Theatres of Independence PDF

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Theatres of
Independence
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Studies in Theatre History and Culture

edited by
Thomas Postlewait
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Theatres of
Independence
Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance
in India since 1947
Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker
university of iowa press, iowa city

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University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242

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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. Theater—India—History—20th century.
2. Theater and society—India—History—20th century.
3. Indic drama—20th century—History and criticism.
I. Title. II. Series.
pn2884.d49 2005
792´.0954´09045—dc22 2005043936
05 06 07 08 09 c 5 4 3 2 1
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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.
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contents
acknowledgments ix
author’s 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” 21
3. Authorship, Textuality, and Multilingualism 54
4. Production and Reception: Directors,
Audiences, and the Mass Media 85
5. Orientalism, Cultural Nationalism, and the
Erasure of the Present 127
part ii
Genres in Context:
Theory, Play, and Performance
6. Myth, Ambivalence, and Evil 165
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viii Genres in Context
7. The Ironic History of the Nation 218

8. Realism and the Edicce of Home 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, 3–17 September 1989 391
2. Major Indian Playwrights and Plays,
1950–2004 392
3. Major Indian Theatre Directors,
1950–2004 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
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acknowledgments
The idea for this book took shape in 1996 and 1997, following a period
during which my postdoctoral work in Restoration and early eighteenth-
century British theatre made way rather unexpectedly for several proj-
ects 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 in-
evitable 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 pos-
sible 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.
ix
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x Acknowledgments
Scholars and writers of my generation from India have typically had

to invent, and often reinvent, themselves and their subjects in the Amer-
ican 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 train-
ing 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 discrimin-
ating criticism that, over two decades, has brought seriousness and com-
plexity to a bedgling celd. My larger debt in this book is to the makers
of contemporary theatre in India—the playwrights, directors, actors,
technical artists, and managers whose stunning collective achievement
makes the decciencies of theory, history, and criticism all the more baf-
bing. 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. Desh-
pande, 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 Rakesh’s posthumous
publications that Anitaji passed on to me have enriched my work, and
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Acknowledgments xi
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 follow-
ing 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 a´liation with
the National School of Drama (New Delhi) during this period. In more
recent years, I have also had helpful exchanges with Sudhanva Desh-
pande 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 Perform-
ing 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 check-
ing 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 con-
siders 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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xii Acknowledgments
series editor of the Iowa Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Tom
was refreshingly undaunted by the peculiarities of a multilingual non-
Western theatre tradition and has been everything an author could wish
for in an editor—meticulous, insightful, generous, and crm. As authors
say, the faults of the book are mine alone, but Tom’s 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 proj-
ect. Carolyn Brown’s superior skills as copyeditor and Charlotte Wright’s
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 insti-
tutional 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 “Histori-
cal Fictions and Postcolonial Representation: Reading Girish Karnad’s
Tughlaq” (110.1 [1995]: 43–58); a portion of chapter 8 appeared in Theatre
Journal as “Diaspora, Nation, and the Failure of Home: Two Contem-
porary Indian Plays” (50.1 [1998]: 71–94); and a portion of chapter 10
appeared in Modern Drama as “John Gay, Bertolt Brecht, and Postcolo-
nial Antinationalisms” (38.1 [1995]: 4–21). 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 “Lis-
tening” (from Eden, 1992), I also thank my friend Emily Grosholz.
It is a special pleasure, cnally, to acknowledge my family. To my par-
ents, 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
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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 immedi-
ate 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 trans-
lation 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 Emily—philosopher, poet,
and mother extraordinary.
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author’s note
It is not possible to date Indian plays of the post-independence period

consistently on the exclusive basis of either publication or crst perform-
ance. Because of the unpredictable conditions that prevail in a largely
noncommercial theatre culture, publication in the original Indian lan-
guage of composition usually precedes the performance of a play, some-
times by several years. Dharamvir Bharati’s 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
Dubey’s direction for Theatre Unit in Bombay. Mohan Rakesh’s 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 Karnad’s Kannada play, Hayavadana (Horse-
Head, 1971), had its crst three productions in Hindi in 1972 and its crst
Kannada production in 1973. In addition, both publication and perform-
ance data about contemporary Indian plays are incomplete and unreli-
able for several reasons. The online catalogue of the Library of Congress
(WorldCat), the leading bibliographic resource for scholars, contains in-
complete listings, even for major contemporary Indian-language play-
wrights 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
xv
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xvi Author’s 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. Indi-
vidually, 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 dićulties 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 sphere—through completion in manuscript, pub-
lication, or performance. In most instances this is the date of crst publi-
cation in the original language of composition, but where warranted by
internal and/or external evidence, I have made exceptions to this prac-
tice. 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. Through-
out 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 trans-
lated 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 cit-
ies oćially 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 Tri-
vandrum became Thiruvananthapuram. In charting the venues of post-
independence Indian theatre (map 1) and in designating the locations of
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Author’s Note xvii
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 nation’s capital
presents a di,erent issue of nomenclature. Delhi is the older name for
the city as well as the oćial name for the contemporary urban complex
as a whole; New Delhi is the modern extension that the British inaugu-
rated 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 metro-
politan 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 Per-
forming Arts, because such a designation is more precise.
Unless otherwise speciced, the English translations of all original pri-
mary and secondary materials from Hindi and Marathi are mine.
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abbreviations
BB Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal

CIT Contemporary Indian Theatre: Interviews with Playwrights and
Directors
CPT Vijay Tendulkar: Collected Plays in Translation
IPTA Indian People’s 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
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Theatres of
Independence
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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 colo-
nial subjection and the beginning of a new revisionary phase in literary
and cultural production, regardless of the actual continuities and dis-
junctions between the past and the present in specicc locations. These
political and aesthetic reorientations have in turn generated new theo-
retical 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” de-
note 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
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2 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 con-
tinues 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 dićulties 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 experimen-
tal 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 institu-
tions 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, contempo-
rary 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 with-
out composing a simultaneous order.
The object of this study is to decne Indian theatre of the post-
independence period as a historically demarcated, linguistically and gen-
erically 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 multi-
dimensional critical object through specicc theoretical and interpretive
procedures. Part 1 of the study, consisting of four chapters, is concerned
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Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre 3
with decning the new dramatic canon that emerged in India after 1947,
the textual and performative conditions and contexts of its develop-
ment, and the complex historical-ideological reasons for its critical mar-
ginality. 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 gen-
erate, 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 con-
texts, theoretical analysis, and literary interpretation. But these multiple
emphases are necessary for bringing fully into focus a major contem-
porary 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 hundred–year history of modern urban theatre in India o,ers
a remarkably extensive view of the interpenetration of two major systems
of theatrical representation—Indian 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 audi-
ence 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 long-
standing theatrical traditions in many indigenous languages. The inbu-
ence of Western textual models produced a body of new “literary” drama
and dramatic theory in several Indian languages, led to large-scale transla-
tions 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 entrepre-
neurial capital in urban proscenium theatres and touring companies,
especially by Bombay’s wealthy Parsi community, created the crst nation-
ally visible popular theatre that reached not only cities and provincial
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towns but some rural areas as well. After 1870, moreover, urban the-
atre assumed a “pivotal political role” and intervened actively in colonial
“contests of power” (Solomon, 323), leading to the Dramatic Perfor-
mances 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 de-
bated and rearticulated the concepts of “indigenous” and “alien,” “intrin-
sic” 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, inter-
nationalism, 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 histori-
cally unprecedented formation in India. For the crst time since the classical
period of Sanskrit drama (ca. a.d. 400–1000), Indian theatrical practice
is framed by fully developed, competing, even polarized theories of dra-
matic representation and reception, and participates equally in the cul-
tures of (print) textuality and performance. It also o,ers a marked contrast
to colonial theatre in virtually every important area of dramatic activ-
ity—authorship, canon formation, the circulation of plays, production,
reception, performer training, patronage, and the forms of institutional-
material 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 reli-
gious, secular, and folk performance in the countryside, and also with
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 5
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 ori-
ginal 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 fea-
tures 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 subcontinent—with
respect to both its colonial origins and its position in contemporary
world theatre—is 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 ideo-
logical imperatives of decolonization have functioned in various ways
to obscure the transformative e,ects of the event of political indepen-
dence 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 Benegal’s A Panorama of
Theatre in India (1967), Adya Rangacharya’s The Indian Theatre (1971), and
Nemichandra Jain’s 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. Stud-
ies such as Perspectives on Indian Drama in English, edited by M. K. Naik
and Shankar Mokashi-Punekar (1977), Kironmoy Raha’s Bengali Theatre
(1978; 2d ed., 1993), and Anand Patil’s 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
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 6
languages and do not distinguish clearly between the colonial and post-
colonial periods unless there is a specicc need for chronological de-
limitation. Arguably the most reductive form of contemporary theatre
criticism in India, this approach informs such otherwise diverse publi-
cations 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 Bharucha’s Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater
of Bengal (1983), Eugène van Erven’s The Playful Revolution (1992), and Jacob
Srampickal’s Voice to the Voiceless: The Power of People’s 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 connec-
tions. No existing work of interpretive criticism o,ers a coherent account
of theory, polemic, and practice in postcolonial Indian theatre that is com-
mensurate with this theatre’s generic, linguistic, and ideological diversity.
There are other, more radical forms of ideological erasure. The tradi-
tionalist Indian critique of Westernized modernity has called for a re-
jection 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 cul-
tural 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.
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 7
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 Jones’s
translation of Kalidasa’s 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 Lévi’s
claim around 1892 that “the Sanskrit theatre is the Indian theatre par
excellence” (3) and A. B. Keith’s 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 vari-
ous 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 dom-
inated by anthropological and intercultural perspectives, evident in such
works as Richard Schechner’s Performative Circumstances from the Avant
Garde to Ramlila (1983) and Between Theater and Anthropology (1985), Peter
Brook’s Mahabharata (1987), and Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese’s
Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology (1991). This remarkable concentration of
interest in India is marked by a radical disengagement from modern cul-
tural forms and narratives. Barba’s 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 tradi-
tional Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Other signiccant
works on Indian theatrical modes have come from American scholars out-
side modern literary studies, such as Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kali-
dasa (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 Haw-
ley, 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
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 8
Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilli—seeks to communicate “the complexi-

ties 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 classi-
cal and modern theatre respectively, the intervening sections abandon
chronology for a synchronic description of “the vast spectrum of per-
formance genres in India”—the ritual, devotional, folk-popular, and bal-
letic forms that rebect the country’s “linguistic, cultural, and religious
diversity” (8). Another inbuential resource, The Cambridge Guide to Asian
Theatre, edited by James R. Brandon (1993), reduces Indian theatre sim-
ply to an alphabetical catalogue of such “forms,” erasing two centuries
of modern urban production altogether. Ralph Yarrow’s 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 pre-
occupation with Indian theatre. Notwithstanding Yarrow’s imaginative
synthesis of intercultural and critical perspectives, the great bulk of
Euro-American criticism and commentary is still concerned with relat-
ing theatricality and performance in India to the social and spiritual life
of a given community; it ignores urban theatre that cannot be assimi-
lated to other social and religious forms, that depends on printed texts
carefully scripted as drama, and that exists as a modern material and cul-
tural 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 the-
atre invisible, because postcolonial discourses foreground the critique
of orientalism and concern themselves with cultural margins. Postcolo-
nial 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. Post-
colonial 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 schol-
arship therefore fails to o,er an adequately theorized methodology for
dealing with multilingual postcolonial writing, the activity of extensive
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 9
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 marginal-
ization 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 per-
formance 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” (8–9). 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 Tomp-
kins’s study practices its own strategies of exclusion. First, the authors
decne postcolonialism as “not a naive teleological sequence which super-
sedes colonialism, . . . [but] an engagement with and contestation of
colonialism’s 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 lan-
guage of most of the texts discussed in their book (4–5). 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 consi-
der. Two later collections edited by Gilbert, (Post) Colonial Stages: Creative
and Critical Views on Drama, Theatre, and Performance (1999) and Post-
colonial Plays: An Anthology (2001), create more nuanced views of the celd
by including material on or from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singa-
pore in addition to Australia, Canada, Africa, and the Caribbean. But her
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 10
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 Banceld’s 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, respec-
tively, 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 com-
mon to all the dramatists considered here,” they argue, “is that of cul-
tural subjection or subordination. . . . Central to their experience of
life—and thus to their art—is 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 him-
self circumvents the issue of cultural subordination and tacitly acknowl-
edges the limits of his decnition.
The most exclusive language-based perspective appears in Bruce King’s
Post-Colonial English Drama (1992), a collection of essays that places pre-
dominantly white anglophone settler colonies, such as Australia, Canada,
and New Zealand, beside non-Western postcolonial cultures with long-
standing 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 tradi-
tions. 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 multi-
vocal theatrical tradition in which the status of English varies accord-
ing to its role in the process of composition. Karen Smith begins her
essay on Indian drama in King’s collection by alluding to the frequency
with which Indian critics dismiss original drama in English as a “lost
cause.” Where India is concerned, King’s narrow decnition of “English
drama” excludes from consideration the most signiccant Indian dra-
matic texts, directorial initiatives, and theatrical innovations of the past
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 11
forty years. In other words, while postcolonial studies is in a unique posi-

tion 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
marginalization—by 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 colo-
nization” 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 colo-
nial 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, adapta-
tion, and intercultural appropriation, contemporary Indian theatre also
maintains an extensive intertextuality with classical and modern Euro-
pean and Anglo-American drama. This multifaceted engagement with
the West coexists with a complicated relation to the classical, post-
classical, and colonial Indian past, both as a cultural possession and an
object of knowledge. Indian playwrights deal with this multivalent cul-
tural legacy by adjudicating between the conbicting claims of tradition
and modernity, Indianness and Westernization, but their use of two major
forms of retrospective narrative—myth and history—also questions re-
ceived 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 priv-
ileged status that particular social groups and communities had acquired
under colonialism. A broader perspective also reveals that the vast major-
ity 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
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 12
the oppositional energy in contemporary theatre, in any case, is not

directed against the colonial experience but against the oppressive struc-
tures 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 mul-
tilingual 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 medi-
ums of postcolonial writing. In The Empire Writes Back (1989), a seminal
critical text in the celd, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Gri´ths, and Helen Tiń
recognize that in India, “where the bulk of literature is written in in-
digenous 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 power-
ful 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 lan-
guage, or even the evolving and distinguishing local [E]nglish of a mono-
lingual society trying to establish its links with place” (39; my emphasis).
In short, The Empire Writes Back is concerned primarily with the relation-
ship of the periphery to the metropolitan center through the medium
of English, and foregrounds those forms of textuality that are opposi-
tional 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 recog-
nition 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 Eurocen-
tric model, in which “the empire writes back” in the language of the col-
onizer, although in a subversive and appropriative form of that language.
Indian playwrights engage with a plurality of languages through original
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 13
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 indepen-
dence marks the beginning of a highly self-conscious, self-rebexive period
in Indian theatre during which most practitioners are engaged in creat-
ing 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 multi-
plicity of theatre languages, the context of their work also includes sig-
niccant 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, direc-
tors, 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 strik-
ing 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 contem-
poraries. 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 moments—the inception of a theatre association in 1943, an all-
India conference in 1956, and a multilingual drama festival in 1989—that
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
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 14
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 “signic-
cant” 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 author-
ship, 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 ven-
ues, and theatre’s relation to the mass-cultural and popular media. Chap-
ter 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 perform-
ance. Chapters 6 and 7 present interrelated arguments about postinde-
pendence works that employ two complementary kinds of narratives
about the past—myth and history—as 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 epi-
sodes in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata as allegories of the emergent
Indian nation—Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha yug (Blind Epoch, 1954), K. N.
Panikkar’s Urubhangam (The Shattered Thigh, 1987), and Ratan Thiyam’s
Chakravyuha (Battle Formation, 1984). Chapter 7 shifts the focus from
myth to history, the hegemonic discourse par excellence of poststructural-
ist and postcolonial theory, and considers historical cctions that serve as
alternative sources of historical knowledge for audiences ideologically
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 15
resistant to the dominant narratives of oćial and/or institutionalized

history. The plays I discuss in this chapter—Mohan Rakesh’s Ashadh ka ek
din (A Day in Early Autumn, 1958), Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq (1964), and
Badal Sircar’s 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 intol-
erable 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 con-
temporary 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 Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan (The Gift of a Daughter, 1983), Mahesh
Elkunchwar’s Wada chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion, 1985), and Cyrus Mis-
try’s 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, unsustain-
able 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, includ-
ing a rejection of the proscenium stage. In terms of form, plays such as
Karnad’s Hayavadana (Horse Head, 1971), Chandrashekhar Kambar’s Joku-
maraswami (1972), and Habib Tanvir’s 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 anti-
modernity 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 meth-
ods 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 paradig-
matic postcolonial practice that dismantles the hegemonic colonial text
by a process of substitution and reconstructs it as the subaltern post-
colonial text. Through a discussion of the various uses of translation,
transculturation, and intertextuality in Indian theatre, I argue for a more
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 16
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. Deshpande’s 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 his-
torical 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 2–5 are concerned with the conditions of writing, production,
and reception for post-independence urban plays in India; the mecha-
nisms 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 continu-
ous presence in urban production at not only a regional but a national
level since their crst appearance. The emphasis in chapters 6–10, how-
ever, is on the coincidence of literary, cultural, and theatrical e,ect—the
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 institu-
tional “histories” of theatre are appropriate in contexts in which drama’s
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 inter-
pretation 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 his-
tory, class and gender, home and family, and center and periphery, while
also attending to the performance practices that have successfully com-
municated this thematic density to national audiences over cve decades.
The signiccant “culture of theatre” in contemporary India is an amal-
gam of these elements: recovering the literary does not marginalize the
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 17
theatrical—and vice versa—and 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 per-
formance, associated with dramatic authorship, publication, and trans-
lation 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 clas-
sical, traditional, religious, folk, intermediary, and popular genres of per-
formance 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 legiti-
macy 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 present-
day 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 origi-
nally 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 par-
ticular interest to me. I have made no conscious e,ort either to privilege
01chap1.qxd 7/6/2005 8:12 AM Page 18
some languages over others, or—at the other extreme—to 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” invari-
ably acknowledge that a single or complete view of the subject is im-
possible, 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 Bharucha’s 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 Chat-
topadhyay, Indira Parthasarathy, Tooppil Bhaasi, and Mahesh Dattani
await interpretation commensurate with the quality of their work—a
challenge that Indian theatre studies would do well to take up in the not
too distant future.
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 19
pa r t i
#
The Field of
Indian Theatre after
Independence
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 20
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 21
chapter 2
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 subconti-
nent, and, like the literature (cction, poetry, and noncction) produced
over the same period, it constitutes a “new national” tradition. This con-
junction between the nation and its cultural forms, intrinsic to modern
Euro-American models of nationhood and literature, appears with pro-
portional rapidity as well as intensity under the conditions of colonialism
and postcolonialism. As the desired end of anticolonial nationalist move-
ments 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 post-
colonial nations as the “new centres of consciousness” in late twentieth-
century 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 polit-
ical 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 sim-
ply be subsumed by the teleology of nationhood, but which neverthe-
less crucially reinforce the idea of “India” as an integral cultural space. As
Sheldon Pollock has argued, the literatures of South Asia are “unrivaled
21
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 22
22 The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence
in the resources they o,er for understanding the development of ex-

pressive 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 the-
atre” and a contemporary “national tradition” as inherently unsustain-
able 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 the-
atrical 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
Sunïl 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 inconclu-
siveness of these positions acquires yet another dimension in Rustom
Bharucha’s comment that “perhaps, the problem is not whether the
Indian theatre is sućiently ‘Indian’ but whether it is true to the com-
plex 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 23
The Formation of a New “National Canon” 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 aggre-
gate 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 model—in which theatre becomes an expression of national-
ist ideology and progressive democratization, acquiring its “national”
features through association with a national language, a metropolitan
venue, and a carefully selected repertoire—cannot 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. Desh-
pande 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,” 94–95).
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 tradi-
tions 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 plural-
ity of linguistic (in this case theatrical) expressions. For that reason the ter-
minology of “regional” is misleading when it comes to cultural production.
Each mode is uniquely important; each mode is uniquely Indian. In that
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 24
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 the-
atre is not possible because the provincial theatre has become impos-
sible,” and the regeneration of provincial theatre is a precondition for
the emergence of a national theatre (“National Theatre” 7). The nation-
ality 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 dićulties, 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 pre-
scriptive and coercive. Indian theatre is qualitatively di,erent from, and
inherently more complex than, most contemporary (and largely mono-
lingual) national traditions, but the conceptual problems it poses ought
not to fallaciously imply the impossibility of critical formulations alto-
gether. The idea of the multiple “literatures of India” or “Indian litera-
tures”—crst developed by scholars in the 1970s and reformulated bril-
liantly by Pollock and others three decades later as the reconstruction
of “literary cultures in history”—o,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 predom-
inantly 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 intra-
nationally 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 re-
newed 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 post-
independence urban theatrical “canon” as a determinable aggregation
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 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 inter-
linked 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 organiza-
tions as the Indian People’s Theatre Association, the Indian National
Theatre, and the Bharatiya Natya Sangh (Indian Theatre Guild). The sec-
ond 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 theatre’s 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 move-
ment 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 People’s
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 Sep-
tember 1989. Launched in 1942–43 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 Asso-
ciation 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 26
posed the crst concerted challenge to “the ‘cheap commercial glamour,’

‘pseudo-aesthetic posturing,’ and ‘sobstu, ’ of the contemporary the-
ater” (Bharucha, Rehearsals, 40), and developed the crst serious program
for “revitalizing the stage and the traditional arts” as important vehicles
for the “people’s” 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, Pun-
jab, 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 1942–52,
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 rap-
idly because of a number of internal and external problems and was for-
mally 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 country’s
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 manqué P. V. Raja-
mannar. 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 the-
atre traditions in the fourteen major modern Indian languages (excluding
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 27
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; children’s theatre and
operatic theatre; actor training, theatre architecture, and play produc-
tion; 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 Akademi’s
quarterly journal, Sangeet Natak, in 2004 (vol. 38, nos. 2–4) but the volume
never appeared in its totality as an oćial Akademi publication.
Thirty-three years later, in September 1989 the Sangeet Natak Akademi
organized a two-week “festival of contemporary theatre” to commemo-
rate the birth centenary of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru—the crst prime
minister of independent India (1947–64), a legendary theatre enthusiast
and, as the “architect of modern India,” a ctting symbol for the celebra-
tion of modernity and contemporaneity in theatre. In cfteen consecu-
tive performances beginning on 3 September 1989, the Nehru Shatabdi
Natya Samaroh presented the work of twenty-six contemporary practi-
tioners: cfteen directors, four of whom were also authors of the plays they
presented, and eleven other playwrights, including the Sanskrit drama-
tist Bhasa (ca. a.d. 275–335), in revival. During the two weeks of perform-
ances, 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 Contempo-
rary 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 func-
tion. 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 redecni-
tion of theatre in relation to “the people”; the 1956 seminar revisits both
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 28
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 loca-
tions that description constantly runs the risk of collapsing into meaning-
less 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 prac-
tice. 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 1950–2004 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 (1838–94)
as “the encounter of a patriotic consciousness with the framework of
knowledge imposed upon it by colonialism. It leads inevitably to an elit-
ism 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
dićulty 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 contradic-
tion on nineteenth-century Bengali theatre, Sudipto Chatterjee points
out that the success of Dinbandhu Mitra’s play Nil-darpan (1859) ini-
tially created an interest in social protest plays about the oppression of
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 29
agricultural labor and the countryside. But after the colonial govern-
ment 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 IPTA’s “nationalism” appears most starkly
in its unqualiced rejection of nineteenth-century theatre and the culture
that sustained it. In a speech delivered at the organization’s 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 con-
ventionality 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 express-
ing 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 30
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 twentieth-
century 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 people’s
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 India’s “rich cultural heritage” and
“traditional arts.” From an ideological standpoint, it found that tradi-
tional, 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 location—in 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 IPTA’s 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 con-
ditions 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 IPTA’s 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 inter-
pretive relationship with the audience, the IPTA organizers constantly
experimented with an amalgamation of theatre forms, both indigenous
and Western” (219). The movement’s crst and most enduring success,
Bijon Bhattacharya’s 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 31
the “people’s theatre,” encompassing numerous full-length, compara-

tively 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 Jafri’s
Yeh kis ka khoon hai (Whose Blood Is This, 1942), Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s
Zubeida (1944) and Main kaun hoon? (Who Am I?, 1947), and Prithviraj
Kapoor’s 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 Bhaasi’s Ninga-
lenne communistaki (You Made Me a Communist, Malayalam, 1952) and
T. K. Sharmalkar’s Dhani (Land, 1942), both of which addressed the prob-
lem of landlordism; and Sharmalkar’s Dada (Brother, Hindi, 1942), which
dealt with the exploitation of millworkers. Juxtaposed against these forms
were topical plays with urgent political messages: Benoy Roy’s Main
bhookha hoon (I Am Hungry, Hindi, 1943) and Ritwik Ghatak’s Dalil (Argu-
ment, 1952), which dealt, respectively, with the Bengal famine and the
problem of refugees after Partition, received large outdoor performances,
while Panu Pal’s Chargesheet (1949), which protested the imprisonment of
Communist Party leaders in 1948–49, was written overnight as a street-
corner play. Among plays with an “international” focus, antifascist vehi-
cles, such as Sergei Tretyakov’s 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 Mitra’s experimental adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of
the People (1949–52) and Mulk Raj Anand’s version of Cli,ord Odets’s
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 IPTA’s 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 symboli-
cally for theatre in India. The signiccant tradition of postcolonial Indian
drama begins with Nabanna—as 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,
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 32
and protest theatre in India, Sudhanva Deshpande acknowledges that

“the radical legacy of IPTA—its emphasis on theatre for the people;
its e,orts to revitalize wherever possible the ‘traditional arts’; its e,orts
to build a people’s theatre movement under the political guidance, at
least initially, of the (then undivided) Communist Party—this 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 organization’s 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 movement—Baldoon Dhingra’s
A National Theatre for India (1944) and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s
Towards a National Theatre (1945).
Kamaladevi’s self-positioning arises from her role as an important for-
mulator of cultural policy who was brieby associated with the IPTA but
became the founding president of two rival organizations—the 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 Chi-
nese 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 coun-
try,” 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 alle-
giance 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 1944–45: 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 pro-
cess of self-decnition that accompanies new nationhood, national con-
sciousness 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 human-
ity,” in part by pursuing beauty and the imagination rather than prob-
lematic 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
Bhattacharya’s Nabanna, directed by Kumar Roy for Bohurupee (Calcutta),
Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival, New Delhi, 1989. Courtesy of Sangeet
Natak Akademi, New Delhi.
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 34
Translated on the eve of independence into a program for theatre,

these universalist and homogenizing arguments produce a series of im-
peratives predicated on theatre’s vital role as a source of spiritual nour-
ishment and cultural enlightenment. Both Chattopadhyay and Dhingra
want cultural activity in general, and theatre in particular, to be recog-
nized 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 gov-
ernment, 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 re-
jects traditional Indian genres as outdated models and considers realism
a mode incompatible with the “Indian genius.” Finally, both commenta-
tors 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 all-
embracing 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 mid-
twentieth 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 theory—between a precise historical positioning in rela-
tion to colonialism, fascism, and immediate socioeconomic and political
problems (such as the devastating Bengal famine of 1942–43) and a sen-
timental universalism that lacks a concrete understanding of the his-
torical 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 35
unproblematic. In her conception, “the people,” whose aspirations the

national theatre must fulcll, encompass all of the nation’s citizens uni-
formly. 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 the-
atre 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 wide-
spread 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 intel-
lectuals 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 “people’s 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, Mitra’s 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 preconcep-
tion 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 possi-

bilities 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 experi-
ment 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 tra-
dition and technique. (Annual Report, 5)
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 36
As an admission of failure, this statement may be adequate; as the pro-

gram for a new theatre, it is conceptually confused and superccial. De
Silva wants to envision “a new Indian theatre, a National Art” but can-
not 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 IPTA’s 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 indepen-
dence altered the terms of the nationalist movement. In 1947, the party
found itself in a state of ideological and organizational crisis. A radically

new situation—where the common imperialist enemy had left the scene
and the recently empowered bourgeois leadership engaged itself in crush-
ing 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 1945–46 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 gov-
ernment 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 retro-
spect 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.
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 37
1956: The “Clean Slate” of Theatre

With the reoriented cultural politics of the crst decade of independence
as a backdrop, the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s 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 commenta-
tors as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Baldoon Dhingra. It recognized
the need not only to dissociate theatre from a specicc political pro-
gram 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 meticu-
lously detailed agenda, it is also the crst sustained exercise in historical
self-positioning—an early postcolonial rebection on the singular prob-
lematic of a multilingual theatrical tradition that had classical and pre-
modern 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, extrin-
sic, 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 post-
independence canon without being able to anticipate either its scale or
its quality. This prescience is all the more remarkable because only three
of the participants–Adya Rangacharya, Shombhu Mitra, and Ebrahim
Alkazi—went 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 subse-
quent theatre theory, practice, or scholarship.
The seminar’s boldest “space-clearing gesture” is a systematic repudia-
tion of the forms, conventions, and institutions of Westernized modernity
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 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 politiciza-
tion of theatre in the decade of independence by the Indian People’s
Theatre Association. Some of the seminar’s most vocal and inbuential
spokesmen—such as the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, the actor Balraj Sahni,
and the writer-critic Prabhakar Machwe—argue that colonial and late-
colonial 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 de-
scribes 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 per-
ception that they were imperialist impositions, destructive of the indige-
nous 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 nat-
uralism 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”
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 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 spec-
tators 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 the-
atres in the cities also created a division between urban and rural audi-
ences 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 politi-
cal 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 enter-
prise based on a historically new relation between theatre, popular cul-
ture, 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 com-
mercial entertainment economy characterized by corporate ownership
of theatrical companies, which arose in tandem with the city’s rapid pop-
ulation 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
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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). Sec-
ond, serious colonial-era dramatists, such as Bharatendu Harishchandra,
Rabindranath Tagore, and Jaishankar Prasad, became largely closet play-
wrights 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 indige-
nous . . . drama or the European contemporary theatre” (344). Only
Narain Kale argues optimistically that the death of the Parsi “commer-
cial superstructure” might actually allow the “true spirit of the theatre”
to assert itself in regions, such as Bombay, that were already rich in the-
atrical 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 “oćial” 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 presi-
dent 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 sev-
eral months in prison during the Indian government’s anticommunist
o,ensive of 1950–51. 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 41
base by reviving some forms of folk drama, but he argues (like Kamal-
adevi) 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 Odets’s 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 a´liation. 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 IPTA’s 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. How-
ever, 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 left-
oriented 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 indepen-
dence, 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 Indian-
English cction, predicts that “the theatre will . . . have to speak the lan-
guages 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 42
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 try-
ing to bridge the gap between the two constituencies, he pragmatically
acknowledges the permanence of the separation in an urbanizing, devel-
oping society but does not specify what kinds of theatre would be appro-
priate 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 rep-
resentative position when he argues that the new national theatre “must
make the maximum use of indigenous material from our national her-
itage, 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 seminar’s formal recommenda-
tions also isolate folk theatre as the genre most in need of preserva-
tion, 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). Anand’s 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 im-
portant 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 imagi-
nation is the centre of Indian tradition, we don’t 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, pass-
ing 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. (352–53)
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 43
In relation to dramatic form, the key term for a future theatre is there-
fore “synthesis”—the middle ground between mere revivalism and imi-
tative 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 re-
spective 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 the-
atres 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 com-
mitment to the art. The term was, in fact, a misnomer for a type of the-
atre 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 Mitra’s group
Bohurupee in Calcutta (founded in 1949) and Ebrahim Alkazi’s 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 the-
atre” and somehow manage to balance the pressures of earning a live-
lihood 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 the-
atre 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 44
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 estab-
lishment 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 the-
atre” of the past, India now needs to develop the “profession of theatre.”
Beyond this polemic that debates the (un)suitability of colonial the-
atre 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 1953–58, urge the Indian gov-
ernment to repeal immediately the colonial instrument of censorship, the
Dramatic Performances Act of 1876, to exempt theatre from the enter-
tainment tax, to establish a central institute for comprehensive training
in theatre, and to allocate funds at the national level in the second cve-
year plan to construct new theatres and assist struggling professional and
amateur companies. The proposals for the Akademi itself include a pub-
lishing program of books, bulletins, and translations of well-known stage-
able plays; regular training camps and theatre festivals; and regional and
national competitions involving minimal oćial supervision. In addition
to folk theatre, children’s 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 publi-
cation, preservation, and patronage, especially in relation to the “tradi-
tional” 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 seminar’s anticolonial polemic can cnally be assessed
only in relation to the celd of post-independence theatre as it has actu-
ally developed over half a century—the subject of the remainder of this
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 45
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 re-
gional 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 comprehen-
sive scale in the present. Finally, as the metaphor of the clean slate in-
dicates, 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 San-
geet Natak Akademi’s companion volume to the Nehru Festival, Girish
Karnad (Kannada playwright and Akademi chair) and Rajinder Paul (edi-
tor 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 canon-
icity, 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 festival’s aim, instead, is to present
for today’s 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 46
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 today’s viewers as
they did their original audiences? (7)
These are remarkable questions to pose about plays that, with the ex-
ception of Bhasa’s Urubhangam (Sanskrit, ca. early fourth century), were
written between 1943 (Bijon Bhattacharya’s Nabanna) and 1985 (Mahesh
Elkunchwar’s Wada chirebandi). Presented through the juxtaposition of
earlier/later and old/new texts and meanings, the processes of canon for-
mation appear both accelerated and compressed in this account. Within
three decades, there has evidently appeared in post-independence the-
atre 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 contempo-
rary 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 func-
tion. As a “retrospective” of post-independence theatre, it signals the emer-
gence 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
“signiccance”—the recognition of a play as a valuable text and perform-
ance vehicle—it 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 semi-
nar? The inclusion of Nabanna in the Nehru Festival program is an
acknowledgement not only of the play’s 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 47
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 long-
lasting theatre groups after their departure from the IPTA, and their
unquestionable signiccance to the post-independence tradition vindi-
cates 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 rela-
tion 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 perform-
ances in India’s 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 Hindi—Mohit Chattopadhyay’s Guinea Pig
(cg. 2) and Adya Rangacharya’s 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
Hindi—a 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 Sir-
car, 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 cen-
trality of language to the politics of inclusion and exclusion in Indian
theatre: Sanskrit enters the map of “contemporary theatre” because of
K. N. Panikkar’s landmark revivals of Bhasa’s plays, but English, which
is a language of both original composition and translation in contempo-
rary Indian theatre, has no representation on the festival program in
either role.
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 48
In terms of form and content, the cfteen plays are suggestively hetero-
geneous. Bhasa’s Urubhangam (The Shattered Thigh, Sanskrit), Bharati’s
Andha yug (Blind Epoch, Hindi), and Thiyam’s Chakravyuha (Battle For-
mation, Manipuri) are based on the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabha-
rata. Kambar’s Jokumaraswami (Kannada), Karnad’s Hayavadana (Horse
Head, Kannada), Tendulkar’s Ghashiram kotwal (Constable Ghashiram,
Marathi), and Tanvir’s Agra bazar (Urdu) draw on premodern folk or his-
torical narratives, and employ indigenous, antirealistic styles of presen-
tation incorporating music and dance. Bhattacharya’s Nabanna (Bengali),
Dutt’s Kallol (Ocean Song, Bengali), Chattopadhyay’s Guinea Pig (Ben-
gali), and Deshpande’s Uddhwasta dharmashala (The Ruined Sanctuary,
Marathi) are political plays with contemporary settings, cast variously
in the expressionist, realist, and allegorical modes. Rangacharya’s 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 Chattopadhyay’s Rajrakto, directed by
Rajinder Nath for Abhiyan (New Delhi), Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival,
New Delhi, 1989. Courtesy of Rajinder Nath.
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 49
plays—Rakesh’s Adhe adhure (The Uncnished, Hindi), Rye’s Kumarni

agashi (Kumar’s Terrace, Gujarati), and Elkunchwar’s Wada 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 land-
owning 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 sociopo-
litical 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 in-
ventive 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 vari-
ety evident in the Nehru Festival performances reproduces quite accu-
rately 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 gender—with the solitary exception of the Marathi
director-actress Vijaya Mehta, all the practitioners are male. This appar-
ent 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 practition-
ers combine the activities of playwriting, translation, and directing in
much the same way as leading cgures in other postcolonial locations have
done—for 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/direc-
tor and a theatre group that is integral to his/her diverse practice. The
other directors on the Nehru Festival program are not playwrights (though
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 50
some, like Kumar Roy, Shyamanand Jalan, Shreeram Lagoo, and Vijaya
Mehta, are celebrated actors), but they stand in the same singularly in-
buential relation to their respective theatre groups as the author-directors
mentioned earlier. Furthermore, with the possible exception of Dutt’s
People’s Little Theatre and Tanvir’s 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 locations—Heggodu 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 Tanvir’s Naya Theatre actually employs nonurban
performers from the tribal Chhattisgarh area (formerly a part of Madhya
Pradesh, but now an independent state). Notwithstanding the experi-
ments 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 cross-
sectional 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 interpretations-
in-performance, and the roles of playwright and director are often fused
in a single person. Because no existing work of criticism, Indian or West-
ern, 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 institu-
tions constitutive of post-independence drama and theatre in appendixes
2 and 3. Appendix 2, dealing with major playwrights of the 1950–2004
period, excludes two of the Nehru Festival authors (Adya Rangacharya
and Madhu Rye) and adds three others (Badal Sircar, Satish Alekar, and
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 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 1989—the last two events
organized by India’s National Academy of the Performing Arts—reveals
a gap between idea and actuality that was inevitable in a theatrical culture
so decisively disrupted by the movement from colonialism to postcolo-
nialism, 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 theatre’s multiple and intersecting lines of develop-
ment 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 in-
dividual 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 theo-
rists, authors, and theatre professionals, especially when they combine
the roles of author and director, as is the case with the majority of play-
wrights 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 were—or were meant to be—
published. The di,erential relations to the media of print and perform-
ance are a major aspect of the existence of plays and performance
texts, and the connection is especially important in the case of a play-
wright 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 52
practice. Some directors—for instance, Shombhu Mitra, Arvind Desh-

pande, and K. V. Subbanna—maintain 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
a´liations (and consequent patronage) of Alkazi, Karanth, and Vijaya
Mehta also distinguish them from largely self-supporting professionals,
like Satyadev Dubey and Jabbar Patel—a di,erence that is crucial in a sit-
uation where the absence of commercialized production makes the sur-
vival and transregional mobility of theatre disproportionately dependent
on various forms of state, private, and corporate sponsorship. A director’s
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 nondirect-
ing 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 direc-
tors 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 produc-
tion 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 audi-
ence 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
02chap2.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 53
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 there-
fore materially di,erent from those of theatre. The decnition of post-
independence 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.
03chap3.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 54
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 for-
mally 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 theo-
rist of drama, of drama into a serious literary form in print as well as per-
formance, 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, lan-
guages, locations, and sociopolitical intentions that constitute the hetero-
geneous 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 mech-
anisms of translation and intertextual appropriation; the formation of
audiences; and the careful self-positioning of theatre professionals in rela-
tion to popular and mass-cultural media. Although contemporary Indian
practitioners thus hold wide-ranging and often antithetical positions on lit-
erary, 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.
54
03chap3.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 55
Authorship, Textuality, and Multilingualism 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 dur-
ing the nineteenth century, but throughout the colonial period authors
who practiced the print genres concerned with private experience and
serious public discourse—poetry, short and long cction, noncctional
prose, social commentary, cultural philosophy, and nationalist political
theory—were clearly distinguished from those who practiced the perfor-
mative, 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, cross-
cultural, and interdisciplinary enterprise, in which Europeans and Indians
worked independently and together in response to the ‘new set of intel-
lectual, 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 playwright’s
primary persona was not that of author but impresario: Girish Chandra
Ghosh and Sisir Kumar Bhaduri were actor-managers in the British tra-
dition of David Garrick and Henry Irving, while Amanat, Betab, and
Kashmiri were playwright-directors attached to specicc Parsi theatre com-
panies. Colonial theatre was also intrinsically inhospitable to language-
centered literary drama because of its heavy reliance on the nonverbal
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semiotics of dance, music, and spectacle. Narain Kale’s “complaint” dur-

ing the 1956 drama seminar underscores both the popularity of that the-
atre experience and the distaste it aroused in proponents of serious drama
after independence. Kale observes that in the colonial professional the-
atre “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 pri-
macy in colonial theatre, even though the “text” of this theatre engaged
seriously with the Indian and Western canons, mainly through transla-
tions 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 Mitra’s
Nil-darpan (1861), the antigovernment plays that precipitated the Dra-
matic Performances Act of 1876, or D. L. Roy’s Siraj-ud-daula (1905) and
Khadilkar’s Kichaka vadha (1910).1
At the other extreme from this pervasive culture of commercial per-
formance, such poet-playwrights as Bharatendu Harishchandra, Rabin-
dranath 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 over-
all 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 Prasad’s vision: “Such was the e,ect
of the recned but simple language, thematic gravity, and literary perfec-
tion of Prasadji’s plays that the very consciousness of the relationship
between drama and the stage disappeared [from discourse about the
theatre]” (Sahitya, 88–89). Similarly, Vasudha Dalmia Luderitz notes that
in both theory and practice Harishchandra recognized the theatre’s 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, India’s crst and only Nobel laure-
ate 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 Tagore’s crst play, Valmiki-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 the-
atre, 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 commer-
cial productions in Calcutta at the Star Theatre and Sisir Kumar Bhaduri’s
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 Tagore’s plays “admittedly . . . never quite established
themselves in the repertoire of Bengali professional theatre” (9). Tagore’s
unparalleled literary reputation, prolicc playwriting, and deep personal
investment (material as well as artistic) in the staging of his work thus cre-
ated 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 pur-
pose 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,
it’s acting’s loss—it makes no di,erence to me.” (Tagore, 95)
Tagore’s 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 ex-
perience is the identiccation of drama as poetry and the dismissal of
viewers in favor of readers. Notwithstanding Tagore’s active dramatic
career, colonial Indian theatre (like nineteenth-century British commer-
cial 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 principle—though not in practice—from 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-as-
text 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 performance-
rather 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, lan-
guage, 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 signic-
cant 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 textual-
ity” and a consequent interest in the deconstructive resources of per-
formance (4–5). 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 poli-
cymakers 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 rep-
resentation, and signiccant performance histories in turn reinforce the
plays’ canonicity as texts. In fact, the interdependence of drama and the-
atre goes much further: the text-performance opposition itself becomes
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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 poten-
tially 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 excep-
tion, 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, accord-
ing 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. We’re
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 Dubey’s landmark 1962 production for Bombay’s
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 dićulty of maintaining one’s self-
hood as a writer the central problem of a literary existence (Sahitya,
40, 9). In drama, according to Rakesh, the author is “represented” by a
text—published or unpublished—that 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 re-
gard 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 perform-
ers (Sahitya, 74). Less anxious about drama’s dual modes of existence,
Elkunchwar good-naturedly accepts the descriptions of him as a “tradi-
tionalist,” a “tediously wordy playwright,” and a “‘litterateur’ in the the-
atre, . . . 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,” 7–8).
Even a political playwright like G. P. Deshpande, creator of the “play
of ideas” in Marathi (and in Indian theatre at large), insists that post-
colonial Indian theatre has to be a “language theatre,” and the supremacy
of the word in this art form could perhaps help to arrest the precipi-
tous 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 nar-
ratives at large. Bharati was a poet, novelist, and essayist, and for three
decades (1960–89) an enormously inbuential editor of the leading mass-
circulation Hindi literary weekly, Dharmayug. Chattopadhyay crst estab-
lished himself as a poet in Calcutta in the late 1950s and began writing
plays around 1963. G. P. Deshpande describes himself as “an unsuc-
cessful novelist who became a playwright” (CIT, 103); he is also one of
India’s 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, India’s highest literary prize,
he has concrmed his position as a major contemporary Indian writer,
regardless of genre—a distinction he shares with Bharati and Rakesh. All
these playwrights engage with the processes of performance and pro-
duction exclusively in connection with their own work and yet have par-
ticipated 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. Tendulkar’s
early plays, for instance, were written and performed in close collabo-
ration 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 Tendulkar’s plays received their crst major productions at Awishkar,
and in 1992 the group mounted the largest revival of the playwright’s
work—twenty plays with an equal number of directors—as part of its
cfth annual Arvind Deshpande Memorial Theatre Festival. In addition,
Tendulkar has been the leading screenplay writer in India’s Middle Cin-
ema 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 Pune’s The-
atre 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 criti-
cism and supervises several annual productions. Kambar is a poet, novel-
ist, 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, includ-
ing 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 domi-
nant. “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 emphat-
ically that “a play is an integral part of a performing art and not literature.
Unless you learn the techniques of enactment—and 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 play-
wright 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 par-
adise—the village of Shivapura—which 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 suc-
cess in performance. In practice, such plays as Rakesh’s Ashadh ka ek din
and Karnad’s 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 atten-
tion 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, re-
peats 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 exten-
sive critical attention in their respective languages, all these playwrights
have also entered the national critical and journalistic media and class-
rooms 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, direc-
tors, and founder-managers of their own experimental theatre groups.
This polydexterity allows a degree of autonomy, self-sućiency, and per-
formative control that leads to the identiccation of each of these practi-
tioners 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 People’s 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 Dutt’s work was a transhistorical interest
in the theory and practice of rebellion and revolution, but as manager
of the Minerva Theatre in Calcutta (1959–70) he developed a singular
repertoire of spectacular multimedia productions that urged the specta-
tor to “fall in love” with the experience of theatre itself. Mahesh Dattani,
the most successful contemporary playwright in English, combines essen-
tially 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 India’s most
successful director-authors who have developed the performance tradi-
tions of specicc regions and assimilated folk, tribal, classical, traditional,
ritualistic, and martial forms into varieties of “total theatre.” Since the
1960s, Habib Tanvir’s Naya Theatre, one of only three serious profes-
sional 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. In-
stead of the contrived “authenticity” of urban performers experimenting
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with nonurban performance genres, Tanvir’s 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 well-
known 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. Panikkar’s
Trivandrum-based group Sopanam has drawn on classical Sanskrit aes-
thetics, the classical form of kudiyattam, which has survived in Kerala
for two millennia, regional music and martial arts traditions, and the nar-
ratives of folklore and legend to develop a distinctive repertory of old and
new plays. Ratan Thiyam’s work testices to the unique survival of Brah-
manical 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 the-
atricality 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.
Sircar’s 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), Tring-
sha shatabdi (Thirtieth Century, 1966), and Shesh nei (There’s No End,
1969), created the crst anxious protagonists in modern Indian theatre
overcome by the burden of history and the emasculating e,ects of mid-
dle-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 Grotowski’s “poor theatre” and Richard Schechner’s
“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 perform-
ance, outdoor urban environments, such as large parks and open grounds,
and extensive tours in rural areas. His theatre is intimate, emotionally in-
tense, detached from political dogma, opposed to the commodiccation
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of art, and committed to communication—between 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 simultaneously—literature 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 theo-
ries of drama and theatre because in India there is little signiccant theo-
retical 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 Sircar’s Tringsha shatabdi, directed by
Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan, New Delhi, 1998. Courtesy of Rajinder Nath.
03chap3.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 67
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 Lévi, and theorized in the image of the mod-
ern European national theatres. The canonical core of this national the-
atre consisted of the classical Sanskrit plays of Kalidasa, Shudraka,
Bhasa, and Bhavabhuti, and the ancient treatise on dramaturgy, Bharata’s
Natyashastra. Vasudha Dalmia Luderitz notes that for the nineteenth-
century 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 his-
torical tradition of their own” (181). Because of the orientalist preoccu-
pation with Sanskrit, classical Indian theory and practice became the
privileged referents of indigenous discourse about theatre in the colo-
nial 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 cen-
tury” (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. 1850–1940) consisted of plays
based on narratives of the past (myth and history) and plays addressing
contemporary social problems; the crst category increased in impor-
tance 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 sec-
ondary to performance or consisted of publicity materials and records
of censorship.
Since independence, the triple emphases of the colonial theoretical
legacy—Westernized modernity, cultural nationalism, and anticolonial-
ism—have taken distinctly postcolonial forms and developed into full-
bedged positions regarding theatre’s role in the culture of the new nation.
Two sets of distinctions are pertinent to the playwright’s 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.
Bharati’s Manava mulya aur sahitya (Human Values and Literature, 1960)
and Rakesh’s Sahitya aur sanskriti (Literature and Culture, 1975) are in
essence ambitious commentaries on the late twentieth-century (Indian)
writer’s role in the nation and the world. Sircar’s The Third Theatre (1978),
Dutt’s Towards a Revolutionary Theatre (1982), Tendulkar’s Natak ani mi
(The Theatre and I, 1997), and Deshpande’s 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 pri-
marily 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 playwright’s career.
Yet another important critical persona comes into play when the play-
wright 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 collec-
tion titled City Plays (2004), which brings together works by Elkunchwar,
Shanta Gokhale, and Manjula Padmanabhan in what city-oriented play-
wrights 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 “indigenous-
ness” and “tradition,” resulting in opposing conceptions of a “national
theatre.” In the only important exception to the rule of the playwright-
as-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 stage—and what it
implies in terms of location, architecture, audience relations, economics,
and representational modes—as 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 in-
buences 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 indige-
nous forms but disclaim any interest in “cultural purity” and “authen-
ticity.” 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 Tendul-
kar, Elkunchwar, and Dattani, who choose realist representations of con-
temporary 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 con-
ventions are less important than their assimilation to particular histori-
cal 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 ex-
perience, 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 histori-
cal 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
invention—both 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 post-
independence theatre that fall largely outside the zone of ideological
conbicts over nation, tradition, and culture. The crst and most impor-
tant category is that of left-oriented political theatre, which draws vari-
ously 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 politi-
cal forms, including realistic representations of contemporary political
experience, historical and mythic allegory, documentary theatre, full-
length 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 Alekar—is 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 Benjamin’s 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 precur-

