including street theatre and dalit theatre, resists this reading. Certainly the work of many of the women directors and some theatre written in English would bear out such an analysis.
G.P. Deshpande’ Satyashodhak, directed by Atul Pethe, performed by sanitation workers at Delhi’ May Day Café on 31 May 2012.
The uncertain and shifting status of culture as an administrative obligation of the Indian state can be seen in its changing designation within the government — Ministry of Scientific Research and Culture Affairs in 1961, Department of Culture in 1971, Ministry of Education and Culture in 1979, Ministry of Culture Affairs in 1985, Department of Culture under Ministry of Human Resource Development in 1985, Ministry of Culture, Youth Affairs and Sports in 1999, Ministry of Tourism and Culture in 2000. Source: http://indiaculture.nic.in/indiaculture/history.html, accessed July 16, 2013.
EPW Research Foundation, ‘Finances of Government of India’, Economic and Political Weekly 40.31 (2005), 3472–96.
Translated by S. Raghunanda, http://www.theatreforum.in/static/upload/ docs/Theatre_Global_industry.pdf, accessed July 19, 2013. The Kannada version of this essay was published in Desha Kaala 1.4 (2006).
In 1975 the National School of Drama became an independent teaching institution no longer affiliated to the SNA.
Erin B. Mee, Theatre of Roots: Redirecting the Modern Indian Stage (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2008)
For just some critiques of the theatre of roots scheme, read Rustam Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1993), 208
Vasudha Dalmia, Poetics, Plays and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian Theatre (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 203–5.
Dalmia writes of the 1985–86 Festival of India in the USA as being marketed as, ‘We have to show that India is not only exotic but contemporaneously exotic as well as modern and competent’ (Vasudha Dalmia, 201).
Leela Gandhi in her detailed study of the activities of the Ford Foundation in the field of Indian culture writes, ‘In the early 1980s, when the FF began to enter the arena of performing arts funding, its thinking on the subject was, however, still caught between the conflicting messages of the 1978 grant to culture, and its 1983 supplement: the former emphasizing “heritage” and a conservationist or archeological view of culture, the latter appealing for greater “revitalization,” or, for activities to “explore how cultural traditions interact with the present in the evolving of new creative expressions and how these might be made accessible to the public”.’ In ‘The Ford Foundation and its Arts and Culture Program in India: A Short History,’ 55, http://theatreforum.in/static/upload/docs/For d_Fndn_A_short_history.pdf, accessed 16 June 2013.
Its many projects include support to the Southern Languages Book Trust for promoting regional languages through publication and translation, Mahanadi river project for preserving folk forms along the river, support to Telugu University, University of Calicut, Tezpur University and North-Eastern Hill State University for folklore studies, Rupayan Sansthan for recording and archiving Rajasthani folk songs (Cf. Leela Gandhi, 16–40).
Sanjana Kapoor, ‘Welcome Address,’ http://theatreforum.in/static/upload/ docs/Weicome_Address.pdf, accessed 4 June 2013.
‘Not the Drama Seminar — a concept note,’ India Theatre Forum, http://theatreforum.in/static/upload/docs/NTDS_Concept_Note.pdf, accessed 12 Dec 2012.
Little Theatre Group Auditorium, FICCI Auditorium, Triveni Kala Sangam, Kamani Auditorium, Max Mueller Bhavan, and the Shri Ram Bharatiya Kala Kendra.
Sachin Sengupta, #x2018;Seminar Director #x2019;s Speech,’;SangeetNatak 38.2 (2004), 12. 11–14.
P.V. Rajamannar, SangeetNatak 38.2 (2004), 7. 5–7.
S. Radhakrishnan, SangeetNatak 38.2 (2004), 8. 8–10.
Sachin Dasgupta, Sangeet Natak 38.2 (2004), 12–13.
Cf. Dalmia, 34–9.
J.C. Mathur, ‘Hindi Drama, #x2019;Sangeet Natak 38.3 (2004), 3. 3–17.
J.C. Mathur, ‘Hindi Drama, #x2019;Sangeet Natak 38.3 (2004), 10.
J.C. Mathur, ‘Hindi Drama, #x2019;Sangeet Natak 38.3 (2004), 17.
Sachin Sengupta,’ seminar Director’ speech,’ 3.
Akshara KV, ‘Keynote Address,’ Not the Drama Seminar, India Theatre Forum, http://theatreforum.in/static/upload/docs/Keynote_.pdf, accessed 4 June 2013.
In the early years after Independence the playwright enjoyed so much importance that a play, performed or not, would always be attributed to ‘him#x2019;alone. Since I focus on the work of directors more in the following sections, here we pause simply at why reading plays has become less important. Even in the canon formation argument, certain important plays today live on as performance rather than as primarily scripts that circulate. For newer playwrights, there seem to be fewer ways of even getting their scripts read and circulated (to be canonized or not) while previously the script mattered more than the performance.
The editors of the volume for instance are at pains to clarify in their ‘Introduction’#x2018;this particular seminar was not meant to be an academic affair, attended mostly by academics ‘(14) or’ since this was not an academic seminar ... ’(16). See Sudhanva Deshpande, et al., Introduction, Our Stage: Pleasures and Perils of Theatre Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika books, 2009). 11–16.
A fuller discussion of Ninasam ‘innovation in and contribution to reshaping the parameters of Indian theatre can be found in Rustom Bharucha ‘Theatre and the World: Performance and Politics of Culture.