sor 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 de-
constructive, 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 fol-
low the “paradigm” of postcolonialism elsewhere, in which texts com-
posed after decolonization “write back” only or primarily to the colonizer’s
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 mod-
ern 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 “tra-
dition,” textualized folk plays also appear fully entangled in the contem-
porary 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, experi-
ence, and modern citizenship in the postcolonial state. Approached in
this way, the pre-text and text of drama appears as the cumulative expres-
sion of specicc theoretical positions, formal choices, and rhetorical objec-
tives adopted by post-independence playwrights as authors and theorists
of drama. But the multilingualism of this drama on a national scale trans-
forms its post-text, in performance and print, in fundamental ways, and
neither the theories of theatre nor the models of authorship and textual-
ity 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 playwright’s 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 var-
ious 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 activ-
ity was less widespread, but still more extensive than in other southern
cities. Because of its geographical proximity to Madras and the inbu-
ence 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 re-
gions 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 lan-
guages 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. Desh-
pande, 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
03chap3.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 73
in relation to a long-standing theatrical tradition as well as a vital com-

munity 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, Ban-
galore, Mysore, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Madras, and Trivandrum; the prac-
titioners 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 Dat-
tani, 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 loca-
tions 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, in-
buence, 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 activ-
ity of translation undergirds the very formation of a modern print and
performance culture in India because the decisive nineteenth-century
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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.
03chap3.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 75
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 lan-
guages). Where drama was concerned, this multidirectional trać high-
lighted 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, Euro-
pean plays in English translation, English and European plays in Indian-
language 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 com-
position and in translation.
In the post-independence context, however, the translation of new
plays into multiple Indian languages is signiccant in ways that are quali-
tatively 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 prolif-
eration 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 generates—and has already generated—a body of nationally circulat-
ing 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 post-
independence period.
There was no specicc discussion of the role or importance of inter-
lingual translation in Indian theatre at the 1956 drama seminar, but the
seminar’s formal recommendations to the Sangeet Natak Akademi sug-
gested that “there should be a special programme of translations of well-
known and stageable plays of the di,erent languages of India into the
regional languages enumerated in the Constitution,” and that “these plays
03chap3.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 76
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 the-
atre 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 lan-
guages within a few years of the event orchestrated by the Akademi. The
movement brought leading playwrights and directors from di,erent lan-
guages 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 other’s work, so that major
new plays could reach a larger audience of spectators and readers. Girish
Karnad translated Badal Sircar’s classic Evam Indrajit into English, and
Vijay Tendulkar translated Karnad’s Tughlaq and Sircar’s 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-as-
text 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 Ballabh-
pur 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 Karnad’s Naga-mandala and Chandrashekhar Kambar’s 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 Bhattacharya’s Nabanna and Sircar’s Baki itihas to
his credit, and Rati Bartholomew and Ramgopal Bajaj, who translated
Sircar’s Shesh nei (as Ant nahin).
From Marathi, Vasant Dev has translated Vijay Tendulkar’s 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 Elkunchwar’s Sultan, Holi, Arakta kshan, Pratibimb, Atmakatha,
and Wada chirebandi (as Virasat); G. P. Deshpande’s Uddhwasta dharmash-
ala and Andhar yatra; Satish Alekar’s Mahanirvan and Begum Barve; and
Vasant Kanetkar’s Prema tujha rang kasa (as Dhai akhar prem ka). There are
also other less prolicc translators from Marathi. Sarojini Varma has trans-
lated Tendulkar’s 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. Khanolkar’s Kaal tujhe namaskar. Kusum Kumar
has rendered Jaywant Dalvi’s Sandhya chhaya and Kanetkar’s Himalayachi
saoli (as Himalaya ki chhaya). Kamlakar Sontakke has translated Khan-
olkar’s Ek shunya Bajirao, and Jyoti Subhash has done G. P. Deshpande’s
Raaste. From Gujarati, Jyoti Vyas’s translation of Madhu Rye’s Koipan ek
phoolnu nam bolo to (as Kisi ek phool ka nam lo) has had wide circulation, as
has Pratibha Agrawal’s translation of Rye’s 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. Narayan’s work includes the major plays of Adya Rangacharya
and Chandrashekhar Kambar, as well as Karnad’s Yayati. With some
exceptions, all of these translations have appeared as individual publica-
tions in Hindi, therefore reaching classrooms as well as interested read-
ers. 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 ac-
quired 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 press’s Three Crowns imprint. This list includes Karnad’s own
Tughlaq, Hayavadana, and Naga-mandala (crst published separately and
then collected into a single volume titled Three Plays in 1994); Sircar’s
Evam Indrajit (1974); Five Plays (1992) and later Collected Plays in Trans-
lation (2003) by Vijay Tendulkar; and the collection Three Modern Indian
Plays (1989), which contains Sircar’s Indrajit, Tendulkar’s Shantata! and
Karnad’s Tughlaq. From 1967 to 1983, the bimonthly English-language
theatre magazine Enact, edited by Rajinder Paul from New Delhi, regu-
larly 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
03chap3.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 78
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 transla-
tion. 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 Thiyam’s Chakravyuha and Tanvir’s Charandas chor. This initiative
has brought a second group of signiccant translators to the fore—Samik
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 “post-
independence 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 situa-
tion 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, 100–1).
The performance of drama in translation follows three distinct tra-
jectories. 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 out-
standing plays in translation. This explains the importance of Desh-
pande’s Marathi production of Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq for Awishkar in
1971; the Bengali production of Karnad’s Yayati by Mitra’s group, Bohu-
rupee, in 1988; the Marathi production of Karnad’s Hayavadana by
Mehta’s Rangayan; and the Manipuri productions of Bharati’s Andha yug
and Rakesh’s Ashadh ka ek din by Thiyam’s 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 loca-
tions 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 Kan-
nada; and K. N. Panikkar with Malayalam and Sanskrit. Their multilin-
gual reach enables such directors not only to work in several dramatic
traditions simultaneously but also to produce important multiple ver-
sions of the same play. Thus, Mehta has directed major productions of
Karnad’s Hayavadana in Marathi and German and of Elkunchwar’s Wada
chirebandi in Marathi and Hindi; Dubey has directed Elkunchwar’s Rak-
tapushpa in both Marathi and Hindi; and Karanth has directed Karnad’s
Hayavadana in both Kannada and Hindi.
The role of these dissimilar but complementary relations between
director, location, and language in establishing the contemporary the-
atrical 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 exhaustive—most 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
03chap3.qxd 7/6/2005 8:14 AM Page 80
two or more languages in addition to the original; but the focus on direc-
tors 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 processes—the progressive dispersal of a single dra-
matic 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 cir-
culation 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 Wada 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 per-
formance vehicle depends on high-quality noncommercial productions
rather than on market conditions and critical assessments of the West-
ern kind. But within these limitations, Wada chirebandi has the attri-
butes 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 adap-
tation of the play by Subrata Nandy was staged under Sohag Sen’s direc-
tion 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 Dalvi’s Gandhi viruddha Gandhi (Gandhi against
Gandhi, Marathi, 1996) shows how this process of circulation is acceler-
ated even further in the case of a commercially produced and contro-
versial 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 1997–98, 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 1998–99, international) tour. The English
version, in particular, attracted major corporate sponsorship because of
its medium and because Naseeruddin Shah, one of India’s 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 con-
temporary Indian plays, regardless of their serious or popular character.
The Languages of Translation

The close linkage of translation to publication and performance has fos-
tered 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 impor-
tant target languages of translation. There is, however, an important dis-
tinction 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 pub-
lication. 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 com-
mands 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 writ-
ing 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, English-
language drama has not acquired a strong theatrical base or textual cur-
rency. 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, re-
main 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 presentation—which
decnes “the conditions established between the [author] and his pub-
lic”—is the printed word, but not when the radical of presentation is the
spoken or enacted word (Frye, 247). In this respect Indian drama and the-
atre are very similar to Indian clm, television, video, and music. India has
the largest clm industry in the world, but virtually no original English-
language 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 categories—the-
atre, clm, television, and music—there 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 theatri-
cal 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 Nandy’s Bengali adaptation of Wada chirebandi is set in rural
Bengal, not in the Maharashtra of Elkunchwar’s 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 disjunc-
tion between language and sensibility, material and medium. Dattani
does not see his choice of English as arbitrary, as a “postcolonial” ges-
ture, or as an example of “the empire writing back”—a 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). Dat-
tani’s 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 author-
ship, theatre theory, and the textual life of drama. Playwrights who con-
ceive 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. Desh-
pande, 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 under-
standing 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, play-
wrights 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 lan-
guages and provinces. Signiccantly, although such playwrights as Karnad,
Tendulkar, Elkunchwar, Kambar, and Deshpande write their plays ex-
clusively 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 multi-
lingualism and circulation is to create at least four distinct levels for the
dissemination and reception of contemporary Indian plays—the local,
the regional, the national, and the international. Marked by a com-
plex 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 theo-
retical 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
theatre—the unusual role of the director, the constitution of audiences,
and the relationship of theatre to modern mass media.
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 85
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 rela-
tion to the long history of the stage but that has exerted a decisive
inbuence on the formation of a complex modern theatre. In the mid-
nineteenth 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 inte-
grated play, actor, movement and decor into an organic theatrical image”
(Cole and Chinoy, vii). The director’s pursuit of uniced artistic e,ects on
the stage necessarily modiced the control that playwrights and actors
had previously exercised over production, and, as O’Neill enumerates,
the director’s craft gradually appropriated the functions of “critic, ana-
lyst, interpreter, historian, designer, actor, coach, manager, audience, and
administrator” (R. H. O’Neill, 2). Grounded in the idea of “the direc-
tor 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 Meyer-
hold, Harley Granville-Barker, Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator, Harold
Clurman, Elia Kazan, Peter Hall, Lloyd Richards); as avant-garde theo-
rist and inventor of texts-for-performance (Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Gro-
towski, Eugenio Barba, Richard Schechner, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson,
Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Ariane Mnouchkine, Augusto Boal); and
85
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 86
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 director’s 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 in-
distinguishable 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 man-
aging prominent playhouses, such as the National and the Minerva in Cal-
cutta. 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, 110–11). In the Parsi theatre, such res-
ident 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 People’s Theatre
Association in 1943 gave Indian cultural discourse an international polit-
ical 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 IPTA’s commitment to an anti-imperialist, antifascist,
nationwide theatre movement also produced the crst powerful critique of
commercialism in theatre and cinema and invested theatrical representa-
tions 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 direc-
tors—notably Shombhu Mitra, Utpal Dutt, Ebrahim Alkazi, and Habib
Tanvir—had 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 (1939–42). In 1943–
44 he gave the IPTA its crst, and perhaps only, national-level success—
the production of Bijon Bhattacharya’s Nabanna—but his concern with
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 87
Production and Reception 87
technique and theatrical virtuosity was incompatible with a mass move-

ment that focused on the message rather than the medium. Mitra’s for-
mal 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 (1950–51) after several years with Geo,rey Kendall’s 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 trans-
formative. 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 London’s Royal Academy of Dra-
matic 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 self-
education” (Alkazi, 290). As a founder-member of Theatre Group
(1950–54) and Theatre Unit (1954–62), he collaboratively instituted com-
prehensive 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 enor-
mously inbuential cfteen-year stint as the school’s director. Following a
long association with the IPTA (1945–54), Tanvir’s very crst major pro-
duction, 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 expe-
rience of watching Brecht’s plays at the Berliner Ensemble within a few
weeks of the German playwright’s death convinced him that the future
of Indian theatre lay in indigenous performance forms and determined
the experimental direction of both his companies—Hindustani Theatre
(1958–59), and Naya Theatre (1959–). Thus, within a few years of indepen-
dence, a typically heterogeneous group of directors had set the standards
of artistry and sociopolitical engagement against which a revisionary post-
colonial practice would be measured in the following decades. More gen-
erally, the IPTA movement’s aesthetic-political reorientation of drama
combined with a range of other inbuences to institute a conception of
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 88
serious “theatre work” that has incrementally consolidated the director’s

roles as theorist, poetician, educator, and innovator on the stage.
The outstanding feature of theatre production and direction in post-
independence India is the multiplicity of potential choices that contempo-
rary 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 a´liations and the patron-
age 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 contempo-
rary; 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 People’s Little Theatre (Calcutta), Nehru Centenary
Theatre Festival, New Delhi, 1989. Courtesy of Sangeet Natak Akademi.
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 89
the multiple circumstances that have led to a redecnition of the direc-

tor’s mission in Indian theatre since independence and the new condi-
tions 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 director’s new role
are the crucial formations discussed in chapter 3—the 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 expres-
sion 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 the-
atre 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 direc-
tor’s 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 produc-
tion of his second play, Lahron ke rajhans. The play’s third act was rewrit-
ten 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 Mehta’s “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
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 90
insists, on the one hand, that “a writer who wishes to write for the the-
ater 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 playwright’s 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 experi-
ences that had stressed group work, and, like Tendulkar, he underscores
the importance of practical experience in the theatre “because you real-
ize that you’re not writing to be read. . . . That the actors are going to
take your script and they’re 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 con-
temporary author-director-actor with perhaps the most intricate theatre
craft, Thiyam o,ers a revealing gloss on his “twin obligations” in a char-
acteristically colloquial voice:
It is not necessary, even if I’m writing my own plays, that whatever I imag-
ine as a playwright will come about when I direct it. Because while direct-
ing I may feel the urge to do something else. . . . The moment I become
the director, the playwright in me goes away. . . . A director’s thinking is
very di,erent from a playwright’s thinking. Otherwise you have no free-
dom, you would be overshadowed. . . . All those things are the job of a
playwright—how the argument is evolved, how the argument is taken for-
ward, 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 dra-

matic authorship and textuality and concrm the e,ects of a redetermi-
nation 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 director’s 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 director’s work in con-
temporary Indian theatre in comparison with, and often at the expense
of, the playwright’s work. First, the decisive disengagement of serious
theatre work from the “commercial superstructure” has created an envi-
ronment 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, self-
regulating functionaries who translate their vision onto the stage as and
when they can, but whose ideas of theatre are important in and of them-
selves, 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 the-
atre 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 survival—and the consequent irregularity of produc-
tion—characterizes the work of Om Shivpuri’s Dishantar in Delhi as
much as Jabbar Patel’s Theatre Academy in Pune or Neelam Mansingh
Chowdhry’s The Company in Chandigarh. But the scarcity of resources
does not deterministically preclude pioneering theatre, and vice versa:
in Bombay, Vijaya Mehta’s Rangayan group practically launched experi-
mental theatre during the 1960s with productions of Eugène Ionesco’s
Chairs, C. T. Khanolkar’s absurdist Ek shoonya Bajirao, and the early plays
of Vijay Tendulkar; ironically, Mehta’s reluctance to accept corporate
sponsorship was one of the factors that prompted the departure of Ten-
dulkar 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 seri-

ous 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 addi-
tion 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 Centre’s 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 deserv-
ing organizations and instituting healthy competition between theatre
groups (Paul, “Satyadev Dubey”). Both at the Centre and at Prithvi The-
atres 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 NSD-
trained director Waman Kendre, and the Centre’s 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 Akademi’s 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 director’s 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 play-
wrights. Since the late 1950s, a number of important partnerships be-
tween playwrights and directors have launched or consolidated a given
author’s 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 1943–44 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 Rakesh’s criti-
cally 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 Rakesh’s most important interpreters for the stage.
Similarly, Bharati’s Andha yug, the crst notable post-independence play in
any Indian language, acquired its reputation as a monumental stage vehi-
cle through Satyadev Dubey’s pioneering production of 1962 and Alkazi’s
NSD Repertory Company productions of 1964, 1967, and 1974. Dubey,
Alkazi, and Karanth have also given Girish Karnad’s plays, especially
Tughlaq and Hayavadana, their most inbuential productions in Hindi and
Kannada. Vijaya Mehta brought Vijay Tendulkar’s early work to the stage
in the mid-1950s; Arvind Deshpande took up Tendulkar’s mature full-
length plays of the 1960s; and in 1973 Jabbar Patel founded Theatre Acad-
emy in Pune solely to counteract censorship and continue performances
of Tendulkar’s 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 contem-
porary 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 underly-
ing the SNA’s “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” dra-

matic 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, styl-
ized, 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 com-
plex 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 director’s aggressive advancement of certain
forms of intertextuality and transculturation (discussed fully in chapter
10) has also created a range of contemporary intertexts that exist prima-
rily 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 excep-
tions, the theatre work of such playwight-directors as Tanvir, Dutt, Sir-
car, 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, inter-
national 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, Molière, Georg
Büchner, August Strindberg, Federico García 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 India’s premier director of English-language the-
atre, the Bombay-based Alyque Padamsee has maintained a predomi-
nantly 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 artis-
tic grounds. In the director’s note to Ek musacr be-asbab (NSD Repertory
Company, 1991), the Hindustani version of Anouilh’s 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 litera-
ture is enriched unless it is introduced to the best literature of other lan-
guages. 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 contem-
porary 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 conven-
tions 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 homo-
geneous 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 environ-
mental theatre, word-centered drama with nonverbal theatre languages,
Sophocles with Tendulkar. As determined by the work of the most in-
buential 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 direct-
ing work that in qualitative terms represent the polarities of contempo-
rary 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 “metro-
politan” 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 re-
ceived part of his training abroad, spent his theatrical career in Bombay
and Delhi, and for cfteen years headed the National School of Drama,
India’s premier state-supported institution of theatre education and
training. Subbanna’s 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 India’s two transregional languages—
English during the 1950s in Bombay, and Hindi, which he promoted vig-
orously as a major theatre language, during the 1960s and 1970s in Delhi.
Subbanna works exclusively in Kannada, which has about thirty-cve mil-
lion speakers in the crst decade of the twenty-crst century but consti-
tutes 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 pres-
tigious pan-Asian Ramon Magsaysay Award for creative communication
in the arts. His organization is supported by its own activities and grants-
in-aid from the state and national governments; to date, two Ford Foun-
dation grants for clm and theatre outreach (1983–85 and 1986) have been
the only signiccant sources of additional funding. Despite these di,er-
ences of background, training, and institutional a´liation, Alkazi and
Subbanna are comparable national cgures, placed on a footing of equal-
ity by the pioneering quality of their work as directors, their organiza-
tional energy, and the ambitious contexts in which they place theatre.
Alkazi’s 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 educa-
tion course he instituted at the Theatre Group in the 1950s consisted
of “thirty-cve lectures covering all aspects of the theater, dramatic liter-
ature, and the cne arts, politics, sociology, and economics” because he
believed in “the inter-relationship among the arts” and in theatre’s con-
nections 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 theoreti-
cal and practical education in world drama and performance with special-
ization in a chosen celd. Again, the pedagogic principle underlying the
program was that theatre could not be taught, learned, or practiced with-
out a knowledge of its signiccant traditions—Indian, Western, and non-
Western, 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 Dharam-
vir Bharati’s Andha yug (1967 and 1974), Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq (1974),
and Balwant Gargi’s 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 Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1967), Büchner’s Danton’s Death
(1973), and Molière’s School for Wives (1976), as well as Shakespeare’s King
Lear (1964) and Othello (1969). At the Repertory, Alkazi therefore concen-
trated on assimilating Western playwrights to a major Indian language,
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while the company’s 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 the-
atre company of its kind in Delhi—a role it continues to fulcll today.
Alkazi’s work as a director and administrator from the 1950s to the
1970s was also inseparable from his e,orts to create and sustain audi-
ences. During his management of Theatre Group and Theatre Unit in
Bombay (1950–62), audience development was a priority because in his
view “the real test of theatre” lay in the artist’s ability to communicate
with audiences and the audience’s 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, Alkazi’s 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 spon-
sored by the cultural bureaucracy. To dislodge the foreign “High Com-
mission” 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 Delhi’s
most famous archeological and historical monuments—the Old Fort,
Ferozeshah Kotla, and Talkatora Gardens. Alkazi’s productions of Tughlaq,
Andha Yug, and King Lear in the latter venues combined quality, accessi-
bility, and historical importance in a way that became a turning point
in the experience of spectatorship in Delhi. The scale of NSD produc-
tions has never been as grand after Alkazi’s 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 Alkazi’s 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 “dedi-
cated itself to making accessible to its society the best of world art, liter-
ature, culture, and knowledge” (“Ninasam Ensemble,” 1). From the early
1950s to the late 1970s, activities at Ninasam mainly centered on Sub-
banna’s 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, Sub-
banna undertook one of his most ambitious projects—an adaptation of
Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart for performance by members
of the Siddhi tribe, descendants of African slaves who inhabit small for-
est settlements in North Kanara. The production followed the inception
of the Ninasam Theatre Institute, which was established in 1980 to pro-
vide 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 practice—o,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 limita-
tions of both professional and noncommercial serious theatre in the state.
Like its NSD equivalent, Tirugata works within an institutional frame-
work, 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 children’s 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 organization’s
publications). Unlike the state support extended to the NSD, Tirugata
productions are supported largely by box-oće receipts in rural and
semirural areas. While Alkazi focused on directing at the NSD Reper-
tory, 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 Subbanna’s output—his versions of Shakespeare’s Timon of
Athens (1993), Gogol’s The Inspector General (1983 and 1989), and Brecht’s
The Threepenny Opera (1986) and The Good Woman of Setzuan (1989) accom-
plish for Kannada as the language of performance what Alkazi’s indige-
nized 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 domi-
nant functionary, in keeping with the Ninasam credo of “democracy and
decentralization.”
The organization’s approach to audience is summed up in Subbanna’s
dictum that “theatre cannot survive without a community—so 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 the-
atre 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 Karnad’s
Talé-danda, directed by C. R. Jambe, Ninasam Tirugata, Heggodu, 1992.
Courtesy of Girish Karnad.
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 101
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 pro-
ductions 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 train-
ing, clms, and clm appreciation courses on the road so that even remote
villages could participate in the experiences available at Heggodu. Sub-
banna 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 Chi-
trasamaj, 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 1989–90 and expanded to
include theatre, music, literature, and the visual arts. Strikingly reminis-
cent of Alkazi’s 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 posi-
tioning of theatre by Alkazi and Subbanna carry lessons that are vital in
India. Modernity, cosmopolitanism, and professionalism are not metro-
politan preserves but qualities achievable in unlikely locations when art-
ists and intellectuals establish a sućiently complex connection between
theatre and the world. The activities of Ninasam indicate neither a tra-
ditionalist 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 action—a 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 perspec-
tive, 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 profes-
sionalism and professionalization as its most important goals, in the areas
of teaching, theatre training, production, audience education, and out-
reach. 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 other-
wise of an ‘indigenous,’ culturally matrixed theatrical language,” which in-
volves “not only the verbal medium of the drama, but also its nonverbal
constitutive forms and techniques and their source traditions” (“Drama-
tizing,” 486). In India the metaphor of language, with its accompany-
ing 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 prin-
cipal 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 per-
formance 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 India’s 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 stud-
ied, 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 sangee-
tam, 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, “tra-
ditional” 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 perti-
nent to a discussion of his method—his 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 occa-
sion 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 Aristotle’s 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 care-
fully 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 extrin-
sic material to make the core text “aesthetically e,ective.” Such inven-
tiveness, 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 Panikkar’s theatre de-

rive from the nonverbal expressivity of dance, the rhythm and melodic
vocality of music, the iteration of ritual, and the aggressive but con-
trolled 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 Panikkar’s 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 in-
terpretation” 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 mean-
ing as action, particularly through the resources of music and dance.
Panikkar’s ideal of dramatic representation in this respect is the kudi-
yattam 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 Kalidasa’s
Fig. 6. The ascetic and the courtesan. Scene from Mahendra Vikram Varman’s
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 sućient 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 Panikkar’s to
some extent because he has a similar interest in combining classical Indian
dramaturgy with regional and folk musical, dance, and martial arts tra-
ditions, and has presented some of the same Sanskrit plays by Bhasa in
revival. Thiyam’s work as a director, however, is a unique fusion of the aes-
thetic and the political. Such plays as Karnabharam (1979), Imphal Imphal
(1982), Chakravyuha (1984), and Uttar priyadarshi (1999) are deeply im-
mersed in the problem of violence and the embattled post-independence
politics of Thiyam’s native northeastern state of Manipur. But the omni-
present inbuence of indigenous narratives and regional performing tra-
ditions 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 “word-
oriented” 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 move-
ments, postures and gestures orchestrated and translated into action”
(Chakravyuha, xlii). Todd Hammes describes the rhythms of Thiyam’s
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, Thiyam’s works rely on an inten-
sive and physically demanding performance technique, developed speci-
ccally 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 dra-
matic lighting e,ects are other important elements in Thiyam’s carefully
choreographed, visually spectacular theatre.
Thiyam regards the cultural resources of the Manipur region as criti-
cal 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 non-
direct elements” (Thiyam, “Audience,” 64). The members of Thiyam’s
company, however, are not traditional performers but city dwellers who
want to “study theatre as an art form both physically and intellectu-
ally,” because Thiyam’s object is to design a training program for “con-
temporary theatre” and communicate with contemporary audiences
(Chakravyuha, xxiv). In comparison with Panikkar, therefore, Thiyam’s
relationship to “tradition” is more deeply mediated by postmodernist ex-
perimentation, and his view of theatre as eventually an autonomous and
syncretic art: “I don’t really know what [my theater] should be called. . . .
What I call my method has no manifesto. . . . I don’t 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 con-
sistent traditionalist aesthetic of Panikkar’s plays.
As a third systematic theorist of nonverbal theatre languages, B. V.
Karanth (1928–2002) presents interesting parallels and contrasts to Pan-
ikkar and Thiyam because his theatrecraft is less intricate and intense
than theirs but has greater range, both in the choice of texts and direct-
ing 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 (1977–81) and the Bharat Bhavan Rang-
mandal (1982–86), before returning to Karnataka as a freelance direc-
tor. 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 Ban-
aras, Delhi, Heggodu, Bhopal, Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, Ahmed-
abad, 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, represent-
ing in aggregate the richest body of directing work among his contem-
poraries (see appendix 6). He was also the leading composer of stage
music in his generation, a passionate and prolicc director of children’s
plays, and, like Alkazi, a theatre administrator at two key institutions.
Karanth’s 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 Karna-
taka, 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 for-
got 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 revision-
ary practice of the post-independence director, however, a given theatre
language may be “intrinsic” to a play, or it may be “superadded” for par-
ticular e,ects in performance. Thus, Karanth’s 1973 Kannada production
of Karnad’s 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 Shake-
speare’s Macbeth in the yakshagana style (using a major new poetic trans-
lation 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 inbuen-
tial 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 Thiyam’s original texts for performance are “nat-
ural” expressions of an aesthetic grounded in tradition, but, in principle,
Karanth’s “synthetic” method in Macbeth also o,ers a theoretical expla-
nation for Tanvir’s Chhattisgarhi version of Shudraka’s Sanskrit classic
Mrichhakatika (1958); Thiyam’s Manipuri version of Antigone (1986); Nee-
lam Mansingh Chowdhry’s Yerma (1991), which uses the cross-dressing
male naqqals of Punjab to recreate Lorca’s tragedy in Punjabi; and Usha
Ganguli’s Rudali (1993), which adapts Mahasweta Devi’s 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 tradi-

tion, 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 represen-
tation, 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 popu-
lations 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 con-
tinuous “traditions” of theatrical performance and spectatorship from
the mid-nineteenth century onward. Since the 1950s, the e,orts of spe-
cicc theatre groups, professional companies, and institutions have cre-
ated 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 languages—Bengali 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 Rangacharya’s
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,” contin-
ues to be largely, and regrettably, true nearly forty years later (“Profes-
sional Theatre,” 52).
The ambivalent axiom that the audience for contemporary theatre is
overwhelmingly urban, if not metropolitan, is coupled with a strong the-
oretical and critical presumption that it is homogeneous in composition.
The typical Indian theatregoer is perceived as middle-class, educated
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 109
(though not always professionally trained or employed), relatively unsea-

soned 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 West-
ern 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 com-
parable tradition of theatregoing, the Indian viewer is more likely to
invest in the price of a luxury ticket at the cinema (Rs. 65–100 at 2004
prices) than go to a new play (for Rs. 30–80); 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 neces-
sary correlation between theatrical production and a body of paying con-
sumers. Even major theatre groups do not have an unqualiced hold on
their patrons: Badal Sircar recalls Shombhu Mitra’s 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 fos-
tered 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 separa-
tion of serious from commercial theatre also means that in the few urban
locations where both forms do exist, their respective audiences are per-
ceived 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 cre-
ating, augmenting, and sustaining audiences. Like post-independence
drama itself, the issue of audience is characterized not by a steady pro-
gression from decciency to plenitude but by erratic patterns of activ-
ity 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 movement’s most ener-
getic 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 IPTA’s mass activism, the
drama seminar of 1956 (discussed in chapter 2) did not focus on the audi-
ence 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” (Gan-
guli, “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 loca-
tions or at semiurban and rural viewers. Among the various positions
that actively relate theatre to its potential and actual audiences, two
approaches are notable—one 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 changes—for instance, the increase in box oće receipts
on the day of a given performance—and saw the unusual success of
Dishantar’s 1969 production of Rakesh’s Adhe adhure as the sign of a
new trend in spectatorship. In Nath’s 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”).
Nath’s remarks articulate the essential premise underlying the per-
formance 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 clas-
sic a´liations in contemporary Indian theatre have in fact consisted of
such partnerships—for instance, between Mitra, Tagore, and the Bohu-
rupee 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 predomi-
nantly 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 groups—most
are founded and managed by the same individual for two or more
decades—promotes such loyalty, which is both a condition and an e,ect
of anticommercialism.1 As Alkazi’s 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 the-
atre 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 spectatorship—but
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 pro-

duction. Most “landmark” productions in India have exceptionally short
runs: Vijaya Mehta’s ambitious and experimental Marathi version of
Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan closed after cve performances in
1972, while Alkazi’s Tughlaq at the Old Fort in Delhi ran for a few weeks
in the spring of 1974. One of the performances of Harold Pinter’s The
Caretaker, undertaken as an independent venture by Dubey, had to be
canceled because it had no audience at all—yet the event was not seen
as detracting from the importance of either Pinter or Dubey. While on
tour, such classics as Tendulkar’s Ghashiram kotwal and Habib Tanvir’s
Charandas chor are routinely scheduled—even 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 noncommer-
cial production), the credit goes primarily to the text—for 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 spec-
tators 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-as-
self-expressive author, theorist, and critic, Rakesh did not o,er any sig-
niccant 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 Elkunchwar’s early plays were
written in isolation from the mainstream of Marathi theatre, without
any expectation of performance—they caught Vijaya Mehta’s attention
when they appeared in the leading Marathi literary magazine, Satyakatha.
Although he has rebected extensively on the craft of playwriting, Elkun-
chwar 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 de-
cned his art in relation to his “public” because he views theatre as essen-
tially 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). Tendulkar’s 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, there-
fore, 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 accord-
ing to the audience’s whims. It’s not just that I want a viewer—it 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 imagina-
tion, and savors artistic allusion, subtlety and naturalness instead of well-
spoken inanities and showy plot-twists while watching a play. The viewer
doesn’t have to be an intellectual. If he can simply be as alert, thoughtful,
and open-minded in the theatre as his own o,spring, that’ll be enough! Is
this an illegitimate expectation? (Natak, 23)
Such combativeness toward the audience is atypical among literary play-

wrights, and the performance history of Tendulkar’s plays bears out the
paradoxical relationship. Three of his plays—Gidhade, Sakharam binder,
and Ghashiram kotwal—encountered 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 post-
independence play; others, such as Kamala (1981) and Kanyadaan (1983),
are among the most controversial. Although Tendulkar’s 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 con-
temporary 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 India’s leading Marxist playwright after independence, Utpal Dutt
believed that “revolutionary theatre is essentially people’s 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 Brecht’s description of spectators as “co-
authors” 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. Dutt’s 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 “people’s theatre.” Giving even greater priority
to the ordinary viewer, but positioning himself crmly outside the Marx-
ist 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 Dutt’s populism. First, Sircar’s 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. Sec-
ond, performance spaces (proscenium and nonproscenium) do not serve
as the basis of a separation between urban and rural theatre: Sircar’s
plays are performed indoors and outdoors, in cities, towns, and villages.
Third, Sircar’s theatre does not depend on capital or o,er itself as a com-
modity. He eliminates the buyer-seller relationship in a theatre that is
“poor” by virtue of being reduced to essentials, but also in being in-
expensive or free for anyone interested in the experience. Fourth, Sircar
relies on movement and gesture rather than a verbal text to quicken the
viewer’s imagination, using the performer’s body instead of language as
the vital expressive element in theatre. Although antithetical in their pol-
itics, 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 edu-
cated lack the culture which the masses of the villages possess so richly
though they’re 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 trans-
formation of the drama-audience relation in both locations. Hence, Tan-
vir’s 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. Subbanna’s 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, pro-
ducing 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 Rat-
nakar Matkari’s Lok-katha (1987) and Elkunchwar’s Holi (1989), and Hindi
adaptations of Western works, such as Arnold Wesker’s Roots (as Parichay,
1978) and Ibsen’s A Doll’s 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 productions—ambitious stage versions of cc-
tional 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 Brecht’s 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 audi-
ences for Ganguli on an entirely new scale. According to Jalan, “Hindi
theatre used to be restricted to a small, Hindi-speaking population [in
Calcutta]. Usha’s group has been able to cut across language and com-
munity barriers” (L. Ghosh, “Iron Lady,” 2). At the levels of both process
and product, Ganguli’s 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 chil-
dren, 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 cen-
tury: 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 oće. (In this context, the survival
of Rangakarmee for nearly thirty years in Calcutta is considered a re-
markable 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 repu-
tation for fashionable slogan mongering, but her engagement with femi-
nist 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 major-
ity language of the region) that makes a spectacular departure from
the literary norm and concerns itself primarily with the intensity of the
audience’s experience in the theatre. “Basically my premise,” Chowdhry
comments, “was to take the world’s classics—regionalize the national and
nationalize the regional—because I feel that you cannot be truly contem-
porary unless you know your own roots” (“Unpeeling,” 21). Her “texts”
have ranged from Karnad’s 1988 play, Naga-mandala, to the life of the
ancient Sanskrit poet Bhartrihari (Raja Bhartrihari, 1997), and such clas-
sics as Lorca’s Yerma (cg. 7), Racine’s Phaedra (as Fida, 1997), and Jean
Giraudoux’s 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 Esquivel’s Like
Water for Chocolate and Isabel Allende’s 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 experi-
ence of the cooking and communal consumption of food during a per-
formance. The South African author Moira Crosbie Lovell’s short story
“Supermarket Soliloquy” is the basis of Chowdhry’s 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.
Chowdhry’s theatre has been shaped by three key collaborations. The
Sikh poet Surjit Patar has rendered her Indian as well as non-Indian orig-
inals 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 pro-
ductions by her group, The Company, also combine urban performers
with members of the traditional Punjabi community of female imper-
sonators, the naqqals. In Chowdhry’s “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, it’s over” (Chowdhry, “Unpeeling,” 19). Smita Narula
points out that, in opposition to the current focus on realism, natural-
ism, and the experimental in Indian theatre, “there is an obvious the-
atricality 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 tra-
ditions and aspirations in terms of our body language, in terms of our
emotional charges” (Faulkner). She also regards it as a major accomplish-
ment that “we have built up a tremendous audience. We have performed
all over Punjab—Jullundhur, Amritsar, Patiala. In Chandigarh there’s a
Fig. 7. “Fusion theatre”: Lorca in Punjabi. Scene from Neelam Mansingh

Chowdhry’s production of Federico García Lorca’s Yerma, The Company,
Chandigarh, 1991. Courtesy of Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry.
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 119
stampede—it’s uncontrollable” (“Unpeeling,” 19). Her command of for-

eign audiences is just as extraordinary: The Madwoman of Chaillot has
been featured at both the London International Theatre Festival (LIFT)
and the Festival d’Avignon (1995); Kitchen katha at international festivals
in Singapore, Japan, Germany, and Dubai (2001–3), 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 typ-
ical modern Indian theatre audience, but a number of practitioners have
advanced theoretical positions, polemical arguments, and practical ini-
tiatives to expand viewership across the boundaries of class, region, and
language. These developments, moreover, are important both in them-
selves and for the results they achieve. The success of female directors
in creating new modes of performance and appealing to new communi-
ties 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 post-
independence theatre as a system. However small, fragmented, and un-
trained they may be, Indian audiences have participated in the post-1950
theatre movement and witnessed the establishment of a new national
canon—without 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” (229–30). 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 Inter-
net), Benjamin’s formulation of the essential unreproducibility of theatre
remains intact in the West. The massive scale of modern dramatic writ-
ing and performance, the rigor of theatre history, theory, and criticism,
and the viability of theatre as a public and material institution collec-
tively reinforce an autonomy that theatre could command on theoretical
grounds alone, despite its absorption into such media as clm, television,
and video.
Benjamin’s 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 coex-
istence 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 Calcutta’s 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 thea-
tre had provided a variety of artists—actors, musicians, singers, techni-
cians—with their principal form of livelihood, but
the cinema with its standardised production, higher payment, wider pub-
licity 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 avail-
able 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 commercial-
ized 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 writ-
ers and actors moved permanently to clm: the two notable exceptions
were Mitra and Tanvir, who had already launched independent theatri-
cal 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 the-
atre 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 noncom-
mercial urban enterprise, therefore, has placed it in a particularly dis-
advantageous 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 theatre—long
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 122
an intrinsic part of the existence of drama in the West—is limited in

India to occasional television productions or telecasts. Aside from
Mahasweta Devi’s Rudali and Hajar churashir ma, which went from the
stage to the large screen in the 1990s, Thiyam’s 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 play-
wrights, Dutt was a leading character actor in Bengali and Hindi commer-
cial cinema; Karnad is an award-winning actor, director, and screenplay
writer for clm and television; Tendulkar was the most signiccant screen-
play 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 Shiv-
puri, 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 practi-
tioners. The crst is an unequivocal critique of clm as a medium, both
in itself and as an encroachment on theatre. Unconsciously echoing
Benjamin’s comment that clm is the most powerful agent of the mass
movements that have brought about a “tremendous shattering of tradi-
tion,” Inder Dass complains that the “spell” of cinema has disrupted
ancient aesthetic traditions in India and destroyed the audience for the-
atre. 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
04chap4.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 123
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, drama’s
characteristic synthesis of literary, poetic, mimetic, and expressive qual-
ities could well become obsolete in the “media world” (9). Ashoke Vis-
wanathan refers to the “unqualiced brute strength” of cinema, which has
sapped the audience’s 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 dan-
gerous to theatre. The audience for today’s commercial clm cannot (and
will not) stray into any auditorium devoted to genuine theatre” (100).
The forms of “contamination” these critics attack, however, are insepa-
rable 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 det-
rimental to theatre but accept their pervasive presence in contempo-
rary 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 conven-
tions (such as realism). In India, however, the principal argument is that
cinema has made realism obsolete in theatre: theatre within the pros-
cenium is closest to a “talking picture” and ought to abandon that aes-
thetic because it cannot possibly compete with the realism of clm. Badal
Sircar’s 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 state-
owned 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 Door-
darshan (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 conven-
ience of easy access within the home and hence o,ers the best opportu-
nity 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 Door-
darshan in 1977 to join the faculty of the National School of Drama
and was the shool’s director in the mid-1990s. Jain argues that clm and
theatre have captive audiences in public spaces, whereas television cre-
ates 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 re-
sources 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 concep-
tion 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 drama—I mean, human beings pretend-

ing 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 “busi-
ness” 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, directors—everyone found employment. I
don’t see why one should feel unhappy about that! (“Performance,” 363)
One measure of the extent to which such “drama” has displaced thea-
tre is that Rohini Hattangady, the NSD graduate who played Mahatma
Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, in Richard Attenborough’s 1982 clm, had lead-
ing roles in three hour-long weekly television serials in 1998. This “adul-
teration” 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.
#
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 self-
rebexive 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 tra-
dition 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 extra-
ordinary 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.
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chapter 5
Orientalism, Cultural Nationalism,

and the Erasure of the Present
In the introduction to a collection of essays relating orientalism specic-

cally 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 evolu-
tion of knowledge that brings us into the postcolonial (or neocolonial)
present” (2). Made more poignant by the Saidian decnition of oriental-
ism as a discourse of domination, the resulting “postcolonial predica-
ment” 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 colo-
nial discourse” (2). The cultural emphases and exclusions of colonial(ist)
philology and commentary continue to inform postcolonial construc-
tions of South Asian history, culture, and experience, not only among
the former colonizers in the West but also among the formerly colon-
ized 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 sev-
eral aspects of the peculiar critical fortunes of Indian drama, theatre, and
performance in the modern period. The orientalist tradition of philo-
logical scholarship and commentary inaugurated by Sir William Jones in
127
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1789 has shaped subsequent commentary on Indian theatre to an extra-

ordinary 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 contem-
porary “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 per-
formance 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: Jones’s
1789 English translation of Kalidasa’s Sanskrit play, Abhijnana Shakuntalam
(1789, commonly known in the West as Shakuntala), H. H. Wilson’s Select
Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus (2 vols., 1827), Sylvain Lévi’s The The-
atre of India (2 vols., originally published in French in 1892), A. B. Keith’s
The Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory, and Practice (1924),
and Sten Konow’s The Indian Drama (originally published in German ca.
1930). Max Müller described Jones’s translation as virtually “the starting-
point of Sanskrit philology,” a work that placed a “beautiful specimen
of dramatic art” before enraptured Europeans and also drew “the atten-
tion 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” (1–2). Wilson’s work, in contrast,
was more an exercise in belles lettres than scholarship; in Sylvain Lévi’s
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 dis-
cussion of the “dramatic system of the Hindus” (Lévi, 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
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Orientalism, Cultural Nationalism, and Erasure 129
national theatre and perform the plays in the modern languages of

the subcontinent. Against this backdrop, the works of Lévi, 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. Lévi structures his work
in response to Jones and Wilson, Keith in response to Lévi 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 syn-
ecdochic 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 San-
skrit provided (in Max Müller’s phrase) “irrefragable evidence” of a com-
mon 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” (Müller, 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 repub-
lic 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 Müller, 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 com-
parative 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 India’s
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 ori-
entalist 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 impres-
sive 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 Euro-
pean excitement over the dramatic and poetic exquisiteness of Kalidasa’s
Shakuntalam, which began with Jones’s 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 West-
ern 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 gen-
eral 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
Lévi’s The Theatre of India. Lévi begins by acknowledging that both Wilson
and Ernst Windish concne their study of Indian drama to plays writ-
ten 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).
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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)
In keeping with the date of his work (1892), Lévi’s defense of this posi-
tion is uncompromisingly aesthetic and individualist. Only the individ-
ual 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 Lévi’s cn de siècle 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 in-
dividual 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 Lévi,
but the focus on Sanskrit and the criterion of greatness remains un-
changed. “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 “San-
skrit” 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
Lévi’s point also: Sanskrit, being universal, is Indian; the modern indige-
nous languages, being regional or local, are not. Indeed, in Konow’s un-
informed estimation, the modern Indian vernaculars are not “languages”
05chap5.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 132
at all but only “dialects.” Only as recently as 1969 was this reductive logic
challenged by Konow’s Indian translator, S. N. Ghoshal, who added the
subtitle “The Sanskrit Drama” after the original title and argued in the
translator’s preface that any discussion of “Indian” drama should in-
clude the Middle and New Indo-Aryan languages. Ghoshal explains that
Konow’s 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 tradi-
tions and hence in the modern “mother tongues.” In retrospect, however,
Ghoshal’s corrective move merely underscores the irony that instead of
identifying with the modern regional languages, Indian cultural national-
ists 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, Indologi-
cal 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 prin-
ciple of historical organization that separates the ancient and medieval
from the post-Renaissance world and a name for qualities that distin-
guish 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 mod-
ernity 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 assim-
ilation of modern Western literary forms—novelistic 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 commer-
cial 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 under-
pinnings of such a position, the “colonial” origin of Indian literary and
cultural modernity has emerged as a key issue in the debates of the post-
independence period (witness the 1956 drama seminar) because colonial-
ism 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,er-
ently 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 pre-
occupied not with the question of European origins or the unmediated
replication of European models but with the appropriation, indigeniza-
tion, 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 mod-
ern Indian literatures, Sisir Kumar Das places the encounter between
Europe and India in perspective through a historical comparison: “Prob-
ably 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 out-
comes of the Enlightenment, print capitalism, or romantic nationalism
of Europe. . . . The colonial subject formed at the intersection of writ-
ing, 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 Spivak’s 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 proto-
nationalist and nationalist protagonist of cction, poetry, and drama in
virtually all the major modern Indian literatures” (“Print Culture,” 120).
In Dharwadker’s analysis, what appears alongside resistance is also a
position of self-possessed “cultural ambidexterity, an equal or commen-
surate 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 in-
ternationalism 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” origi-
nated 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 borrow-
ings went by that name. A fairer way of judging a country’s literature is
to see the way its writers use certain international forms, to try to appreci-
ate the changes they make along or against their particular literary tradi-
tions, 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 func-
tion as a chronological and qualitative marker, but the perceived rela-
tion 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 century—nationalism, romanticism, progres-
sivism, and modernism—they 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 de-
pendent on the West) but because they belong to earlier stages of liter-
ary 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 postmodernist—the product of a
more, not less, aggressive modernity.
Indian cultural-nationalist arguments about drama, theatre, and per-
formance after 1947 approach the issues of modernity and Western in-
buence 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 mod-
ern 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 contrast—so the traditionalists claim—the modern Western-
ized culture of realistic, secular, and commercial urban performance
disrupted and displaced indigenous theatrical traditions that had devel-
oped 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 per-
formance grounded in traditional (mainly rural) life to accommodate real-
ism, 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,” West-
ernized theatre on the subcontinent also led to a rejection of such popu-
lar 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 tra-
ditions 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 rejec-
tion of writing in English has invoked the relation between culture, expe-
rience, 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 cri-
tique 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 var-
iously 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 pro-
duced 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” (Gri´ths, “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: mod-
ern 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 world-
view and aesthetic approach” (64). Under neutral cultural conditions
it would have met with certain failure, but under the conditions of colo-
nial 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, 184–85); 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 nec-
essary 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 spectator-
ship 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 Brecht’s epic theatre, because for them this crisis demon-
strates 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 tra-
ditional 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 contem-
porary directors as Panikkar, Thiyam, and Karanth, who have followed
Shombhu Mitra’s 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” (iii–iv). These qualities of the “new” tra-
ditional theatre, however, remain more a matter of assertion than dem-
onstration 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 work—or 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 con-
ventions 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 experimen-
tation. 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 Karnad’s

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 in-
herent in this antimodern stance: in the same measure that the tradi-
tional and the folk are invested with originality, creativity, authenticity,
and Indianness, the forms of contemporary theatre that do not partici-
pate in the revivalist movement are reduced to inconsequence.
The Countercritique of Traditionalism

The motivations, positions, and e,ects of the cultural-nationalist cri-
tique 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 Gri´ths 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 prin-
ciples 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 nineteenth-
century theatre, the conventions and stage tricks derived from the pan-
tomimes 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 realism—that 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 the-
atre 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 actu-
ally weakened the Western impact in the beginning, delaying the West-
ernization 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 tra-
ditional Indian entertainments and the presumptuous crudity of Indian-
ized 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 in-
terests 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 commit-
ment 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 the-
atrical 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 dramat-
ically 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. Nineteenth-
century urban theatre was, crst and foremost, a product of new forms
of entrepreneurial capital, best symbolized by Calcutta’s National The-
atre, 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
05chap5.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 142
arts—acting, 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 stag-
ing. 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 mid-
dle 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, self-
hood, culture, and nation. Sudipto Chatterjee argues that the English-
educated 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-)
Scène, 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
05chap5.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 143
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 archi-
tects of the Bengal Renaissance, Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Rabin-
dranath 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 the-
atrical 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 trans-
plantation. 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 medium—clm. In short, critics like Vatsyayan misrepresent the in-
troduction of a new popular culture of performance (which waxes and
wanes according to market conditions and taste) as a process of deliber-
ate cultural suppression and destruction.
There are two further aspects of colonial theatre that underscore its
thorough assimilation into the matter of India. Chatterjee uses theatri-
cality as a metaphor to analyze the “multifarious workings” of the socio-
cultural mise-en-scène 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-scène of the social order” (Chatterjee,
“Mise-en-(Colonial-)Scène,” 25). In a similar vein, Julie Stone Peters argues
that “those who imply that the history of theatre in the empires is the
05chap5.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 144
history of two sides at war are . . . mistaken” (Peters, 201). These posi-
tions 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 Chat-
terjee’s observation—that 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 ori-
entalism on nationalist sentiment. But the furor over the English trans-
lation 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 Bhatia’s 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 strug-
gle 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 o´-
cially 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 post-
independence period reestablishes forms and conventions that colonial-
ism had disrupted, and that this restoration is (or should be) the most
signiccant event in contemporary theatre, both in itself and as the in-
strument of cultural decolonization. In fact, the “new” traditional theatre
is a commodity for the same predominantly middle-class urban audience
05chap5.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 145
as other major forms of contemporary theatre. Its materials and conven-

tions of representation are di,erent; its locations and modes of con-
sumption are not. It is simply a new kind of urban theatrical experience
mediated by large-scale state patronage and dependent on the institu-
tions both of print and performance.
It is not dićult 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 folk-
based and traditional performance styles of Tanvir, Kambar, Thiyam, and
others have often taken performers out of their native rural environ-
ments 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 sig-
niccant 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 post-
colonial 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, con-
temporary plays employing traditional/folk techniques straddle the gap
between orality and print. In their “natural” state folk, traditional, and in-
termediary forms have buid performance texts, but usually no published
versions, whereas such recent folk-based plays as Karnad’s Hayavadana,
Tendulkar’s Ghashiram kotwal, Chandrashekhar Kambar’s Jokumaraswami,
and Thiyam’s Chakravyuha—which are among the iconic texts of con-
temporary traditionalist theatre—are equally important as performance
vehicles and as printed texts. The traditional forms were hybridized dur-
ing 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 conti-
nuity 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 rea-
son: the urge to unlearn alien habits and relearn those intrinsic to one’s
“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
05chap5.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 146
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 dis-
rupted 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, let’s cght”),
rely fundamentally on the very categories of Western thought they seek
to exclude. The critics’ ostensible purpose is “to wrestle the critical ethno-
centrism 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 com-
peting 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 un-
acceptable Western legacy, one would logically also have to reject moder-
nity 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 Indian-
ness 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” tra-
ditions 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 prefer-
ence 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, post-
colonial 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,”
170–71).4 Notwithstanding this shift, South Asia scholarship in the Euro-
American 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 period—A. 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 Pollock—are, without exception, classi-
cally trained philologists and Sanskritists, although Basham, Dumont,
and Halbfass also work extensively in later periods and a variety of dis-
ciplines. Unlike the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, however,
when orientalist scholarship on classical Indian theatre formed an inter-
connected body of discourse, postwar philological criticism has largely
ignored drama and theatre. Henry W. Wells is the only postwar Euro-
pean scholar who works mainly on classical drama, and Barbara Miller’s
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 prefer-
ence 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
05chap5.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 148
any genuine capacity for modernity because it does not possess true rea-
son, 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 Müller
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 develop-
ment 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 strug-
gles of thought; their past, the problem of creation; their future, the prob-
lem 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 meta-
physical 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 prac-
tical faculties of a whole people, and, in fact, almost destroyed those qual-
ities 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. (30–32)
The inbuence of such metaphysical judgments on aesthetic assess-

ments is evident in the conclusions Sylvain Lévi 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: 120–22). If Max Müller found
the opposition between Greek and Indian religious philosophy crucial in
explaining the singularity of Indian culture, Lévi cnds the same opposi-
tion pertinent to an explanation of dramatic forms: “The Greek drama is
05chap5.qxd 7/6/2005 8:15 AM Page 149
the action itself. Whereas the nataka is ‘the imitation of a condition,’ the
Greek drama is ‘the imitation of an action.’ . . . Aristotle and Bharata con-
tradict 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 fundamen-
tal literary change, “India remained faithful to the ancient precepts of
Bharata” (129). Yet even Lévi 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 chang-
ing 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 be-
come 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 clas-
sical theatre has given way to a broader interest among Western scholars
in traditional, religious, ritualistic, folk, and popular-secular (or “inter-
mediary”) theatrical forms and genres of performance. The substitution
of the categories of “drama” and “theatre” by the category of “perform-
ance” has also made possible the absorption of theatre into the disci-
plines 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 over-
all marginalization of modern cultural forms remains unchanged. Brecken-
ridge 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 attribu-
tion 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 iden-
tity 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” moder-
nity undergirds Kathryn Hansen’s 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 activ-
ity,” and, on the other hand, from the classical, elite, urban theatre de-
rived from Sanskrit (37). Neither a village nor a city form, nautanki is an
“intermediary theatre” because it occupies an intermediate level of com-
plexity 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 distinc-
tions 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 proper-
ties 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 prefer-
ence among Western critics (especially area-studies scholars and inter-
culturalists) 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 sim-
pler subject than the multiregional, multilingual, text- and performance-
based celd of modern urban theatre. But in a study like Hansen’s 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 contem-
porary Indian urban theatre has rendered the issue of “Westernness”
rather irrelevant. We need binaries that are descriptive rather than pre-
scriptive and evaluative to cope with the multiplicity of theatrical prac-
tices that are contained by the same historical moment: regional/national,
monolingual/multilingual, print/performance, written/oral, individual/col-
lective, 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 trans-
formation in the post-independence period. An approach like Hansen’s
is valuable in explicating its chosen subject, but it misrepresents the
larger context of contemporary performance, which is now too com-
plicated to be summed up by generalizations about “European-derived
urban theatre.”
A very di,erent disciplinary focus appears in another example of area-
studies 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 exorcis-
tic 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 Huizinga’s 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 litera-
ture,” 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 “lit-
erary drama” and “author literature,” the individual essays deal with rit-
ual theatre, village drama, folk theatre, and Bombay clm. Neither Lutze’s
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foreword nor the essays in the volume mention a single major contem-
porary 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 Asia”—post-independence
urban theatre—as 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 book’s 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 per-
formative celd that constitutes the panorama of Indian theatre” (xi). The
scholars clarify at the outset that they use the terms “theatre” and “per-
formance” 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 India”—the ritual, devotional,
folk-popular, and balletic forms that rebect the country’s “linguistic, cul-
tural, 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 dis-
cussion 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. Contem-
porary 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 mid-
dle 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 criti-
cal problems for the authors of this study. But their account of mod-
ern (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 sec-
tion 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 Rich-
mond’s faulty knowledge of Indian history, geography, languages, and
sociocultural contexts led to numerous factual, typographical, and con-
ceptual errors in the main Cambridge Guide entries; these have reappeared
in the spin-o, volume because neither the text of the entries nor the bib-
liography 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 discus-
sion 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 “genres”—static
descriptions of more or less the same religious, folk, and popular forms
that seem to constitute the celd of “Indian theatre” in the West. Under-
standably, Lal describes the compilation as an example of the shortcomings
of intercultural scholarship, pointing out that “this . . . focuses dispropor-
tionate attention on the otherness of Indian theatre by stressing tradi-
tional 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 gen-
res, and cultural narratives as the liberating antitheses of a regimented
text-based theatre. In the Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, Barba’s dec-
nition 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 aes-
thetic 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 iden-
tity of theatre and dance as performance situations (5). Grotowski’s en-
gagement with kathakali appears in his theorizing about the “theatre of
sources” and the “poor theatre”; his self-mocking version of Kalidasa’s
Shakuntalam in 1960 was the crst major postwar production to take on
Artaud’s idea of “oriental theatre” as well as the oriental play par excel-
lence. Schechner uses kathakali, along with the Japanese Noh, to demon-
strate the systematic opposition between “performer training” in Asian
and Euro-American theatres, respectively—an 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 exper-
imental 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, Brook’s Mahabharata—the nine-hour stage version and the six-
hour clm version—represents a singular international and intercultural
e,ort to enact before Western audiences the world’s 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, interdis-
ciplinary, 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 func-
tioned even more e,ectively as instruments of erasure than other con-
temporary 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 neoori-
entalist preoccupation with classical aesthetics and traditional perform-
ance 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 con-
sumption also lies in the conception of a country like India as a “tradi-
tional” 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 anthro-
pology and interculturalism invite criticism on grounds of theory and
ideology as well as performance practice, many of which are exempliced
by Brook’s Mahabharata. These scholars criticize the ideological positions
and practices of theatre anthropology and interculturalism as forms of
neoorientalism and neoimperialism; of Euro-American hegemony dis-
guised 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” episte-
mology that merely reinforces the mind/body dualism; and of a persis-
tent 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 one’s ‘own’ group as cxed and
uniform) that is bound up with nationalist ideologies, with an us-versus-
them 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 uni-
versality 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 mean-
ingless. On the question of identity, however, Peters slips into a senti-
mental 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 century—those who
have not learned that cultural identities (like racial ones) are buid com-
posites with multiple genealogies, will perpetuate for us all the sad his-
tory of racism and intercultural animosity that has been part of the
human inheritance in the twentieth century” (Peters, 210). This romanti-
cization 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 in-
terculturalism 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 inter-
est to interculturalists are not the only, or even the most important, con-
temporary forms in the non-Western world; and that these forms have a
signiccant history in the present. A critique of postmodern intercultur-
alism 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
Schechner’s “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 Indonesia—all 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 post-
modern. 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 tradi-
tional 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 perform-
ance.” In fact, modern theatre in the various Indian languages has closer
links with the traditions in those languages—theatrical 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

curiosity—the traditional theatre. Lumping together Asian countries
and their leading contemporary playwright-practitioners signals a disin-
terest and tokenism that asserts commonalities where they may not exist.
For instance, China and Japan do not share India’s history of colonization
by Europe (although they have their own histories of colonial engage-
ment), and Indonesia’s colonial past is very di,erent from India’s. 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 Brook’s 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, Jatra—every region has its form of drama and almost
every form—sung, mimed, narrated—touches or tells a part of the Mahab-
harata. Wherever we went, we met sages, scholars, villagers, pleased to cnd
foreigners interested in their great epic and generously happy to share their
understanding. (Carrière, xiv–xv)
Like Barba, Brook is fascinated by the meticulous systems of codic-

cation in classical Indian aesthetics and the perfection of bodily move-
ment 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 anthro-
pology and interculturalism has not aroused an iota of interest in modern
Indian theatre or in the postcolonial context in which the present ex-
change takes place. Brook’s representation of Indian performance is nec-
essarily 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. Brook’s 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 pres-
ent 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, his-
tory, and folklore, while folk theatre is the model for the Indian People’s
Theatre Association during the political 1940s. My discussion of the tra-
ditionalist, revivalist, and cultural-nationalist positions in contemporary
theatrical discourse also indicates the aesthetic-cultural-political func-
tions 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,” Brook’s
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 (The-
atre and the World, 97–98). 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 un-
cover 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 poem’s “links with its own society” include its extraordi-
nary presence in the contemporary culture of nontraditional representa-
tion. 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 Bharati’s
Andha yug (1955), Tanvir’s Duryodhana (1979), and Thiyam’s 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 Brook’s collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière
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 levels—in 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 one’s 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,” 20–21). 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 transla-
tion, crst in colonial and now in postcolonial contexts. Indeed, the tradi-
tionalist position in Indian theatre discourse is a reaction against pervasive
Western inbuence—an 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 intertextu-
ality, the postcolonial interpenetration of East and West in theatre, or the
historicity even of the performance traditions it embraces—in 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 post-
classical cultural forms with attitudes of curiosity, fascination, and rever-
ence, 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 Brook’s Mahabharata and Ariane Mnouchkine’s orientalized produc-
tions, “that some of the most suggestive work comes out of the intersec-
tion of British (or French) culture and a former colony is in no small
measure a decisive factor in the discussion” of the problematic of inter-
culturalism (“Thinking,” 13). For many, Brook’s Mahabharata is a neo-
colonial work at the level of both process and product. In Theatre and the
World (94–96, 118–20), Rustom Bharucha’s wry account of “the master’s”
extended presence in India suggests that the inequality of power rela-
tions 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. Brook’s 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 the-
atre discourse that is ostensibly about India has not promoted any inter-
est 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 theoretical-
critical 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 subject—the intrinsic is in-
tertextual 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 desig-
nate and interpret major postcolonial dramatic genres in their theoreti-
cal, literary, and performative contexts.
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pa r t i i
#
Genres in Context
Theory, Play, and Performance
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chapter 6
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
nation’s ancient, premodern, and precolonial past through the two prin-
cipal modes of retrospective representation—myth 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 events—individual and
collective, specicc and general—whose “actuality” is documented and
empirically vericable.
The inaugural work of this crst dramatic phase is Dharamvir Bharati’s
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. Bharati’s 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
165
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166 Genres in Context
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 patron-
age. The second play, Lahron ke rajhans (The Royal Swans on the Waves,
Hindi, 1963) centers on the Buddha’s 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.
Rakesh’s plays overlap chronologically with three plays in Kannada,
one by Adya Rangacharya and two by Girish Karnad. Rangacharya’s Kelu
Janmejaya (Listen Janmejaya, 1960) is an allegory of nation building that
invokes in its title the Pandava prince (Arjuna’s great-grandson) to whom
the Mahabharata is narrated on the occasion of a ritual snake-sacricce.
Karnad’s 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 weak-
willed 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 princi-
pally with establishing and debating the relation of the new nation’s pres-
ent 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, ex-
perimental, 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 Tendulkar’s Ghashiram kotwal (Marathi, 1973), a play set
during the corrupt reign of the late eighteenth-century Peshva rulers of
Pune; Karnad’s Talé-danda (Death by Beheading, Kannada, 1989), which
deals with the destruction of a twelfth-century anticaste movement in
Karnataka; G. P. Deshpande’s Chanakya Vishnugupta (1988), whose title
character is the celebrated chief councillor at the court of the late
fourth-century Maurya emperor Chandragupta; and Karnad’s Agni mattu
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Myth, Ambivalence, and Evil 167
malè (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 poetry—K. N. Panikkar and Ratan Thiyam—have recast the
Mahabharata plays of the classical Sanskrit playwright Bhasa to develop
distinctive but overlapping epic performance sequences for their respec-
tive 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 Kalidasa’s Vikramorvashiyam (Urvashi Won by Valor, 1981, 1996) and
Shakuntalam (1982); Mahendra Vikram Varman’s Bhagavadajjukam (The
Ascetic and the Courtesan, 1984, 1985, 1988) and Mattavilasam (1985); and
Bhasa’s Swapnavasavadattam (The Dream of Vasavadatta, 1993), Prati-
manatakam (The Statue, 1999), and Charudattam (2003). The perform-
ances are often in both Sanskrit and Malayalam, setting up tensions
between the classical and the modern both in the conception and recep-
tion of these works. Similarly, in addition to his Mahabharata sequence,
Thiyam has directed Bharati’s Andha yug and Rakesh’s 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 cul-
tural contexts of his remote northeastern state.
The third phase in this collective practice consists of revivals, trans-
lations, 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 1965–66, more than a decade before Panikkar and Thiyam
turned to these plays; in addition, she directed Vikram Varman’s Bha-
gavadajjukam 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. Tanvir’s other well-known “folk” productions of Sanskrit plays
are Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa (The Signet Ring of Rakshasa) and Shu-
draka’s Mrichchhakatika (The Little Clay Cart). Vijaya Mehta has directed
Kalidasa’s 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 Rakesh’s Hindi translation of
this play to the stage (1974). B. V. Karanth has directed Mudrarakshasa
(1978), Kalidasa’s Malavikagnimitram (Malavika and Agnimitra, 1982), and
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Bodhayan Kavi’s Bhagavadajjukiyam (1978). Because most of the old and

new plays—whether text-centered or performance-oriented—circulate
in multiple languages, the cumulative e,ect of this engagement with the
past has been to keep classical Indian plays, playwrights, and drama-
turgy, 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 reformu-
lation of T. S. Eliot, the radical contemporaneity of the past in present-
day 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 mythic-
historical 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 con-
temporary repertoire. Given the controversy over the status of premod-
ern 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 provoca-
tive 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 preexist-
ing experiences of nationhood. As Ronald Beiner explains concisely, “a
radically modernist view of the nation serves to debunk nationalist myth-
making, whereas the view that nationalist sentiment is linked to authen-
tically premodern cultural resources helps to legitimize these sentiments
of national belonging” (6). In the inbuential formulations of Eric Hobs-
bawm, Ernest Gellner, Elie Kedourie, and Benedict Anderson, the mod-
ernist 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 alter-
native 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 tra-
dition that modern national identities are reconstituted in each genera-
tion, 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 nation-
alism that necessitate the long view: the processes of nation formation
are historical; they unfold over extended periods of time; and the col-
lective 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 ante-
cedents means in the present.
Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach o,ers a fresh theoretical perspective
on a constitutive cultural trait that also undergirds the theatrical works
under discussion—the continuity and evocative power of the country’s
myths, memories, and traditions. In India, the premodern past is not
in itself either merely “invented” or merely “imagined”: as the accumula-
tion of the complex political, religious, social, and cultural formations
of three millennia, it has an archival, textual, and cultural existence in-
dependent 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 recon-
structions 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; fol-
lowing 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 contradistinc-
tion 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 anti-
colonial movement. In a perhaps unconsciously Eurocentric and orien-
talist 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 inter-
ests 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. (9–10)
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 cul-
tural values. In addition, if anticolonialism had united a diverse populace
against a common adversary to make the nation possible, the postcolo-
nial 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 Bharati’s Andha yug (1954), Rakesh’s Ashadh ka

ek din (1958), and Karnad’s Yayati (1961) evoke the epic and classical Hindu
world, authors and audiences are strongly aware that the representation—
whatever its view of its subject—is received in a diverse religious, social,
political, and economic environment. Other plays, especially Karnad’s
Tughlaq (1964) and Talé-danda (1989) and Tendulkar’s Ghashiram kotwal
(1973), are in fact about the historically grounded problem of irreducible
religious and cultural di,erences on the subcontinent, and the fundamen-
tal divisiveness of hierarchical Hinduism. These playwrights thus repre-
sent 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 evoca-
tion 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 usu-
ally implies a fundamental antipathy toward the subject culture, and anti-
colonialism implies political, economic, and cultural opposition to the
colonizer, the “discovery” and recovery of the Indian past was a collabo-
rative enterprise between the European orientalists and Indian national-
ists. The indigenous modes of cultural preservation, transmission, and
circulation—written as well as oral–that 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 demon-
strated 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 re-
establishes 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 nation-
state” (12). Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer’s formulation
of the “postcolonial predicament” reappears in relation to this cultural
circularity—for the emerging nation-state there is no escape from ori-
entalist categories with respect to either the “traditional” past or the
“modern” future.
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These challenges to the ideas of the nation’s cultural unity and epis-
temological autonomy indicate that the simplistic binaries of colonizer/
colonized, indigenous/alien, positive/negative, and colonial/postcolonial
are dićult 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” dis-
courses that has shaped European and Indian constructions of India since
the late eighteenth century. Vinay Dharwadker describes these antithet-
ical, 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 strate-
gies 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 prac-
ticed 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 repre-
sentations 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 Mill’s History of British India
(1817) and Vincent Smith’s Early History of India (1904), parallel Hegel’s
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 re-

discover 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 ori-
entalist 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 Tilak’s 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
India’s greatness.2 In all these works, the “Golden Age” of classical Hin-
duism 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 nation’s “free” citizens the opportunity to
repossess their past. The continued dialectic of heroic and satiric modes
in postindependence Indian writing, however, has precluded any unilat-
eral 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 writing—including the plays under discussion here—draws on his-
tory and myth as narrative sources precisely to reappraise and de-idealize
the past. A late-colonial “historical novel,” such as Raja Rao’s Kanthapura,
can function as “the literary dimension of nationalist ideology” by claim-
ing truth and authenticity for its mythologized history. But Rumina
Sethi’s 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 writ-
ing of the post-independence period, which invokes the past mainly for
purposes of interrogation and critique. As Saleem Sinai (the hero “mys-
teriously handcu,ed to history”) warns at the end of Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s 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). Rushdie’s

“chutniccation” of modern Indian history in this novel, Shashi Tharoor’s
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 his-
tory and urges the culture as a whole to revise (and modernize) its self-
perceptions (Dimock et al., 27–34). 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 itihasa—literally, “thus it
was”—which is the Sanskrit term for “history,” and nationalist cctions,
such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Ananda math (The Monastery
of Joy, 1882) and Rao’s 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, trans-
mission, 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 nar-
rative 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 cul-
tural 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)nation-
alist and antinationalist discourses in the modern period. As A. K. Rama-
nujan 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 forms—oral and written, textual and performative,
literary and philosophical, classical and folk, elite and popular. The coin-
cidence 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 com-
mentary, 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 con-
ditions for the circulation of the Mahabharata. These shifts distinguish
the “premodern” phases in the life of the epic from its “modern” after-
life, 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 Sal-
vation, that is found elsewhere. But what is not here is nowhere else”
(van Buitenen, 130). More important to the assimilation of cultural mem-
ory 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 eighteen-
day 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’ Bharata”—the 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 sub-
continent (the land of the Bharatas), which became at independence the
oćial 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 in-
dependence in R. N. Dandekar’s 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 Mahabha-
rata as national epic persists despite the predominance within the poem
of narratives of intense emotional su,ering, moral irresolution, and phys-
ical 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. Pande’s sociocultural reading, the Mahab-
harata “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 het-
erodoxy were emerging as signiccant features” (Dandekar, 123). Jean-
Claude Carrière’s text for Peter Brook’s production of the Mahabharata
invokes the qualities of kaliyug when at Pandu’s death the poet-author
Vyasa prophesies “a universal struggle without pity, an outrage to intel-
ligent 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” (Carrière, 119). Signiccantly, this crisis of degeneration does not
belong safely to remote antiquity but encompasses the historical pres-
ent, 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 impossibil-
ity 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 Hasti-
napur, 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 moral-
ity become unresolvable because the Pandavas eliminate the principal
Kaurava warriors—Bhishma, Drona, Karna, and Duryodhana—by deceit
and trickery, and in each case the instigator is Krishna, Arjuna’s chariot-
eer 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.1.28–32), 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 Pan-
davas 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, immoral-
ity, 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 twentieth-
century works (see appendix 7) reveals both the commonalities and dis-
junctions between colonial and postcolonial modes of re-presentation.
The traditions of textual scholarship, scholarly commentary, philo-
sophical meditation, popular prose retellings, and literary elaborations
that crst emerged during the nineteenth century emphasized the high-
cultural, heroic, and didactic qualities of the poem. Among the works of
nineteenth-century Indian cultural nationalists, Romesh Chunder Dutt’s
condensed English verse translations of The Great Epics of Ancient India
(with an introduction by Max Müller, 1900), Swami Vivekananda’s The
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and Aurobindo Ghose’s commentary on
the two epic poets, Vyasa and Valmiki (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-Williams’s Indian Epic Poetry (1877) belonged to the tra-
dition of Indological scholarship, while Annie Besant’s The Story of the
Great War (1899) and Flora Annie Steele’s 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 Dutt’s
Sermista: A Drama in Five Acts (1859) and Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitra:
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A Play in One Act (1892; rpt. 1914) initiated the modern tradition of liter-
ary 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 anti-
colonial 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 Arjuna’s young son Abhi-
manyu, 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 mili-
tant anticolonialism. In the best-known example of this method—K. P.
Khadilkar’s 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 repre-
sents a resurgent Indian masculinity coming to the aid of a nation imag-
ined as feminine and maternal. Khadilkar’s 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 com-
mercial theatre (see Solomon). This politicization of the epic was con-
temporaneous with its transformation into popular musical spectacle in
such classics of the Parsi theatre tradition as Pandit Narayan Prasad
Betab’s Mahabharata (1913), and Radheyshyam Kathavachak’s Draupadi-
swayamvara (The Wedding of Draupadi, 1935) and Veer Abhimanyu (Brave
Abhimanyu, 1916). In southern India, the Karnataka-based Gubbi Vee-
ranna Company’s 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 Mahab-
harata have not only continued but expanded considerably. The monu-
mental critical edition of the Sanskrit text, begun at Pune’s Bhandarkar
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Institute in 1918, reached completion in 1970. J. A. B. van Buitenen’s 3–

volume English prose translation (1970), although incomplete, is the stan-
dard scholarly work of its kind, whereas P. Lal’s English “transcreation”
(1968–80) provides a complete and innovative poetic version by a contem-
porary Indian-English poet. The novelist R. K. Narayan, the politician-
scholar 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 pop-
ular cinematic genre of the “mythological,” the Mahabharata appeared
as a 52–part megaseries on Indian national television in 1989 under B. R.
Chopra’s direction, following Ramanand Sagar’s equally lavish produc-
tion of the Ramayana in 1987. Both series are available on videocassette,
thus consolidating a contemporary mass audience for the epics. Shyam
Benegal’s 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 under-
gone 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 self-
delusion, 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, Ash-
watthama, 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 one’s “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 Mahab-
harata have served as recurrent source texts for new forms of urban per-
formance that are primarily visual, aural, and spatial rather than verbal
in emphasis. Like the many “traditional” modes of Mahabharata recita-
tion 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 envi-
ronment of urban theatrical performance; are seen primarily by urban
and semiurban audiences in India; and cgure prominently among India’s
cultural exports to various parts of the world, especially to the West. In
thematic terms, these “plays” grapple to various degrees with the philo-
sophical and moral ramiccations of the Mahabharata story, but their
distinctive achievement has been to create a performer-oriented, multi-
media theatre experience through the resources of classical dramaturgy,
regional forms of music, dance, ritual, and martial training, and postmod-
ern performance modes. The result is “traditional” Indian performance
(based on a classic text) that is paradoxically “modern,” if not avant-
garde, 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 produc-
tions of the two leading contemporary proponents of theatre as a body-
centered 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 Mahab-
harata 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 land-
mark production of Madhyam vyayog (The Middle One) at the Kalidasa
Samaroh in Ujjain in 1978. This seriocomic vehicle about an imagin-
ary 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), Bhasa’s unconventionally tragic play about the death
of Duryodhana. Notwithstanding his extensive repertoire of other clas-
sical 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.
Thiyam’s intertextual productions have followed a distinctly di,er-
ent trajectory. Having developed an interest in Bhasa in part because
of the example of Panikkar’s 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 Parva—the death of Arjuna’s son, Abhimanyu, in battle—in 1984
Thiyam premiered his most successful Mahabharata play, Chakravyuha
(Battle Formation), which depicts the entrapment of the young Abhi-
manyu by both Kaurava and Pandava elders. There are extensive ref-
erences to this crisis in Bhasa’s Duta-Ghatotkacham (Ghatotkacha as
Envoy), which deals with the aftermath of Abhimanyu’s 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 Tanvir’s Duryodhana
(1979), a “folk” version of Urubhangam in the Chhattisgarhi dialect of
Hindi, which represents an isolated experiment with the Mahabharata
in Tanvir’s career.
The intertextual celd of major post-independence Bhasa “revivals”
involving the Mahabharata can therefore be depicted as follows:
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Bhasa (Sanskrit) Panikkar (Sanskrit Thiyam Tanvir

and Malayalam) (Manipuri) (Chhattisgarhi)
Madhyama vyayogam Madhyam vyayog (1978) — —

(The Middle One)
Karnabharam (The Karnabharam (1984) Karnabharam (1991) —

Burden of Karna)
Urubhangam (The Urubhangam (1987) Urubhangam (1981) Duryodhana

Shattered Thigh) (1979)
Dutavakyam (The Dutavakyam (1996) — —

Embassy)
Duta-Ghatotkacham — Chakravyuha (1984) —

(Ghatotkacha as Envoy) Abhimanyu (n.d.)
This interlinked Bhasa-Panikkar-Thiyam-Tanvir sequence represents

the most complex instance of the dispersal of the classic within con-
temporary urban performance—a multilingual dissemination in which
Bhasa’s original texts and their relation to the Mahabharata are just as
important as the meanings they have acquired in the present. The diver-
sity of the re-presentations—in the medium of drama that is centered
on performance rather than text—has 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 con-
tinuous, if rather obscure, link with Sanskrit theatre through such forms
as kudiyattam and kathakali. But more than any other theatre profes-
sional in India, he has theorized the relation of epic narrative to classical
theatre, and of both to contemporary theatre conceived as a performer-
centered practice grounded in tradition. If Bhasa’s plays exemplify the
relation of the Mahabharata to drama, Panikkar’s 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, cul-
tural, and political contexts of the embattled northeastern state of Mani-
pur. 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 eclecti-

cally with regional cultural forms, such as thang-ta, a martial art; nata-
sankeertana, 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 Bhasa’s text and emphasizes physical and
technical elements, such as costume, design, lighting, movement, gesture,
and speech. In contrast, a play like Habib Tanvir’s 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. Tex-
tually, it “translates” the classic into the tribal context, retaining the prin-
cipal characters and events but presenting them in the cultural register
of folk performance. Dramaturgically, Tanvir’s production employs tribal
actors on a bare stage and underscores the pathos of Duryodhana’s anti-
heroic 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 anti-
hero. 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-through-
performance also stands apart from the pervasive presence of the Mahab-
harata 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 tradi-
tion assimilates the mythic and symbolic elements of the epic to local
and regional inbuences; unlike the inherent universalism of urban liter-
ary 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 wari-
leeba 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 keer-
tana are one-person musical performances deriving their e,ect entirely
from the virtuosity of the performer, with pandavani also depending heav-
ily on improvised narrative and mime. The outer circle consists of tradi-
tional 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 Duryod-
hana, Karna, Ghatotkacha, Krishna, and Bhishma, and on character clus-
ters, 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 conver-
gence 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 tra-
dition within which we can distinguish epic, classical, postclassical, colo-
nial, 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. Bharati’s
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 Bharati’s 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, blindness—why should
one binch from these states, when it is in them that the few rare traces
of truth lie hidden? Why shouldn’t 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 “lit-
erariness” and “theatricality” because its reputation as a tour de force of
poetic drama coexists with an extraordinary, although uneven, perform-
ance 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 expectations—including those
of the author himself—has 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 Mahab-
harata, as the origin of a blind civilization in which “conditions, men-
talities, 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 sud-
denly emerges in Bharati’s 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 pow-
erful cautionary allegory for the newly constituted nation. Andha yug
thus symbolically separates pre- and post-independence literary concep-
tions of myth and history and inaugurates the tradition of interrogation,
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problematization, and critique that has dominated theatrical and cc-

tional representations of the Mahabharata since the mid-1950s. The very
disjunction between expectation and actuality in the use of myth also
boldly redecnes the playwright’s status as (poetic) author, (poetic) drama’s
potential for cultural intervention, and theatre’s 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 post-
war 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 play’s
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 gen-
eration of viewers was initially disinterested in the antiquity of the play’s
subject matter, while the older generation could not accept its icono-
clasm and modernity. After a reported six-year period of preparation,
Satyadev Dubey mounted his pioneer production for Theatre Unit (Bom-
bay) on the sixth-boor rooftop terrace of Ebrahim Alkazi’s Cumballa Hill
apartment building, reaching about 1,200 middle- and upper-middle class
spectators in the course of twelve performances in November–December
1962 (cg. 8). That Dubey achieved a crucial breakthrough in translating
the play’s intense poetic structure into sustainable theatrical action is evi-
dent 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 pro-
ductions 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 metro-
politan 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, Guwa-
hati, 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 un-
paralleled 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 Bharati’s Andha yug, performed on the terrace of
Ebrahim Alkazi’s Cumballa Hill apartment. Directed by Satyadev Dubey,
Theatre Unit, Bombay, 1962. Courtesy of Natya Shodh Sansthan, Calcutta.
06chap6.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 189
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 time-
span 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 1–4, 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 Dhri-
tarashtra 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 Duryodhana’s
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 treach-
ery on the battleceld because they could not overcome him in fair
combat.4 Taking his cue from the equivocation that killed his father—
Yudhishthhira’s refusal to distinguish between man and beast—Ashwat-
thama resolves to take revenge against the Pandavas by inventing a new
identity for himself as narapashu (“man-beast”).
In act 3, “Ashwatthama’s Half-Truth,” this son deranged by grief is jux-
taposed against two others: Yuyutsu, the one Kaurava son who fought
on the Pandava side because he placed dharma above the bonds of fam-
ily; 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 Ashwatthama’s chariot at the Pandava
camp. In act 4, “Gandhari’s Curse,” the Kauravas’ grieving mother takes
desperate comfort in Sanjay’s description of the massacre Ashwatthama
carried out inside the Pandava camp. But the cve Pandava brothers, their
wife Draupadi, and Abhimanyu’s pregnant wife, Uttara, escape Ashwat-
thama’s 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 Krishna’s partiality to the Pandavas and the sight of her
last dead son then lead Gandhari to curse Krishna’s progeny and proph-
esy 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 Yudhishthhira’s supposedly ideal reign over Hastina-
pura has turned out to be an exercise in futility and disillusionment
because the culture he had inherited was feeble and accursed. The self-
destructive impulses within this culture now cnd expression in the sui-
cide 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 Krishna’s calm acceptance of his own foreordained end
in the forest near the city of Dwaraka on the Gujarat coast. At the pre-
cise 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 un-
relieved 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 act—the 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 mother’s grief at the annihilation of her o,spring, the urge toward self-
destruction 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/beast—half-truths—curse—suicide—death. Like Euripides’ Trojan
Women, Bharati’s 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 (6–7); wild beasts of prey drag the wounded
Duryodhana o, into the bushes (52); Ashwatthama’s 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
(61–63). The other deaths in the last two acts—Yuyutsu’s suicide, the
self-immolation of the Kaurava and Pandava parents, and the hunting
down of Krishna—are di,erent only in that they are less inhumane, not
less vivid.
In this fervid, selective remapping of the Mahabharata, Bharati cre-
ates new meanings by fashioning unusual symbolic identities for charac-
ters 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 Dhritarashtra’s 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, Bha-
rati ascribes the same self-destructive qualities to the reign of dharma-
raja 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 vic-
tory 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 Pandavas—and the war will consequently
have no victors, only losers. Because Bharati emphasizes Krishna’s super-
human qualities as Prabhu (god, divine being) rather than his suprahuman
identity as Vasudev (the best of men), Krishna’s 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 three-
pronged 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 vic-
tims but more or less disengaged and e,ete spectators: the three inter-
changeable old Kaurava warriors, Vidura (Dhritarashtra’s half-brother),
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Kripacharya (Ashwatthama’s maternal uncle), and Kritavarma; the go-

between 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 Hegel-
ian 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 aims—to 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 play’s 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 1947–48. Mahatma
Gandhi’s 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 non-
violent struggle on the part of the Indian populace and led to a massive
popular rebellion that the British government (embroiled in an unmanage-
able global war) suppressed with unprecedented brutality. The following
year, the cessation of rice imports from Southeast Asia, the government’s
wartime policy of diverting food to the army in the northeast, procteer-
ing, 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 vic-
tims, 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.
Bharati’s 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 disillu-
sionment that had set in with surprising swiftness once India was de-
colonized. 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 self-
gloriccation during the late-colonial period: the “extraordinary attach-
ment that we developed towards our tradition at that time,” Bharati
notes, was an antidote to a humiliating present, but it was “fundamen-
tally hyper-emotional—it 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 encour-
aged by “a few tired, defeated outcasts of European civilization enam-
oured 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 writer’s most
important responsibilities in independent India, then, is to forge a mean-
ingful relationship with the cultural past—not only for himself but to
liberate the “common man” from the “blind beliefs, disa,ections, unrea-
son, stupor, and dead traditions that inhabit his mind. . . . In this per-
spective 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 sub-
jection 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
06chap6.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 194
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 stan-
dards; seeking the path of development and moving towards it; but this
was a long, unnegotiable way” (MM, 235–36). 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 Bharati’s 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 un-
reason” 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,er-
ent 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 struggle—the 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 cul-
tural 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 par-
allel of the present: “when I say ‘After the war this epoch of blindness
descended on earth,’” Bharati comments, “I intend to evoke today’s post-
war 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 relation-
ships; the struggle for power, corruption, and moral blindness; and the
disillusionment of the common man after independence are the signic-
cant 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 (com-
menting on James Joyce’s 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 re-
spect Andha yug is comparable to condensed modernist verse epics, such
as Eliot’s The Waste Land or St.-John Perse’s 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 Carrière and Peter Brook’s 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” (Carrière,
xiv), Bharati–writing some thirty years earlier—took 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 perspec-
tive, it strongly informs the composition of the play in the early 1950s,
rebects important elements in the literary conditioning of a cosmopoli-
tan 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’ way—its propriety now lies in becoming ‘universal’ once
again” (iii). The basis for the universalist position is Bharati’s broadly
secular-humanist view of the trajectory of Western civilization since the
early modern period, as well as his understanding of the intersecting des-
tinies of East and West since the eighteenth century because of colonial-
ism and the emergence of transnational relations of power. The playwright
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sees “modernity” as the product of two antithetical impulses: a valori-

zation 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 emer-
gence of such repressive-exploitative systems as industrialism, totalitari-
anism, 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 Euro-
pean civilization that began in the nineteenth century and assumed the
proportions of a global crisis by the middle of the twentieth century. Else-
where, Bharati’s 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-making—man is getting closer to meaningless-
ness 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 East—it has appeared all over the world at vari-
ous 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 para-
lyzed . . . then it is the responsibility of the other parts . . . to give it the
gift of life” (MM, 227). In Bharati’s 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 rela-
tion to the universal destiny of humanity” (227). As a necessary corollary
to this ambitious conception of the writer’s 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 litera-
ture 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 writer’s responsibility in India, he

argues, is no di,erent from the writer’s 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 liter-
ary attributes. Nietzsche’s 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. Naipaul’s 1964 conceit of India as “an area of dark-
ness”), 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 à Becket in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
and have also suggested that the Kaurava city of Hastinapur in Bharati’s
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 Waste Land, and Joyce with
Dublin in Ulysses. The situation of these cities is similar in that relation-
ships are disintegrating, the status of humanity is in danger, faith has bro-
ken 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 1950–51—it 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, totalitari-
anism, the nuclear holocaust, and the cold war. In universalist terms, the
same characters enact a transhistorical allegory of the human condition,
characterized by Dhritarashtra’s self-destructive blindness, Gandhari’s all-
consuming grief, Ashwatthama’s inhuman savagery, Yuyutsu’s self-hatred,
Sanjay’s 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 consum-
mate expression of Bharati’s complex philosophical, historical, and cultural
self-positioning, and it undergirds both the major and minor theatri-
cal 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
ruin—a 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. Raina’s 1977 National School of Drama Reper-
tory 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 self-
questioning wherein lie the seeds of hope and light for all mankind”
(Taneja, 148). Most productions do attempt to create a “period” atmos-
phere 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 “tra-
ditional” e,ects by variously incorporating costumes and performance
styles from kathakali, Kabuki, kudiyattam, chhau, and thang-ta, among
other forms. But Ravi Baswani’s minimalist 1974 presentation had bare-
chested male actors in black trousers, their heads bandaged with di,erent-
colored strips of cloth to denote distinct ethical and emotional states. To
underscore the play’s modern contexts, Baswani replaced ancient wea-
pons with guns, paramilitary jackets, helmets, and sound e,ects sugges-
tive 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 Hiro-
shima. 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 play’s 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 overwhelm-
ing sensory experience by exploiting the monumental potential of vari-
ous 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). Dubey’s 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 blunders—even 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 prac-
titioners (including such important regional directors as Kamlakar Son-
takke, 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 Bharati’s verse drama as a meticulously orchestrated “play of
voices” to a logical conclusion by undertaking a solo recitation of the
entire text in August 1990—a 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 Dubey’s approach appears
in the extravagance and magniccence of Ebrahim Alkazi’s 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
play’s 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 struc-
tures, against canyon, rock, blasted forest, deep jungle cave, marshland,
swamp. I see Gandhari small, lost, a mere speck under the huge su,ocat-
ing 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, 127–28). However, Alkazi’s 1967 production
at Talkatora Gardens has also become a touchstone for the intimate,
quintessentially theatrical connection between the performance environ-
ment, the moments of poignance in the audience’s 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 predator–presaging 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 Gandhari’s curse, Ashwatthama’s 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 Alkazi’s
monumental techniques is evident in the stylized convulsions of Ratan
Thiyam’s 1974 Manipuri version and M. K. Raina’s 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
play’s allegorical meanings highlight certain emotional and intellectual
qualities in the principal characters—Dhritarashtra’s blindness and Ash-
watthama’s uncontainable rage, for instance–which in turn have been
rendered memorably by particular actors. The performance documen-
tation 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 Dubey’s 1962 production,
the Marathi-English actor Manavendra Chitnis made a lasting impres-
sion 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.
06chap6.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 202
a lost soul” in the audience’s consciousness well after the performance