Channakeshava, in ‘Locales: Respondents,’ Sudhanva Deshpande, et al., Our Stage: Pleasures and Perils of Theatre Practice in India, 51, 51–4.
http://www.prithvitheatre.org/aboutus.php, accessed 13 Feb, 2013.
http://www.junoontheatre.org/action.html, accessed 13 Feb 2013.
http://www.junoontheatre.org/action.html.
http://www.rangashankara.org/horne/, accessed 13 Feb 2013.
Tutun Mukherjee, ed., ‘Prolegomenon to Women ‘Theatre,’ Staging Resistance: Plays by Women in Translation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7. 1–27.
Arnold Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (New York: Routledge, 2000), 5.
Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000), 375.
Vasudha Dalmia, 314.
Cf. Arnold Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History, 6–10.
Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, 3.
Interview with Maya Rao, June 28 2011.I am thankful to her for the interview.
‘Marathi theatre accords the highest place to the playwrights. ‘In Shanta Gokhale, Playwright at the Centre: Marathi Drama from 1843 to the Present (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2000), xi. ‘Dramatic representation…[is] largely confined to the printed page in the Hindi region’ (Dalmia, 50). Strikingly, at the first SNA Drama Seminar presenters repeatedly mention playwrights and to some extent the actor. Almost no mention is made of the theatre director. It were as if the words of the playwright seamlessly transfigured to the dialogue of the actor with no intermediate interaction/interpretation. Cf. among others, the ‘Inaugural Address’ by S. Radhakrishnan (Sangeet Natak 38.2 (2004), 8–10),’ seminar Director’s Speech’ by Sachin Sengupta (Sangeet Natak 38.2 (2004), 11–14), and ‘The Training of the Actor’ by E. Alzaki (Sangeet Natak 38.4 (2004), 77–87). The situation is happily changing where theatre directors are now seen on a par with or superseding the playwrights in their contributions to Indian theatre. This in no small part has happened because of a small but powerful coterie of women directors like Vijaya Mehta, Amal Allana, Anuradha Kapoor, Anamika Haksar, Neelam Man Singh Chowdhry Usha Ganguli, who do not write plays but rather adapt or stage materials and scripts from a variety of sources. Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory and Urban Performance in India since 1947 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 56. The situation changes somewhat after the 1980s. As a glance at most current collections of modern Indian plays will demonstrate, fewer original scripts were canonized with quite the same effusion as those in the 1960s and 1970s. With the rise of the figure of the director, less emphasis came to be placed on the written word. On one level there is the highly stylized work of a director like Ratan Thiyam, and on the other, women directors who often work through collaborative forms of authorship.. In the twentieth century this network of circulation had largely changed to the many theatre festivals that were organized around the country — the Prithvi Theatre festival of Mumbai and the Bharat Rangmahotsav organized by the National School of Drama in New Delhi — to name two of the most noteworthy..‘Both English and Hindi continue to share the honour of being two most important target languages of translation — English being the more important when it comes to print, making as it does for national visibility — Hindi outpaces English when it comes to performance and the issue of audience appeal’ (Dalmia, 6–7); and ‘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 in 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’ (Dharwadker, 81). ‘Without a doubt, the main playwrights of the Parsi theatre in its earliest phases were themselves Parsis, and they wrote in Gujarati’ (Somnath Gupt, The Parsi Theatre: Its Origin and Development, translated and edited by Kathryn Hansen (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2005), 41)..It was these characteristics of cosmopolitanism, entrepreneurial capital, and technological advancement that made the absorption/continuation of Parsi theatre into the Bombay film industry possible. Many claim that it also gave Indian film its distinctly musical, melodramatic character.
Dalmia, 95.
Somnath Gupt, 175.
NSD, an SNA wing, readily comes to mind here. I have touched on the NSD ‘language preferences before. The trouble is that NSD ‘curriculum keeps shifting significantly with regard to regional languages. Rather than attempting a longer analysis of this issue it should be enough to point out here that English-language plays were not produced consistently, save by a few elite networks, NSD notwithstanding.
http://sangeetnatak.gov.in/sna/awardeeslist.htm#PlaywritingAssamese, accessedl June 2013.
Dattani moved to Mumbai in 2005 and now concentrates on directing.
For a greater discussion of Sircar and his theatre, refer to Shayoni Mitra, ‘Badal Sircar: Scripting a Movement,’ TDR 48.3 (2004), 59–78.
Mahesh Dattani, Collected Plays (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000), 225.
Dattani, Collected Plays, 221.
Dattani, Collected Plays, 195.
Dattani, Collected Plays, 387.
Kaushalya Santhanam, ‘Images of Oppression,’ The Hindu 11 Apr 2004, http://www.hindu.com/mag/2004/04/ll/stories/2004041100220400.htm, accessed 3 June 2013.
Tamasha was banned by Morarji Desai, then home minister of Maharashtra who would become India ‘Prime Minister from 1977–79, for allegedly having become a corrupting folk form that promoted promiscuity and vulgarity. Social reformer and activist Anna Bhau Sathe (1920–1969), among others, championed Tamasha and highlighted its connection to popular culture by refening to it as loknatya, or people’s theatre.
Muse India 21 (2008), http://www.museindia.com/viewarticle.asp?myr= 2008&issid=21&id=1208, accessed 1 June 2013.
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Mitra, S. (2014). Dispatches from the Margins: Theatre in India since the 1990s. In: Sengupta, A. (eds) Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre. Studies in International Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375148_2
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