was over (Taneja, 125). Of the 1964 Calcutta revival in which Dubey him-
self played Ashwatthama, reviewer Mahendra Pal noted that “the presen-
tation was extremely impressive and the acting of a high quality. Dubey’s
voice, Gandhari’s loud wailing, and Dhritarashtra’s eyes will remain
alive in people’s memories for a long time to come” (126). Because of the
success with which actors have transplanted the moments of crisis in
Bharati’s text onto the stage, the principal roles in Andha yug have become
associated with a succession of major performers, and major perform-
ers have given even minor roles an unforeseen signiccance. Among the
acclaimed stage and screen actors who have created the key role of Ash-
watthama 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 actresses—Deshpande, Hattangady,
and Pradhan—are as successful in clm and television as in the theatre.
The well-known character actor Amrish Puri played the blind Dhritar-
ashtra in the two Dubey productions of 1962 and 1964 and the old sup-
plicant 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 word-
less 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 interest-
ing 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 Alkazi’s 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; paradoxi-
cally, this power has endured despite occasional arguments that the play
is a bawed masterpiece on both the page and the stage. “When read-
ing Andha yug,” Vipin Kumar Agrawal observes, “we accept a lot of weak
poetry by telling ourselves that we’re 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 we’re reading a poem. . . . Hence for the enlightened reader there
is neither good poetry in Andha yug nor a well-crafted drama” (95–96). As
a text the play can appear single-voiced, overwrought, and relentlessly
didactic; on stage it can come o, as an unplayable aggregation of dis-
connected 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 satis-
factory 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 play’s real energies. These dićulties,
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 Bharati’s play has maintained its presence on the stage
for two generations of theatregoers in India is very di,erent from the
relative self-sućiency and exclusiveness with which director-centered
vehicles, such as the Mahabharata plays of Panikkar and Thiyam, circu-
late 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 per-
formance. The Mahabharata productions of Panikkar and Thiyam repre-
sent, in contrast, two other inbuential but divergent practices within the
complementary celd of urban “total theatre”—the 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. Panikkar’s Urubhangam:
Epic Performance as Cultural Capital
K. N. Panikkar’s 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, Panikkar’s crst and tri-
umphantly successful Bhasa revival, premiered in 1978 at the Kalidasa
Samaroh in Ujjain, the nation’s leading showcase for experiments with
classical and traditional forms in dance, music, and theatre. Bhasa’s Duta-
vakyam followed at the same venue in 1980. The Sanskrit Urubhangam
made its crst Indian appearance at the International Bhasa Theatre Fes-
tival, which Panikkar organized in 1987 to commemorate the seventy-
cfth anniversary of Ganapati Sastri’s 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,
Panikkar’s Mahabharata trilogy as a whole has had extraordinary visibil-
ity 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 sensa-
tion 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 director’s 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 (1985–89), 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 “per-
formance history” for a given work that is identical with their own expo-
sitions. 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 multi-
ple directorial styles, languages, and regions.
Panikkar’s Urubhangam—his version of Bhasa’s version of Vyasa’s
version of the Mahabharata—is 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 Vyasa’s 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 oppo-
sitions that in Aristotelian terms would characterize the “manner of imi-
tation.” 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 micro-
text, 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” (“Mahab-
harata Rebected,” 193). The “microtext” of Panikkar’s production is the
same as that of Bhasa’s 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” stag-
ing and communicates philosophical meanings through physical devices
of enactment, thus both elaborating and reinterpreting the original.
Bhasa’s Urubhangam begins with a short prologue spoken by the sutrad-
har 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 caul-
dron of hate and brute force, of pride and glory” as they describe the hor-
ricc sights in Kurukshetra (Haksar, 105–6). The duel with maces begins
in the middle of this act and is again reported by the soldiers, not shown
directly. After Bhima shatters Duryodhana’s thighs in violation of the
rules of combat, act 2 of the play moves rapidly through to the climax.
Enraged by Bhima’s illicit action, Krishna’s 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 Duryodhana’s parents, Dhritarashtra and Gandhari,
his two principal wives, and his young son, Durjaya, an invented char-
acter 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, Bhasa’s 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 imme-
diacy 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); Duryodhana’s 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 Duryodhana’s demise, deces a cardinal rule of classical Indian drama-
turgy 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 “world’s beloved . . . who suddenly
entered [Bhima’s] sharp mace and delivered me to death” (109). In the
Mahabharata the wounded Duryodhana bees into the forest, but Bhasa’s
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. Duryodhana’s physical su,ering acquires a tragic quality be-
cause his family cannot comprehend it fully—the blind Dhritarashtra and
Gandhari cannot see him, while his son Durjaya is too young to under-
stand either bodily pain or emotional anguish. But with Duryodhana’s
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 dra-
matic action in an elaborate, largely nonverbal structure of dance, recita-
tion, song, percussive sound, and stylized movement. The mise-en-scène
06chap6.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 207
and dramatic pace in his Urubhangam seek to selectively recreate the ele-
ments 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 Panikkar’s production, however, comes from
the extratextual elements for which Bhasa’s 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 combina-
tion of geet (song), nritya (dance), and vadya (instrumental music), which
Panikkar describes as the foundation of his innovative stagecraft. A sub-
stantial portion of stage time is occupied by male and female dancers who
group and regroup constantly to evoke the war, to o,er choric commen-
tary on unfolding events, and to make up an internal audience for the
main dramatic action. The music (composed by Panikkar) draws on “tra-
ditional” 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 consti-
tute 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 pri-
mary signals of change in dramatic mood or circumstance.
Unlike the simple two-part structure of Bhasa’s written text for Urub-
hangam, Panikkar’s acting text consists of a succession of more or less self-
contained performative units that coalesce into three major movements:
the scenes on the battleceld, the duel and its immediate aftermath, and
Duryodhana’s death in the presence of his family. The method through-
out 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 princi-
pal 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 Duryodhana’s emergent alter
ego concrete, Panikkar invents a second character—a theyyam (godhead
or incarnation)—who springs out of the former’s shattered thigh and
literally embodies his better self. Beginning with Duryodhana’s 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 impend-
ing death. The scene obviously has a crucial dramatic function: it places
Duryodhana at the centre and creates a space for his ethical transfor-
mation through the agency of a character who is “visible” only to him.
But it is also visually spectacular, presenting the theyyam as a larger-
than-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 Dhritar-
ashtra and his entourage, is textually close to Bhasa but again unpredict-
able and intricate in its methods of elaboration. The dramatic dialogue in
this scene is interspersed with choreographic patterns that focus atten-
tion 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 after-
world, 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 Bhasa’s uncon-
ventional reading of his character and Panikkar’s even more novel theatri-
cal interpretation of it. The play ends, however, by superimposing the
public on the private once again: the chorus of dancers returns to witness
Duryodhana’s exit, and Ashwatthama’s unappeased rage shatters the ele-
giac 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 view-
ers’ expectations? As suggested earlier, the selective occasions for the San-
skrit productions—the Kalidasa Samaroh, the Bhasa festivals, the Nehru
Festival, the National Theatre festivals—showcase individual plays and
virtually predetermine their presentation as high-cultural artifacts. Audi-
ences 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 contem-
poraneity, to which practitioners such as Panikkar have contributed sig-
niccantly by cross-fertilizing the classic with rich postclassical regional
traditions. The feelings of estrangement from the play’s 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-sućient performative event—the very act of
utterance creates an elite cultural ambience on stage that is qualitatively
di,erent from the exchange of “vernacular” speech. The typical specta-
tor submits readily, with a sense of curiosity and delight, to the virtuos-
ity 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 Bharati’s Andha yug. Panikkar’s 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 identi-
ccation. 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 today’s 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 Bhasa’s classic. The
emotions are all reined in and kept under control” (Panikkar, “Nehru
Theatre Festival,” 2). Clearly, the prestige of the classic and the aesthet-
ics of performance sublimate and heighten—without neutralizing it—
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the central emotional situation in Bhasa’s 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 Thiyam’s 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 nature’s life cycle are emptied of their spiritual
meaning and clled with corruption. The past—a burden; the future—not
on the horizon; the present—dead. Freedom from fear is a distant dream;
hope we have none.
—soyam lokendrajit
Ratan Thiyam’s Mahabharata plays are inseparable from the crisis of cul-
tural 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 San-
skrit 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 (1891–1947) 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 domi-
nate 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 gov-
ernment’s political backlash against underground insurgent movements
as well as popular demands for the right to self-determination has cre-
ated 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 cultur-
ally 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 functions—as 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 structures—whether religious, political, or familial—also
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.
Thiyam’s interest in the Mahabharata, in Bhasa, and in his older con-
temporary, 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) Bharati’s Andha yug, Sopho-
cles’s Antigone, Badal Sircar’s Hiroshima, Utpal Dutt’s Vietnam, and most
recently, Uttar priyadarshi, his theatrical version of S. H. Vatsyayan’s poem
about Emperor Ashoka’s dramatic conversion from brutal militarism to
the Buddha’s 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 Kanhailal’s Karna and Loitongbam
Dorendra’s Draupadi.
Thiyam’s principal objective is perhaps to question structures of au-
thority: 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 Thiyam’s
three major Mahabharata plays are similarly nonheroes who allow the play-
wright to “[take] a position in relation to the mainstream institutional-
ization of the mythical heroes” (ix). Two of these plays have Duryodhana
as a central character. In Urubhangam Thiyam follows Bhasa’s text: Dury-
odhana is caught in a conbict that o,ers a choice only between two evils
and entails violence as the inevitable, inconclusive end. But in Chakra-
vyuha the text is Thiyam’s 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 Bandyopa-
dhyay, “New Karnas,” 74). In contrast, the cgure of Karna brings issues
of social hierarchy and cultural identity to the foreground in Manipuri
theatre. In Thiyam’s Karnabharam the tension is between Karna’s “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 cul-
ture and the powerful ethnic and tribal strains that determine its spe-
cicc regional characteristics. In casting Abhimanyu as the protagonist in
Chakravyuha, Thiyam also shifts attention away from the mature anti-
heroes 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 Arjuna’s young,
recently married son is based on chapters 34–40 of the seventh major
book of the Mahabharata, the “Drona Parvan.” Scene 1 is set in the pre-
ceptor Drona’s 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 mother’s lap and lured to heaven, while
Yudhishthhira relays the message about Drona’s 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 pene-
trating the formation when he was still in the womb of his mother,
Subhadra. A bashback recreates the romantic-erotic scene between Abhi-
manyu’s parents, in which they express their mutual love while also shar-
ing 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 cos-
mic 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 Dury-
odhana desperately calls on Drona to kill him. In scene 6, the seven great
Kaurava charioteers known as the saptarathi—Drona, Ashwatthama, Krip-
acharya, Karna, Shakuni, Duhshasana, and Duryodhana—surround Abhi-
manyu’s 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, Thiyam’s topicality becomes
heavy-handed when Shakuni talks about the deceptive art of “politics”
and refers to one of the cornerstones of Jawaharlal Nehru’s national pol-
icy, the economic cve-year plans, as “colourful dreams heralding a bright
future” that are never implemented but that enable a politician to “be-
come a leader, a king” (15). At a more complex thematic level, Thiyam
rejects the simple binarism of good and evil in political conbict by mak-
ing Duryodhana a vocal critic of his adversaries—in fact, he articulates in
this play the critique of the Pandavas that comes from Ashwatthama in
Bharati’s 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 cor-
ruption 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 sub-
tleties 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 out-
right but recognized as complex. Drona also underscores Duryodhana’s
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 Abhimanyu’s entrapment (scene 2, pp. 22–36)
shows the subtlety of seduction on the part of the elders and the sus-
ceptibility 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” (35–36). 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 Bharati’s 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 Thiyam’s 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 pre-
miere of Chakravyuha because of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, see
Kavita Nagpal’s introduction in Thiyam, Chakravyuha, vii–viii.)
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 pub-
lished by Seagull in 1998, Kavita Nagpal’s detailed “pre-text” describes
the stages in the play’s evolution, the development of its political mes-
sage, and the numerous performance traditions it assimilates—from
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 descrip-
tions 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 open-
ing prayers to Brahma and Vishnu in Sanskrit (not Manipuri) and the
description of the formation of theatre from the four Vedas in the pro-
logue are set pieces with no intrinsic relation to the story of Abhimanyu.
The Sanskrit “Tulasi Shloka” that opens scene 1 has a self-sućient the-
atrical e,ect, although dramatically it establishes Drona’s Brahmanism
to intensify his anxiety at being called to account by the Kauravas to ful-
cll 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 woman’s voice begins a song accompanied by the pung (drum) and cym-
bals. 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. (28–29)
This fusion of the verbal-thematic with the visual-aural in Thiyam’s

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 Thiyam’s play, Bandyopadhyay considers it “a pity that in
spite of Ratan’s 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 celebra-
tion 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). Thiyam’s critique of dom-
inant 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, Thiyam’s 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 Panikkar’s Mahabharata the-
atre is consciously apolitical, Thiyam’s 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 develop-
ment 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 mass-
cultural 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-sućiency and a
potential for elaboration that are especially suited to the relative brevity
of performance. Ironically, the Carrière-Brook production of the Mahab-
harata (widely received as an epoch-making event in world theatre) is
therefore based on an impulse that is cinematic and televisual, not the-
atrical. Third, “literary” plays based on the epic, such as Kelu Janmejaya,
Yayati, and Agni mattu malè, vary signiccantly from each other and high-
light the author’s originality, but the performance-oriented works, such as
the interrelated sequences of Panikkar and Thiyam, have tended to rep-
licate 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 re-
gional cultures of traditional and folk performance—but all three works
stand at a considerable distance from the popular reenactments of the
Mahabharata in the various media of mechanical reproduction.
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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 postmodern-
ism and postcolonialism are alike in undertaking a “dialogue” with history:
diverging from modernism’s ahistorical retreat from temporality, the post-
modern “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 proble-
matized its status as a coherent, unmediated, and authoritative form of
knowledge about the past. Interestingly, one of the most e,ective instru-
ments of destabilization has been history’s resemblance to contiguous dis-
ciplines. 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 “essen-
tially poetic act” in precguring and explaining historical events (Metahis-
tory, x). The element of interpretation in history subverts its claims to
218
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The Ironic History of the Nation 219
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 post-
Renaissance period. Since the appearance of Edward W. Said’s Oriental-
ism 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 colo-
nialist strategies of cultural domination and self-legitimation because the
production of “oćial” histories in the colonial world is almost exclu-
sively the prerogative of the colonizer. Said describes the Western his-
torical 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-Malek’s 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). Said’s redecnition of
Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and hav-
ing authority over the Orient” has also been instrumental in India in
dismantling British colonial historiography, which ascribes a similar ahis-
toricity 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 elit-
ism 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 prac-
tice—the 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 poetry’s 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 ex-
tensive 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 ideo-
logical 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,
265–73), this dialectic of history and cction involves a range of textual and
interpretive practices that inform such early examples as Shakespeare’s
history plays (1592–98), Dryden’s The Duke of Guise (1682), and Joseph
Addison’s Cato (1714), as well as later works, such as Sir Walter Scott’s
Waverly novels (1814–25), Brecht’s Galileo (1945), and Arthur Miller’s 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 alterna-
tive forms of cgural representation. Second, the intertextual connection
has important interpretive implications because cctionalized history
always stands in a determinable ideological relation to textualized his-
tory—concrming, 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 interpre-
tive community possesses both knowledge of and attitudes toward his-
tory 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 author’s manipulation of
history; the audience’s knowledge, expectations, and interpretive incli-
nations; 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 latter’s own national past has a special status among thematic mate-
rials” (6). The drama of the nation’s past is therefore one of the strongest
expressions of what Loren Kruger calls “theatrical nationhood”—“the
idea of representing the nation in the theatre, of summoning a repre-
sentative audience that will in turn recognize itself as nation on stage”
(3). The development of the “national history play” within the institu-
tional 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 socio-
political conditions of reception. Relating this genre to the “Elizabethan
writing of England,” Richard Helgerson conceives of the 1590s as a his-
torical moment when nation, theatre, and playwright were all alike caught
between the opposing claims of popular and elite, inclusive and exclusive
representation. Shakespeare’s 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 expres-
sion of Anglo-British national self-understanding” (204). At other national-
historical moments, the history plays of Nicholas Rowe in England (1714–
15) and historical verse dramas, such as Ibsen’s Brand (1865), Peer Gynt
(1867), and Emperor and Galilean (1873) in Norway, and Strindberg’s Master
Olof (1872) in Sweden, establish the same integral relation between the
nation’s past and the forging of a formative national consciousness in the
present. Common to these disparate texts and locations is the under-
standing 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)con-
struction appropriated by neonationalism, history has become problem-
atic both in itself and in terms of the past it constructs for the nation.
The colonialist mediation of Indian history, which exemplices the prob-
lems 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 per-
form complex epistemological and cultural functions and intervene sig-
niccantly in the discourse of history. In theory it is possible for history
and its cctional intertexts to be ideologically consonant, but, more fre-
quently, in practice historical cctions work precisely to neutralize or re-
pudiate 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 inher-
ited 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 contempo-
rary Indian theatre—Mohan Rakesh’s Ashadh ka ek din (A Day in Early
Autumn, Hindi, 1958), Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq (Kannada, 1964), and Badal
Sircar’s 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 determin-
istic 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. Rakesh’s
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 found-
ing 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 pro-
ductions by Shyamanand Jalan, Ebrahim Alkazi, and Satyadev Dubey (see
appendix 4). Rakesh’s 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 cultural-
nationalist discourses, the hagiographic tendencies within traditional
Indian culture, and the private/public dichotomy in the life of the mod-
ern 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 self-
sacricce of the muse he had left behind in the village of his birth.
Karnad’s Tughlaq is the third major history play of the post-
independence period, following Rakesh’s 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 subcontinent—the 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 Karnad’s play is Muhammad bin Tughlaq, a
brilliant but spectacularly unsuccessful fourteenth-century Muslim sultan
of Delhi, known popularly as “mad Muhammad”; Karnad’s primary his-
torical source is the Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi (1357), a chronicle history whose
author, Zia-ud-din Barani, spent seventeen years at Tughlaq’s court but
died in self-imposed poverty the year the work was completed. Unlike
Ashadh, which overlays its historical core with an invented narrative, Tugh-
laq 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.
Sircar’s 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 history-
writing, 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 (There’s 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 acquaintance’s suicide. As
they present competing versions of the events that led up to the desper-
ate 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 pri-
vate 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 Bharati’s Andha yug, Sircar’s
Baki itihas jolts the reader-viewer into recognizing the radical cosmopoli-
tanism with which the ordinary urban individual in mid-twentieth cen-
tury 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 meth-
odological alternative to allegory, the literary mode most closely associ-
ated with the nation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. In Fredric
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Jameson’s 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 embat-
tled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (69; empha-
sis omitted). The discourse of history, however, diverges from Jameson’s
private/public dichotomy to o,er a public/public split, and its resem-
blance rather than identity with the present resists reduction purely
to allegory. As John M. Wallace argues in the context of seventeenth-
century English historical writing, an audience can always reduce history
to a topical allegory, but the historicist critic must reiterate the “analog-
ical 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 preemp-
tively qualices Homi K. Bhabha’s 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 collaps-
ing the nation’s 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 Rakesh’s Ashadh ka ek din
The portrait of Kalidasa in Mohan Rakesh’s Ashadh ka ek din, the crst
major realistic prose play of the 1950s, is an unambiguous sign of the re-
visionary 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 antiquity—even 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. 375–415), is based at least in part on the scholarly desire
to replicate in “classical” India the a´liation 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, 9–12). The tradition is, of course, sustained by the classic qualities
of Kalidasa’s oeuvre, which includes three long poems, Ritusamhara (A
Gathering of Seasons), Meghaduta (The Cloud-Messenger), and Kumar-
asambhava (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 univer-
sally known Abhijnana Shakuntalam (Shakuntala and the Ring of Recollec-
tion). Far more important than the historicity of Kalidasa’s 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 post-
colonial literary modernist. In theatricalizing Kalidasa, therefore, Rakesh
takes on a body of commentary, exegesis, scholarship, criticism, and ide-
ological 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 Kali-
dasa is established by Indian traditions of poetry, poetics, drama, and crit-
ical commentary, which acknowledge his excellence in both major forms
of classical composition—natya (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 (eighth–eleventh centur-
ies); and poetic works that pay tribute to Kalidasa, such as Banabhatta’s
Harshacharita (seventh century) and Narayana Bhatta’s Venisamhara. Sec-
ond, the orientalist apotheosis of Kalidasa begins with Sir William Jones’s
translation of Shakuntalam in 1789, in the preface to which he announces
his discovery of Sanskrit—and hence of Indo-European civilization and
history—to 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 colo-
nialist derogation, enables nineteenth-century Indian nationalists to ap-
propriate 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 commen-
tary, translation, and experimental performance—which includes the work
07chap7.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 227
of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, Edward Gordon

Craig, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barba—singles out Shakuntalam
as the exemplary work of “Indian drama” and creates a reception his-
tory for it that is more complex than that of any other Indian text (see
Figuera, 12–13 and 190–91; she records forty-six translations of Shakun-
talam 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 decolo-
nizing 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 objec-
tives as a nonanglophone, mid-twentieth-century Indian playwright. Like
Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and Saint Joan or Brecht’s 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 cre-
ates 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 Kalidasa’s extraordinary fame becomes a seemingly e,ortless o,stage
production tangential to his social, romantic, and spiritual crises. Simi-
larly, 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 Kalidasa’s 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 Kalidasa’s poetry and drama—while
Kalidasa’s works emphasize the heroic and erotic modes (vir rasa and
shringar rasa), Rakesh resorts to irony and tragedy. Instead of the happy
resolutions of Kalidasa’s plays and the exquisite recnement of his poetry,
we witness the unhappy drama of Kalidasa—a Dushyanta for whom there
is no ring of recollection and no reunion with the beloved. All these fea-
tures of Ashadh ke ek din are consistent with those of the modern history
play, but in at least two respects Rakesh’s 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, Rakesh’s play contains only four principal characters and a
single, spare village setting.
Indeed, Kalidasa may be the protagonist but he is not the central char-
acter in his own story—that 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 Rakesh’s 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 Mallika’s village home, with the cold mountain rain of the
month of Ashadh (roughly June–July in the Gregorian calendar) serving
as an elemental motif at the play’s 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 Mallika’s precarious femi-
nine world. The same qualities of symmetry and counterpoint mark rela-
tions between the play’s main characters. Mallika and Ambika, daughter
and widowed mother, have opposing ideas about the rights and obliga-
tions of love. Kalidasa and Vilom (a character whose name literally means
“opposite”) represent the di,erence between insecure creativity and self-
possessed cynicism, which Vilom expresses disingenuously as a di,erence
of degree, not kind: “What is Vilom? An unsuccessful Kalidasa. And Kali-
dasa? 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
poet’s life, these patterns of sympathy and antipathy develop the themat-
ically 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 in-
equality that characterize the poet’s attachment to his muse. Act 1 estab-
lishes 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 re-
spectability. Dependent on her companionship and temperamentally
narcissistic, Kalidasa tacitly accepts and a´rms 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 separa-
tion 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 ex-
cludes 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 Mallika’s 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 Kalidasa’s extraordinary career Mallika now regards
herself as an insigniccant detail but has kept abreast of his work by acquir-
ing manuscript copies from passing merchants. Her painful resignation
is shattered, however, by the news that Kalidasa has stopped in the vil-
lage on his way to assuming the governorship of the province of Kashmir.
A succession of oćious courtiers (including the poet’s wife, Priyangu-
manjari) then intrude on Mallika’s home to experience “authentic” vil-
lage life, discover the sources of Kalidasa’s 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 princess’s 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, Kalidasa’s crippled uncle, returns from the capital city
with the news that the poet has given up his position in Kashmir and per-
haps taken up the life of an ascetic in the holy city of Kashi (Banaras)—
events that seem to nullify Mallika’s 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 ear-
lier 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 Mallika’s infant daughter
and of Vilom’s 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, cre-
ativity, and ambition. As an ostensible history play that quickly became a
stage and print classic, it therefore invited two predictable objections:
that Rakesh’s “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). Rakesh’s diary entry for 6 February 1959 men-
tions that a local literary personality in Lucknow had refused to inaugu-
rate 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 cctional-
ized 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
07chap7.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 231
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 the-
atrical possibilities. The play’s unexpected success in print—the second
impression went to press within three months of crst publication, before
any performances had been planned—led him to reemphasize the prior-
ity of performance. In the preface to the second printing of 1958, he
expresses his belief that “the real value of a dramatic work—its success
or failure—is decided only on the stage. For good, successful plays to be
written, the expectation is that they would be acted on stage before pub-
lication, and would then be given cnal form only in the light of that expe-
rience. But it looks as though we will take some years to get to that
point” (SN, 105). Eagerly anticipating the play’s 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, Rakesh’s 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 Kalidasa’s 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 Kalidasa’s character as rebecting certain “critical predispo-
sitions” (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, Rakesh’s arguments regarding the general relation of history
to historical cctions involve the category of “literature” rather than “the-
atre,” but they are honed by his practice in the two history plays—Ashadh
and Lahron ke rajhans—and 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 accom-
plishment 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, 196–98)
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 expend-
ing 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 great-
ness is possible only at a human level—this 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 play’s
visual and aural qualities return it powerfully to history, particularly in
performance. No major director has ignored Rakesh’s meticulous stage
directions regarding the atmosphere, shape, texture, and arrangement of
the spaces and objects constituting the mise-en-scène: 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 Kalidasa’s period on stage in his Sagar pro-
duction 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 envi-
ronment, he created vivid tableaux that both heightened and framed the
play’s moments of emotional crisis and became indelibly imprinted in
his mind (see SN, 109–10). 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 Rakesh’s imagined environ-
ment 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 con-
temporary and sustains the play’s period atmosphere while maintaining a
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quality of natural but cultured communication. Satyadev Dubey pointed

out that the play’s “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 Rakesh’s
ability to get his meaning across to ordinary viewers while negotiating
a Sanskritized diction as his greatest success and one of the play’s major
strengths. Indeed, so vital is the linguistic medium to the play’s emo-
tional e,ects that when author-critic Kanhaiyalal Nandan saw the The-
atre Group’s 1972 English production in Bombay (in Sarah K. Ensley’s
translation), he felt that the empathy and delicacy of emotion associated
with Kalidasa’s character “were completely drowned out by the formal
enunciation of a melodramatic English. . . . There was not even a remote
sign here of Kalidasa’s emotional susceptibility and the profound inner
conbict that should have consumed him at the end” (SN, 120). Else-
where, in Joy Michael’s 1968 English production at Mary Washington Col-
lege in Virginia, Ensley’s English translation still could not domesticate a
play that the reviewer, George St. Julian, described as the modern prod-
uct of an alien culture. St. Julian found Michael’s presentation to be “ex-
cellent” and “beautiful,” but still a very dićult 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 Rakesh’s generation of playwrights, Ashadh ka ek din
has been the one performed least frequently in translation.
Given Rakesh’s investment in the pastness of the past as well as its
presence and his interest in revitalizing the Hindi stage through modern-
ist 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 publica-
tion 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”). Relat-
ing the play speciccally to “the mass of so-called historical plays in Hindi,”
Nemichandra Jain noted the absence in it of revivalist fervor and melo-
drama, 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 Rakesh’s radical positions on history, tradi-
tion, 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 play’s communicable
meanings. As Jha observes (echoing both Rakesh and Dharamvir Bharati
and voicing the majority view among theatre professionals), Indian cul-
ture 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 break-
ing 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 con-
temporaneity) also emerges in several other thematic emphases to which
history is peripheral. In the cgures of Mallika and Ambika, the play cre-
ates 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 mod-
ern Indian theatre to disrupt the equation of idealized Indian feminin-
ity 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: “Mallika’s life is her own pos-
session. 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 cul-
ture 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 poet’s 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 poet’s 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 aren’t you a sentient human being? Doesn’t he, and don’t 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 Mallika’s
grief. She directs her critique at the self-centered, outwardly ascetic, cre-
ative male self, which is no less destructive of Mallika’s innocence and
happiness than Vilom’s 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 Padamsee’s 1972 Eng-
lish 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 Alkazi’s 1962 NSD production, and later
in the 1973 Dishantar production, both times against her (future) hus-
band, 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 school’s Repertory Company, for which they played the
lead roles in Karnad’s Tughlaq, Rakesh’s 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 dis-
parity in their creative lives, Sudha Shivpuri claims to have repeated the
lines from Rakesh’s 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,
07chap7.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 237
that I had also achieved something. And are you going to make my exis-
tence 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 Kalidasa-
Mallika relationship acquired even greater intensity through this associa-
tion with the actors’ lives, and the retrospective text of Shivpuri’s 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 disen-
gaged 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 Rakesh’s iconoclasm in Ashadh
ka ek din is compromised by a rather conventional masculinist insis-
tence 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.
07chap7.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 238
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 else’s ambi-
tion and, even after years of su,ering, o,ers no reproach. Not surpris-
ingly, 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 play’s 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 Mallika’s
self-negation. In the preface to Lahron ke rajhans, he comments that Kali-
dasa and Vilom “are not in themselves the symbols of victory and defeat;
that function belongs to Mallika, who is the embodiment of Kalidasa’s
will to believe. Mallika’s 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 creativ-
ity in which a woman’s su,ering is the necessary price of a man’s achieve-
ment. Ambika’s critique attacks this presumption but cannot dislodge
it because her rage prevents neither the destruction of Mallika’s 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 rela-
tions of art to state patronage and of the center to the periphery—both
vital issues in a new nation in which literary and theatrical “art” (unlike
mass-cultural forms, such as clm and television) could not be economi-
cally self-sustaining, and a “national” literature could not, in important
respects, be more than an aggregation of “regional” literatures. The per-
sistent 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 patron-
goddess 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 narra-
tive 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 post-

independence forms of authorship in both literature and theatre: the
privileges and obligations of patronage, the poet’s 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 Kalidasa’s character. Rakesh asserts that the
writer’s relation to state patronage is the most important “sign of con-
temporaneity” in the play, without which the wrenching irony of Kali-
dasa and Mallika’s 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 pre-
sented 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 play’s central problem—“how
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 acade-
mies) plays a decisive role in fostering cultural forms; the institution of
theatre is organized along patronal rather than commercial lines; and
the state’s support has economic as well as symbolic value. In Rakesh’s
opinion, Indian writers handle the consequent struggle—between the
writer’s need for survival and recognition and the principle of artistic
autonomy—with singular ineptitude: “If they were really indi,erent to
money or to the returns on their writing, then many of them wouldn’t
be seen seeking those favors which would compromise their egos, their
conscience, and everything of this sort. It is not an aversion to money, it’s
not an aversion to rewards. It’s a complex of some sort from within. . . .
We just don’t assert ourselves; we just don’t 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 oće of court poet will not
remain vacant. But all his life Kalidasa will remain what he is today—a
regional poet. Even those who are praising Ritusamhara today will forget
him in a little while” (SN, 46–47).
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This is the essential quandary—the state recognizes and rewards tal-

ent on its own terms, but the artist who does not seize the opportunity
for recognition risks oblivion. Kalidasa’s ambivalence resonates in Mohan
Rakesh’s diary entry for 5 February 1959, where he expresses irritation at
the “scandal” caused by his representation of Kalidasa, along with a real-
istic sense of what was at stake:
I’ve already accepted that somebody else will receive the Sangeet Natak
Akademi prize—although Awasthi [Suresh Awasthi, secretary of the Aka-
demi] did say the other day, “Friend, the rumour is that your play’s getting
the prize. It’s very high up.” I don’t know. Nor do I want to know. One
unnecessarily ruins one’s sleep. I feel vexed only on account of the pub-
lishers, otherwise except for living on the royalties from my books, I don’t
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 state’s
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, Kali-
dasa’s crisis (unlike Rakesh’s) 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 poet’s disa,ection, then, brings the court to his village and the
center-periphery dichotomy into the foreground, along with its distinc-
tive implications for an old-but-new, traditional-but-modern, multilingual-
but-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 ways—as 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 oppo-
sition that informs two inbuential but antithetical visions of the modern
Indian nation—Gandhi’s idea of the village as the critical socioeconomic
and political unit in independent India and Nehru’s 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 Priyangumanjari’s unconscious cruelty in this respect is the encoun-
ter of rural simplicity with urban bureaucratic protocol, the epitome of
mediocrity and sterility. Faisal Alkazi’s 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 play’s most darkly comic moments, Anusvar
and Anunasik—interchangeable male courtiers whose names derive from
nasal sounds in the Devanagari alphabet—parodied bureaucratic inac-
tion by cnding every possible self-important reason not to perform their
assigned task (to prepare Mallika’s home for the princess’s arrival). Need-
less to say, such a tableau has enormous resonance in a context in which
artists are contemptuous of the cultural bureaucracy in the same meas-
ure that they are subject to its whims. More ironically, Rakesh—the arch-
metropolitan, cosmopolitan, modernist author—seems to turn the tables
on his own craft by portraying the village as the realm of beauty and in-
spiration, 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 Kalidasa’s metaphors,
they take o,ense and accuse her of doubting the truth of his poetry. This
imperialism of Sanskrit in Rakesh’s 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 subordi-
nate dialects; those among the various Indian languages, where one lan-
guage 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. . . . It’s the kind of Hindi which is not the mature language, literarily
speaking; it’s 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 posi-
tions 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 al-
together 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 writing—both cction and non-cction—created 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 ‘oćial 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 accumu-
lated 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, per-
formers, theatre audiences, and readers have celebrated, it is sućient 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 Rab-
indranath 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 “authentic-
ity” are tangential to a subject that belongs to the realm of cultural myth-
making. The singularity of Rakesh’s play becomes especially evident in
comparison with Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq, which also questions the accu-
racy and authenticity of history, but in relation to cultural, textual, epis-
temological, formal, and political issues that have a more conventional
association with the genre of the history play.
Girish Karnad’s Tughla q as a History Play

The Past, the Present, and the Nation
Karnad’s account of the genesis of Tughlaq (1964)—put forward in num-
erous essays and interviews over the last four decades and repeated often
by his critics—is a disarmingly simple narrative, quite at variance with the
aura the play has acquired over the same period of time. While attend-
ing 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 neverthe-
less 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 Tughlaq’s decline as a ruler
also o,ered a “striking parallel” to the crst two decades of Indian in-
dependence under Jawaharlal Nehru’s 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 re-
bected 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 play’s com-
position as eclectic, even opportunistic—they include Jean Anouilh’s
Beckett, Albert Camus’ Caligula, Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, the history plays
of Shakespeare, Sergei Eisenstein’s clm Ivan the Terrible, and every histor-
ical play he could see in England, on stage and on the screen. Yet the prin-
cipal 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 [Karnad’s 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 charac-
ters!” (CIT, 79). The “spaciousness” of the overall design, and the con-
ventions 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 tour-
ing productions. In a 1989 essay, he comments at length on the basic spa-
tial 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 curtain—normally depicting a
street—as 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 audi-
ence 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 spa-
tial 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 grad-

ually emptier, and the play’s 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 master-
piece of a twenty-six-year old author who transformed a popular formula
by surrendering his subject to the stresses of existentialist unease, mod-
ernist irony, and an intuitive historical revisionism. Contrary to Karnad’s
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. Karanth’s direction (1966). Thereafter Tughlaq took on an active life
on stage in several notable translations. Karanth’s 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 Padamsee’s
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 Bangalore’s 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 Dubey’s Urdu
version for Theatre Unit (Bombay) and Shyamanand Jalan’s Bengali ver-
sion for Padatik (Calcutta). Paralleling this active performance record is
the play’s multilingual presence in print, in Kannada, Hindi-Urdu, English,
Marathi, Bengali, and Gujarati, among other languages. The English trans-
lation, in particular, has appeared under the Oxford University Press
imprint in India as an independent work (1972), along with plays by Sir-
car 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, “I’d 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 cul-
ture derives signiccantly from the complexity of its construction as a
history play along principles that are antithetical to Rakesh’s Ashadh ka
ek din in almost every respect. Rather than deromanticizing a literary-
cultural icon, it o,ers a serious cctional reappraisal of a cgure ridiculed
in history as well as popular lore. It follows the chronology of Tughlaq’s
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 writ-
ten history, the play also appropriates a specicc historiographic inter-
text, the Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi of Tughlaq’s court historian, Zia-ud-din
Barani. Using Barani’s 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 Tughlaq’s futile attempts to be just and lib-
eral 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 “with-
out 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 “Daulata-
bad 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 noble-
men 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, dis-
ease, and death (scenes 6–7), and when the action resumes in Daulatabad
after a cve-year interval (scene 8), Tughlaq’s subjects are hardened to a
life of loneliness, punishment, and cathartic violence. At the end, Tugh-
laq is left to contemplate in dismay the famine, rebellions, and economic
chaos that signal the collapse of his empire (scenes 9–13).
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The second-level ironies in the play uncover Tughlaq’s sadistic, manip-

ulative impulses and undercut his image of himself as an exemplary ruler.
Developed mainly in scenes 2–4, these ironies show Tughlaq jockeying
for position among such friends and adversaries as an incestuous step-
mother, the historian Barani, and a powerful but credulous religious rival,
Sheikh Imam-ud-din. Tughlaq’s real nemesis and inverted double (and
Karnad’s 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 Tughlaq’s 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 im-
perial 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 sanc-
tify his new capital. But Aziz, now a highway robber, murders Ghiyas-ud-
din 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 mother’s death as an excuse to leave the court. At the end of the
play, a haunted and exhausted Tughlaq acknowledges that he cannot pun-
ish Aziz because Aziz is his only future companion, his “true and loyal
disciple.” Karnad’s explanation for the mingling of discrete worlds is
political and topical: “This violation of traditionally sacred spatial hier-
archy, I decided—since there was little I could do about it—was the
result of the anarchy which climaxed Tughlaq’s times and seemed poised
to engulf my own” (“In Search,” 98).
The E,ects of Historical Representation

Karnad’s 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 (viii–ix). But the play’s paradigmatic qualities as a historical cc-
tion and its cultural vitality derive principally from the multifold engage-
ment 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. Karnad’s play reinscribes the
narrative of Tughlaq in the audience’s memory, recning legend and oral
tradition through a detailed historical reenactment. Consequently, recre-
ating the ambience of premodern Islamic imperial culture through cos-
tumes, 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 atmos-
phere on stage defamiliarizes the action, even as the action makes famil-
iar a relatively unfamiliar past. However, the most bamboyant display of
the play’s historicity has taken place outside the proscenium: Ebrahim
Alkazi’s 1974 production at the Purana Qila—the venue where he also re-
vived Bharati’s Andha yug the same year—placed the fourteenth-century
drama on the ramparts of the premodern Islamic fort, creating that per-
fect 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 Tugh-
laq 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 ideolog-
ical 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 fourteenth-
century 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 Qur’an in dealing with both the faithful and the faithless, and his
attempts to limit Islam’s inbuence in the political and judicial spheres in
India. According to Hardy, Barani therefore deliberately selects his mate-
rial 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 ad-
ministrator Henry Elliot. “Though the intrinsic value of these works may
be small,” Elliot argues, “they will make our native subjects more sensi-
ble of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and
equity of our rule” (1: xx). Whereas Barani had attacked Tughlaq’s 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, excel-
lent ideas, but no balance or patience, no sense of proportion, Moham-
med Taghlak was a transcendent failure” (125). Christianity and Western
conceptions of monarchy would presumably have developed Tughlaq’s
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 Com-
mission (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 present-
day India began to take enduring shape during this period” (1: 264). K. N.
Chaudhuri describes Tughlaq’s experiment with token currency as a seri-
ous 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 revision-
ary interpretation is the same in the play. Karnad revives the paradoxi-
cal Tughlaq of history and occasionally constructs his dialogue verbatim
from historical documents, creating a complex ideological and inter-
textual 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 thematiz-
ing 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 ele-
ments in modern Indian political and cultural experience by presenting
an ostensibly unpolemical, self-sućient historical narrative that con-
temporary 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 audience’s 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 audi-
ence’s 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, Karnad’s play expressed the disenchant-
ment and cynicism that attended the end of the Nehru era (1947–64)
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 Nehru’s 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
07chap7.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 251
leaders and valorized in their respective meditations on political action—

The Discovery of India and The Story of My Experiments with Truth. The sec-
ond is the politics of power relations between groups that are separated
by religious or racial di,erence, in a society that is poised between sec-
ular 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 construc-
tion even of a national perspective. The context of an emergent but pre-
carious twentieth-century Indian nationhood is thus the e,ective point
of convergence for past and present experience in Karnad’s 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 inexplicably—its constitutive democratic features. Western politi-
cal 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 mul-
tiparty 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, 270–74). Assessments of cur-
rent Indian politics, however, emphasize a “steady weakening of well-
established 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 pro-
cesses 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, respec-
tively), 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 India’s
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current “crisis of governability” (Kohli, Democracy). Enmeshed in this ex-

perience, 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 inde-
pendent nation in the mid-twentieth century.
The play’s 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 funda-
mentalist leaders). These two models of political action in turn imply
radically di,erent relations between leaders and citizens, but by em-
bodying 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, Karnad’s 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 play’s opening scene with a
strong invocation of the Gandhian paradigm of political action. One of
Tughlaq’s subjects remarks that Tughlaq is a king who “isn’t 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 subjects—Hindu and Muslim alike—
by abolishing the jiziya, a discriminatory poll tax on Hindus prescribed in
the Qur’an for nonbelievers, and by instituting a judicial process in which
he can be sued by his subjects. The humility and self-questioning neces-
sary for such public confessions of error are fundamental to Gandhi’s
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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 one’s 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 con-
scientious 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 Karnad’s 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 Karnad’s hero is, to borrow Erik H. Erikson’s 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 Erikson’s
assessment of Gandhi that Karnad’s 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 him—which 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 self-
puriccation 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 Gandhi’s
strictly disciplined spirituality, Nehru’s 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 arrange-
ment 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 Karnad’s 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 min-
ister, perhaps most memorably in his midnight address of 15 August 1947,
when he spoke of independent India’s “tryst with destiny.”
Because of the complexity of Karnad’s approach to the political, how-
ever, these paradigms of purity and wholeness are undercut almost from
the beginning by Tughlaq’s second persona—that of the master politi-
cian—which marginalizes the ethical and turns the most serious public
crises into occasions for the leader’s 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 wanted—power,
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 play’s 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 dis-
course. To rape a woman only out of lust is a pointless game, in his view:
“First one must have power—the 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). Tughlaq’s self-rebexivity never pro-
duces this ironic clarity, and while Tughlaq is lost in epoch-making ges-
tures, 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 play’s crst
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half and suppress the cruelty, repressiveness, and cunning of Tughlaq-

Aziz in the second. In contrast, the analogies with Indira Gandhi (and
her political successors), perceived by Karnad’s audiences from about
1970 onward, reverse this emphasis and bring the two halves of the play
together, because what Romesh Thapar calls her “mercurial, manipula-
tive, conspiratorial, brilliant” style of leadership replicates the contra-
dictions 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, 18–22); in journalistic and scholarly writing, she is a “mix-
ture 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 Karnad’s 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 oće: “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 didn’t want to” (Moraes, 220). In serious political assessments, however,
the emergency appears as a major cause of the rapid erosion of constitu-
tional structures in India—the 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 vio-
lence and private madness in Tughlaq than Nehru’s 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, how-
ever, 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 experi-
ence. Following the example of Ala-ud-din Khilji, sultan of Delhi from
1296 to 1316, Muhammad bin Tughlaq ignored Muslim shari’a, 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 repre-
sented 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 reli-
gion. 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 Qur’anic injunction to proselytize
actively, Karnad’s 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 Barani’s words from the
Tarikh), the theologian Imam-ud-din reminds Tughlaq of the duties that
the Qur’an 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 imam’s view, merely a “verbal distinction,” but one
that will destroy the sultan (Tughlaq, 21).
As with Tughlaq’s politics of humility, Karnad both presents and iron-
ically undercuts the secular ideal. Despite Tughlaq’s 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 play’s 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 distinc-
tions of religion and community throughout the play. While Tughlaq’s
quest is for harmony, the terms of di,erence—“Hindu” 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 perform-
ance, 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 cap-
ital. As in Barani’s history, every Hindu household in Karnad’s 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 secular-
ism—the basis on which India was founded as a nation in 1947—since
the period of Nehru’s 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 Nehru’s 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 India’s unity and democ-
racy” (389).
In practice, however, such “nationalist” leaders as Nehru, Gandhi, Val-
labhbhai Patel, Maulana Azad, and others could not prevent the “fun-
damentalist” 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 Tugh-
laq’s 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 Septem-
ber 11, 2001), and the escalation of militant Hindu nationalism to a point
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that brought on India’s crst organized “pogrom” against the minority

Muslim population in the state of Gujarat in February 2002—these are
only some of the events that appeared to rapidly reduce the idea of sec-
ularism 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 Gandhi’s widow, Sonia, and India’s crst Sikh prime minister, Man-
mohan Singh, may signal a swing of the pendulum back toward the secu-
lar 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 his-
tory 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. Pre-
dictably, 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
Karnad’s complex, mercurial, inconsistent antihero has been dićult 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 nei-
ther 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 Alkazi’s three productions and
Prasanna’s 1982 revival to establish a reputation as “the actor born to play
Tughlaq.” The image of Singh “looming large over the ramparts of Alkazi’s
cognisance” to enact a “Macbethian high drama” (Sondhi) has become an
indelible memory for the Delhi audiences who watched these produc-
tions (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 Shiv-
puri’s 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 Karnad’s Tughlaq at Purana Qila,
directed by Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Company, New Delhi, 1974.
Courtesy of the NSD Repertory Company.
07chap7.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 260
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 (sub-
jects, soldiers, courtiers, oćials, members of Tughlaq’s retinue, and ser-
vants) that turns Karnad’s 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 Karnad’s 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 direc-
tor who used most of the 1974 cast in his 1982 production, returned to
Karnad’s original conception and used a curtain running from wing to
wing on an eight-foot high string to divide the deep stage space hori-
zontally. 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 play’s “political action,” viewers have thus seemed to prefer a direct
encounter with various a,airs of state, without the distracting intru-
sion of a patently theatrical device borrowed from the Parsi commer-
cial stage.
A stronger concrmation of the resilience of Tughlaq as a political vehi-
cle appears in the interpretive shifts through which successive produc-
tions, like strategies of textual interpretation, have accommodated the
changing politics of the nation since the 1970s. The move from the “dis-
enchantment” of the Nehruvian decades to a new phase of corruption
and violence is evident in the program note to Arun Kuckreja’s Delhi
production of Tughlaq in September 1975, three months after Indira
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Gandhi had suspended constitutional rights and turned India (temporar-

ily) 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 purpose—to make the play as modern as possible, so that it has rele-
vance to us today. The play now no longer remains merely the tragic history
of a medieval monarch, but grows to larger proportions with Tughlaq him-
self becoming a symbol of our times. ( Jacob, “Tughlaq”)
As a “symbol of the times,” since the mid-1970s the visionary Tughlaq

of the play’s crst half has also receded, giving prominence to the venge-
ful tyrant of the second half. The keynote of Shivpuri’s 1972 version, for
instance, was “vulnerability,” with an increasingly isolated Tughlaq seek-
ing 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 Tugh-
laq 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 Tughlaq’s char-
acter as a baw in Prasanna’s 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 19–year old
poet-philosopher-visionary becomes a cgment of one’s imagination. The
reality is the grand murderer who has rationalized the killings to mega-
lomaniac tolerance levels” (Sondhi, “Tughlaq”). Similarly, the “endearing”
character of Aziz in Ebrahim Alkazi’s 1974 version became “repelling” in
Prasanna’s. 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 Sajnani’s 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
07chap7.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 262
and clmmaker) locates the historical-but-contemporary quality of Kar-

nad’s 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, high-
lighting Tughlaq’s 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 Karnad’s 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 Savarkar’s time. Tughlaq, in this
light, could have asked searching questions” (4). The play’s present con-
text 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 Sajnani’s reluctance to
address these issues, his presentation does not “venture into interpreta-
tion” (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 multi-
national manufacturing corporation Voltas commissioned Sajnani’s pro-
duction to promote its newest product and “launched Vertis Gold [a 1.25
ton room air-conditioner] with Girish Karnad’s theatre masterpiece ‘Tugh-
laq’” (“Voltas”). The sole performance in the city of Hyderabad was orga-
nized by the Indian Institute of Interior Designers and the ITC Kakatiya
Sheraton Hotel and Towers. Attendance was also by invitation only be-
cause the show was intended for leading interior designers and “a focused
audience representing an important decision-making segment” of con-
sumers. Not only Karnad’s 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 Sircar’s 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 Tughlaq—which have commanded
indoor and outdoor stages as well as national and international audiences
for several decades—it was written exclusively for proscenium perform-
ance and has maintained a relatively modest procle in the theatre. The
crst Bengali production by Shombhu Mitra’s group, Bohurupee, in 1967
was followed by Rajinder Nath’s Hindi version in 1968 and Arvind Desh-
pande’s Marathi version, most probably in 1969. The play was performed
twice at the National School of Drama, under Ebrahim Alkazi’s direction
in 1968 and that of guest director S. Ebotombi in 1981. Other important
directors of Sircar’s early work, especially Shyamanand Jalan and Satya-
dev 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 Sircar’s seminal early works and as a classic text in the canon of post-
independence literary drama. Given this inconsistency, it seems most
productive to consider Baki itihas as a thematic counterpoise to Rakesh
and Karnad’s representations of history—one that presents competing
versions of “the truth” (like Akira Kurosawa’s clm, Rashomon) and that
has succeeded as a text more than as a performance.
The adjective “baki,” which qualices the noun “itihas” (history) in Sir-
car’s title, literally means “that which remains,” or “that which is carried
over.” In this play the term also connotes that which is neglected, forgot-
ten, 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 writer’s 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 ordi-
nary event takes on complexity if one investigates the chain of causation
behind it. When he notices the newspaper item about Sitanath’s suicide
and recalls that they had met the man and his wife at Calcutta’s famous
botanical gardens the previous year, he urges his wife to “begin imagin-
ing—why did this happen? Sitanath Chakravarti committed suicide by
hanging himself—this is the incident. But of what chain of circumstances
07chap7.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 264
is this the result—imagine that and write a story” (23). In fact, both he and
Vasanti produce independent conjectural reconstructions of the events
leading up to Sitanath’s death, and their versions are “dramatized” in the
same mode of domestic urban realism as their own lives: Sircar’s repre-
sentation is qualitatively indistinguishable from the “plays-within-the-
play” created by his characters.
The central cgure in Vasanti’s feminine narrative is Sitanath’s wife,
Kanak, a woman who has become obsessed with thrift and security in
her adult married life because of a childhood of poverty and unhappi-
ness. 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 aban-
doned respectability for the sake of cnancial security, becoming a rich
man’s 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 man’s silence. When Kanak discovers that they have lost all their
savings (without learning why), she decides to follow her older sister’s
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 Vasanti’s 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 Nabokov’s 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 Sitanath’s 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
07chap7.qxd 7/6/2005 8:16 AM Page 265
not touched Kanak in all that time. Sitanath then confesses to Vijay that
he has the same “disease” as Nabokov’s hero, and his deviant desires have
found a new object in Gauri, his mentor’s eight-year-old granddaughter.
In this reconstruction Sitanath kills himself in a mood of intense self-
hatred, to expiate an old crime and to prevent a new one.
Vasanti cnds Sharad’s 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 dis-
placement—from public to private experience and from the constraints
of truth and objectivity to the freedoms of cction and the imagination.
At this point, Sircar’s 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 con-
taining 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: That’s 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 that’s how it is. Separate histories for
separate individuals—maybe 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 didn’t you commit suicide, Sharad? (94)
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Sitanath’s counterquestion begins a movement within the play in which

he becomes interchangeable with Sharad and Kanak with Vasanti, and
Sitanath’s personal history turns out to be exactly the same as Sharad’s.
The di,erence is that according to Sitanath, all the vibrancy and excite-
ment of his life with Kanak turned into dull habit because of the relent-
less pressures of day-to-day survival in the city, whereas Sharad protests
violently that Vasanti is not a “make-believe companion”—she embodies
life, and the meaning of life. When Sharad refuses to accept that eleven
years of cohabitation with Vasanti have reduced life to meaningless rep-
etition, Sitanath erases the distinction between individual and collective
lives: “Eleven years? Eleven centuries. Eleven thousand years. The his-
tory of the pointlessness of countless years. The history of the insignic-
cance of countless human insects!” (103–4). For Sitanath, Sharad’s 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 mur-
der, 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 Coli-
seum, the walls of Jallianwalla Bagh, the scorched soil of Hiroshima! The
left over history of thousands of years” (104). Sharad’s 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. Otherwise—otherwise 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 ques-
tion, “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 couple’s 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 news”—of professional and material advancement—
has saved him. But Sitanath’s book of clippings has remained behind,
and the “nightmare” of unacknowledged history returns to destroy Sha-
rad’s 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
anguish—the 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 fren-
zied reminder to himself that Sitanath’s visions will haunt him forever.
Baki itihas is an instructive work to place beside Ashadh ka ek din and
Tughlaq—plays to which it is close in time—because 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 construc-
tion 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 experi-
ence. It is this collectivity, which Sircar calls “history,” that the postcolo-
nial 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
play’s 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 Sircar’s universalism is
presented directly and didactically, in a realistic play of contemporary
urban life rather than through the indirection of myth or remote his-
tory, he appears in some respects to strike a romantic and idealistic note
dissimilar to the ironies of Bharati, Rakesh, or Karnad. But his themati-
zation of history is as much a sign of postcolonial modernity and cosmo-
politanism as the imaginative reconstruction of a specicc past in Ashadh
ka ek din and Tughlaq.
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chapter 8
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 post-
independence 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 contem-
porary 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 per-
formance 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 coa-
lesced over cve decades into an equally, if not more, substantial tradition.
Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, and Mahesh Dattani are among the
268
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Realism and the Edicce of Home 269
major contemporary practitioners who work predominantly in the real-

ist mode and possess a social imagination that expresses itself primarily
through the psychodrama of family relationships. Other leading play-
wrights, such as Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, G. P. Deshpande, Maha-
sweta 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 absur-
dist theatre.
In its totality, the contemporary tradition of urban, realist, predomi-
nantly domestic drama is large and varied and includes some of the most
inbuential plays of the last cve decades: Vijay Tendulkar’s 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
Rakesh’s Adhe adhure (The Uncnished, 1969), in Hindi; G. P. Deshpande’s
Uddhwasta dharmashala (The Ruined Sanctuary, 1974), Ek vajoon gela ahe
(It’s Past One O’ Clock, 1983), and Andhar yatra ( Journey in Darkness,
1987), also in Marathi; Madhu Rye’s Koipan ek phoolnu naam bolo to (Say
the Name of Any Flower, 1974) and Kumarni agashi (Kumar’s Terrace,
1974), both in Gujarati; Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Raktapushpa (Petals of
Blood, 1972), Wada chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion, 1985), Atmakatha (Auto-
biography, 1988), and the Yuganta trilogy (1994), in Marathi; and Mahesh
Dattani’s Tara (1990) and Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), in English.
Despite formal and thematic di,erences, Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit
(And Indrajit, 1962), Baki itihas (1965), Pagla ghoda (Mad Horse, 1967), and
Shesh nei (There’s No End, 1969), in Bengali, Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar
churashir ma (The Mother of Corpse Number 1084, 1973), in Bengali, and
Satish Alekar’s 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 contempo-
rary middle-class life.
Predictably, there is no single “theory” of realism or naturalism that
undergirds this varied drama set mainly in the contemporary middle-
class urban home. Rather, in the polyphonic theatrical discourse of the
last cve decades, the subject of realism has occasioned a range of theo-
retical, ideological, and polemical positions that place a high value on
theatre’s commitment to the historical present and its ability to contend
with its own times. In terms of subject matter, the focus on contempo-
rary 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 psychologi-
cal entity and the public world of social and political action. In perform-
ance, 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 criticism—making theoretical
positions a matter of deduction and inference rather than explicit for-
mulation—some 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 pres-
ent needs. Shanta Gokhale notes that in the crst experimental phase
of Marathi playwriting after independence, “the preferred mode of writ-
ing 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 deter-
mined the direction of his own work and also exerted a profound inbu-
ence on other theatre in Marathi and in various other Indian languages
during the formative decades (ca. 1950–70). 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 main-
stream, the educated middle-class, the upholders of norms, and also
those who carefully deced them, in whom was invested the responsibil-
ity 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. Tendulkar’s
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 demon-
strate the self-sućiency 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 mun-
dane when he argues that “works portraying an unfamiliar and extra-
ordinary existence are never as popular as those which portray ordinary,
everyday life. I live an ordinary life, and from every angle I’m a very ordi-
nary person. That is why I cnd it completely natural to write stories, to
mold this atmosphere of ordinariness into stories” (Sahitya, 42). Conse-
quently, Rakesh is impatient with Indian authors who resort to a breath-
less “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 environment—a 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 there-
fore 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
Karnad’s 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-man’s 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 main-
tains 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
O’Neill” (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 suc-
cessive Hindu, Muslim, and European empires on the subcontinent, and
also the modern nation-state, have fostered urban culture and “metro-
politan” 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 egali-
tarian Indian aesthetic, numerous authors have felt compelled to a´rm
the importance of the city as the site and subject of representation.
What is striking about the opposing arguments is their radical incom-
patibility. While Habib Tanvir insists that “the true pattern of Indian cul-
ture 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 India’s 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 particu-
lar 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, 22–23)
Assessing the same claims with reference to the issue of “indigenous-

ness,” Elkunchwar asks why “theatre in the villages alone [is to] be con-
sidered 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 theatre—especially after such a long his-
tory of exchange—is 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 contem-
porary 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 sig-
niccance 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. Encap-
sulating 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 a´rmation 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 Pune’s Theatre Academy in December 1985 (and
appended to the published Marathi text of Wada chirebandi), Elkunchwar
expresses distaste for the “drill-like gestural language” of environmental
theatre and describes the bodily contact between spectators and per-
formers as “an assault on my physical privacy” (“Natyapravas,” 93–94).
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 [Karnad’s] 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 impor-
tant 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 tor-
ment. I feel that to keep searching its depths is the real purpose of experi-
mentation, and I also feel that we can achieve this within the proscenium.
(“Natyapravas,” 93–94)
In a 1989 interview, Elkunchwar rea´rms his qualiced acceptance of the

inherited Marathi tradition by rejecting the notion of an “old school”
of theatrical realism: “What’s 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 conven-
tions of theatre o,ers one several possibilities; it’s a position of strength.
This one must acknowledge, I feel—rather than abandoning, as so many
people are doing today, the very notion of the proscenium theatre, or so
many conventions” (CIT, 165). Elkunchwar’s advocacy of the proscenium
is not compromised by his strong interest in symbolist, expressionist,
existentialist, and absurdist modes—in 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 forth-
right in his embrace of mimeticism, but Elkunchwar’s 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, domes-
tic 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 aban-
doned 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 Elkunchwar’s Atmakatha in 1988, echoes
the playwright when he describes himself as “a very old-fashioned direc-
tor. 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 Rakesh’s preoccupation with the “real-
ity of life” when he observes that “from the point of view of a director,
I consider Adhe adhure the crst meaningful Hindi play about contem-
porary 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 ten-
sion of contemporary life” (Rakesh, SN, 331). Shivpuri notes that at crst
he found only the “box set” appropriate to the play’s atmosphere of ten-
sion but later resorted to locally obtainable, inexpensive props so that
Rakesh’s drama of the imploding middle-class urban family could be
performed anywhere (SN, 336). Two other major directors of Adhe adhure
share Shivpuri’s 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 char-
acters 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 India’s 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 Tendulkar’s Gidhade and Kanyadaan, G. P. Desh-
pande’s Uddhwasta dharmashala, Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Garbo and Atma-
katha, and V. V. Shirwadker’s Natasamrat (CIT, 122, 113). Vijaya Mehta’s
celebrated roles include those of Aai in Elkunchwar’s Wada chirebandi
and the old, bereaved mother in Jaywant Dalvi’s Sandhya chhaya (Evening
Shadows). Om Shivpuri played the male lead in all three of Mohan
Rakesh’s plays, Shyamanand Jalan had the lead role in his own production
of Adhe adhure, and Amol Palekar acted in Elkunchwar’s Garbo. Among
actors in this tradition who are not directors, Sulabha Deshpande in
Tendulkar’s 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 suće 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 circum-
scribed 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, vio-
lence, and disillusionment have kept home as a literal and symbolic place
in the forefront of urban theatre since the early 1960s. In Badal Sircar’s
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 Sharadendu’s Calcutta home to
condemn the fatal disconnection between the individual self and univer-
sal history. In a more stylized play like Evam Indrajit, where an almost-
bare stage represents a succession of urban spaces (a college classroom,
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an interview room, an oće, a park) in addition to a home, the dialecti-

cal thrust of the action is still mainly against the constraints of domes-
ticity. 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 allow-
ing the Writer to create a buid identity that di,erentiates him from
the discontented, homogenized male selves fashioned at the “Institute of
Bettermanship.” Rakesh’s Adhe adhure, the acknowledged classic of the
collapse of the nuclear family in the modern metropolis, establishes an
intimate connection between economic decline, emotional disintegra-
tion, 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 playwright’s 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 setting—again and again he uses
the family home as his locale—and 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 drama-
turgy, 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, con-
frontation, and barely suppressed violence, until a last-minute reversal
exposes some guilty secret from the past that has fueled the mundane
family antagonisms.
Vijay Tendulkar’s drama of ideas represents perhaps the most sub-
stantial exploration of the symbolism of home because his customary
method is to translate social and political conbicts into personal dilem-
mas 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 expe-

rience, 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 tree”—an 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 husband’s illegitimate
brother, Rajaninath. Sakharam binder uncovers the same propensity for
male violence at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. Sakharam’s
Fig. 12. “Can’t 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 Rakesh’s 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 mar-
riage. The two simultaneously visible rooms within the house also come
to represent Sakharam’s fatal suspension between radically opposed forms
of femininity—the unabashed sexuality of Champa and the timid but
manipulative chastity of Laxmi. In Kamala, Jaisingh Jadav’s “small bun-
galow in the fashionable New Delhi neighbourhood of Neeti Bagh”
(CPT, 3) is an appropriate setting for his callow careerism as an inves-
tigative journalist and the spatial expression of a sense of proprietor-
ship that turns Jaisingh’s 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 trać 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 (for-
merly “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 Deshpande’s Uddhwasta
dharmashala, the university oće that is the scene of an inquiry into
Sridhar Vishwanath Kulkarni’s radical politics (cg. 13) alternates with his
home, the scene of his failed marriage to the ideologically rigid and party-
oriented Saraswati, his redemptive intimacy with a younger actress,
Madhavi, and his soul-searching conversations with a son who is boun-
dering. 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 man—rebellious party member, uncompromising intellectual,
husband, lover, and father. Deshpande’s Ek vajoon gela ahe celebrates Nana,
a larger-than-life left-wing intellectual, entirely within the occasional con-
text 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 Devi’s 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

Brati’s 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
son’s true nature for the crst time.
The cnal grouping within the tradition of realistic urban drama in-
volves 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. Deshpande’s play
suggests vividly how a material construct may symbolize the ideologi-
cal crisis in the life of an individual and a nation. Similarly, at the end of
Tendulkar’s 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. Deshpande’s 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 Elkunchwar’s Wada chirebandi

(1985) and Cyrus Mistry’s Doongaji House (1978). In Elkunchwar’s play, the
“ancient and respectable but dilapidated mansion” of an upper-caste vil-
lage family is a visible symbol of its socioeconomic slide from a privileged
past to an intolerable present. Mistry’s 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) in-
habitants 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 imper-
atives of progress and the problems of cultural di,erence as to the disso-
lution 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 the-
atre in India in unusual ways to two dominant but antithetical forma-
tions in modern writing and experience—the 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 protagonist’s fundamental prob-
lem, 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 vol-
untary 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 popula-
tions since World War II and have shaped the “exilic consciousness” of
such authors as Brecht, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel García Márquez, and
Ariel Dorfman. “The need for a sense of home as a base, a source of iden-
tity even more than a refuge,” Andrew Gurr comments, “has grown pow-
erfully 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, 13–14). 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 Dat-
tani 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 eco-
nomic circumstances into an impossible coexistence. The emotional
and physical violence in Tendulkar’s Gidhade stems equally from the old
father and his three adult children, while the two characters who possess
moral selves—Rama and Rajaninath—have neither the strength nor
the resolve to assert themselves. In Rakesh’s Adhe adhure, each member
of the decaying household is equally alienated from every other member,
creating the play’s signature atmosphere of festering emotions and con-
stantly erupting frustrations. The same is true of the emotionally stunted
upper-class couples in Dattani’s Bravely Fought the Queen. The major char-
acters 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 antag-
onisms, 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 fam-
ily 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 models—derived mainly from the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata and reinforced daily in the mass-cultural narratives of cin-
ema and television—of 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 Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan, dwelling with typi-
cal 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 Rakesh’s Adhe adhure. Un-
employed 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, “Isn’t 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 rela-
tionship 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 suppos-
edly escaped from it. The older daughter, who has unknowingly married
one of Savitri’s 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 over-
wrought 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 it’s 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,” acknowl-
edging the impossibility of release (325). Repeated in the majority of sig-
niccant 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 post-
colonial Indian subject in diaspora (especially in the West) occupies a
position of increasing intellectual and economic privilege, the “postcolo-
nial 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 “integration”—necessary to the formation of a modern democratic
nation-state—have caused the steady erosion of traditional economies,
occupations, customs, beliefs, and practices. In the countryside, new sys-
tems of land ownership, new agricultural technologies, and political mobil-
ization 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 bureaucra-
cies, 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 nation’s borders.
In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on three recent, family-
centered realistic plays in which the sustaining cction is the loss of home
at home—Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan (Marathi, 1983), Mahesh Elkunch-
war’s Wada chirebandi (Marathi, 1985), and Cyrus Mistry’s Doongaji House
(English, 1978). Tendulkar’s play moves the typical narrative of modern
realist drama—a family conbict in a domestic setting—in 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 attach-
ments, 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, Ten-
dulkar’s 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 rad-
ically di,erent locations—a small village in the fertile Vidarbha region
of northeastern Maharashtra in the case of Elkunchwar, and metropoli-
tan Bombay, the capital of Maharashtra, in the case of Mistry (see map
of Maharashtra). My analysis seeks to emphasize, crst, that contempo-
rary 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 refer-
ent 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 Tendulkar’s 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 father’s gift of the daughter in marriage to a suitable

groom, is a central ritual within the Hindu marriage ceremony, com-
pleted before the couple recite their wedding vows around the ceremo-
nial 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 men’s 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.

08chap8.qxd 7/6/2005 8:17 AM Page 287
women cannot have independence—“in childhood a woman should be

under her father’s control, in youth under her husband’s, 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, 45–46). 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 man—is so unimag-
inable 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 protec-
tion; the object of this reciprocity is to create the ideal family through
which society may successfully perpetuate itself.
In Tendulkar’s 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 think-
ing 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 social-
ist and a senior member of the state’s 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 women’s rights activist), however,
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cnds Jyoti’s decision hasty, impractical, and unmindful of the realities of

cultural and class di,erences, but Nath’s enthusiasm overrides her objec-
tions as well as those of Jyoti’s 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 Arun’s drunken self-abasement before her
family, and Nath’s conviction that “it is Jyoti’s duty to put all her strength
into making [the marriage] work” (44), force her to leave the parental
sanctuary. Arun’s compulsive violence soon becomes a threat to the now-
pregnant Jyoti’s safety, but the unexpected literary success of his autobi-
ography also encourages him to behave with increasing insolence and
coerciveness toward Jyoti’s family. When Nath agrees under duress to
preside over a felicitation meeting for Arun, a visibly hardened Jyoti
intuits the reason for his “hireling’s speech” and forces a cnal confronta-
tion 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 Arun’s 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! I’ve heard so much about
you.” Shreeram Lagoo as Nath Deolalikar, Sadashiv Amrapurkar as Arun, and
Sushama Tendulkar as Jyoti in Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan, directed by
Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Indian National Theatre, Bombay, 1983. Courtesy of
Indian National Theatre.
08chap8.qxd 7/6/2005 8:17 AM Page 289
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 Maha-
rashtra in the direction of sustained political action, Ambedkar also in-
stilled 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 conver-
sion 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 pejora-
tive or oćial 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 creativ-
ity” (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 liter-
ature 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 ade-
quate, 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 social-
ist, recalls upper-caste progressive reformers, such as Jyotirao Phule and
Sane Guruji (whose photographs hang in Nath’s living room). Tendulkar’s
choice of subject also appears to be deliberate and strategic, because any
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cctional representation of Dalits necessarily intersects with the commu-

nity’s highly visible procle in the social and political life of Maharashtra.
The play’s reception on the stage and in print, however, points to the
skillful but provocative (if not inbammatory), and ultimately apolitical,
nature of Tendulkar’s intervention in the sociopolitical debate, leaving
the work open to praise and censure in equal measure. When Kanyadaan
opened at Bombay’s Indian National Theatre in February 1983, Dalit
groups in Maharashtra attacked it as a malicious, reductive portrait of
their community, made more objectionable by Arun’s 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 play’s message was no less problematic outside
the author’s home state. Reviewing Rajinder Nath’s 1985 Hindi produc-
tion 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 Gupta’s e,ective ren-
dering of an unsympathetic role in the same production but found the
exaggerated villainy of Arun’s character unconvincing, and the marginal-
ization 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 “a´rmation 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 pro-
duction 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 Tendulkar’s own daugh-
ters—Sushama and later the more celebrated Priya—in the role of Jyoti
(see cg. 14). This Marathi production was followed within a few years
by three major Hindi versions—Rajinder Nath’s in Delhi (1985), Shyama-
nand Jalan’s in Calcutta (1987), and Dinesh Thakur’s in Bombay. In the
South, the Madras Players (one of the country’s leading English-language
theatre groups) mounted the crst notable English production, in Gowri
Ramnarayan’s 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 attrac-

tive—witness the all-female production by the JBAS Women’s College
Dramatics Club that was part of the Inter-Collegiate Drama Compe-
tition in Madras in 2000. Even observers dissatisced with the play’s
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 Tendulkar’s reputation as a serious
thinker and gifted craftsman in the theatre.
The play’s literary reputation reached its apex in March 1994 when
it received the K. K. Birla Foundation’s third Saraswati Samman, one of
India’s 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 foundation’s oćial felicitation commended Ten-
dulkar for creating a vibrant work that compelled intelligent readers
to think, challenged their materialistic pursuits, and expressed an endur-
ing 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
Samman—that’s what the composite destiny of this play must be! As the
play’s 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 for-
mation 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 genera-
tional conbict by setting the entire play in the living room of the Deo-
lalikars’ middle-class bat in Pune. The incompatibility of Brahman and
Dalit ceases to be an abstract principle and manifests itself as the fric-
tion between parent and child, sister and brother, husband and wife.
The mise-en-scène in Kanyadaan thus serves as the indispensable visual
environment for Tendulkar’s 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 play’s 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 world—indeed, of the
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nation—where by resorting parodically to the language of parliamen-

tary 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 home—we don’t 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 Arun’s
“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 sus-
pects Nath of manipulating Jyoti’s 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 Arun’s mind Jyoti’s
middle-class home is always and only the alienating opposite of his fam-
ily’s one-room hut and shared village toilet; the exquisiteness of Brahman
cuisine, only a reminder that his tongue is accustomed to rotting hand-
outs 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 can’t 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 Arun’s character turns more ugly and exploitative after marriage, it

becomes clear that Tendulkar’s 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, Arun’s identity as a writer is subsumed by his visceral hostil-
ity toward the Deolalikars’ self-assured domesticity and by his desire to
claim a communal past and present that is incomprehensible to them.
Nath’s painful reassessment of Arun similarly resists a “political” in-
terpretation and appears instead as a politician father’s 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, it’s all clthy. What a man I have got mixed up with, what a
man!” (51). It is possible to see Nath’s outburst simplistically as an “anti-
Dalit” statement—as a reactionary suggestion that the twice-born man
abhors the “untouchable” because of the insurmountable “lowness” of
the latter’s character. But in Tendulkar’s 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 pro-
gressive 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 Jyoti’s marriage as “a very pre-
cious 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 dis-
regards the complex emotional bond that does develop between Jyoti
and Arun, because she can see the ill-treatment of Jyoti only as Arun’s
revenge against the upper castes. Jyoti, in turn, holds herself to a stan-
dard of conduct that is meaningless in Arun’s 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, in-
terpersonal conbicts, the space of the privileged (though politically pro-
gressive) 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 Jyoti’s premarital a,air with Arun, her
abusive marriage, and Nath’s public humiliation by Arun, take place
o,stage; the places associated with them—the one-room village hut of
Arun’s childhood or Jyoti’s “clthy room in the slum”—are repeatedly
invoked but never shown. Instead of being the proactive, radical, authen-
tically 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 socio-
economic advantage. Nath’s obsession with the symbolic signiccance
of Jyoti’s 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 image—uncannily repeating the injunction in
the Manusmriti—she renounces the source of her older identity: “I am
not of this house, I am nothing to any one of you” (60). Devastated by
Jyoti’s 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 don’t 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 don’t use the word
Dalit because I don’t like it. I am not a Dalit, I am a Maharin! Just as
there is a Maharani [queen], I am a Maharin! Don’t touch me. Don’t 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 Manu’s
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 roles—in
which Jyoti lays down the conditions of her future life—rewrites the text
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of Manu while marking a radical moment in the contemporary treat-

ment 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 Tendulkar’s view,
the “unaccommodated” quality of this life is also a mark of the disjunc-
tion 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 Elkunchwar’s Wada
chirebandi—another 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 Elkunchwar’s
Wada chirebandi
The noun wada literally means “mansion”; in addition to wealth, it con-
notes propriety, self-sućiency, and authority. Chirebandi is an adjective
that means “solid, hewn from stone.” Relating the play Wada 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 institu-
tion] 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 remark-
ably close real-life enactment of the “problem of place” that Una Chaud-
huri describes as the geopathological basis of modern realist drama. In
Elkunchwar’s play the condition of victimage encompasses four genera-
tions of the Deshpande family, which include the ninety-year-old matri-
arch Dadi, her son, Venkatesh (“Tatyaji,” whose death is the occasion
for the family gathering), Tatyaji’s wife, Aai, their children, Bhaskar (mar-
ried to Vahini), Sudhir (married to Anjali), Prabha, and Chandu (both
unmarried), and Bhaskar’s 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 regard-
ing it as the decning problem in their lives. But just as father-son rela-
tions in the play are counter-oedipal in nature, there is no escape from
home through departure, nor is departure conceived as heroic. Elkunch-
war’s cctional characters do not (cannot) make the choice that he did in
his own life.
Home is both setting and subject in Wada chirebandi, and its failure
is material as well as ideological. As a structure that provides the Desh-
pande family with its physical environment and the theatre audience
with a visual frame, the “ancient and respectable but dilapidated man-
sion” is the obsessive center of family discourse and a constant source
of anxiety. Elkunchwar’s stage directions (followed faithfully in Vijaya
Mehta’s 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 Tendulkar’s
Kanyadaan), Elkunchwar’s 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 (Wada, 1). With the telling exception
of Dadi and Aai, the play’s 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 dialogue—a perfect measure of how their lives have
shrunk in relation to the signs of old splendor that lurk just beyond the
audience’s 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 motifs—the 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 ceiling—keep 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, institution-
alized 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 tra-
ditionally high-caste Brahmans and Kshatriyas (warriors), Lord Corn-
wallis’s 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 legisla-
tive acts in the various states during the 1950s. Elkunchwar’s 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 colo-
nial 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 community’s
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 Elkunchwar’s play as
crucial determinants of sociocultural and economic identity. The trans-
formation of home into antihome—a place of oppression, resentment,
and anxiety rather than nurture and support—is mainly the result of
inbexible attitudes to caste within the wada. With patriarchal legiti-
mation 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 dićult 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, clean-
shaven 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 cal-
low 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 Elkunchwar’s image of slow strangulation
within the wada are those of Prabha and Chandu, Bhaskar’s unmarried
middle-aged siblings, who were tragically denied higher education and
modern occupations because such independence would have compro-
mised the family’s prestige. This complex application of religious and
cultural codes to individual subjects in Elkunchwar’s 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, polit-
ical power, education, and occupation (see Dumont; Searle-Chatterjee
and Sharma, 1–24, 49–71).
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 Brah-
mans 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 dur-
ing 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 strong-
est 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 Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan, caste politics in Elkunchwar’s 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 con-
version of 200,000 Mahars to Buddhism in 1956, is the largest city in the
Vidarbha region where Elkunchwar’s play is set. When Bhaskar blames
the “Brahman haters” in the village and the city for the loss of his patri-
mony (44), he is rationalizing his failures as a cultivator, landowner, and
manager of family a,airs, but he is also invoking—especially for a Marathi
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audience—this long- and short-term cultural history of the state. In addi-

tion, 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” (100–1). As cultivators, the castes that
have been “low” in the inherited ritual hierarchy have become economi-
cally empowered as well as politically enfranchised in recent decades. For
a contemporary Indian audience, therefore, the high-toned helplessness
of the Deshpandes in Wada chirebandi concrms that their obsolete meth-
ods 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 family’s
relations with the outside world. Bhaskar’s 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. Sudhir’s migra-
tion to the metropolis twenty years earlier for the sake of better profes-
sional 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 dićult,
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-sućiency.
Sudhir’s journey from the wada to his city bat replicates on a smaller
scale the geographical, material, psychological, and cultural displacements
of diaspora—from 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 Tatyaji’s funeral expenses: “It’s 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).
Sudhir’s 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 vernacu-
lar 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, tradi-
tion, generosity, innocence, and warmth, but also with wastefulness and
impotence, and the Konkanis with a self-centered modernity, territorial-
ity, coldness, and cunning, but also with beauty, intelligence, and success.
A major feature of the original Marathi play, fully communicable in per-
formance, 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 accommo-
dated 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 Anjali’s
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 play—caste and land, tradition
and modernity, wealth and impoverishment—come together in the sym-
bolism of two antithetical objects, the tractor sunk into the ground in
the Deshpandes’ front yard and the family gold (in the form of the
women’s jewelry) that Bhaskar has concealed from everyone else within
the house. Although both objects are useless in the present, their poten-
tial for use has reference to past failures and future possibilities. The trac-
tor (mentioned frequently, but not actually shown on stage) is a ruined
artifact of technology, something Bhaskar could not control even though
his family’s 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 Shiva’s 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 appear-
ance and that has appreciated unimaginably in value. It is also “much
more” than just gold. In the play’s most theatrical scene (64–65), the only
moment when the feminine tradition within the mansion asserts itself,
Vahini puts on all the gold ornaments at night at her husband’s 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 col-
lapse. A cut sustained in the dark against the tractor causes gangrene
in Chandu’s 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 pre-
serve 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 Tatyaji’s 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 Mistry’s Doongaji House
In Wada chirebandi, the mansion’s 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 Mistry’s Doongaji House, written orig-
inally in English, creates a relationship of identity between home and its
occupants because there is nowhere else to go, and together they are par-
adigmatic of the minority Parsi community negotiating majority Hindu
culture in metropolitan Bombay. Mistry’s 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, yellow-
ish 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 natu-
ralistic description” and “try to achieve the same overall e,ect by using
somewhat more abstract means” (viii). But in either case, unlike Elkunch-
war’s 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 through-
out the colonial period. This homology between decaying structures and
the state of the community seems to be commonplace. Tanya M. Luhr-
mann’s 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 commu-
nity in decline” (Luhrmann, 1).
The narrative of Parsi ascent and decline can be understood only with
reference to the community’s 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 sev-
enteenth century as principal shipbuilders for the British East India
Company. Over the next two centuries, Parsis contributed more than
any other Indian community to Bombay’s development as India’s leading
colonial port and cnancial center, gradually acquiring control of a large
portion of the city’s 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 iden-
tifying thoroughly with British colonial culture and enterprise, in which
the community found a concrmation of its own exceptional charac-
ter. Luhrmann comments that “under colonial rule, the attributes of the
good Parsi became hierarchized, in part through the adoption of hierar-
chized 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’ argu-
ments 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 volun-
tary detachment on the part of most Parsis from the dominant Hindu-
Muslim polarities of Indian history, culture, and politics.
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The principal dićulty 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 con-
texts 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 foreshort-
ened 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 his-
tory of the country in which I live is, to me, a borrowed history” (Por-
trait, 196–97). 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 popula-
tion has inevitably experienced a revision of roles in a heterogeneous
society.
Ironically, the obscurity of Cyrus Mistry as a playwright and the unusu-
ally precarious existence of Doongaji House in both print and performance
seem to replicate in the world of theatre the problem of Parsi marginal-
ization in the wider Indian world. This play is Mistry’s only published
work for the stage—his other writing consists of cction, screenplays, and
journalism, while a second play (The Legacy of Rage) has remained unpub-
lished. The manuscript of Doongaji House won the Sultan Padamsee
Award for the best new English play from Bombay’s 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 Française in Bombay. In an understated publisher’s 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 dićult to overcome” (Cyrus Mistry, v). Exacerbated
by Mistry’s 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 Datar’s Marathi version for Awishkar in 2000. The
scant exposure on stage also suggests that the proper context for Mis-
try’s 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 (Cyrus’s 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, Mis-
try incorporates the constitutive features of Parsi identity with ethno-
graphic 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 com-
munity 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 endogamy—Rusi mar-
rying a Canadian and Fali a Christian woman employed as a nanny—Hor-
musji considers them guilty of miscegenation and feels that “the blood
has been polluted” (20). This paternalistic outrage is ironic because, fol-
lowing 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 pro-
cle 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 didn’t know such places
existed. It’s a museum piece. A zoo! Such samples I’ve met today . . . one
better than the other. This house should have been certiced unct for
habitation years ago! (58)
Mistry’s 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 experi-
ence. In the medium of this language, Hormusji’s 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 Zoroastri-
anism 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 Hormusji’s con-
sciousness because he regards political independence as simply an event
that reversed his community’s relation to the majority Hindu culture. In
a double-edged critique that implicates both minority and majority atti-
tudes, Mistry concnes Hormusji to a posture of immobilizing rage that
cnds relief in fantasies of domination and violence. His most vivid mem-
ory, for instance, is of the Prince of Wales’s visit to Bombay in 1921, when
Parsis proclaimed their loyalty to the British Crown by attending cele-
brations 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 don’t understand
these people, Piroja . . . They’ve 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 Elkunchwar’s 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 Hormusji’s 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 organi-
zation, has argued for greater control of Bombay’s 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 Sena’s chauvinism is directed against all “outsiders”—Hindus
from South India, Muslims, Christians, and secular left-wing activists. But
it is particularly infuriating to the Parsis because of their deep involve-
ment in the history and development of the city of Bombay. The point is
not whether Parsis are speciccally targeted by the Sena’s politics, but that
Hindu fundamentalism alienates, frightens, and angers this once-powerful
minority, and that its writers regard communal di,erences as the decn-
ing condition of Parsi life. In these respects, Cyrus Mistry’s 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 Mistry’s 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 commu-
nal 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 remarkable—an early
foreshadowing of a postcolonial politics that has deliberately, and tragi-
cally, manipulated religious and communal di,erence.
Home, Gender, and Nation

Written in two di,erent languages (Marathi and English) over a seven-
year period, set in di,erent locations in the state of Maharashtra, and
08chap8.qxd 7/6/2005 8:17 AM Page 307
linked to radically unequal stage histories, the three plays discussed above
reveal unexpected connections across languages, classes, and regions de-
spite the speciccity of their respective narratives. Wada 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 repre-
sent “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 colo-
nialism 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 Wada chirebandi and Hormusji in
Doongaji House—that 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 decon-
structs the identity between female virtue and family honor (Ranju’s
bight to Bombay in Wada chirebandi) or a liberated female will that rejects
male authority (Avan’s 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 com-
munity (Prabha, Aai, Piroja).
Furthermore, the critique of patriarchy in both plays extends to the
nation as a male conception—the 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
Elkunchwar’s 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 large—the very grandeur of the conception makes the edicce unsus-
tainable. Likewise, Hormusji wonders at the end of Mistry’s 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 com-
munity 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 Elkunchwar’s 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 “re-
gional” cultures through translation. The enactment of the same crisis in
Doongaji House reinforces the signiccance of such narratives in a manner
that renders the play’s obscurity in print and performance more or less
irrelevant.
In comparison with the retrospective, elegiac mood of these two
plays, Tendulkar’s 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 icono-
clasm 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, Tendulkar’s 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 Nath’s attempt to treat his home as a micro-
cosm of the nation impose a limit on progressive agendas and enforce
the idea that home and the world are not interchangeable. Nath’s self-
absolving view of Jyoti’s marriage as an act of free will on her part also
appears disingenuous because the cnal confrontation between them re-
veals that her choice was guided by a devotion to his ideas.
Jyoti, in turn, embodies a female will that breaks free of parental con-
straints 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 self-
aggrandizing ways. Complicating this familiar gender conbict in Kanya-
daan 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 compari-
son with Wada chirebandi does show that its narrative lacks the same uni-
versal sweep and is less easily adaptable to the culture of other regions in
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India. Where Elkunchwar’s realism is sometimes hard to separate from

the texture of real life itself, Tendulkar’s realism also highlights the ele-
ment 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 Tendulkar’s
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.
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chapter 9
Alternative Stages
Antirealism, Gender, and
Contemporary “Folk” Theatre
“Traditional” Indian Theatre and the

Status of Folk Forms
In the theoretical and polemical discourses that have elaborated con-
temporary Indian theatre’s “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 pres-
ent. 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 cultural-
nationalist 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 mono-
lithic constructions of an always redemptive Indian tradition are justi-
ced in these perspectives by reference to the cultural continuity, formal
310
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Alternative Stages 311
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 second—metropolitan/provincial, elite/pop-
ular, 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 disjunc-
tions and economic inequalities between these two domains have become
persistent “national” problems. Commenting on the “unfortunate dichot-
omy between urban and rural life . . . [which] is expressed in disparities
in economic standards, services, educational levels and cultural develop-
ments,” Badal Sircar links the historical development of the Indian city
with “colonial interests” and that of the village with a “traditional indige-
nous culture” that even colonialism could not destroy (Third Theatre, 1).
The city-village relation in India thus becomes (perhaps unintentionally)
a version of Raymond Williams’s analysis of unequal city-country rela-
tions in the feudal and industrial West, conferring the same priority on
the village as a materially exploited but culturally resilient space (see
Williams, 46–54).
With specicc reference to theatre, this ideological conception of the
village creates its own oppositions. The energy and vitality of folk per-
formance genres appear all the more remarkable in view of the subservient
09chap9.qxd 7/6/2005 8:17 AM Page 312
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, antireal-
istic, open-air, environmental qualities of folk performance constitute a
form of “total theatre” antithetical to the seemingly regimented prod-
ucts 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 theatre-
goer in a darkened auditorium. The political conception of folk theatre
as a people’s theatre evokes in part the European Enlightenment decni-
tion 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 re-
source in the present.
The contemporary cultural and political potential of folk forms crst
came into view during the 1940s, when the Indian People’s Theatre Asso-
ciation based its program for a “cultural awakening of the masses of India”
on a revitalization of the country’s “traditional arts” and “rich cultural
heritage.” The IPTA’s traditionalism was the crst major modern reaction
against two deeply entrenched colonial practices: a century-long deni-
gration 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 cc-
tions about their lives. By speaking to both kinds of oppressed “folk”—
urban industrial workers and peasants caught in preindustrial agrarian
economies—folk forms could also attempt to bridge the problematic
urban-rural divide and sustain a mass theatre movement of the kind en-
visioned by the IPTA. Malini Bhattacharya notes that “the call to resus-
citate 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 IPTA’s polit-
ical message of opposition to fascism, imperialism, and capitalism acces-
sible 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” gen-
res in the association’s 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 dis-
misses the IPTA’s “fetish of folk” as a sign of middle-class sentimental-
ism masquerading as socialist realism (“Fetish,” 49). But the movement’s
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 mobili-
sation’” (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 playwright-
directors Habib Tanvir, Chandrashekhar Kambar, K. N. Panikkar, and
Ratan Thiyam, whose theatre has been devoted either largely or exclu-
sively 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 cul-
ture, 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 vari-
ety of theatrical modes. However, they have produced pathbreaking work
during the last three decades by employing folk narratives and conven-
tions in specicc plays. Thus, among the classics of post-independence
antirealist practice, Karnad’s 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 incorpo-
rated into their respective productions of 1973. Karnad’s 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.
Tendulkar’s Ghashiram kotwal relies extensively on the tamasha and dash-
avatar forms of Maharashtra for its corrosive cctionalization of late
eighteenth-century Maratha history. In addition to the production of
Hayavadana mentioned above, Karanth’s productions of Chadrashekhar
Kambar’s Jokumaraswami (in the bayalata form) and Barnam vana (a
yakshagana version of Macbeth) are among his most celebrated. Mehta’s
well-known productions of Brecht’s 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 estab-
lished 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 Parekh’s Mena gurjari, directed in
the Malvi language by Bharat Dave for the NSD Repertory Company in
1980–81; and the Rajasthani Amar Singh Rathore. Pursuing a performance-
centered 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. Shu-
draka’s Mrichchhakatika in Habib Tanvir’s vernacular Chhattisgarhi ver-
sion (as Mitti ki gadi), Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General in the nautanki
style of Uttar Pradesh (as Ala afsar), and Brecht’s 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 per-
formance, 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 prac-
tice coexists with a determined bureaucratic e,ort to generate and sustain
interest in folk forms through various forms of patronage and conserva-
tion. 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 IPTA’s
platform, the seminar’s formal recommendations to the Sangeet Natak
Akademi (recorded in the academy’s Report for 1953–58) included the
“opinion” that “the regeneration of the Indian theatre can only be pos-
sible 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 revival-
ist and reactionary by practitioners of the colonial theatre and reporters
of theatre events. They maintained that traditional theatre had no rele-
vance 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 Akademi’s journal, Sangeet Natak (no.
21, July–September 1971). From 1965 to 1975, Awasthi also managed a
program of “sponsored traditional performances, festivals and exhibi-
tions 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 Akademi’s “Scheme of Assistance to Young
Theatre Workers” who were interested in experimenting with traditional
forms (1984–94) was very much in the same line of state patronage, spon-
soring 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 con-
tributor. 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 distinc-
tive, 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 signic-

cant 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 contempo-
rary thinking about theatre, producing revised conceptions of the dra-
matic text, the text-performance and author-audience relations, the cgure
of the performer, performance spaces, staging conventions, and the var-
ied 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 repre-
sentation. 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 con-
clusions 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 the-
atre is therefore a subject that demands critical procedures adequate to
its complexity. In chapter 5 I discussed the ideological e,ect of tradi-
tionalist positions in erasing the historicity and particularity of post-
independence theatre as a diverse body of work. In this chapter I
approach theatre based on folk forms as a celd of contemporary prac-
tice—not 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 authen-
ticity 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 per-
formance 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 con-
sequent separation of form from content—problems 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 practitioner’s back-
ground, location, training, and objectives. Like the nation itself, folk cul-
ture in India is diverse: those who draw on it for theatrical purposes are
not recuperating an undi,erentiated cultural essence but using premod-
ern 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 pro-
gram. But as G. P. Deshpande notes, few have asked why serious urban
playwrights have turned to folk materials, and what e,ects and mean-
ings the indigenous forms communicate (“Fetish,” 50). In the next two
sections, I take up the relation between folk theatre and its urban recon-
cgurations, as well as the problems inherent in this exchange. In sub-
sequent 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 works—Girish
Karnad’s Hayavadana (1971), Chandrashekhar Kambar’s Jokumaraswami
(1972), and Habib Tanvir’s 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, grand-
mother’s tale and bardic narratives, ritual and theater, nonliterate tra-
ditions 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 per-
formance 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” (46–47). 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 argu-
ments 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 commu-
nity. 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 un-
breakable ties with the locality, its ecology, its myths, their social impli-
cations. 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 levels—those 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 sep-
arates 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 sex-
ual,” the realm of entertainment itself “assumes a total and microcosmic
character—microcosmic 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 con-
trasts 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 embod-
ies “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 Kambar’s 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 uni-
formly not in themselves the products of folk culture. As the “counter-
critique” 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 play—a plot rooted in myth, folklore, or ritual;
nonproscenium staging; an antirealistic structure accommodating music,
dance, and stylized movement; and dramatized characters who “pre-
sent” 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 Tanvir’s 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 author-
ship in a culture in which the recognition of the playwright as “author”
invests even quintessentially “theatrical” work with “literary” qualities.
Karnad’s Hayavadana and Naga-mandala and Tendulkar’s 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 authen-
ticity, plays such as Jokumaraswami, Charandas chor, Thiyam’s Chakravyuha,
and Panikkar’s 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 text-
uality 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 tradi-
tions. 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 perfor-
mative dimension of urban folk theatre by contrasting it with the textu-
ality 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 per-
forming time is nearly two hours. The di,erence in the reading-performing-
time 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 tex-
tuality lies not in the measure by which a performance text exceeds a
written text but in the fact that the written text underlying the perform-
ance 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 composi-
tion 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 commu-
nity, the urban folk drama can be detached from all these particulari-
ties 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 perform-
ance. 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 visi-
bility, signiccance, and value, because it turns them into objects of read-
ing, 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 rel-
evance 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 theatre—form, content, style, language, and staging
conventions—to 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 perform-
ance, 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 Rakesh’s comment (quoted
in chapter 8) about the limitations of the village as a literary subject sug-
gests, playwrights incline toward realism and urban experience precisely
because these qualities have a compelling relation to both the author’s
and the audience’s 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 Nath’s 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 Chatto-
padhyay 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 work-
ers at intra/inter-regional levels, the dichotomies of development remain
as stark as ever, with the city continuing to live o, the human and eco-
logical 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 Thiong’o objects to the fallacious confusion of cul-

ture with “irrelevant traditionalism”—it 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 audience’s alienation from
village culture is the problem of the sociology of the village forms them-
selves. During the drama seminar of 1956, several participants interested
in folk performance genres had already commented on the danger that
the country’s 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 Gujarat—caused in part
by nineteenth century puritanism, but mostly by negligence and poverty
in the present (Proceedings, 105). J. C. Mathur found sućient reason
“to believe that community culture and tradition are completely broken
down and shattered in most of the regions of this sub-continent” (Pro-
ceedings, 122–23). Ebrahim Alkazi was considerably more forceful in argu-
ing 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 audi-
ences themselves and the whole structure of the countryside have under-
gone 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 vil-
lage 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 won’t 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 atmos-
phere 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 sensibil-
ity, shaped largely by Western ideas, relate to this art form? . . . I also feel
no “nostalgia” for this art form. Maybe because I’m 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,” 91–92)
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 (Elkunch-
war, “Interview,” 1, 2). Bharucha similarly dismisses the “theatre of roots”
as a conceptually bankrupt construct which is “neither linked sućiently
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).
Elkunchwar’s 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 com-
parable 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 cli-
mate. 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 emanci-
pation—social, 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, backward-
ness, obscurantism, and its promotion of feudal structures” (qtd. in Van
Erven, 141). Indian anthropologists, sociologists, and political econo-
mists 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 his-
torical 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 environ-
ment 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 Tendulkar’s 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 genesis—its history, its anthropology, its
religion and, therefore, its link with the past” (Raina, 29). A more perva-
sive problem is the pursuit of “naive,” antirealistic forms as an end in
itself, with no correlation to content. According to Shanta Gandhi, direc-
tor of the bhavai classic Jasma odan, in the search for a new theatre semi-
otic, folk forms can be raided merely for “production styles,” but “unless
this trend is more securely tied up with the writing of new plays rebect-
ing 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 con-
siders 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 ritualis-
tic 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 re-
demptive role some cultural critics have assigned to it in an anti-Western,
postcolonial practice. But they also underscore the importance of indi-
vidual authors and directors who have negotiated these dićulties, creat-
ing not only successful but iconic works that seriously expand our sense
of the possibilities of dramatic composition and theatrical representa-
tion. Such plays as Karnad’s Hayavadana, Tendulkar’s Ghashiram kotwal,
Kambar’s Jokumaraswami, and Tanvir’s 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 conven-

tions 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 contempo-
rary 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 fash-
ioned from “unsophisticated” folk materials. In the following readings I
focus on two issues in particular—the playwrights’ self-conscious manip-
ulation of the folk conventions of presentation and the centrality of gen-
der 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 back-
ground, 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 dis-
junction between the premodern narrative of the inner play and the post-
colonial 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 play-
wrights as Mohan Rakesh, Vijay Tendulkar, the early Badal Sircar, Mahesh
Elkunchwar, Jaywant Dalvi, and Mahesh Dattani have come to be asso-
ciated 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-seeking—but in their totality the urban
and quasi-urban worlds are frustrating, disappointing, or seriously destruc-
tive. 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 women’s 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 opposi-
tions—text/performance, product/process, close/open, realist/antirealist,
complicit/resistant—that seem to encapsulate gender issues quite fully.
The narratives of urban folk theatre constitute, however, a third im-
portant 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 mak-
ing of all kinds of cultural meanings,” and women as occupying “the cen-
ter stage of this work” (Appadurai et al., Gender, Genre, 8, 5). Ramanujan
describes women’s tales as a “counter-system,” whether women are the
tellers or the subjects of narrative. Commenting on women’s 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
women’s subversive speech” (193), and that “women were not the unques-
tioning 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 ‘tradi-
tional’ 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 con-
cern 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 life’s 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 reposi-
tory of attitudes to gender and should receive due critical attention.
Such plays as Hayavadana, Jokumaraswami, and Charandas chor are im-
portant 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 pres-
ence 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 cdelity—a notion that ques-
tions 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 mother-
hood 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 fem-
ininity, 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 counter-

parts in Rakesh’s Adhe adhure or Vijay Tendulkar’s Shantata! court chalu ahe.
The presence of these subversive thematic elements, and their accom-
modation 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 Karnad’s Hayavadana
In the “Author’s 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 suc-
cessfully in some other cultural context, [but] to discover whether there
was a structure of expectations—and conventions—about 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, half-
curtains, 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 theatre’s 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 Mann’s philosophical novella The Transposed Heads, Karnad’s dis-
tinctive 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 play’s credentials were impeccable and its timing fortuitous. Kar-
nad’s 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 Fellow-
ship, which he held from 1970–72 “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 re-
ceived 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. Karanth’s
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 play’s most ambitious and persistent direc-
tors. 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 National-
theater, Weimar, for a German production with German actors. With this
succession of major productions virtually complete by 1990, Hayavadana
is still one of Karnad’s 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 Karnad’s exploratory approach, the outstanding quality
of Hayavadana as urban folk drama is that it joins the structure and con-
ventions 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 ele-
ments on the page and in performance, we have to consider the complex
intertextual relation between the play’s premodern and modern sources
and their successive transformation by Karnad’s present objectives. In
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the Kathasaritasagara, the story of “The Heads That Got Switched” con-
tains 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. Madanasundari’s brother
visits them after some time, and all three begin a journey back to her par-
ents’ home. In the city of Shobhavati, Dhavala discovers the great tem-
ple of Parvati and decides on the spur of the moment to sacricce himself
to the goddess in order to achieve salvation. His (nameless) brother-in-
law 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 husband’s head acquires
her brother’s body, and vice versa. The resulting problem of “true” iden-
tity has an unambiguous solution in this version: “The one with her hus-
band’s 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 Purusha’s head, and the
supremacy of that part of the body is so crmly established in the subse-
quent Hindu tradition that it overrides the implications of incest in the
twelfth-century narrative.
Thomas Mann’s philosophical elaboration of this story in The Trans-
posed Heads (1940) is a fully developed parable about conjugality, pro-
scribed 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 naked-
ness 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 Mann’s ver-
sion, the husband beheads himself in Parvati’s 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
Mann’s 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. Shridaman’s once-recned face comes to rebect Nanda’s
crudity, while Nanda’s crude features take on Shridaman’s 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 Karnad’s Hayavadana follows elements
of characterization and the order of events in Mann’s novella closely
enough to be considered in some respects a “deorientalized,” contempo-
rary Indian theatrical version of it. The play’s originality lies in the rebex-
ive 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. Karnad’s crst radical move is to mul-
tiply 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 man’s body reverts to its original quali-
ties, 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 comple-
mentary and inseparable when they were separate become mortal enemies
when they are forcibly joined together. Padmini’s self-serving mistake
therefore begins a violent struggle within and between these three char-
acters that ends only with the destruction of their lives.
Karnad di,uses this human “tragedy” by placing it alongside two other
realms of experience—the 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 the-
atre, 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 ani-
mal and human worlds. Hayavadana’s mixed-up self is not the result of
an accidental transposition—like 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 Karnad’s 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 character-

istics and turning completely into a horse. This triple perspective on
disrupted selves puts into practice Karnad’s belief that the various con-
ventions of Indian folk theatre create e,ects similar to those associated
with Brecht’s 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 alter-
native points of view, of alternative attitudes to the central problem”
(TP, 14).
The second level of complication in Hayavadana involves the author’s
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 his-
torical 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 perform-
ance 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 dis-
rupted 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 perform-
ance of Padmini’s 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 Padmini’s 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 lost—as he wants to—this 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 Padmini’s crisis, and, as a playful horse at
the end, he brings Padmini’s 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. Hayavadana’s 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 horse’s 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 charac-
ter; 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 Hayavadana—his
curse lies in his lineage, not his own actions. In further ironic contrast
to this problematic, rebexive, topical frame, the inner play uses the con-
ventions of folk theatre conventionally. Following Karnad’s printed direc-
tions, in early productions the actors playing the roles of Devadatta and
Kapila wore masks so that the narrative of transposition would have a
visual parallel—in later versions they merely switch clothes. The half-
curtain also appears throughout the performance as a versatile stage prop,
connecting Padmini’s 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 histori-
cal present.
Karnad’s inventive frames produce a new dramatic synthesis that re-
contextualizes the story of the transposed heads and separates it from
its sources. But how e,ective is this synthesis on the stage? Karanth’s
1989 production for the Nehru Festival (recorded by the Sangeet Natak
Akademi) revealed several respects in which the play’s 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 sur-
prisingly muted, and the music itself consisted in recned urban melo-
dies 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 Padmini’s marital
crisis was more realistic than stylized, and the dialogue often resembled
the bickerings of a discontented small-town couple. The thematic con-
nections 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 perform-
ance came across as an intellectual exercise on the part of an urban liter-
ary 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 Hayavadana’s mother, who had insisted on choos-
ing 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 ex-
clusively 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, many-
bowered 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 Padmini’s marriage, which follows an unusual logic. Pad-
mini is childish but whole; it is the men who represent a mind/body dual-
ism 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 body—fabulous brain—fabu-
lous Devadatta” (113). Excluded from this moment of triumph, the man
who now has Kapila’s undesirable head and Devadatta’s undesirable
body complains that it is not right for Padmini to “just go and live with
a man who’s not her husband,” and that her “fancy” cannot be allowed
to provide the solution to their problem—but 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 Padmini’s position in the triangular relation-
ships, 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 men’s double suicide
in Kali’s temple and the fatal confrontation at the end are, in Padmini’s
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 unrav-
els 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 San-
skrit folktale as retold by Mann and Karnad in the twentieth century,
the men kill themselves twice for the sake of the woman, though accord-
ing to Padmini the cnal victory belongs to Devadatta and Kapila—she
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 I’d said, ‘Yes, I’ll live with you both,’
perhaps they would have been alive yet. But I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t
say ‘Yes.’ No, Kapila, no, Devadatta—I know it in my blood you couldn’t
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 other’s arms.
You could only have lived ripping each other to pieces. I had to drive
you to death. You forgave each other, but again—left me out” (130–31).
In Karnad’s 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 Kambar’s Jokumaraswami
As another decnitive work in the 1970s sequence of experimental urban
folk plays, Chandrashekhar Kambar’s Jokumaraswami stands in a re-
vealing relation of sameness and di,erence to Karnad’s 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 Dubey’s direction in Bombay in 1979 (for Theatre Unit
as well as Awishkar) and under Rajinder Nath’s 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 show-
piece of the brilliant theatre a,orded by rural forms of performance and
ritual; unlike Karnad’s 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 post-
colonial 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 Kambar’s conception, folk theatre is a vibrant, quasi-
religious, 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 compo-
nents—music, dialogue, dance or gesture—are not discrete elements but
“mutually dependent and reinforcing” (“Traditional Theatre,” 26). But
Kambar’s 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 par-
ticulars of a given play.
From this viewpoint, Jokumaraswami presents not a cerebral synthe-
sis 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 cele-
brated in north Karnataka villages every year on “Jokumara hunnive,” the
full-moon night during the late monsoon month of Bhadrapada (August–
September). The playwright’s 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: Joku-
maraswami, 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 iden-

tity 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 land-
owner; 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 rit-
ual 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 Gowdathi’s preg-
nancy, his henchmen ambush Basanna and shoot him dead.
Like Karnad, but through a simpler structure that juxtaposes the com-
munal 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 perform-
ance. 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 wor-
shipping Jokumaraswami instead of the traditional presiding deity of folk
performance, Ganesha. As the sutradhar narrates Jokumara’s exploits as
an indiscriminate seducer of women, Himmela takes on the role of cen-
sor and insists that such an “obscene god” poses a “big risk” at a digniced
community gathering. He inserts euphemisms into the sutradhar’s sexu-
ally explicit descriptions and urges the use of poetry rather than prose as
a less “dangerous” narrative medium for the god’s 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 dia-
logue simultaneously questions and performs the ritual propitiation that
ensures success for the participatory event of theatre. The symbolic pres-
ence of Jokumaraswami establishes the subversion of all forms of patri-
archal control as the play’s 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 Karnad’s 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 prin-
ciple 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 Gowda’s musket—the object
that enforces his unjust power—as “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 Gowda’s “weapons,” while the victims
he shoots with his own gun, he claims, “don’t die, they litter” (26). Trans-
lated into real-life terms by Basanna’s 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 head-
man, Gowdathi is strongly circumscribed by patriarchy, and her over-
whelming 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 don’t 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 ful-
cllment of her quest legitimately enough—by 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 bodies—the substitution of lover for husband—also comes
about because of Gowda’s cowardice. Instead of confronting Basanna in
the “devil’s celd,” as he had threatened, Gowda sends his henchmen in
his place and escapes to the prostitute Shari’s 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” adult-
ery 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 Gow-
dathi 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, Basanna’s 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 vic-
tims of oppression, determined to avenge themselves against the same
oppressor. Kambar’s 1989 production of Jokumaraswami at the Nehru
Festival caught the mutuality and sexual force of this relationship bril-
liantly, especially in the courtship scene where the delicate, radiant Gow-
dathi 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 meanings—it 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 politi-
cized but powerless peasantry by the ruthless landlord class. But in no
case does death prevent regeneration—Basanna’s child lives on inside
Gowdathi, the husband has to accept his humiliation at the lover’s hands,
and the earth continues to be fruitful because of the peasant’s 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 play—Gowdathi, the prostitute Shari, the young
village girl Ningi, and the servants Shivi and Bassi—stand 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 Shari’s home to
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plead with this “beloved whore, whore my mother” to relinquish Joku-

maraswami to her because “like you, I’m 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 Jokumara-
swami. 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 Shari—are thus embodiments of self-
possessed femininity in the play because they have a gritty decance that
the wife, or even a rebellious peasant like Basanna, cannot match. More
than Basanna’s masculinity (which hastens his death), it is this sisterhood
of sympathetic women that seems to ensure a secure future for Gow-
dathi and her child.
Ascetic Men, Sovereign Women:

Habib Tanvir’s Charandas chor
In comparison with both Hayavadana and Jokumaraswami, Tanvir’s Cha-
randas chor illustrates the bexibility of structure and content that the cat-
egory 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 Tanvir’s 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 dia-
lect, making it a turning point in the playwright’s career—both because
it excluded urban actors and because it introduced Chhattisgarhi (usually
marginalized as a regional “dialect” of Hindi) as the language for a con-
temporary 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 com-
fortable with. Tanvir wrote some of the songs himself and commissioned
two poets from the region—Swarna 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, post-
classical 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 collec-
tive 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 epi-
sodes held together by the central cgure of Charandas. Act 1 creates an
overwhelmingly male world, using an episodic structure to establish
Charandas’s 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 cg-
ures—the foolish havaldar (constable), who is a type of defunct authority,
and the Satnami guru, a charismatic yet ambivalent male ideal. Dressed
in a policeman’s khaki uniform and carrying a nightstick, the constable
is the stock gull who provides vicarious release for the villagers’ pent-
up 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
males—a thief, a drunk, a gambler, a drug addict—who 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
disciple’s 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 neme-
sis; 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. Charandas’s comic energy, however, is moderated by the
audience’s gradual recognition of his contrariness—he 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 pro-
fession 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 sev-
eral unnecessarily fantastic oaths to that resolve, the guru-chela (master-
disciple) 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 1—in 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 rani’s authority at the same time by com-
mitting 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 play’s early pro-
ductions 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. Charandas’s 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. (Cha-
randas, 74)
But not only does Charandas refuse the queen’s 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 dai”—“dai” 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 “mas-
culine” role, she can restore order and her own self-respect only by
destroying Charandas. Like Basanna, Charandas is thus a sacriccial vic-
tim, 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, patri-
archy 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 reject—symbolically at least—existing 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 member’s rights and duties are cxed” (21). The con-
stitutive 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
09chap9.qxd 7/6/2005 8:17 AM Page 349
Fig. 18. The ascetic thief and the sovereign queen. Govind Ram as Charandas
and Fida Bai as the rani in Habib Tanvir’s Charandas chor, directed by Habib
Tanvir, Naya Theatre, New Delhi, 1974. Courtesy of Habib Tanvir.
09chap9.qxd 7/6/2005 8:17 AM Page 350
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 inclu-
sion 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 socioeco-
nomic organization and undergo inevitable atrophy as the rural regions
adapt to modern urbanization, industrialization, and development. Kam-
bar comments that in the region of north Karnataka to which he be-
longs, “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 forms—however primal
their appeal in other respects—mount 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 en-
hances this accessibility.
The element of critique is most evident in Jokumaraswami and Charan-
das chor, which are closer to village experience than Karnad’s multi-
layered 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 antago-
nisms into a real and symbolic opposition between virility and impotence.
In the ritualistic structure of the resulting stage vehicle, the audience’s
understanding of successful resistance has to accommodate the sacric-
cial death of the hero. Similarly, in Charandas chor Tanvir embeds his folk
09chap9.qxd 7/6/2005 8:17 AM Page 351
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 foot-
ing by a bare stage that can signify any place. The rani’s feudal kingdom
coexists with a recognizably modern political world in which a land-
owner hoards grain in a village full of starving peasants, and mere battery
is enough to distract a minister while Charandas robs the queen’s treas-
ury. 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
plays—it provides a theatrical experience antithetical to that of the real-
ist 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
audience’s aesthetic and ideological leanings, contemporary Indian prac-
tice o,ers compelling reasons to deexoticize folk theatre and attend to
the ways in which it participates in the politics of gender, class, and com-
munity in the present.
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chapter 10
Intertexts and Countertexts
Canonical Counter-Discourse and

“Postcolonial” Indian Theatre
One of the most inbuential and controversial recent debates in post-
colonial studies has centered on the relations of dependency and oppo-
sition between postcolonial writing and dominant Western forms of
textuality. The generalized form of this argument, presented by Ashcroft,
Gri´ths, and Tiń 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 lit-
erary 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” (Sle-
mon, 10). Slemon describes such colonialist acts of cultural appropria-
tion, 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.
352
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Intertexts and Countertexts 353
The horizon of cguration upon which a large number of post-colonial lit-

erary 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 counter-
discourse. (11)
Helen Tiń takes a very similar position when she argues that postcolo-
nial 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 psy-
chohistory of colonialism from the early modern to the modern period—
Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719),
and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). All three have been de-
scribed as “paradigmatic colonial texts” and “classic cctions of the
colonial encounter,” revealing in essence the processes of domination,
exploitation, and brutalization that mark Europe’s colonization of the
Other. In his study of the psychology of colonization, O. Mannoni even
treats the Prospero-Caliban and Crusoe-Friday relationships as paradig-
matic examples of the master-slave dialectic in a colonial context, char-
acterized by mutual hatred (in The Tempest) or cooperation (in Robinson
Crusoe), but postulated on the colonizer’s unquestioned racial, intellec-
tual, and moral superiority (see Mannoni 97–109). Postcolonial reinscrip-
tions of these texts have understandably focused, then, on subverting
the cognitive and thematic codes of colonialist appropriation. Compar-
ing 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 Shakespeare’s
male-centered fable of colonial experience, choosing Miranda rather than
Caliban as the complex cgure of postcolonial self-recognition, knowl-
edge, and power (Brydon, “Re-writing,” 77–84 passim). Allan Gardiner
argues that J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands and Foe systematically subvert the
“canonical formulation of the colonial encounter” in Robinson Crusoe
(174). Dusklands resituates Crusoe’s imperial domain in a nameless em-
pire that signices the twilight of all empires; Foe disrupts the apparent
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 354
harmony of the Crusoe-Friday partnership by introducing a female nar-

rator and implicates the cctionalized author (De)Foe himself in the bru-
tal silencing of the slave. Heart of Darkness is commonly regarded as a
powerfully anticolonial text, but Brydon argues that such novels as Mar-
garet Atwood’s Surfacing and Patrick White’s 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 Ances-
tor,” 389, 392). In his trenchant critique of Conrad’s novella, Chinua
Achebe goes much further: he attacks the West’s “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 coun-
terdiscourse reduces “the post-colonial . . . to a purely textual phenome-
non, 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 rela-
tions 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,
95–96). The emphasis on “writing back” also places inordinate signic-
cance 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 ex-
perience. 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
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 355
Slemon decnes as a system of signifying practices that produces, natural-

izes, and mobilizes “the hieracrchical power structures of the imperial
enterprise,” does not encompass all forms of textuality and textual ex-
change 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, Gulliver’s Travels, and The Waste Land are canonical but
cannot be proclaimed as hegemonic unless we dissolve modal di,erences
between literary texts altogether. Indeed, the subversions of postcolo-
nial writing are often practiced through, not against, canonical texts that
are already deeply subversive. Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children
(1980) is written through Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), Gun-
ter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1962), and García Márquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude (1967), among other works; Mustapha Matura’s play, The
Playboy of the West Indies (1988), is written through J. M. Synge’s The Play-
boy of the Western World (1907); and Octavio Paz’s condensed epic, “The
Petrifying Petriced” (1976) is written through Eliot’s The Waste 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, post-
colonial self-conceptions are heroic as well as satiric; they consist in self-
praise as well as self-criticism. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame
(1983), Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists (1971), and Achebe’s Anthills of the
Savannah (1987) are all self-rebexive critiques of political and social mal-
formations in a third-world nation that follow the colonizer’s withdrawal
from the former colony. To argue that these works are nevertheless con-
tained 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
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 356
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 con-
temporary intertexts, both Indian and Western, which signal the emer-
gence of one play from another and, occasionally, of a play from some
other form of literary narrative. The multifarious assimilation of West-
ern as well as non-Western drama has also diversiced and consolidated
an emergent theatrical culture by introducing into it nonindigenous nar-
ratives and textual practices, because Indian playwrights usually write
through (rather than against) the canonical text and regard such “writ-
ing” as a legitimate exercise of authorship. However, there is nothing dis-
tinctively “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 post-
colonial practice in this respect is one of degree, not of kind. Further-
more, 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 precursors—Western and Indian, dra-
matic and nondramatic—in terms mindful of the historicity and cultural
reciprocity of the exchange. In the following sections I discuss the rele-
vance of the concepts and processes of translation, transculturation, and
intertextuality to the various forms of “rewriting” in contemporary the-
atre. I use the seminal example of Bertolt Brecht to chart the multifac-
eted 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 post-
colonial world. The genealogical connections between John Gay’s The
Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Bertolt Brecht’s 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 Havel’s Beggar’s
Opera (1972) or the critique of the postcolonial nation in a play like Wole
Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi (1977). I connect the plays of Gay, Brecht, and
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 357
Soyinka to the Marathi playwright P. L. Deshpande’s Teen paishacha

tamasha (The Three-Paisa Entertainment, 1978) and use these correspon-
dences to explore the enabling political functions of Brechtian inbuences
and other thematic relations in the specicc case of Deshpande’s play.
These links between two European playwrights, a contemporary Afri-
can playwright, and an Indian-language author are not arbitrary critical
assertions—rather, they point to the formation of an extraordinary the-
atrical 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 trans-
lation, 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
languages—the measure in which “languages are not strangers to one
another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, inter-
related in what they want to express” (Benjamin, “Task,” 74). But trans-
lation 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 one’s 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, how-
ever, “the purpose of translation [became] to go beyond the appropria-
tion of content to a releasing of those linguistic and aesthetic energies
that heretofore had existed only as pure possibility in one’s own language
and had never been materialized before” (13). Through translation, the
vernacular literatures of Europe acquired, and were enriched by, nar-
ratives 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 prin-
cipal means by which an emergent and ambivalent urban theatre culture
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 358
consolidated itself, but after independence the sphere of translation has

expanded enormously. If we take Hindi as the target language, for in-
stance, among the older Indian plays, Mohan Rakesh has translated Kali-
dasa’s Abhijnana Shakuntalam and Shudraka’s Mrichchhakatika, and Hazari
Prasad Dwivedi has rendered several plays by Rabindranath Tagore. The
large celd of classic Western plays in translation includes Harivansh Rai
Bachchan’s King Lear; Rangeya Raghav’s Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice,
and Macbeth; and Raghuvir Sahay’s Macbeth and Othello. From modern
Western drama, Rajendra Yadav has translated Anton Chekhov’s The
Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, and Three Sisters; J. N. Kaushal, Ibsen’s An
Enemy of the People, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Arthur Miller’s Death of
a Salesman, and William Saroyan’s The Cave Dwellers; and Sahay, three
modern Hungarian plays, including Istvan Orkeny’s Totek. These are trans-
lations by playwrights, poets, and critics who are major contemporary
Indian authors in their own right; the total body of Western drama ren-
dered 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 (Calderón, Molière, Corneille, Racine, Beau-
marchais, Goldoni); nineteenth-century Europeans (Büchner, Edmond
Rostand); and the full range of modern European and American play-
wrights, especially Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Gogol, Gorky, Shaw,
Pirandello, Lorca, O’Neill, 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 Drama’s 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 loca-
tions, although on a smaller scale, because of the ongoing literary and
theatrical interest in foreign drama. In keeping with the principle of lin-
guistic equivalence, all these translations “carry across” a text from one
set of linguistic codes to another but leave the cultural codes of the orig-
inal 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
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 359
assimilates canonical Western and Indian texts to the modern Indian lan-
guages and contemporary experience. Borrowing their conceptual vocab-
ulary from Sanskrit, such languages as Hindi and Marathi di,erentiate
anuvad (translation-in-general) into bhashantar (a conscientious render-
ing of the language or verbal texture of the original) and rupantar (a sys-
tematic “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 audi-
ence, and the urge toward such rewriting is more strongly visible in drama
and theatre than in the other literary genres. It is much more dićult 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 his-
torical 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 Dryden’s 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 Ker-
mode’s 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 docu-
ment may be induced to signify what it cannot be said to have expressly
stated,” while translationes “become transitions from a past to a pres-
ent 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, 117–18).2 Struc-
turalist poetics o,ers perhaps the most rigorous view of the interdepen-
dence 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 intertex-
tualities, where one work takes another as its basis or point of departure
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 360
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
Frow’s 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-sućient 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 lan-
guages more or less di,erent from the original conditions of composi-
tion of a given work.
During the colonial period, Shakespeare was again the only Western
playwright to undergo such large-scale accommodation (speciccally, ru-
pantar) within Indian theatre, but now the celd has widened to include
Molière (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 Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle or Shakespeare’s King Lear,
can become the core of a singular archive by generating multiple indige-
nized versions, all of which bear a family resemblance to each other (see
appendix 8). It is also important to note that the pervasive intertextual-
ity 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 orig-
inal and in translation, but Habib Tanvir’s Mitti ki gadi (1958) and Duryo-
dhana (1979), respectively, deconstruct the canonical text of Shudraka’s
Mrichchhakatika and Bhasa’s Urubhangam as e,ectively as Deshpande’s Teen
paishacha tamasha (1977) works through and against The Threepenny Opera.
We might even argue that the primary objective of the controversial “tra-
ditionalist” impulse in urban Indian theatre is to interpellate the text of
contemporary experience with the preexisting text of classical aesthet-
ics, the Western dramatic canon, or indigenous performance genres.
The strongest argument, however, against a totalizing counterdiscur-
sivity 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
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 361
for every production, but specicc translators or adaptors for only cfty-
eight plays; in seven instances, the translator is the same as the director,
and only three of the adapted versions have appeared in print as self-
contained works. Clearly, the intertexts are scripts for performance devel-
oped by directors, not texts for reading, and they constitute an extraordi-
nary record of the reappearance of Euro-American dramatic monuments
at some distance from their metropolitan origins. Following indepen-
dence in 1947, for some time such directorial initiatives were crucial to the
development of a stable performance culture. As Badal Sircar acknowl-
edges 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 reper-
tory 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
Molière’s 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 Brook’s Mahabharata and the workshops
of Grotowski and Barba, theatrical interculturalism is best embodied in
such productions as Fritz Bennewitz’s 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 Night’s Dream, Othello (with Ebrahim Alkazi, 1983),
and The Tempest (1990); Carl Weber’s Caucasian Chalk Circle (1968);
Richard Schechner’s Mother Courage (1981) and The Cherry Orchard (1983);
Shozo Sato’s Ibaragi; and Egil Kipste’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1984). In the
1990s, intertextual performance has evolved into the sign of a volun-
tary and accommodating cosmopolitanism, moving beyond Shakespeare,
Molière, and Brecht to such plays as Chinghiz Aitmatov’s Fujiyama (1991),
Anouilh’s Traveller without Luggage (1991), Lorca’s The House of Bernarda
Alba (1992), and Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1993),
Archangels Don’t Play Pinball (1996), and Comedy of Terrors (1998). Most of
these productions have also been in Hindi, India’s 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 inter-
mediary performance genres, which indigenizes the text as well as the
style of presentation. For instance, there are Bengali or Hindi or Marathi
versions of Shakespeare’s major works, as there are Bengali, Marathi,
and Tamil versions of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Request Concert. But there
are also rupantars that recompose Shakespeare in Indian performance
styles: B. V. Karanth’s Barnam vana (1979) employs the yakshagana folk
form of Karnataka for Macbeth, Habib Tanvir’s Basant ritu ka sapna (1993)
casts A Midsummer Night’s 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,
Gogol’s The Inspector General and Molière’s 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 recon-

cguration of preexisting, usually self-sućient prose narratives—short
stories, novels, or folktales—as 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 rang-
manch), 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 Anandku-
mar, Harishankar Parsai, Chanakya Sen, Mannu Bhandari, and Nirmal
Varma. The foreign works include Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q, Franz
Kafka’s The Trial, Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s Rashomon, and Gabriel García
Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in Hindi, and Chinua Achebe’s
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 Bha-
rati, 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 director’s auton-
omy 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 director’s impatience with a sparse theatrical celd:
“People say there are no good scripts in Hindi after Mohan Rakesh. But
as a director I can’t 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 the-
atre for him to write for?” (qtd. in Kalidas 45). Critics of this cross-
fertilization of genres, however, regard it as parasitical, antitheatrical,
and a sign of second-rate authorship—a 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 mea-
sure 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, cos-
tumes, makeup, lighting, music, and seamless dramatic characterization.
The actors perform multiple functions: they narrate the author’s 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 sum-
mer 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 audi-
ence. 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 stage—audiences cnd its devices repetitive, tedious, and
undramatic, and regard the actors’ work as “nonacting.” Ankur’s argu-
ments 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 intertex-
tuality in the theatre and functions as one more medium for exploring
theatre’s connection with other genres.
Thus, in the textual and performative celds of post-independence the-
atre, 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 inbu-
ences, 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 per-
formance text is distinctly di,erent from linguistic translation because
the translator’s 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 appro-
priations 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 one’s own systemic
codes onto the ‘vacant’ or ‘uninscribed’ territory of the other,” the act of
transcultural appropriation is the projection of one’s 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 one’s 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 lan-
guage of its audience; it is both a version of the Western original(s) and
a self-sućient performance vehicle in its own right. This simultaneity
of reference is evident both in the large-scale dissemination of Brecht’s
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 playwright’s inbuence as a theorist of
theatre equals (if it does not outweigh) the exemplary force of his prac-
tice, 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 progres-
sive culture as we Indians have done with Bertolt Brecht,” and the signs
of Brecht’s singular inbuence are widely evident (“Brecht”). In Bengal, a
state where IPTA activists, street theatre groups, and radical playwright-
directors, such as Utpal Dutt and Badal Sircar, have sustained one of
the strongest political theatre movements in the country, Brecht’s plays
are performed more frequently than those of native son and Nobel lau-
reate Rabindranath Tagore, leading Rustom Bharucha to give separate
attention to the phenomenon of “Brecht in Bengal” in his study of polit-
ical theatre in the region (see Bharucha, Rehearsals, 191–201). An impres-
sive 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 pro-
ductions of his plays around the country (see appendix 8). At the National
School of Drama in New Delhi, professional productions of Brecht’s plays
have outnumbered those of any other foreign playwright, and an active
program of lectures, workshops, exhibits, and publications has a´rmed
his primacy in the curriculum.4 Habib Tanvir, Vijaya Mehta, Hasmukh
Baradi, P. L. Deshpande, and Amal Allana are among the theatre profes-
sionals 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 Brecht’s 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 twentieth-
century program for political representation, predicated on a materialist
rather than idealist understanding of history, antirealist staging, nonlin-
ear narrative progression, and an appeal to reason and action rather than
emotional catharsis in the spectator. The subject of Brecht’s plays—the
content that prescribes the form—is always the dialectic of social rela-
tions and historical processes. As Walter Benjamin explains, the starting
point for Brechtian epic theatre is “the attempt to introduce fundamen-
tal 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 sub-
jects, 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 pro-
ducer, the actor is no longer a mime who must embody a role, but a func-
tionary 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 “accom-
modation” (rupantar), is still to engage with the most complex textual
and performative vehicles of political meaning in modern and contem-
porary theatre. This is as true in the West as it is in India. Christopher J.
McCullough notes that Brecht bourished in the subsidized national the-
atres 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). Eugène Van Erven’s study of radical people’s theatre in Europe
and the United States shows that Brecht’s “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 (for-
malism, organicism, mimeticism) lends “canonical authority” to the cri-
tique 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
perception—reported frequently in Indian discussions as a “pleasant
coincidence”—that Brecht’s 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 virtu-
osity 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,” Brecht’s 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 Brecht’s theatre soon became
exceedingly relevant” (Allana, 2–3). Indeed, Tanvir reports that after a year
of training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, the ex-
perience of watching Brecht’s plays at the Berliner Ensemble in the mid-
1950s 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 Brecht’s 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 list—the 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 Weber’s Caucasian Chalk Circle in
Hindi (1968), Kumar Roy’s Galileo in Bengali (1980), and C. R. Jambe’s
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 Bennewitz’s production of The Threepenny
Opera in the swang style of Uttar Pradesh (1970), Vijaya Mehta’s Marathi
versions of The Good Woman of Setzuan and The Caucasian Chalk Circle in
the tamasha and dashavatar styles (1972 and 1974), M. K. Raina’s Punjabi
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folk version of The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1976), Tanvir’s Chhattigarhi

folk version of Good Woman (1978), P. L. Deshpande’s tamasha version of
The Threepenny Opera (1978), and B. V. Karanth’s Bundelkhandi folk ver-
sion of Caucasian Chalk Circle (1983) represent a transformative indige-
nization 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 naturaliza-
tion. As Bennewitz observed of Karanth’s 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 some-
thing new and unique” (Bennewitz, “Interviewed”). Similarly, Bennewitz
felt that, in his collaborative production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle
with Vijaya Mehta, Mehta’s talent allowed the successful “integration” of
Brecht’s 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 exper-
iments 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 inter-
cultural experiments with tradition.5 In a 1976 review essay, for instance,
Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni compares Mehta’s The Good Woman of Setzuan
with a production of Vijay Tendulkar’s original play Ghashiram kotwal
and describes both as good examples of the synthesis of “folk” and “bour-
geois” forms (Nadkarni, “Search”). Signiccantly, the distinction between
indigenous and foreign vanishes at this point in the critic’s 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 Brecht’s theoretical positions
more useful than his staging techniques. According to Bharucha, Utpal
Dutt has “argued very persuasively that Brecht’s theater does not fulcll
the expectations and needs of the working class in Bengal. . . . The revo-
lutionary theater of Bengal has to cnd its models in jatra and the histor-
ical 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). Sircar’s group Satabdi
did take up Brecht once—in Gondi, a Bengali version of The Caucasian
Chalk Circle—“not because we wanted to do a Brecht play, but because I
found that play to be Indian and contemporary” (Voyages, 33). But as direc-
tor he used the actors’ bodies to create all set elements, excluded “irrele-
vant” 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 Mehta’s 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 Mehta’s Marathi pro-
ductions 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 Nandikar’s
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productions of The Threepenny Opera and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Bha-
rucha 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 seri-
ous political intervention.
As a play and a production from the 1970s, P. L. Deshpande’s Teen pai-
shacha 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 perfor-
mance contexts. At the same time, the Marathi play is part of a coherent
thematic exchange that reaches back through twentieth-century Ger-
many to early eighteenth-century London. As my analysis in the follow-
ing 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 Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera for postcolonial
authors is in some respects a remarkable anomaly because the social-
political formations in Gay’s 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 Gay’s conceptions of human
character, behavior, and social organization appear almost instinctively
to have created a versatile grid for representations of power and power-
lessness 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 Beggar’s Opera also appear irre-
ducible because Gay employs two radical strategies in representing dia-
logue 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 wife’s spirits” (24). Gay also practices an
early version of Brechtian estrangement in The Beggar’s Opera by under-
mining 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 prosti-
tutes are collective parodies of courage and gentility, and in their respec-
tive scenes they are again rhetorically indistinguishable from each other.
Character in Gay’s 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 Beggar’s Opera is also the crst major English play to represent pol-
itics as a secularized sphere of action, devoid equally of the charisma of
kingship and the sanctity of religion. In Gay’s topical satire of the 1720s,
criminality becomes a natural analogue for politics, instituting an iden-
ticcation 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 cruel-
ties. As John Bender notes, “The Beggar’s 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 rep-
resenting 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 “cel-
ebrates” the end of a just social order. With corrosive irony, it also elimi-
nates 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 com-
ment 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). Gay’s analysis of class antagonisms is cul-
tural and moral rather than materialist: he attacks the materialism of the
bourgeois ethic by playing it o, against the antimaterialism of the high-
waymen’s 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 presenta-
tion 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 Gay’s ironies are thus explicit
in Brecht’s 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 “Estab-
lishment for Beggars” that combats human callousness by commodify-
ing misery, and the e,ect of his manipulations is “shattering rather than
repellent” (100). Macheath, according to Brecht, is “a bourgeois phe-
nomenon” (101), distinguished from the bourgeois only in that he is not
cowardly. Thus, while in The Beggar’s Opera Peachum and Macheath rep-
resent 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 Macheath’s men into respectable
stockholders. The delicate pastoralism of the Polly-Macheath romance
and the decant courage of Macheath’s gang in Gay’s text are also absent
in Brecht’s version. The only character e,ectively excluded from irony in
The Threepenny Opera is Jenny Diver, whom Brecht develops as a quasi-
tragic 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, Gay’s unstable ironies and specicc satiric targets
seem more compatible with the antinationalist cctions of Opera Wonyosi
and Teen paishacha tamasha than Brecht’s generalized ideological critique.
Both Soyinka and Deshpande follow Brecht’s structural modiccations of
The Beggar’s Opera closely and often echo his dialogue but reject stream-
lined materialist explanations in favor of disorderly, satiric-humanist con-
ceptions of postcolonial politics, culture, and character. Opera Wonyosi
(1977) was written during the post–civil 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-Bédel Bokassa in 1977. The
foreign setting enables Soyinka to view the Nigerian national charac-
ter 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 Emer-
gency, Gandhi assumed absolute executive powers and suspended funda-
mental 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 The-
atre Academy production, with Jabbar Patel as director and Bhaskar Chan-
davarkar 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 malforma-
tions 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 mod-
els, appears to exemplify the counterdiscursive impulse and reinforce the
criticism Soyinka has faced since the beginning of his career: that of priv-
ileging “Euromodernism” and “universality” over Africanism and authen-
ticity. 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). Soyinka’s response is to assert that his own “creative in-
spiration . . . inbuences my critical response to the creation of other
cultures and validates selective eclecticism as the right of every produc-
tive 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 beg-
gar’s opera (that is, the opera of Gay’s 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 play’s title brings these strains together—the 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 inter-
texture 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 1967–70 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 Gay’s 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 children’s heads
with hobnailed boots. Polly’s “business” ventures tie into specicc scan-
dals 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.
Soyinka’s focus on the Nigerian nation as a manifest rather than imag-
ined 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 en-
hances the sense of a national identity, because all the Nigerians in New
Ikoyi are political or politically signiccant representatives of their coun-
try: in the police (Tiger Brown), the army (Colonel Moses), the business
establishments (Mack, Polly, and the gang), and on the streets (Anikura’s
beggars, who are powerful enough to disrupt Bokassa’s coronation). The
indisputable genius of the nation, however, cnds expression mainly in re-
pugnant acts. In Opera Wonyosi Soyinka portrays two societies in the del-
icate early stages of decolonization and nation formation, only to show
that the national character is already irredeemably corrupt. As Mack and
Polly’s “Song of ‘The Ruling Passion’” states, “Corruption is the oil that
greases/ The national wheels and smoothes the creases/Of the body poli-
tic” (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 class-
based 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 power-
drunk 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 indiscrim-
inately. 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 antimaterial-
ist argument underscores Soyinka’s 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 transi-
tion from colonialism to postcoloniality has meant, in Mack’s words, a
move from the “bad old days” to “the worse new days” (21). The country’s
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 colonizer’s 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 imperi-
alist 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 Afri-
can Republic emerges in Colonel Moses’s 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 expatria-
tion. 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 foreigners—the
natives that is—a rather unsophisticated lot if I may say so” (5). The
expression of colonialist attitudes is only partly parodic, because Nigeri-
ans 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. Deshpande’s reinscription of Gay and Brecht, Teen paishacha tamasha
(1978), transforms its Western models more thoroughly than Soyinka’s
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. 1968–78). Ajitesh Banerji’s
Bengali Teen poyshar pala had been performed in Calcutta in 1969, and
Fritz Bennewitz had directed Surekha Sikri’s Urdu version, Teen take ka
swang, in the swang folk style at the National School of Drama in 1970.
Audiences embraced Banerji’s 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, “Inter-
viewed”). As an established satirist who had watched Brecht’s plays in
performance at the Berliner Ensemble and produced a very successful
musical Marathi version of Shaw’s 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 ideo-
logical leanings. In Deshpande’s view, Brecht’s 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 presen-
tational 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 poten-
tial 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 play’s
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
Deshpande’s literary and popular models. According to Nadkarni, “an-
tipathy towards Brecht had been simmering in Marathi theatre circles”
ever since Vijaya Mehta’s two productions of Brecht’s plays in 1972–74.
The Pune production of Teen paishacha tamasha in June 1978 opened to
a “phenomenally hostile press” that questioned both Deshpande’s and
Jabbar Patel’s cdelity to Brecht (Nadkarni, “Brecht”). The tamasha ele-
ments 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 san-
geet, the well-established style of commercial Marathi stage music; Polly
and Lucy moved between sentimental geet (song) and children’s nonsense
verse; the prostitutes used the courtly Urdu ghazal and semiclassical tra-
ditions; 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 Web-
ber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar). The play fared better in Bombay,
a city more accustomed to Brecht in Marathi, while in Delhi (the nation’s
capital and a Hindi-speaking region), audiences were far more enthusi-
astic 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 oćial approval.
In the theatre, the varied exuberance of Teen paishacha tamasha can
(and perhaps did) outpace its didacticism, without neutralizing the polit-
ical message altogether. Strains of Brecht’s ironic poison, however, appear
in the words behind the music and in the dense satiric commentary
Deshpande develops simultaneously around the issues of politics, reli-
gion, gender, spectatorship, and theatrical form, while remaining within
the boundaries of the Brechtian text. Like Soyinka, Deshpande is con-
cerned 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, ges-
ture, and physical movement. In this multilayered representation, four
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satiric targets stand out in particular—the manipulative nature of the

theatre of illusion; the criminalization of politics; the simultaneous fail-
ure 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 pro-
fessional 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 Deshpande’s 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
Deshpande’s 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 intol-
erable 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 compas-
sion 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 audience’s 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 cul-
tural artefacts up to investigation and challenge” (9). In Teen paishacha
tamasha this investigative function and the consequent critique of ideol-
ogy belong almost exclusively to the sutradhar, who practices what Brecht
calls “literalization” by presenting, commenting on, and interpreting the
play’s 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 paro-
dic bureaucratization of criminal activity is the strongest sign of the dis-
integration of civic order, and the argument has optimum resonance in a
nation with a large, corrupt, and notoriously complacent neocolonial
bureaucracy. Even the play’s 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 businesses—indeed, 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 with-
out a permit, Panchpatre lays down the rules in unambiguous oćialese:
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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street corner in one of these fourteen districts, he has to pay the appropri-
ate fee and obtain a permit authorized by Janardan Jagannath Panchpatre
and Company. If we don’t bring this kind of business discipline into our
society, any unqualiced hoodlum will think he can start up a begging busi-
ness. So, you have to crst pay three rupees for your Temporary Permit.
Then we’ll give you a Learner’s Licence for Begging, which you’ll have to
renew every week. (20–21)
Panchpatre and Ankush also represent two opposed strategies for ille-
gitimate 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 don’t like to look at their ille-
gitimate 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 Ankush’s arrest.
The experience of the Emergency—which is the immediate political
context of Teen paishacha tamasha—shifts attention away from the anti-
thetical social roles of Ankush and Panchpatre onto the political maneu-
vering of Tiger Bhandare, Malan, and the sutradhar’s 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 preda-
tory connotations of police chief Tiger Bhandare’s 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 Bhandare’s betrayal of his old friend, Ankush. Malan’s trans-
formation belongs more to the performative than the textual dimension.
In the 1978 productions, when the men in Ankush’s gang objected that
running a business like theirs was not a woman’s work, Malan (played
by Vandana Pandit) strong-armed them into admitting that only a woman
could carry on such a business (49–50). 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 sutradhar’s urgent metatheatri-
cal appeals to the audience to refrain from responding to the spectacle
of the tamasha (Deshpande’s theatrical work as well as the play-within-
the-play). For Brecht the audience is, in Walter Benjamin’s 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 one’s 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 les-
son before they leave the theatre. This is in fact the sutradhar’s 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 Gandhi’s parable of the three monkeys who respectively see no
evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Deshpande turns the Gandhian asso-
ciation on its head, because his monkeylike spectators must be blind,
dumb, and mute in the presence of evil so that they may protect them-
selves. This is exactly contrary to the Gandhian practice of militant non-
violence, which actively opposes evil at the risk of self-destruction. By
imposing passivity and silence on the audience, Deshpande’s 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 Deshpande’s text enormously in compari-
son with Soyinka’s is that in India, social and political practices are neither
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“modern” nor “secular”: they continue to derive their legitimacy from

inherited religious and social structures that powerfully inbuence daily
life. Deshpande’s 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 dally-
ing with the gopis of Mathura. But in Teen paishacha tamasha religion is
all pervasive and performs the same function that the principle of self-
interest does in the plays of Gay, Brecht, and Soyinka—it sanctices all
forms of injustice, exploitation, hedonism, dishonesty, and failure. Two
examples will suće 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 con-
sort 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. Malan’s
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 mun-
dane and sacred identities. In prison he invokes Hindu symbols of mar-
riage, such as the mangalasutra (an auspicious necklace that designates
a woman’s married state) and kumkum (the red powder worn on the fore-
head by married women), as well as the powerful rhetoric of pativrata
dharma (the wife’s 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
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 385
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 Macheath’s execution would draw the crowds away from the Queen’s
coronation. In Deshpande, Ankush escapes because the sutradhar does
not want to thrust the grotesque spectacle of an execution on his peace-
loving audience; he wants to pander to his countrymen’s unqualiced belief
in the miraculous power of god’s 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 audience’s disengagement from the action of the play.
Throughout the play, the sutradhar addresses the audience as sabhya stree-
purush (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.
Deshpande’s 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 en-
dure low and painful displays: they are literally as well as a,ectively alien-
ated from the action. In the political perspective, the viewers should not
respond to the tamasha for the sake of their own safety; in the religiocul-
tural 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 Maharashtra—the Kolhati, Mahar, Mang, and Bhatu—and reli-
gious 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 Beggar’s 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 dialec-
tic, the Peachum-Macheath-Polly-Tiger Brown quartet as represented by
Soyinka and Deshpande is paradigmatic of the postcolonial condition.
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 386
The representation of social exploitation, institutionalized crime, bureau-

cratic corruption, and coarsened femininity in this aggregation of char-
acters forms a culturally transportable theatrical complex that expresses
the social and political failures of the postcolonial third world remarkably
well. The permanent contribution of Gay’s 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. Deshpande’s 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 con-
tains powerful elements of repetition, echo, and recursiveness. The nar-
rative sources of much contemporary drama—myth, history, legend, and
folklore—represent preexisting “texts” that the playwrights reinscribe
with the meanings they can sustain in the present. Dharamvir Bharati’s
Andha yug and Ratan Thiyam’s Chakravyuha rewrite the Mahabharata;
Mohan Rakesh’s Ashadh ka ek din, Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq, and Vijay Ten-
dulkar’s Ghashiram kotwal recast narratives inherited from specicc periods
of classical, premodern, and early colonial Indian history; Girish Karnad’s
Hayavadana and Chandrashekhar Kambar’s Jokumaraswami rework famil-
iar folktales. Similarly, the revival of classical, traditional, and folk perfor-
mance genres accommodates an older aesthetic to postmodern contexts.
In one perspective, only the action of contemporary social-realist plays
is entirely an authorial “invention”—an imaginative but verisimilar rep-
resentation of urban life as it can exist only in the historical present. The
“specicc intertextualities” that connect Deshpande with Gay and Brecht
or Habib Tanvir’s Mitti ki gadi with Shudraka’s classic Mrichchhakatika are
thus only the most recognizable forms of the interdependences that per-
vade contemporary theatre.
The “internationalism” of Deshpande’s play is similarly the overt sign
of a quality that has characterized modern Indian theatre as a whole—the
contexts of this theatre have been, and continue to be, at once regional,
national, and international. The transformative inbuence of Western liter-
ary 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
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 387
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 post-
independence 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, produc-
tion, and reception as it is of such thematic loci as history, myth, home,
family, society, politics, and tradition. For example, Bharati’s reworking of
epic myth in Andha yug and Sircar’s 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, Elkunchwar’s Wada chirebandi and Mis-
try’s Doongaji House stand on a continuum with the geopathic discourse
that Una Chaudhuri ascribes to modern Western drama. They also dis-
play the same ambivalence toward home that has shaped modernist nar-
ratives 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, Common-
wealth 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 sys-
tems concurrently” (Dharwadker, “Print Culture,” 123). New theoretical
perspectives and critical procedures of this sort are necessary if non-
Western, non-Anglophone theatre is to participate fully in the processes
of canon formation, reception, and interpretation.
10chap10.qxd 7/6/2005 8:18 AM Page 388
11Appendixes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 389
Appendixes
appendix 1
The Program of the Nehru Shatabdi Natya Samaroh
(Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival), New Delhi, 3–17 September 1989
Composition/
Performance Author and Play Production Director, Group,
Date (Composition Date) Language and Location
3 September Utpal Dutt, Bengali/Bengali Utpal Dutt, People’s

Kallol (1965) Little Theatre, Calcutta
4 September Chandrashekhar Kannada/Kannada Chandrashekhar
Kambar, Kambar, Ninasam,
Jokumaraswami (1972) Heggodu
5 September Mohit Chattopadhyay, Bengali/Hindi Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan,
Guinea Pig (1971) Delhi
6 September Bijon Bhattacharya, Bengali/Bengali Kumar Roy, Bohurupee,
Nabanna (1944) Calcutta
7 September Bhasa, Urubhangam Sanskrit/Sanskrit K. N. Panikkar,
(ca. 2nd–4th cent.) Sopanam, Trivandrum
8 September Mohan Rakesh, Hindi/Hindi Shyamanand Jalan,
Adhe adhure (1969) Padatik, Calcutta
9 September Girish Karnad, Kannada/Kannada B. V. Karanth,
Hayavadana (1971) Mitravrinda, Mysore
10 September Dharamvir Bharati, Hindi/Hindi Satyadev Dubey,
Andha yug (1954) Samvardhan/Arpana,
Bombay
11 September Govind Deshpande, Marathi/Marathi Shreeram Lagoo,
Uddhwasta Roopwedh, Bombay
dharmashala (1974)
12 September Adya Rangacharya, Kannada/Hindi B. M. Shah, Kala
Suno Janmejaya (1960) Mandir, Gwalior
13 September Ratan Thiyam, Manipuri/Manipuri Ratan Thiyam, Chorus
Chakravyuha (1984) Repertory Theatre,
Imphal
14 September Vijay Tendulkar, Marathi/Marathi Jabbar Patel, Theatre
Ghashiram kotwal (1973) Academy, Pune
15 September Madhu Rye, Kumarni Gujarati/Gujarati Pravin Joshi, Pravin
agashi (1974) Joshi Theatre, Bombay
16 September Mahesh Elkunchwar, Marathi/Marathi Vijaya Mehta, Kala
Wada chirebandi (1985) Vaibhav, Bombay
17 September Habib Tanvir, Agra Urdu/Urdu Habib Tanvir, Naya
bazaar (1954) Theatre, Delhi
391
appendix 2
Major Indian Playwrights and Plays, 1950–2004
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), 1925–72
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 Shudraka’s Mrichhakatika, Sanskrit,
ca. 5th century)
Mudrarakshasa (Signet Ring of Rakshasa, 1964; adapt. of Vishakhadatta’s
Mudrarakshasa, Sanskrit, ca. 6th–9th 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 Varma’s 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 (There’s No End, 1969)
Sagina Mahato (1970)
Abu Hosain (1971)
Ballabhpurer rupkatha (The Fairy Tale of Ballabhpur, 1972)
Spartacus (1972)
392
Appendix 2 393
Michhil (Procession, 1974)

Rupkathar kelenkari (Scandal in Fairyland, 1974)
Bhoma (1976)
Hattamalar oparey (Beyond the Land of Hattamala, 1977)
Bashi khabar (Stale News, 1979)
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 Prechand’s “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)
394 Appendixes
g. p. deshpande (delhi, pune), 1938–

Uddhwasta dharmashala (The Ruined Sanctuary, 1974)
Ek vajoon gela ahe (It’s Past One O’Clock, 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)
Vasanakand (Episode of Lust, 1973)
Party (1976)
Wada 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)
Wasansi 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 2 395
Tukrana kanasu (Tukra’s Dream, 1992)

Mahamayi (Supreme Mother, 1999)
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)
Talé-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 Sircar’s Tringsha shatabdi, 1994)
Uttar priyadarshi (The Final Beatitude, 1999)
Ritasamhara (A Gathering of Seasons, 2003)
English
mahesh dattani (bangalore), 1958–
Where There’s 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, 1950–2004
Languages of productions and groups or institutions with which directors have been
a´liated are listed; some dates are approximate.
ebrahim alkazi (english, hindi, hindustani)

Theatre Group, Bombay (1950–54)
Theatre Unit, Bombay (1954–62)
National School of Drama, New Delhi (director, 1962–77)
National School of Drama Repertory Company, New Delhi (director, 1964–77)
neelam man singh chowdhry (punjabi, hindi)

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

Playpen, Bangalore (1984–)
arvind deshpande (marathi)

Rangayan, Bombay (1955–64)
Awishkar, Bombay (1971–87)
satyadev dubey (hindi, urdu, marathi, gujarati, english)

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

Shakespeareana (with Geo,rey Kendall) (1947–49)
IPTA, Calcutta (1950–51)
Little Theatre Group, Calcutta (1959–70)
People’s Little Theatre, Calcutta (1971–93)
usha ganguli (hindi)

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

Anamika, Calcutta (1955–72)
Padatik, Calcutta (1972–)
b. v. karanth (kannada, hindi, sanskrit, and other languages)

Various groups, Bangalore, Varanasi, and Delhi (ca. 1960–77)
Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal, Bhopal (director, 1982–86)
Rangayan, Mysore (director, 1989–95)
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 (1943–44)
Bohurupee, Calcutta (1949–79)
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 (1945–54)
Hindustani Theatre, Delhi (1958–59)
Naya Theatre, Delhi (1959–)
Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal, Bhopal (director, 1996–98)
ratan thiyam (manipuri)

Chorus Repertory Theatre, Imphal (1976–)
appendix 4
Key Productions of Some Major Post-Independence Plays
Authors and their plays are listed in alphabetical order; productions are listed
chronologically.
Production Location
Language Director and Group and Date
Dharamvir Bharati
andha yug (hindi)
Hindi Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Bombay, 1962
Hindi Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Calcutta, 1964
Hindi Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD/NSD Repertory Delhi, 1964, 1967, 1974
Bengali Ajitesh Banerji, Abhinetri Sangh Calcutta, 1970
Hindi Mohan Maharshi, Triveni Club Mauritius, 1973
Hindi Ravi Baswani, Sandhya/Nepathya Delhi, 1974
Marathi Kamlakar Sontakke, Theatre Department, Aurangabad, 1974
Aurangabad University
Manipuri Ratan Thiyam, NSD Imphal, 1974, 1984
Hindi M. K. Raina, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1977, 1986
Hindi Bansi Kaul, Madhya Pradesh Rangmandal, Bhopal,
1983
Hindi Satyadev Dubey, Arpana Delhi, 1989
Hindi Ramgopal Bajaj, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1992
Hindi Mohan Maharshi, Theatre Lab Chandigarh, 1992
Hindi Arvind Gaur, Asmita Delhi, 1994
Manipuri Ratan Thiyam, Chorus Repertory Theatre Imphal, 1994, 1996
Marathi Kamlakar Sontakke, Sangeet Kala Kendra Bombay, 1997
Bijon Bhattacharya
nabanna (bengali)
Bengali Shombhu Mitra, IPTA Calcutta and other
venues, 1943–44
Bengali Kumar Roy, Bohurupee Delhi, 1989
G. P. Deshpande
uddhwasta dharmashala (marathi)
Marathi Shreeram Lagoo, Roopwedh Bombay, 1974
Hindi Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan Delhi, 1977, 1978, 1984
Hindi Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Calcutta, 1982
399
400 Appendixes
Mahesh Elkunchwar
wada chirebandi (marathi)
Marathi Vijaya Mehta, Kalavaibhav Bombay, 1985
Hindi Satyadev Dubey, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1985
Hindi Vijaya Mehta, Kalavaibhav Bombay, 1985
Bengali Sohag Sen, Ensemble Calcutta, 1989
Marathi Vijaya Mehta, Kalavaibhav Delhi, 1989
Girish Karnad
hayavadana (kannada)
Hindi B. V. Karanth, Dishantar Delhi, 1972
Hindi Rajinder Nath, Anamika Calcutta, 1972
Kannada B. V. Karanth, Benaka Bangalore, 1973
Marathi Vijaya Mehta, Rangayan Bombay, 1973
Hindi B. V. Karanth, Darpan Lucknow, 1974
Hindi B. V. Karanth, BB Rangmandal Bhopal, 1982
German Vijaya Mehta, Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar, 1984
Kannada B. V. Karanth, Mitravrinda Delhi, 1989
talé-danda (kannada)
Hindi Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1992
Kannada C. R. Jambe, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1992
tughlaq (kannada)
Kannada B. V. Karanth, Kannada Bharati Bangalore, 1966
Urdu Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Bombay [1966]
Urdu Om Shivpuri, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1966
English Alyque Padamsee, Theatre Group Bombay, 1970
Marathi Arvind Deshpande, Awishkar Bombay, 1971
Urdu Om Shivpuri, Dishantar Delhi, 1972
Urdu Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Delhi, 1972
Urdu Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1974
Urdu Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory London, 1982
Marathi Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Bombay, 1989
yayati (kannada)
Marathi Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Bombay, 1970–71
Bengali Kumar Roy, Bohurupee Bombay, 1989
C. T. Khanolkar
ek shoonya bajirao (marathi)
Marathi Vijaya Mehta, Rangayan Bombay, 1966
Hindi Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan Delhi, 1968
Appendix 4 401
Mohan Rakesh
adhe adhure (hindi)
Hindi Om Shivpuri, Dishantar Delhi, 1969
Hindi Shyamanand Jalan, Anamika Calcutta, 1970
Konkani Amol Palekar Bombay, 1971
Hindi Rajinder Nath, Sangeet Kala Mandir Calcutta, 1974
Hindi Amal Allana, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1976
Hindi Mohan Maharshi, Theatre Department, Punjab Chandigarh, 1981
University
Hindi Alakhanandan, BB Rangmandal Bhopal, 1983
Hindi Satyadev Dubey, Awishkar Bombay, 1991
ashadh ka ek din (hindi)

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

Hindi Om Shivpuri, NSD Delhi, 1967
Hindi Rajinder Nath, Dishantar Delhi, 1973
Hindi Faisal Alkazi, Ruchika Delhi, 1981
Hindi Kirti Jain, NSD, Delhi [unavailable]
Badal Sircar
baki itihas (bengali)
Bengali Shombhu Mitra, Bohurupee Calcutta, 1967
Hindi Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Delhi, 1968
Marathi Arvind Deshpande, Rangayan Bombay [1969]
Hindi S. Ebotombi, NSD Delhi, 1981
402 Appendixes
evam indrajit (bengali)

Kannada B. V. Karanth, Shaka Shylusharu Bangalore, 1972
Hindi B. V. Karanth, NSD Delhi, 1979
pagla ghoda (bengali)

Hindi Satyadev Dubey, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1988
Vijay Tendulkar
ghashiram kotwal (marathi)
Marathi Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy Pune, 1973
Hindi B. V. Karanth, BB Rangmandal Bhopal, 1981
Hindi Rajinder Nath, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1993, 2000
sakharam binder (marathi)

Hindi Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Calcutta, 1973, 1991
shantata! court chalu ahe (marathi)

Marathi Arvind Deshpande, Rangayan Bombay, 1967
Hindi B. V. Karanth, Dishantar Delhi, 1969
Kannada B. V. Karanth, Kalakunja Bangalore, 1969–70
Marathi Arvind Deshpande, Awishkar Bombay, 1971
Hindi Sudhir Kulkarni, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1978
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, 1970–71).
———, 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 Vallabhpurachi 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).
Molière, 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, L’alouette, 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 Doll’s 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).
———, Talé-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 Büchner, Danton’s 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 García Lorca, House of Bernarda Alba, as Din ke andhere (1992).
Molière, 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).
Eugène 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 Wada 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).
———, Vadhdivas, 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 García 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 6 411
———, 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).
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, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m 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 O’Neill, Long Day’s 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, 1969–70); 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 6 413
———, 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).
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).
Molière, The Bourgeois Gentleman, in Kannada as Samanyanu sahebnadaddu (Karnataka
Teacher’s 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 Teacher’s 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 Doll’s 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).
———, Talé-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 Dürrenmatt, The Visit, as Kanakagamana, adapt. Raghu Sopheena, dir.
Jayatirtha Joshi (1994).
Euripides, Medea, trans. K. Marulasiddapa, dir. B. V. Karanth (1996).
Dario Fo, Archangels Don’t 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).
Molière, 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 Night’s 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 Doll’s 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 Lovell’s “Supermarket Soliloquy,”
2003).
Raja Bhartrihari (based on Dhani Ram Chatrak’s collection of the poetry of
Bhartrihari [1993]).

Jean Giraudoux, The Madwoman of Chaillot, as Shahar mere di pagal aurat, adapt. Surjit
Patar (1995; Festival D’Avignon, 1995; London International Festival of Theatre,
1995).
Doris Lessing, An Unposted Love Letter, trans. Surjit Patar (2002).
Appendix 6 417
Federico García 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).
Molière, 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 (1918–70)
P. Lal, The Mahabharata (1968–80)
J. A. B. van Buitenen, ed., The Mahabharata (1973)
Critical interpretation
colonial
M. Monier-Williams, Indian Epic Poetry (1863)
postcolonial
P. Lal, Vyasa’s Mahabharata: Creative Insights (1992)
Philosophical commentary
colonial
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Secret of the Gita (1915)
Aurobindo Ghose, Vyasa and Valmiki (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, Panchali’s 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 (1978–1987)
S. L. Bhairappa, Parva (1979)
Shyam Benegal, Kalyug (clm, 1980)
Ratan Thiyam, Mahabharata trilogy (1981–1991)
Jean-Claude Carrière 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
Language and Indian Title
Author and Play (Translator/Adaptor)
chinghiz aitmatov
and kaltai mohammejanov
Fujiyama Hindi, Fujiyama
edward albee
The Death of Bessie Smith English
The Zoo Story English
Marathi
jean anouilh
Antigone Hindustani
Kannada (G. N. Ranganath)
L’alouette Bengali, Aguner pakhi
Traveller without Luggage Hindustani, Ek musacr be-asbab (Ranjit Kapoor)
Episode in an Author’s Life Hindustani, Surajmukhi aur Hamlet
aristophanes
Lysistrata Hindustani
beaumarchais
The Barber of Seville Hindustani, Kya karega kazi ( J. N. Kaushal)
samuel beckett
Waiting 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 Bombay, 1962

Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy Pune, 1974
Ebrahim Alkazi, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1967

N. Premchand Rao, Ninasam Tirugata Hegodu, 1998
Kumar Roy, Bohurupee Calcutta, 1984
Ranjit Kapoor, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1991
Ranjit Kapoor, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1991
Rajinder Nath, Abhiyan Delhi, 1977
Barry John, SRC Repertory [1987]
Satyadev Dubey, Theatre Unit Bombay, 1978

Barry John et al., NSD Repertory Delhi, 1979
Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1990
Ebrahim Alkazi and Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Delhi, 1972

Vijaya Mehta and F. Bennewitz, Mumbai Marathi Bombay, 1974;
Sahitya Sangh Deutsches National-
theater, Weimar, 1984
Rudraprasad Sengupta, Nandikar Calcutta, 1978
422 Appendixes

Bengali, Gondi (Badal Sircar)
Bundelkhandi, Insaf ka ghera

The Exception and the Rule Hindi
Galileo Hindi
Bengali
The Good Woman of Setzuan 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)
Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti Hindi, Chopra kamal naukar jamal (Anil Chaudhury)
Kannada, Puntila ( Jaswant Jadhav)
Mother Courage Hindi
Hindi, Himmat mai
Hindi, Himmat mai (Neelabh)
The Resistible Rise ofArturo Ui Hindi, Tamancha Khan ki ghazab dastan (Niaz Haider
and Shama Zaidi)
Threepenny Opera 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
Danton’s Death Hindi ( J. N. Kaushal)
anton chekhov
The Cherry Orchard Hindi, Cherry ka bagicha (Rajendra Yadav)
Uncle Vanya Urdu (Anwar Azeem)
Three Sisters Kannada, Moovaru Akkatangiyaru (Vaidehi)
ariel dorfman
Death and the Maiden English
friedrich dürrenmatt
The Visit Kannada, Kanakagamana (Raghu Sopheena)
Appendix 8 423

Badal Sircar Satabdi, Calcutta, and
other venues, 1978
B. V. Karanth, BB Rangmandal Bhopal, 1983
Rudraprasad Sengupta, NSD Delhi, 1982
Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Delhi, 1983
Fritz Bennewitz, BB Rangmandal Bhopal
Fritz Bennewitz, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu
Fritz Bennewitz and Kumar Roy, Bohurupee Calcutta, 1980
Habib Tanvir, Naya Theatre Delhi, 1962
Vijaya Mehta, Rangayan Bombay, 1972
Shyamanand Jalan, Padatik Calcutta, 1977

Amal Allana, NSD Delhi, 1984
B. V. Karanth, Surabhi Hyderabad, 1998
Fritz Bennewitz, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1989
Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1979
C. R. Jambe, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1990
Richard Schechner 1981
Amal Allana, Theatre and TV Associates Delhi, 1993
Usha Ganguli, Rangakarmee Calcutta, 1998
Bansi Kaul, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1995
Ajitesh Banerji, Nandikar Calcutta, 1969

Fritz Bennewitz and Amal Allana, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1970
Fritz Bennewitz and Amal Allana, BB Rangmandal Bhopal
Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy Pune, 1978
Akshara K.V., Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1986
Richard Schechner, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1983

Manohar Singh and K. K. Raina, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1979
C. R. Jambe, Ninasam Tirugata Heoggodu, 2000
Jayatirtha Joshi, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1994

424 Appendixes

euripides
Medea Marathi
Kannada
The Trojan Women Hindustani ( J. N. Kaushal)
dario fo
Accidental Death of an Anarchist Marathi, Eka rajkiya kaidyacha apghati mrityu
(Maya Pandit)
Archangels Don’t Play Pinball Hindi, Bade na khelen chhote khel
Kannada, Jujubidevara jugariyata (K. T. Gatti)
Comedy of Terrors 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 Hindi, Dushman (Safdar Hashmi)
Ibaragi
The Mother Hindi, Ma
henrik ibsen
A Doll’s House Bengali, Putul khela
Hindi, Gudia ghar
Enemy of the People Bengali, Dashachakra
Hindi, Janata ka Shatru
Ghosts Hindi, Pret

Kannada, Pret (Adya Rangacharya)
eugene ionesco
Chairs Marathi, Khurchya
The Lesson Hindi (R. K. Braroo)
Appendix 8 425
Jayadev Hattangady, Awishkar Bombay, 1983

B. V. Karanth, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1996
Vijay Kulkarni, Awishkar Bombay, 1993
Robin Das, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1996

Suresh Anagalli, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1999
Ranjit Kapoor, SRC Repertory Delhi, 1998

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, Chandigarh, 1995
The Company
Abhinet Lucknow, 1980

Akshara K. V., Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1983, 1989
B. M. Shah, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1985
Habib Tanvir, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1989

Shozo Sato, NSD Delhi, 1972
M. K. Raina, Rangakarmee Calcutta
Shombhu Mitra, Bohurupee Calcutta, 1958

Tripti Mitrai, Rangakarmee Calcutta, 1981
Shyamanand Jalan, Anamika Calcutta, 1959
B. V. Karanth Bangalore, 1971

Bhanu Bharati, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1973
426 Appendixes

robinson jeffers
Medea English
arthur kopit
O Dad, Poor Dad . . . English
franz xaver kroetz

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

The House of Bernarda Alba English
Hindi, Din ke andhere
Yerma Marathi, Changuna
Punjabi (Surjit Patar)
christopher marlowe
Dr. Faustus English
arthur miller
All My Sons English
Hindi, Sara sansar apna parivar
The Crucible English
Death of a Salesman Hindi, Ek sapne ki maut ( J. N. Kaushal)
A View from the Bridge English
English
molière
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)
Capitol Express Hindi (Chittranjan Tripathy)
Don Juan Hindi, Sarkar pyade lal ki amar kahani
(Swanand Kirkire)
The Miser Hindustani, Kanjoos (Hazrat Awara)
Hindi, Bichhu
School for Wives Hindustani, Biwiyon ka madarsa (Balraj Pandit)
istvan orkeny
Totek Hindi, Priyatam tote (Raghuvir Sahay)
Appendix 8 427
Rustom Bharucha, Awishkar Bombay, 1986

Rustom Bharucha and Samuel Lutgenhorst Calcutta, 1986
Rustom Bharucha Madras, 1987
Ebrahim Alkazi, Theatre Group Bombay [1954]

Jayadev Hattangady, Awishkar Bombay, 1974
Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, The Company Chandigarh, 1991

J. N. Kaushal, SRC Repertory Delhi, 1982
Girish Karnad, Madras Players Madras, 1967

B. V. Karanth, Karnataka Teachers’ Workshop Bangalore, 1968
Ekbal Ahmad, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1995
Rajesh Tiwari, SRC Repertory Delhi, 1998
Chittranjan Tripathy, SRC Repertory Delhi, 2001
Prasad Vanarase, SRC Repertory Delhi, 1999

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry Bhopal, 1980
Ebrahim Alkazi et al., NSD Repertory Delhi, 1976
Ekbal Ahmed, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1995
Manohar Singh, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1983

428 Appendixes

eugene o’neill
Long Day’s Journey into Night English
Marco Millions 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 Hindi
Six Characters in Search of an Kannada, Natakaran shodh dalli aaru patragur
Author (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 English
The Cave Dwellers Hindi, Panah gaah ( J. N. Kaushal)
jean-paul sartre
No Exit Hindi, Band darwaze
English
The Respectable Prostitute Hindi
anthony shaffer
Sleuth Marathi, Khelia (Rajaram Humne)
shakespeare
Hamlet English
Hindi
Kannada
Julius Caesar English
Urdu
Appendix 8 429

Rodney Marriot, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1988

B. V. Karanth, Shaka Shylusharu Bangalore, 1971
Rudraprasad Sengupta, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1981
Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, The Company Chandigarh, 1997
Egil Kipste, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1984

J. N. Kaushal, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1988

Ebrahim Alkazi, Theatre Group Bombay [1954]
Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, BB Rangmandal Bhopal, 1980
Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy Pune and other

venues, 1976

Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Delhi
K. V. Subbanna, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1984
430 Appendixes

King Lear Urdu (Majnoon Gorakhpuri)
Hindi, Pagal raja teen betiyan
Hindi
Kannada
Kannada, Lear Maharaja (H. S. Shivaprakash)
Hindi, Raja Lear
Macbeth Hind, Barnam vana
Kannada (Ramchandra Deva)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Hindi
Hindi, Bagro basant hai
Kannada, Habbada hanneradane ratri (N. S. L. Bhatta)
Hindi, Basant ritu ka sapna
Much Ado about Nothing Kannada, Dham dham suntaragali (Vaidehi)
Othello English
Urdu (Sajjad Zaheer)
Hindi (Raghuvir Sahay)
The Taming of the Shrew English
The Tempest Hindi (Amitabh Srivastava)
Timon of Athens Kannada, Athensina arthavanta (K. V. Subbanna)
george bernard shaw

Candida English
Don Juan in Hell Hindi
Pygmalion 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 English
World of Chekhov Hindustani, Chekhov ki duniya
sophocles
Antigone English
Oedipus Rex Bengali, Raja Oedipus
Marathi, Oedipus
Kannada, Oedipus (P. Lankesh)
august strindberg
The Father Hindi (Mohan Maharshi)
Miss Julie English
Appendix 8 431

B. V. Karanth, Kala Parishad Bhopal, 1977
Fritz Bennewitz, BB Rangmandal Bhopal, 1986
B. V. Karanth, Kannada Teachers’ Workshop Bangalore, 1988
S. Raghunandan, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1988
B. V. Karanth, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1979
Akshara K. V., Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1987
Fritz Bennewitz, NSD Delhi
Bansi Kaul, NSD Delhi
Fritz Bennewitz, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1991
K. G. Krishnamurthy, Ninasam Tirugata Heggodu, 1989
Fritz Bennewitz (with Ebrahim Alkazi), NSD Repertory Delhi, 1983
Fritz Bennewitz, SRC Repertory Delhi, 1990
C. R. Jambe Heggodu, 1993

Bhanu Bharati, NSD Repertory Delhi, 1988
B. V. Karanth Bangalore, 1998

Ranjit Kapoor, SRC Repertory Delhi, 1992

B. V. Karanth, Pratima Natak Mandali Bangalore, 1972

432 Appendixes

peter weiss
Marat/Sade English
arnold wesker
Roots Hindi, Parichay
oscar wilde
An Ideal Husband English
tennessee williams
The Glass Menagerie Hindi, Shishon ke khilone
A Streetcar Named Desire Marathi, Gaurai (Vyankatesh Madgulkar)
Appendix 8 433
Usha Ganguli, Rangakarmee Calcutta [1978]

Asha Dandavate, Awishkar Bombay, 1975
appendix 9
Prose Narratives on the Stage
Author and Work Language and Translated Title
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Kannada (Kappu jana kempu neralu)
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Rashomon Hindi
Pandit Anandkumar, Begam ka takia Hindi
Mannu Bhandari, Mahabhoj Hindi
Dharamvir Bharati, Kanupriya Hindi
———, Band gali ka akhri makan Hindi
Bhanu Bharati, Japanese folktale Hindi (Katha kahi ek jale ped ne)
Franz Kafka, The Trial Hindustani ( Joseph ka muquddama)
Kalhana, Rajtarangini Hindi (Nagar-udas)
Lu Xun, The True Story of Ah Q Hindi (Chandrama Singh urf Chamku)
Mahasweta Devi, Hajar churashir ma Hindi (Hazar chaurasi ki ma)
———, Rudali Hindi (Rudali )
———, Mukti Bengali
Saadat Hasan Manto, Five stories Hindi (Manto ba-qalam khud )
———, Khol do Hindi
Mohan Rakesh, selected stories Hindi (Kahaniyan)
Harishankar Parsai, Lanka vijay Hindi
ke baad
Premchand, Godan Hindi (Hori)
Chanakya Sen, Mukhya mantri Hindi
Krishna Sobti, Mitron marjani Hindi
Jaishankar Sudari, Autobiography Hindi (Sundari )
S. H. Vatsyayan, Apne apne ajnabi Hindi
Nirmal Varma, Teen ekant Hindi
———, Doosri duniya and Kavve aur Hindi

kala pani
———, Subah ki sair and Zindagi yahan Hindi
wahan
Kashmiri Lal Zakir, Karmanwali 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 Theatre Group, Location, and Date

K. V. Subbanna Ninasam, Heggodu, 1983
B. V. Karanth MP Rangmandal, Bhopal, 1982
Ranjit Kapoor NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1977
Amal Allana NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1982
Nikhilesh Sharma NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1994
D. R. Ankur NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1996
Bhanu Bharati SRC, Delhi, 1998
Mohan Maharshi NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1989
Gaurishankar Raina / Mushtaq Kak SRC Repertory, Delhi, 2001
Bhanu Bharati NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1985
various various, 1973–
Usha Ganguli Rangkarmee, Calcutta, 1993
Usha Ganguli Rangakarmee, Calcutta, 1999
Mushtaq Kak SRC Repertory, Delhi, 2002
Maya Rao Delhi
Rajinder Nath SRC Repertory, Delhi, 1993
G. Kumara Varma NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1968

Ranjit Kapoor NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1978
B. M. Shah NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1988
Anuradha Kapur NSD, Delhi, 1998
Satyadev Dubey Theatre Unit, Bombay, 1985
Rajinder Nath SRC Repertory, Delhi, 1987
Dinesh Khanna NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1989
M. K. Raina NSD Repertory, Delhi, 1990

appendix 10
Brecht Intertexts in Post-Independence Indian Theatre
(Translator/Adaptor) Director, Group, Location (Date)
The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Hindi, Khadia ka ghera (Razia Sajjad Carl Weber, NSD Repertory, Delhi (1968)
Zaheer)
Hindi, Insaf ka ghera Ebrahim Alkazi and Fritz Bennewitz, NSD,
Delhi (1972)
Marathi, Ajab nyaya vartulacha Vijaya Mehta and Fritz Bennewitz,
(C. T. Khanolkar) Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh,
Bombay (1974); Deutsches
Nationaltheatre, Weimar (1984)
Punjabi M. K. Raina, Punjab Repertory Theatre,
Chandigarh (1976)
Bengali, Kharir gondi Rudraprasad Sengupta, Nandikar,
Calcutta (1978)
Bengali, Gondi (Badal Sircar) Badal Sircar, Satabdi, Calcutta and other
venues (1978)
Bundelkhandi, Insaf ka ghera B. V. Karanth, BB Rangmandal,
Bhopal (1983)
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.)
Bengali Fritz Bennewitz and Kumar Roy,
Bohurupee, Calcutta (1980)
The Good Woman of Setzuan

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

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

Hindi, Tamancha Khan ki ghazab dastan Bansi Kaul, NSD Repertory, Delhi (1995)
(Niaz Haider and Shama Zaidi)
Threepenny Opera
Bengali, Tin poyshar pala Ajitesh Banerji, Nandikar, Calcutta (1969)
Urdu, Teen take ka swang (Surekha Sikri) Fritz Bennewitz and Amal Allana, NSD
Repertory, Delhi (1970); BB
Rangmandal (n.d.)
Marathi, Teen paishacha tamasha Jabbar Patel, Theatre Academy,
(P. L. Deshpande) Pune (1978)
Kannada, Moorukasina sangeetana taka Akshara K. V., Ninasam Tirugata,
(K. V. Subbanna) Heggodu (1986)
12Notes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 439
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 litera-
ture; . . . literary representations can conceptually organize space, and the dis-
semination 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). Pollock’s 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, 233–560, for descriptions of the plays
censored or suppressed by the British colonial government, and Solomon for a
detailed account of the suppression of Khadilkar’s 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
12Notes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 440
440 Notes
1964. B. V. Karanth directed plays by Jaishankar Prasad and Bharatendu Harish-

chandra 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), Vasanakand (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, simulta-
neously 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 Wada chirebandi was translated as Old Stone Mansion by
Kamal Sanyal. In 2004, Seagull also published Gokhale’s translation of Yuganta as
The Wada Trilogy.
4. The Rashtriya Hindi Natya Samaroha (National Hindi Drama Festival),
held in Bhopal from 1–7 October 1980, provides an insight into the strategic era-
sure of the di,erence between “Hindi drama” and “drama in Hindi translation.”
The plays at the festival included the NSD Repertory Company’s Mukhya mantri,
translated from Bengali; Abhiyan’s Jat hi poochho sadhu ki, translated from Tendul-
kar’s Marathi Pahije jatiche; Abhinet’s Ala afsar, translated from Gogol’s Russian
The Inspector General; Majma’s Uddhwasta dharmashala, translated from G. P.
Deshpande’s Marathi play of the same title; Padatik’s Hazaar chaurasi ki ma,
translated from Mahasweta Devi’s Bengali Hajar churashir ma; and Darpan’s
Katha nandan ki, translated from Indira Parthasarathy’s 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 “oćial” patronage because Hindi
theatre in Bengal is not readily supported by either the central or the state
government; hence Jalan’s support comes from the wealthy and established
12Notes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 441
Notes 441
immigrant Hindi-speaking business community in Calcutta. His boldness, how-

ever, is evident in that he was the very crst director to stage Rakesh’s Hindi clas-
sic, 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 English—Asif Cur-
rimbhoy, 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 perva-
sive 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 perform-
ance. Because few contemporary Indian plays are performed in English, English-
language 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 audi-
ence are thus another unusual feature of spectatorship in the country, placing
theatre in the two national-level languages—Hindi and English—in a special cat-
egory, 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 Kash-
miri’s version of Hamlet for the Parsi theatre, for instance, became Sohrab Modi’s
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 unsuc-
cessful clm.
The metamorphoses of Agha Hasan Amanat’s 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
12Notes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 442
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 Madan’s 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. Lévi 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” (4–5). The prestige of Sanskrit
drama thus depends on the cumulative perception that it was intimately con-
nected 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 indepen-
dence. This long historical view places the “problem” of colonialism in an alto-
gether 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 trans-
lations 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 Gowda’s preface to Indian
Drama: A Collection of Papers (1974) notes that the classical, folk, and Western tra-
ditions are now simultaneously available to the contemporary Indian playwright:
“The really creative writer can use all these three inbuences and make a distinc-
tively 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
12Notes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 443
Notes 443
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 Per-
formances 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 prop-
aganda 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 inten-
sively on the premodern (or “medieval”) and modern literary traditions in about
half a dozen Indian languages, resulting in major works of translation, interpre-
tation, and commentary. A selective roster of scholars would include Gordon
Roadarmel, Charlotte Vaudeville, Ronald Stuart McGreggor, John Stratton Haw-
ley, 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 Rae-
side, 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 multidis-
ciplinary scholar whose work in classical Tamil, medieval Kannada, and the mod-
ern Dravidian languages carries the same prestige as that of the postwar Euro-
American 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 orientalism’s conception
of itself as “a body of scienticc discoveries about Indian reality” and the devel-
opment 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 liter-
ature” 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
12Notes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 444
444 Notes
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 philo-
sophical 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 func-
tioned both within and outside the political sphere. As Bipan Chandra points
out, “the concepts of Bharata Varsha and Hindustan were a reality of Indian his-
tory” (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) suc-
cessively 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 her-
itage, medieval traditions, such as bhakti and Sucsm, and the colonial/postcolo-
nial parameters of modernity are very broad markers of the continuity of Indian
civilization.
2. Vivekananda (1863–1902) represented India at the World Parliament of
Religions in Chicago in 1893 and became a celebrated spokesman for Vedantic
Hinduism in the West. Tilak (1856–1920) was the crst nationalist leader to pro-
claim complete independence from British rule as every Indian’s birthright.
Prasad (1890–1937) wrote his seven historical plays between 1921 and 1937, ex-
pressing 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 (15–35); Dayananda Saraswati (52–61); M. G. Ranade (102–12); Bankim Chan-
dra Chatterji (130–39); and Syed Ahmad Khan (180–94).
3. Bhasa’s 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 Bhasa’s “established fame” in the prologue to the play Malavikagni-
mitram, and he was acknowledged as a signiccant playwright in such later works
as Bana Bhatta’s Harshacharita (seventh century), Dandin’s Avantisundarikatha
12Notes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 445
Notes 445
(seventh century), and Jayadeva’s Prasanna Raghava (thirteenth century). Accord-

ing 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 iden-
ticcation 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 Sastri’s attributions have been questioned peri-
odically, 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,ec-
tively 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 loy-
alty, 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 Drona’s 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 impres-
sion that the victim was Drona’s son. Distracted by grief, Drona laid aside his
weapons and was beheaded by Dhrishtadyumna, Draupadi’s brother.
5. About half the population in the state consists of Manipuri-speaking Hin-
dus 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 economi-
cally 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 Kalidasa’s aesthetics and dram-
aturgy 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 classi-
cal and traditional theatrical forms, and the Kalidasa Samman is second only to
the Jnanapith Award in the hierarchy of national literary awards.
12Notes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 446
446 Notes
2. Leslie de Noronha described the Theatre Group production as a three-

hour “historical epic spectacular” that “did full justice to the splendours of the
[pre] Mughal Age, and Mr. Padamsee’s reputation of showmanship” (“Tughlaq”).
In Sajnani’s 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 (25–45); Weiner on the problems of maintain-
ing democratic institutions in India (21–37, 319–330); Lall on the “stormy” politics
of the post-Nehru period (190–249); Je,rey and Akbar on the secessionist move-
ments 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 national-
ist 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. Desh-
pande, 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 com-
parable group of practitioners.
2. Again in alphabetical order, the contributors to this special issue were
Lokendra Arambam, Suresh Awasthi, G. P. Deshpande, Shanta Gandhi, Nemi-
chandra 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 metropoli-
tan audiences include Forum Three (Bangalore, September 2002), Theatricians
(Calcutta, February 2003), and the Industrial Theatre Company (Bombay, Janu-
ary 2004). The Shakespeare Society at St. Stephen’s 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 dias-
pora, the Singapore-based classical dancer Siri Rama has adapted Hayavadana
into a “dance drama”; Sudipto Chatterjee directed it at Tufts University; Alter
12Notes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 447
Notes 447
Ego, a New York group founded by Anurag Agrawal, performed it as their inau-
gural 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 Tanvir’s “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 1962–81 show performances in Hindi
of the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Molière, Ibsen,
Shaw, Strindberg, Gogol, Chekhov, Gorki, Tolstoy, Synge, Pirandello, Brecht,
Sartre, Camus, Büchner, Gerhart Hauptmann, David Mannowitz, Anouilh,
Beckett, Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Stoppard, Fernando Arrabal, Lorca, Thornton
Wilder, O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Edward Albee, and Osborne.
2. The massive move in Indian theatre toward accommodation and Dryde-
nesque 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 Molière 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
Johnson’s poems “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes”; Homer’s Odyssey
becomes Joyce’s Ulysses; Sophocles’ Antigone becomes Jean Anouilh’s Antigone;
and, to change the medium, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear become Akira
Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran. As one of the authors most extensively
accommodated in contemporary Indian theatre, Brecht is particularly interest-
ing because he is himself a notable imitator of earlier drama, producing versions
of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, Gay’s Beggar’s
Opera, and Shaw’s Saint Joan, among others.
3. The major Indian-language productions of Brecht are discussed in the
following section. Since the early 1950s, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, An Enemy of the
People, and Ghosts have had such leading directors as Shombhu Mitra, Shyamanand
Jalan, and Satyadev Dubey. Molière’s 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
Night’s 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.
12Notes.qxd 7/6/2005 8:19 AM Page 448
448 Notes
4. At NSD the focus on Brecht was most intense, and the international col-
laborations most numerous, during Ebrahim Alkazi’s 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 Brecht’s “theatre of commitment” at
NSD in 1970; and attended a Modern World Theatre seminar in the GDR in
1978. In 1993, Alkazi’s daughter, Amal Allan, an NSD alumna, copublished a
Tribute to Bertolt Brecht, which showcases Brecht’s 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
Mehta’s two productions of 1972–74 are the best examples of the cultural visibil-
ity 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 Weimar—one of
the few instances of such a high-procle international collaboration in the post-
independence 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 pop-
ulation, 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 art’s sake or Victorian puritanism, the imagist
or the symbolist movements. The dominance of English on modern Indian liter-
atures was so complete that the nature of Indo-English literary relationships
needs a much more detailed and comprehensive treatment” (Das, 54–55).
13Biblio.qxd 7/6/2005 8:20 AM Page 449
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index
(For various concordances of plays, playwrights, directors, theatre groups, and produc-
tions in the following modern Indian languages, see appendixes 1–10: Bengali, English,
Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Punjabi, and Urdu.)
Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad, 26, 31, 121 Repertory Company, 92, 93, 96–98,
Abdel-Malek, Anouar, 219 112, 199–201, 202, 236, 245, 248, 259,
Abhinavagupta, 226 260, 261, 263, 361; directing work for
Abhiyan theatre group. See Nath, Theatre Group and Theatre Unit, 87,
Rajinder 98, 101
Achebe, Chinua, 354; Things Fall Apart, Alkazi, Faisal, 233, 239, 241
99, 363 Allana, Amal, 278, 363, 366
Addison, Joseph, 220 Allana, Nissar, 368
Aeschylus, 358 allegory, 224, 225, 352–53
African literature, 146 Allende, Isabel, 117
Agrawal, Pratibha, 76, 77, 94 Amanat, Agha Hasan, 55, 441–42n2
Agrawal, Vipin Kumar, 202 Amar Singh Rathore, 314
Ahmad, Aijaz, 12 Ambedkar, B. R., 289, 298
Ahmad, Ekbal, 100 Amrapurkar, Sadashiv, 288, 290
Aitmatov, Chinghiz: Fujiyama, 362 Anamika theatre group. See Jalan,
Akshara K. V., 100, 369 Shyamanand
Alekar, Satish, 18, 50, 62, 68, 70, 72, 78, 83, Anand, Mulk Raj, 31, 38, 40, 41, 42
269, 273; Begum Barve, 77; Mahanirvan, Anand, Satish, 187, 199
77; Pidhijat, 269 Anandavardhana, 226
Alkazi, Ebrahim, 37, 43, 45, 51, 52, 79, 86, Anandkumar, Pandit, 363
87, 93, 94, 95, 96–98, 100, 101–2, 106, Ananthamurthy, U. R., 101, 247
108, 121, 187, 198, 223, 233, 237, 275, 324, Anderson, Benedict, 168
366; as director of NSD, 96–97; Ankur, D. R., 92, 364
directing work for NSD and NSD Anouilh, Jean, 95, 160, 358, 362
463
14Index.qxd 7/6/2005 8:20 AM Page 464
464 Index
anticolonialism, 4, 6, 21, 25, 134, 186, Barani, Zia-ud-din, 248, 249, 255; Tarikh-i
193–94; in modern Indian theatre, Firoz Shahi, 223, 246, 256, 257
29–30, 35, 56, 67, 136–39, 144, 179, 318 Barba, Eugenio, 7, 85, 137, 154, 160, 161,
Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Union, 227, 362
70 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 86
antinationalism, 355, 356, 374, 375–78, 383 Barthes, Roland, 359, 360
antirealism, 3, 15, 38, 48, 64–65, 102, Bartholomew, Rati, 76
137–38, 271–72, 275, 366; of folk/urban Basham, A. L., 147
folk theatre, 310, 312, 314, 317, 318, 327, Baswani, Ravi, 187, 198, 202
329–30, 348, 350 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de,
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 146 358
Arambam, Lokendra, 73, 211 Beck, Julian, 85
Aristophanes, 358 Beckett, Samuel, 70, 358
Aristotle, 103, 125, 149, 205, 367, 380, 383 Bedi, Kabir, 258, 259
Artaud, Antonin, 70, 137 Beiner, Ronald, 168
Ashcroft, Bill, 12, 352, 355 Bender, John, 372
Atwood, Margaret, 354 Benegal, Shyam, 180
audience: approaches to, 88, 98–101, Benegal, Som, 5
109–19, 312–13, 319–20, 440–41n1; of Bengal famine, 25, 33, 34, 192
colonial theatre, 3; fragmentation of, Bengal Renaissance, 143
52, 108; rural, 99, 100–1, 114, 121, 145, Benjamin, Walter, 70, 119, 120, 122, 123,
312; urban, 108–9, 111, 114, 115, 121, 220, 357, 366–67, 383
141, 145, 322, 350, 440–41n1; urban- Bennewitz, Fritz, 100, 362, 366, 368, 369,
rural split in, 5, 110, 114, 115, 123, 312, 378
323, 324 Berliner Ensemble, 87, 366, 368, 378
Augustus Caesar, 226 Besant, Annie, 178
authorship: in colonial theatre, 55–58; in Betab, Narayan Prasad, 55, 86, 179
post-independence theatre, 4, 14, 54, Bhaasi, Tooppil, 18, 31, 73
58–66, 89–91, 112–13, 387; relation to Bhabha, Homi K., 225, 251
theatre theory, 59, 66–71 Bhaduri, Sisir Kumar, 55, 57, 86
Awasthi, Suresh, 37, 69, 138, 184, 240, 311, Bhairappa, S. L., 180
316, 321 Bhandari, Mannu, 363
Awishkar theatre group, 62, 80, 91, 111, Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal, 109, 332
245, 304, 340. See also Deshpande, Bharata, 149
Arvind; Dubey, Satyadev Bharati, Bhanu, 92, 98, 187, 363
Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam, 252, 257 Bharati, Dharamvir, 51, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67,
71, 73, 78, 89, 95, 111, 166, 180, 235, 243,
Babbar, Raj, 122, 202 267, 363; Andha yug, 14, 48, 60, 79, 93,
Babri Masjid, 257, 306 97, 98, 159, 165, 167, 171, 185, 186–203,
Bachchan, Harivansh Rai, 358 209, 211, 213, 214, 217, 224, 248, 386,
Bajaj, Ramgopal, 76, 187 387; Manava mulya aur sahitya, 68, 193,
Banabhatta, 226 194, 196
Bandyopadhyay, Samik, 78, 211, 216 Bharatiya Natya Sangh, 25, 32, 316, 332
Banerji, Ajitesh, 187, 378 Bharucha, Rustom, 6, 18, 22, 26, 140, 156,
Banceld, Chris, 10, 140 161, 323, 325, 366, 370, 371
Baokar, Uttara, 278 Bhasa, 47, 65, 67, 103, 105, 130, 211, 212,
Baradi, Hasmukh, 366 310, 360, 444–45n3; Karnabharam, 321;
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Madhyama vyayogam, 321; Mahabharata 352–54, 359, 366, 375; Eurocentrism of,
plays of, 167, 181–83, 184, 203, 217; 354–55; limitations of, 354–56, 360–61
Urubhangam, 46, 48, 204–6, 207, 321, Carrière, Jean-Claude, 159–60, 177, 195
360 caste system, 12, 278; politics of, 287,
Bhasa festivals, 204, 209 289–91, 297–301, 341, 348, 385; schol-
Bhatia, Nandi, 4, 36, 141, 144 arly approaches to, 298; as subject in
Bhatia, Sheila, 26, 45 drama, 287–301, 309, 341–44, 379;
Bhattacharya, Bijon, 26, 95; Jabanbandi, “untouchables” in, 287, 289
93; Nabanna, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 46, 48, Chandavarkar, Bhaskar, 374
76, 87, 93 Chandra, Bipan, 170
Bhattacharya, Malini, 30, 35, 312 Chandra, Ramesh, 41
Bhavabhuti, 67, 130, 360 Chandragupta II, 225
Blackburn, Stuart H., 321 Chatterjee, Partha, 28
Boal, Augusto, 70, 85 Chatterjee, Sudipto, 28, 142, 143, 144
Bodhayan Kavi: Bhagavadajjukiyam, Chatterji, Bankim Chandra, 28
167 Chatterji, Saumitra, 202
Bohurupee theatre group, 33, 43, 79, 361. Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi, 32, 37, 41; on
See also Mitra, Shombhu national theatre, 32–34, 35
Bokassa, Jean-Bedel, 374, 375, 377 Chattopadhyay, Mohit, 18, 60, 61, 68, 70,
Bose, Buddhadev, 180 72, 76, 83, 272, 323; Guinea Pig, 47, 48, 76
Brecht, Bertolt, 15, 70, 86, 87, 95, 100, 116, Chaudhuri, K. N., 249
137, 220, 227, 282, 356, 360, 361, 364, Chaudhuri, Satyabrata, 365
365, 366–68, 383, 384; Caucasian Chalk Chaudhuri, Una, 156, 281, 387
Circle, 314, 360, 362, 368, 369, 370, Chekhov, Anton, 272, 274; The Cherry
371; Galileo, 362, 368; Good Woman of Orchard, 360, 362; Three Sisters, 358;
Setzuan, 100, 112, 314, 368, 369, 370; Uncle Vanya, 358
Herr Puntilla and His Man Matti, Chin, Darryl, 156
362, 368; indigenization of, 368–71; Chitnis, Manavendra, 201
inbuence of, 244, 365–71, 373–74, Chopra, B. R., 180
448n4; Mother Courage, 358, 362; Chowdhry, Neelam Mansingh, 13, 51, 65,
Threepenny Opera, 16, 100, 314, 356, 94, 95, 102, 114, 275, 329; directing
360, 362, 365, 368, 369, 371, 373–74, work for The Company, 91, 117–19;
378, 379, 381, 384, 385, 386 Sheher mere di pagal aurat, 117; Yerma,
Breckenridge, Carol, 127, 171 107, 117
Brook, Peter, 7, 85, 137, 154, 155, 156, 158, Churchill, Caryl, 86
159, 161; The Mahabharata, 177, 217, 195, city: as site of modernity, 42, 197, 323; as
217, 362 subject of drama, 197, 240–41, 268–69,
Brydon, Diana, 353, 354 302; theoretical defense of, 272–73, 323
Büchner, Georg, 97, 358 class: and audience, 3, 108–9, 141, 144,
Buck, William, 180 152, 275; and authorship, 146; as sub-
ject, 16, 269, 270, 271, 272, 275, 277, 278,
Cage, John, 383 292, 309, 341–45, 348, 376–77, 379, 385
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 358 Clurman, Harold, 85
Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, 8, 153 Cocteau, Jean, 160
Camus, Albert, 70, 244, 274 Coetzee, J. M., 353–54
canon formation, 3, 24–25, 28, 46–53, colonial theatre, 2–4, 56, 58, 144; critique
79–81; counterdiscourse, 12, 15, 71, of, 26, 27, 28, 29–30, 38–40, 41, 44
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colonialism: cultural e,ects of, 1, 3, 21, 28, decolonization, 2, 5, 71, 127, 128, 138, 144,
37, 132, 133, 143, 172–73, 193–94, 311, 353, 146, 159, 307, 376
385; and postcolonialism, 11, 21, 37, 135– Defoe, Daniel, 353–54
36, 139–40, 303, 305, 307, 353, 356, 378 Deosthale, Arundhati, 78
commercialism: of colonial theatre, 38, Desai, Anang, 202, 260
40, 56, 86, 312; e,ect on literary Deshpande, Arvind, 51, 52, 62, 91, 94, 122,
drama, 40, 56–58, 244; rejection of, 275; directing work, 79, 93, 95, 223, 263
38–40, 43–44, 50, 52, 86 Deshpande, G. P., 13, 18, 52, 70, 72, 77, 78,
Commonwealth Arts Festival, 216 93, 269, 273, 327; Andhar yatra, 77, 269;
communalism, 251–52, 256–58, 261–62, Chanakya Vishnugupta, 166; Ek vajoon
306 gela ahe, 269, 279; as playwright, 60, 61,
Communist Party of India, 25, 32, 35–36, 62, 83; on national theatre, 23–24; as
41 theorist, 13, 67, 68, 313, 318, 323, 371;
Company theatre group. See Chowdhry, Udhhwasta dharmashala, 48, 77, 269,
Neelam Mansingh 276, 279, 280
Conrad, Joseph, 353, 354 Deshpande, P. L., 16, 72, 92, 139, 366, 378;
Corneille, Pierre, 358 Teen paishacha tamasha, 16, 314, 357,
Craig, Edward Gordon, 227 360, 369, 371, 374, 378–87
Crow, Brian, 10, 140 Deshpande, Sudhanva, 32
Culler, Jonathan, 359–60 Deshpande, Sulabha, 62, 91, 202, 276
cultural nationalism, 2, 32, 67, 69–70, Detha, Vijaydan, 345
132, 135–36, 145–46, 149–50, 173, 178, Deutsches Nationaltheater, 332
227, 231; critique of Westernized Dev, Vasant, 76, 77, 94
modernity in, 42, 135–39, 310–11, 316 Deval, G. B., 55
Currimbhoy, Asif, 82 Dhananjay, 226
Dharwadker, Vinay, 55, 129, 133–34, 147,
Dalits, 287, 289–94 171, 387
Dalvi, Ajit, 81 Dhingra, Baldoon, 32, 37; on national
Dalvi, Jaywant, 77, 273, 328; Sandhya theatre, 32–34
chhaya, 276 Dishantar theatre group, 332. See also
Dandekar, R. N., 176 Shivpuri, Om
Dandin, 226 Doniger, Wendy, 147
Daruwalla, Keki, 304 drama seminar of 1956, 13, 25, 26–27,
Das, Gurcharan, 73, 82 28, 37–45, 51, 56, 110, 136; critique of
Das, Sisir Kumar, 133, 141 colonial theatre in, 37–38, 39–40, 44;
Dasgupta, Gautam, 156, 159 critique of Western theatre in, 39, 42;
Dass, Inder, 43, 122 objectives of, 26–27; recommenda-
Datar, Chetan, 304 tions of, 41–42, 44–45, 75, 315–16
Dattani, Mahesh, 18, 51, 64, 68, 69, 71, 73, Dramatic Performances Control Act, 4,
82, 90, 93, 94, 95, 146, 268, 273, 275, 29, 44, 56, 144, 443n3
277, 282, 328; Bravely Fought the Queen, Dryden, John, 359
269, 282; directing work, 64; on Dubey, Satyadev, 13, 52, 95, 112, 122, 223,
English as language of drama, 83; 234, 275; directing work, 60, 79, 80,
Tara, 269 93, 94, 95, 111, 187, 188, 223, 239, 245,
Dave, Bharat, 314 263, 332; on new Indian plays, 78;
Davis, Jack, 10 productions of Andha yug by, 187, 188,
De Silva, Anil, 35–36 199, 201–2
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Dumont, Louis, 147 Fo, Dario, 70, 111, 358; Accidental Death of
Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, 60, 82, 143, an Anarchist, 362; Archangels Don’t Play
178 Pinball, 362; Comedy of Terrors, 362
Dutt, Romesh Chandar, 178 folk forms, 313; and classical forms,
Dutt, Utpal, 13, 18, 26, 49, 67, 68, 70, 72, 311–12, 314–15, 317; conditions for
76, 77, 78, 86, 90, 122, 139, 211, 366; on survival of, 325; decline of, 324, 350;
audience, 114, 115, 119; directing work, “feudalism” of, 326; qualities of, 311–12,
47, 50, 64, 87, 88, 94; on jatra theatre, 317, 348
367, 370; Kallol, 48, 76, 88 folk theatre, 150–51, 159, 310–31, 330; and
dvapar yug, 176 folk culture, 3, 11, 15, 49, 71, 143, 149–
Dwivedi, Hazari Prasad, 358 50, 159, 270, 272, 314–15, 317, 318–20,
340–41; as people’s theatre, 312–13;
Ebotombi, Harokcham, 211 signiccance of, 40, 42, 139, 146, 312–18,
Ebotombi, S., 263 368, 386
Edinburgh International Drama Festival, Foucault, Michel, 218
346 Friedrich, Hugo, 357
Eisenstein, Sergei, 244 Fugard, Athol, 10, 86
Eliot, T. S., 168, 282, 387; The Waste Land,
195, 197, 355 Gadkari, Ram Ganesh, 55, 275
Elkunchwar, Mahesh, 13, 60, 61, 62, 63, Gandhi, Dina. See Pathak, Dina
68, 69, 71, 77, 78, 95, 111, 112, 116, 268, Gandhi, Indira, 215, 250, 251, 252, 255, 261,
272, 282, 328, 440n3; Atmakatha, 77, 374, 382, 384
269, 275, 276; on audience, 112; on Gandhi, Mohandas K., 81, 192, 193, 198,
authorship, 89, 146; Garbo, 276; 240, 242, 250, 252–53, 254, 257, 289, 381,
Raktapushpa, 79, 269; as theorist, 272, 383
273–74; on urban folk theatre, 324–25; Gandhi, Rajiv, 251, 258
Wada chirebandi, 15, 46, 49, 77, 79, Gandhi, Sanjay, 252
80–81, 83, 269, 273, 276, 281, 285, Gandhi, Shanta, 45, 98, 167, 314, 315, 316,
295–301, 307–9, 387; on “wordy” plays, 324, 327
61, 89; Yuganta, 80, 269 Ganesha, 335, 336, 342
Elliott, Henry, 249 Ganguli, Usha, 13, 51, 52, 94, 95, 122, 329;
Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 249 on audience, 114, 119; directing work,
Emergency Rule in India, 255, 261, 374, 93, 107, 116–17
379, 381–84 García Márquez, Gabriel, 282, 355, 363
Ensley, Sarah K., 234 Gardiner, Allan, 353
Erikson, Erik H., 253 Gargi, Balwant, 22, 95, 97
Esquivel, Laura, 117 Garrick, David, 55
Euripides, 95, 97, 111, 190, 358 Gaur, Arvind, 111, 187
Ezekiel, Nissim, 82 Gay, John, 356, 365, 371–74, 377, 381, 384,
385, 386
feminist performance, 329 Gellner, Ernest, 168
Fida Bai, 349 gender: in folk culture and urban folk
clm and other mass media; Indian theatre, 318, 328–31, 338–39, 341–45,
audience for, 5, 53, 108–9, 145, 180, 347–48, 351; in urban theatre, 116–19,
320; and theatre, 5, 14, 40, 51, 54, 235–38, 278–79, 286–89, 294–95,
62–63, 107, 108–9, 115, 119–25, 143, 307–9, 328–29
150, 151, 217, 238, 441n2 Ghatak, Ritwik, 31, 121
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Ghose, Aurobindo, 176, 178 Hein, Norvin, 7

Ghose, Manmohan, 82 Helgerson, Richard, 221
Ghosh, Girish Chandra, 55, 86, 224, 370 heroic and satiric discourses, 172–73, 175,
Ghoshal, S. N., 132 181, 248, 355
Gilbert, Helen, 9, 10, 11, 12 Hill, Errol, 49
Giraudoux, Jean, 117 Hinduism, 148
Goa Hindu Association theatre group, history: and allegory, 224, 225; and cction,
335 219–21, 222, 230, 232–33; orientalist
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 227 constructions of, 171–72, 219; post-
Gogol, Nikolai, 358, 360; The Inspector colonial approaches to, 174, 218, 219,
General, 100, 314, 362 267; poststructuralist approaches to,
Gokhale, Shanta, 68, 78, 270 218–19, 222; relation to nation, 219,
Gold, Ann Grodzins, 329 220, 221–22, 267; as subject of drama,
Goldman, Robert, 147 3, 4, 11, 14, 16, 49, 67, 71, 143, 159, 165,
Goldoni, Carlo, 358 166, 171, 268, 269, 386, 387
Gonda, Jan, 147 history play, 222–25, 230, 232–33, 234,
Gorky, Maxim, 70, 358, 362 243–51, 262, 267. See also Karnad,
Gottlieb, Phyllis, 353 Girish; Rakesh, Mohan
Govind Ram, 347, 349 Hobsbawm, Eric, 168
Gowda, H. H. Anniah, 6 Hodge, Bob, 12, 354
Granville-Barker, Harley, 85 Holderness, Graham, 381
Grass, Gunter, 355 home: and diaspora, 284–85; as cgure for
Gri´ths, Gareth, 12, 352, 355 nation, 15, 281, 307–8; as subject of
Grotowski, Jerzy, 65, 85, 137, 154, 161, 227, drama, 268–74, 281–85, 295–98, 301,
362 309, 387; typology of, 276–81
Gubbi Veeranna Company, 179 Hutcheon, Linda, 12, 218, 219
Gupta, Rajendra, 187, 199 hybridity, 134, 140, 143, 145, 151
Gupta, Subhash, 290
Gupte, H. V., 39 Ibsen, Henrik, 31, 95, 116, 221, 272, 358,
Gurr, Andrew, 282 360, 361
Inden, Ronald, 172
Habib, Irfan, 249 Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 69
Haksar, Anamika, 329 Indian National Congress, 144
Halbfass, Wilhelm, 147 Indian National Theatre, 25, 32, 245, 288,
Hall, Peter, 85 290
Hall, Stuart, 387 Indian People’s Theatre Association
Hangal, A. K., 121 (IPTA), 13, 25, 27, 37, 38, 43, 46–47, 51,
Hansen, Kathryn, 7, 39, 141, 142, 143, 86, 312–13, 315, 366; critique of colonial
150–51 theatre by, 27, 28, 29, 35, 121, 312;
Hardy, Peter, 248 decline of, 26, 35, 36, 41, 313; impor-
Harishchandra, Bhartendu, 40, 56, 67, 95, tance of folk forms in, 139, 312–13;
141; as theorist, 57, 58 legacy of, 32, 35, 36, 86, 87, 236, 312–16;
Hashmi, Safdar, 326, 367 as national theatre movement, 26, 30,
Hattangady, Rohini, 122, 125, 202 34, 110, 312–13; objectives of, 26, 30, 35,
Havel, Vaclav, 356 312–13; principal plays of, 30–31. See
Hawley, John Stratton, 7 also drama seminar of 1956; Dutt,
Hegel, G. W. F., 172 Utpal; Mitra, Shombhu; Tanvir, Habib
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Indian theatre: diversity of, 6, 18, 23, 26– intertextuality, 3, 11, 15–16, 71, 94–95, 314,
28; Indianness of, 22, 23; multilingual- 356–65, 368–71, 375–86
ism of, 1, 2, 8, 37; periodization in, 1, 5; Ionesco, Eugene, 91, 361
problematic decnitions of, 2, 5–6, 7, 8, Irving, Henry, 55
22–23, 126, 127–32, 148–49, 151–53,
154–61, 442–43n2; as synonymous with Jafri, Ali Sardar, 31
Sanskrit theatre, 7, 129–32; Western Jain, Nemichandra, 5, 22, 37, 69, 76, 136,
approaches to, 7–8, 126, 147–61 137, 187, 234, 290, 314, 316
Indian Theatre Guild. See Bharatiya Jakobson, Roman, 357
Natya Sangh Jalan, Shyamanand, 50, 62, 116, 122, 124,
indigenous forms: akhyana (Gujarat), 185; 276; directing work, 62, 79, 80, 93, 94,
bayalata (Karnataka), 313, 314, 340; 95, 112, 223, 234, 245, 263, 275, 290
bhand pather (Kashmir), 315; bhavai Jambe, C. R., 100, 368
(Gujarat), 135, 310, 315, 324, 327; Jameson, Fredric, 225
burrakatha (Andhra Pradesh), 31; chhau JanMohamed, Abdul A., 377
(Bihar and Orissa), 198; dashavatar Jasma odan, 314, 315, 327
(Maharashtra), 314, 368; harikatha Jayadeva, 169
(southern India), 185; jatra (Bengal), Jeejeebhoy, Jamsetji, 302
31, 135, 310, 313; kalaripayattu (Kerala), Jha, Vivekdutt, 233, 234, 235
103, 207; kathakali (Kerala), 154, 183, Jinnah, M. A., 257
185, 198, 200, 310, 362; kathakatha Jones, William, 7, 67, 127, 128, 129, 172, 226
(Bengal), 315; keertana (Maharashtra), Josalkar, Vasant, 260
185; kudiyattam (Kerala), 183, 185, 198; Joshi, Dinkar, 81
mohini attam (Kerala), 103; nach Joshi, Pravin, 51
(Madhya Pradesh), 315; naqal (Punjab), Joshi, Suhas, 276, 290
315; nata-sankeertana (Manipur), 184; Joyce, James, 195, 282, 387
nautanki (Uttar Pradesh), 142, 150–51, Jussawalla, Adil, 134, 303, 304
310, 314, 362; odissi (Orissa), 154;
ojhapali (Assam), 185; padayani (Kerala), Kabir, 345–46
103; pala (Orissa), 185; pandavani Kabuki, 198, 200, 275
(Madhya Pradesh), 185; powada (Maha- Kafka, Franz, 363
rashtra), 312; ramlila (northern India), kahani ka rangmanch, 363–64
154, 157, 310; raslila (Uttar Pradesh), Kalamandalam, 362
310; sopana sangeetam (Kerala), 103; Kalamandir, 92
swang (Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh), Kalavaibhav, 296, 297–98
315, 378; tamasha (Maharashtra), 31, 135, Kale, Narain, 40, 44, 56
310, 312, 314, 332, 368, 378, 379, 382, 384, Kalekar, Rekha, 335
385; terukkuttu (Tamil Nadu), 185; Kalelkar, Kaka, 274
thang-ta (Manipur), 184, 198; theyyam Kalidasa, 7, 56, 67, 95, 103, 147, 165, 169,
(kerala), 103; wari-leeba (Manipur), 184, 182, 222, 223, 226, 230, 231–33; Abhijnana
185; yakshagana (Karnataka), 106, 185, Shakuntalam, 7, 105, 128, 130, 154, 167,
310, 314, 332, 362 226, 227, 231, 358; as canonical author,
Indonesian theatre, 157 75, 225–27, 310; as cctionalized char-
industrialization, 145 acter, 227–30, 235, 238, 240, 242; in
Innes, C. L., 136 orientalist criticism, 130, 222, 226–27.
interculturalism, 7–8, 14, 132, 150, 155–61, See also Rakesh, Mohan
362 Kalidasa Samaroh, 182, 204, 209
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Kalidasa Samman prize, 204 Keith, A. B., 7, 128, 129, 130, 131
kaliyug, 176, 177, 192 Kendall, Geo,rey, 87
Kambar, Chandrashekhar, 50, 51, 62, 63, Kendre, Waman, 92
68, 69, 71, 73, 76, 77, 78, 83, 94, 111, 122, Kermode, Frank, 359
145, 313, 321, 329, 331, 340, 346; as Khadilkar, K. P., 55, 56, 71
director, 90, 102, 340; on folk theatre, Khan, Feroze, 81
319–20, 340–41, 350; Jokumaraswami, Khandekar, V. S., 180
15, 48, 145, 314, 318, 321, 327, 328, 330, Khanna, Rajesh (Jatin), 202
339–45, 346, 350, 386 Khanolkar, C. T., 70, 72, 77, 91, 111
Kanetkar, Vasant, 77, 95, 274 Kher, Anupam, 202
Kanhailal, Heisnam, 73, 211, 212, 216 King, Bruce, 10–11, 21
Kapoor, Prithviraj, 26, 121 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 198
Kapoor, Ranjit, 92, 95, 363 Kinkaid, Jamaica, 387
Kapur, Anuradha, 329 Kipste, Egil, 362
Karanth, B. V., 13, 52, 62, 94, 102, 117, 122, Konow, Sten, 128, 129, 131, 132
138, 203, 313–14, 331, 340, 362, 366; Kroetz, Franz Xaver, 111, 362
directing work, 79, 92, 93, 95, 100, Kruger, Loren, 221
106–7, 167, 223, 245, 275, 332, 337, 339, Kuckreja, Arun, 245, 260
340, 362, 369; as theorist, 106–8 Kulkarni, Chandrakant, 81
Karnad, Girish, 10, 13, 45, 52, 60, 61, 62, Kurtkoti, Kirtinath, 243
63, 68, 69, 71, 73, 94, 95, 111, 122, 125,
166, 180, 224, 225, 263, 271–72, 273, Lagoo, Shreeram, 50, 62, 93, 94, 122, 275,
313–14, 320, 329, 331, 340, 342; Agni 276, 280, 288, 290
mattu malè, 166, 217; on audience, Lal, Ananda, 6, 22, 57, 153
112–13; Hayavadana, 15, 48, 77, 79, 93, Lal, P., 180
107, 139, 145, 314, 318, 320, 325, 327, 328, Lane-Poole, Stanley, 249
330–39, 340, 345, 346, 350, 386; Naga- Lawrence, Margaret, 353
mandala, 76, 77, 117, 314, 320; on Parsi Lévi, Sylvain, 67, 128, 129, 131, 148–49
theatre, 244–45; Talé-danda, 100, 166, Lindenberger, Herbert, 221, 250
171; as translator, 76, 83–84; Tughlaq, Little Theatre Group. See Dutt, Utpal
15, 63, 76, 77, 79, 93, 97, 98, 112, 113, Littlewood, Joan, 86, 270
166, 171, 222, 223–24, 236, 243–62, 263, Lloyd Webber, Andrew, 379
267, 331, 332, 386; Yayati, 77, 79, 166, Lokendrajit, Soyam, 210, 211, 216
171, 217, 244, 331, 332 Loomba, Ania, 354
Karve, Iravati, 180 Lorca, Federico García, 95, 102, 111, 272,
Kashmiri, Agha Hashra, 55, 86 274, 358; House of Bernarda Alba, 362;
Katha Collage, 364 Yerma, 117–18
Kathasaritasagara, 331, 333 Lovell, Moira Crosbie, 117
Kathavachak, Radheyshyam, 179 Lu Xun, 363
Katrak, Kersi, 304 Luderitz, Vasudha Dalmia, 57, 67
Katyal, Anjum, 78 Luhrmann, Tanya M., 302, 303
Katz, Ruth Cecily, 177, 178 Lutze, Lothar, 151–52
Kaul, Bansi, 92, 187
Kaushal, J. N., 358 Machwe, Prabhakar, 38, 40, 55
Kazan, Elia, 85 Madan, Indranath, 197
Kean, Charles, 85 Madan, J. F., 120, 121
Kedourie, Elie, 168 Madan Lal, 347
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Madhya Pradesh Rangmandal. See Mhaiskar, Uday, 335

Karanth, B. V. Michael, Joy, 233, 234
Madras Players, 290 Mill, James, 172
The Mahabharata, 7, 60, 155, 156, 158, 159, Miller, Arthur, 220, 228, 358
161, 166, 169, 174–78, 180–81, 212, 265, Miller, Barbara Stoller, 7, 147
283, 313; in colonial theatre, 179, 224; Mishra, Vijay, 12, 354
modes of transmission, 169, 178–86; Mistry, Cyrus, 15, 281, 301–6, 307, 308,
as national epic, 175, 176, 186; in post- 309, 387
independence theatre, 14, 48, 165–68, Mistry, Rohinton, 304, 306
181–217. See also Bharati, Dharamvir; Mitra, Dinbandhu, 28, 55; Nil-darpan, 56
Panikkar, K. N.; Thiyam, Ratan Mitra, Manoj, 76, 273
Maharshi, Mohan, 92, 98, 187, 260, 363 Mitra, Saonli, 329
Mahasweta Devi, 93, 269, 273; Hajar Mitra, Shombhu, 13, 26, 37, 40, 45, 47, 51,
churashir ma, 122, 269, 279–80; Mukti, 52, 55, 86–87, 94, 122, 138; on amateur
117; Rudali, 93, 107, 122 and professional theatre, 43; directing
Mahendra Vikram Varman, 103; Bhagava- work, 79, 87, 93, 95, 109, 111, 263; as
dajjukam, 104, 167; Mattavilasam, 167 interpreter, 111; relationship with
Majumdar, Debashish, 76, 111 IPTA, 30, 31, 35, 86–87
Malina, Judith, 85 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 85
Mallinatha, 226 modernity, 1, 11, 132, 144–46, 180–81,
Mamet, David, 86 196–97, 253–54, 281–82, 324; colonial
Mammata, 226 versus postcolonial, 135, 169, 175,
Mandanna, Ashok, 258 270; and colonialism, 37, 132, 133, 136;
Mankani, Ravi, 335 critiques of, 2, 4, 6, 15, 132, 135–36, 146,
Mann, Thomas, 331, 333–34, 339 149; erasure of, 6, 7, 128, 147–59; of
Mannoni, O., 353 Indian theatre, 2–4, 37, 54, 70, 146,
Mansceld, Katherine, 387 153, 186–87, 227, 234–36, 238–39,
Manto, Saadat Hasan, 363 270–71, 308–9, 328, 351; and Western
Manusmriti, 286–87 inbuence, 132, 133, 355, 386–87
Marranca, Bonnie, 155, 156, 161 modernization, 145, 146, 150, 240, 284,
Marzban, Adi, 37 325, 355
Mathur, J. C., 37, 40, 121, 123, 124, 324 Mokashi-Punekar, Shankar, 5
Matkari, Ratnakar, 116 Molière, 95, 358, 360, 361, 362
Matthew, Paul, 78 Monier-Williams, M., 178
Matura, Mustapha, 49, 355 Moscow Art Theatre, 70
McCullough, Christpher J., 367 Muhammad bin Tughlaq, 223, 243, 246,
McRae, John, 277 248, 249, 250, 255
media. See clm and other mass media Mujeeb, M., 39
Mehta, C. C., 37 Muller, Max, 128, 148, 178
Mehta, Vijaya, 13, 49, 50, 52, 89, 91, 92, multilingualism. See colonial theatre;
94, 112, 122, 276; as director of Brecht, Indian theatre; post-independence
112, 362, 366, 368, 370, 379, 448n5; theatre
other directing work, 62, 79, 80, 93, myth, 159, 169, 172, 173; in colonial
95, 167, 296–97, 313–14, 332, 335 theatre, 4, 67, 71, 143; distinguished
Memmi, Albert, 303 from history, 165, 174; in post-
Merchant, Sabira, 259 independence theatre, 3, 11, 14, 15, 16,
Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyeuich, 85 49, 165–68, 171, 225, 268, 269, 318–19,
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327, 386, 387. See also Bharati, 226, 252; in post-independence period,
Dharamvir; The Mahabharata; 29–30, 42, 73
Panikkar, K. N.; Thiyam, Ratan nationhood, 173, 307; and history, 169,
221; and literature and theatre, 1, 2,
Nabokov, Vladimir, 282 221, 251, 307, 380; and secularism, 252,
Nadkarni, Dnyaneshwar, 370, 379 255–58
Nagar, Amritlal, 230 The Natyashastra, 56, 67, 69, 130, 183, 206,
Nagpal, Kavita, 215 207, 212, 216
Naik, Arun, 370 Naya Theatre. See Tanvir, Habib
Naik, M. K., 5 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 27, 213, 240, 242, 243,
Naik, Rajiv, 111 250, 252, 253–54, 255, 257, 260, 262
Naipaul, V. S., 197, 387 Nehru Shatabdi Natya Samaroh, 13, 25,
Nandan, Kanhaiyalal, 234 27, 33, 45–51, 80, 204, 209, 216, 280,
Nandikar theatre group, 111, 204, 361, 332, 337, 340, 344; program of, 46–50,
370 88; relation to drama seminar of 1956,
Nandy, Subrata, 80, 83 46–47, 49; as retrospective, 28, 45
Narayan, B. R., 77 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 324
Narayan, R. K., 180 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 197
Narayana Bhatta, 226 Nigam, Santvana, 76, 77, 94
Nath, Rajinder, 62, 79, 80, 89, 94, 112, 273, Ninasam, 50, 62, 96–97, 98–101, 320, 340,
323; on audience, 110–11; directing 369. See also Subbanna, K. V.
work, 48, 66, 92, 263, 290, 340, 332, nirguna tradition, 345–46
363; on new Indian plays, 78 Nizami, K. A., 249
nation: and allegory, 224, 225, 307; cultural Noh theatre, 154, 183
antecedents of, 137, 169–71, 174–76, noncommercialism in theatre, 34, 43, 50,
222; and secularism, 170, 285, 307, 371; 58, 91, 92, 108, 111, 112, 121, 312
as subject in literature and theatre, 21,
22, 30, 37, 67, 170–74, 192–96, 213–15, Odets, Cli,ord, 41
217, 222, 239, 250–58, 292, 307–8, Olaniyan, Tejumola, 102, 375
374–78, 379, 381–84 Oldenberg, Hermann, 176
National Centre for the Performing Arts Omvedt, Gail, 299
(NCPA), 92, 109, 245 O’Neill, Eugene, 272
National Institute of Dramatic Arts, 332 orientalist scholarship and criticism,
National School of Drama, 43, 44, 62, 78, 147–55, 175, 226; approaches to Indian
80, 87, 92, 99, 109, 124, 167, 204, 314, theatre in, 128, 147–49, 151, 152;
364, 366, 378 continuing inbuence of, 7, 127–28,
National School of Drama Repertory 443–44n4; critiques of, 173, 219, 222;
Company, 92, 99, 198, 236, 245, 278, and Indian nationalism, 144, 171; and
297, 314, 315, 361, 363 Indology, 8, 128, 132, 147, 226, 443–
national theatre concepts, 13, 22–26, 30, 44n4; privileging of Sanskrit in, 7, 67,
32–35, 42, 45, 69, 73, 75, 128. See also 128–32, 142, 147–49, 226
Bharucha, Rustom; Chattopadyay, Orkeny, Istvan, 358
Kamaladevi; Deshpande, G. P.; Osborne, John, 95, 270
Dhingra, Baldoon Osocsan, Femi, 49, 323, 325
National Theatre Festival, 204, 209
nationalism, 168–69, 170–72; in colonial Padamsee, Alyque, 51, 52, 93, 94, 95, 122,
period, 28, 67, 173, 175, 186, 193–95, 223, 233; directing work, 236, 245, 248
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Padatik. See Jalan, Shyamanand 135–36; primacy in colonial theatre,

Padmanabhan, Manjula, 68 55–56, 58, 67; and translation, 78–79;
Pal, Mahendra, 202 urban forms of, 151, 181–84, 320–22
Pal, Panu, 31 Permanent Settlement Act, 297
Palekar, Amol, 275, 276 Perse, St.-John (Alexis Saint-Léger
Pali, 147 Léger), 195
Pande, G. C., 177 Peters, Julie Stone, 143, 156
Pandit, Balraj, 361 philology, 147
Pandit, Vandana, 382 Phule, Jyotirao, 289
Panigrahi, Sanjukta, 154 Pillai, G. Shankara, 316, 319, 320, 327
Panikkar, K. N., 49, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, Pinter, Harold, 112
73, 78, 79, 90, 94, 100, 102, 106, 107, Pirandello, Luigi, 358
108, 138, 167, 211, 225, 275, 313, 320, 321, Piscator, Erwin, 70, 85
324, 329; directing work, 65, 103, 167; playwriting, 89–93, 361
Karnabharam, 182, 183, 204; Madhyam political drama, 4, 18, 25–26, 30–32, 48,
vyayog, 167, 182, 183; Mahabharata 70, 87, 211–16, 366–67, 369–71, 373–80,
plays of, 167, 180, 181–84, 203–4, 216, 382–86
217, 321; as theorist, 64, 103–5; Pollock, Sheldon, 21, 147, 439n1
Urubhangam, 14, 48, 167, 182, 183, 204– postcolonial theory and criticism: anglo-
10, 217 centrism and Eurocentrism of, 9, 10,
Parekh, Rasiklal, 314 12; place of theatre in, 8–11, 143
Parsai, Harishankar, 363 postcolonialism, 1, 21, 71, 127, 251, 385–
Parsi community, 301–6; as colonial elite, 86; decnitions of, 11–13, 355–57;
302–3 experience of, 1, 284, 285, 295, 303; and
Parsi theatre, 3, 4, 55–56, 141, 179, 244, postmodernism, 218, 267; reduction
260, 304; critiques of, 38–40, 43, 56, of, 352–55; relation to literature and
312; relation to clm, 40, 86, 120 theatre, 1, 9–11, 12, 21, 143, 307–8, 327;
Parthasarathy, Indira, 18, 73 restrictive decnitions of, 9–12, 352–55
Partition, 192–93 post-independence Indian theatre:
Patar, Surjit, 117 canon-formation in, 3, 4, 13, 46;
Patel, Gieve, 82, 304 critical methodology for, 11–16, 17;
Patel, Jabbar, 52, 93, 94, 95, 122, 366; genres of, 3, 6, 11, 49, 61, 70, 94, 161,
directing work, 91, 275, 374, 379 169, 362, 364; marginality of, 2, 3;
Patel, Vallabhbhai, 257 multilingualism of, 2, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14,
Pathak, Dina (Gandhi), 26, 37, 40, 41, 121, 17, 47, 71, 72–75, 94, 362, 368–69; as
236 postcolonial formation, 2, 3, 4, 5,
Patil, Anand, 5 11–16, 51, 53, 54, 55, 71, 352, 387; relation
patronage: importance of, 4, 52, 238–39; to colonial theatre, 4, 11, 71; relation
state institutions of, 34, 44, 92, 98, to mass media, 51, 53, 54, 82, 108–9,
240, 241; of traditional forms, 69, 121–25; relationship of languages in,
93–94, 135, 142, 145, 315–17 10, 12, 17, 47, 52, 72–75, 81–83; signic-
Paul, Rajinder, 45, 77, 245, 260, 261, 290 cance of director in, 86–89, 91–96,
Paz, Octavio, 355 114–19, 363; status of English in, 10–11,
People’s Little Theatre. See Dutt, Utpal 12, 47, 81–83, 304, 441n1
performance, 2, 3, 4, 16–17, 58, 59, 65, 92– Pound, Ezra, 282
95, 117–19, 136, 145, 147, 152, 166–67, Pradhan, Sudhi, 30, 313
174, 360–62; and modernity, 133, Pradhan, Sunila, 202
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Prakrit, 147 61, 89; on dramatic authorship, 60,

Prasad, Jaishankar, 56–57, 58, 60, 67, 71, 240; on Hindi drama and theatre, 57,
173, 224 230–31; on history play, 232–33; Lahron
Prasanna, 92, 259, 260, 261 ke rajhans, 83, 93, 112, 166, 223, 230, 232,
Prashanth, G. N., 262 236, 238; Sahitya aur sanskriti, 68, 271,
Pratima Natak Mandali, 340 272–73; as theorist, 67–68, 231–33, 271,
precolonial and premodern forms and 272–73
traditions, 2, 4, 37, 43, 48, 135, 140, Ramachandran, C. N., 348
145–46, 310, 318, 320, 325, 350 Ramanujan, A. K., 175, 318, 321, 329
Premchand, 60 The Ramayana, 7, 154, 169, 180, 283
print culture: and dramatic authorship, Ramnarayan, Gowri, 290
55–56, 58–59, 61–64; emergence of, 55, Rangacharya, Adya, 5, 22, 37, 50, 73, 77,
133–34; and modernity, 132–35; relation 108; Kelu Janmejaya, 47, 48, 166, 217
to drama and theatre, 4, 5, 8, 17, 51, 61, Rangakarmee. See Ganguli, Usha
63, 68, 145, 151, 311, 320–22, 360–61; Rangayan, 62, 91. See also Deshpande,
and translation, 73–78 Arvind; Mehta, Vijaya; Tendulkar,
Prithvi Theatre, 92, 111, 245, 263 Vijay
Progressive Writers’ Association, 25, 70, Rao, Raja, 173, 174
86 realism, 3, 15, 30, 34, 67, 69, 70, 71, 137,
proscenium stage and staging, 31, 49, 93, 143, 268–76, 285, 309, 323; as anti-
115, 141–42, 248, 263, 268, 273–76, 312; thetical to folk genres, 321, 323, 348;
critique of, 38–39, 64, 65, 69, 87, 123, critique of, 380; Indian theories of,
135; defense of, 273–74 269–76; Indian versus Western, 282–
Puri, Amrish, 122, 202 84; marginality of women in, 307,
Puri, Om, 122, 260 328–29; as sign of modernity, 270, 271
Rg-veda, 333
Quit India Movement, 192 Richards, Lloyd, 85
Richmond, Farley, 7, 152–54
Racine, Jean, 102, 117 Ridgeway, William, 129
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 26 ritual, 318–19, 341–42
Raghav, Rangeya, 358 Roberts, G. D., 353
Raghavabhatta, 226 Roopwedh, 280
Raghavan, V., 176 Rostand, Edmond, 358, 362
Raha, Kirnmoy, 5 Rowe, Nicholas, 221
Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, 329 Roy, Benoy, 31
Raina, M. K., 92, 198, 200, 202, 327, 363, Roy, D. L., 56, 71, 141, 224
368 Roy, Dulal, 187
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 78 Roy, Kumar, 33, 50, 51, 368
Rajagopalachari, C., 180 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 87, 368
Rajamannar, P. V., 26, 38, 70 rupantar. See translation
Rakesh, Mohan, 13, 60, 62, 63, 67, 71, 73, Rushdie, Salman: Midnight’s Children,
77, 111, 166, 167, 224, 225, 263, 269, 273, 173–74, 355; Mirrorwork, 242; Shame,
276, 282, 323, 328, 358, 363; Adhe adhure, 355
49, 63, 93, 110, 112, 269, 275, 277, 278, Rye, Madhu, 50, 73, 273; Koipan ek phoolnu
282, 283–84, 331; Ashadh ka ek din, 15, nam bolo to, 77, 269; Kumarni agashi, 49,
63, 79, 93, 165, 167, 171, 222, 223, 225–43, 77, 269
246, 263, 267, 386; on director’s role, Ryonusuke, Akutagawa, 95
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Sacchidanandan, K., 180 Sengupta, Rudraprasad, 366

Sagar, Ramanand, 180 Sengupta, Sachin, 26, 38, 40, 41
Sahay, Raguvir, 107, 358 Sethi, Rumina, 171, 173
Sahni, Balraj, 38, 39, 40, 41, 121 Shah, B. M., 51, 363
Sahu, Swarna Kumar, 346 Shah, Naseeruddin, 81, 122, 202, 260
Said, Edward W., 219 Shakespeare, William, 56, 67, 95, 102, 220,
St. Julian, George, 234 244, 272, 361, 362, 364, 365, 447n3;
Sajnani, Arjun, 245, 248, 261, 262 Hamlet, 358, 362; iconic status of, 75,
Sane Guruji, 289 357, 360; Indian-language productions
Sangeet Natak, 27, 316 of, 97, 98, 100, 362; indigenization of,
Sangeet Natak Akademi, 25, 33, 44, 69, 75, 107, 141, 360, 362; King Lear, 355,
76, 92, 98, 109, 138, 204, 223, 240, 315, 358, 360, 362; A Midsummer Night’s
316, 332, 337 Dream, 362; Macbeth, 107, 358, 362;
Sanskrit drama, 137, 183, 310; canonization The Merchant of Venice, 358; Othello, 358,
of, 128–32, 147–49, 442n1; relation to 362; The Tempest, 353, 362; translations
modern theatre, 4, 6, 7, 150, 381; of, 56, 357–58
revivals in post-independence theatre, Shankar, Ravi, 26
48, 95, 103–5, 107, 167, 182–84, 203–9, Shankar, Sachin, 26
211–12, 386; translation into modern Sharma, P. R., 78
Indian languages, 67, 75, 142–43, 358 Sharma, Partap, 82, 95
Sanskrit literature, 147; canonization of, Sharma, Tripurari, 92
7, 129–32, 142; classical period of, 147, Sharmalkar, T. K., 31
149 Shaw, George Bernard, 70, 227, 228, 358,
Sarabhai, Mallika, 161 360
Saraswati Samman, 291 Shepard, Sam, 86
Sarnaik, Arun, 258 Shirwadker, V. V., 276
Saroyan, William, 358 Shiv Sena, 306
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 70, 274, 361 Shivpuri, Om, 62, 98, 122, 202, 236, 237,
Sastri, Ganapati, 204, 444–45n1 258, 259, 261, 275, 276; directing work,
Satabdi. See Sircar, Badal 91, 110, 111, 245
Sathe, Makarand, 111 Shivpuri, Sudha (Sharma), 202, 236, 237,
Satnamis, 345 259, 276
Sato, Shozo, 362 Shri Ram Centre for the Performing
Savarese, Nicola, 7 Arts, 92
Saxe-Meiningen, George II, Duke of, 85 Shri Ram Centre Repertory Company,
Schechner, Richard, 7, 65, 85, 137, 154, 155, 340, 363. See also Nath, Rajinder
157, 161, 362, 366 Shudraka, 67, 130, 167, 310; Mrichchha-
Scheme of Assistance to Young Theatre katika, 167, 314, 358, 360, 386
Workers, 92, 93–94 Siddiqui, I. H., 249
Schiller, Friedrich von, 227 Sidhwa, Bapsi, 304
Scott, Walter, 220 Sikri, Surekha, 259, 278, 378
Seagull Foundation for the Arts, 78 Singh, Manohar, 258, 259, 278
Seeket, Gangaram, 346 Sircar, Badal, 10, 13, 18, 45, 50, 51, 63, 64,
Sen, Chanakya, 363 65–66, 67, 70, 72, 78, 91, 93, 94, 95, 108,
Sen, Mrinal, 121 111, 119, 146, 157, 225, 245, 269, 273, 275,
Sen, Sohag, 80 311, 328, 361; Baki itihas, 15, 65, 76, 93,
Sen, Tapas, 114 222, 224, 263–67, 269, 276; directing
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work, 91, 370; Ebong Indrajit (Evam Tandon, Sudhir, 258–59

Indrajit), 65, 76, 77, 224, 263, 269, 276; Taneja, Jaidev, 187, 195, 197
on folk forms, 326; Pagla ghoda, 93, 263, Tanvir, Habib, 13, 47, 49, 52, 64, 65, 66,
269; Shesh nei, 65, 76, 224, 269; as theo- 68, 69, 71, 86, 90, 94, 107, 138, 145,
rist of Third Theatre, 65, 68, 70, 114– 180, 272, 275, 313, 314, 320, 329, 331, 347,
15, 123; Tringsha shatabdi (Hiroshima), 362, 366; Agra bazar, 48, 87, 139; on
65, 66, 211 audience, 114, 115, 119, 121; Charandas
Slemon, Stephen, 355, 365 chor, 15, 76, 78, 112, 318, 321, 327, 330,
Smith, Anthony D., 168, 169, 170 345–48; directing work, 50, 64, 87, 115,
Smith, Karen, 10 320, 346–47; Duryodhana, 159, 167, 182,
Smith, Vincent, 172, 249 184, 360; on folk forms, 138–39, 272,
Solomon, Rakesh, 4 367, 368, 369; Mitti ki gadi, 314, 360,
Sommer, Doris, 173 386; as theorist, 102
Sondhi, Reeta, 259, 261 Taranath, Rajeev, 78
Sontakke, Kamlakar, 77, 187, 199, 202 Tendulkar, Priya, 290
Sopanam. See Panikkar, K. N. Tendulkar, Sushama, 288, 290
Sophocles, 95, 96, 102, 160, 211, 236, 358 Tendulkar, Vijay, 13, 51, 62, 63, 67, 68, 69,
Soyinka, Wole, 10, 49, 86, 102, 140, 328, 71, 72, 76, 77, 83, 89, 90, 91, 95, 111,
371, 381, 384; Madmen and Specialists, 122, 245, 268, 270, 271, 273, 277–79,
355; Opera Wonyosi, 356–57, 374, 375–78, 282, 313–14, 328; on audience, 113;
383 Ghashiram kotwal, 48, 76, 112, 113, 145,
Spivak, Gayatri, 170, 365 166, 171, 275, 314, 320, 325, 327, 370, 386;
Srampickal, Jacob, 6 Gidhade, 76, 113, 269, 276, 278, 282;
Srinivasa Iyengar, K. R., 176 Kamala, 77, 113, 269, 279, 290;
Stanislavsky, Constantin, 85, 86, 370 Kanyadaan, 15, 77, 113, 269, 276, 279,
Steele, Flora Annie, 178 280, 283, 285, 286–95, 296, 298, 308,
Steiner, George, 160 309; Sakharam Binder, 77, 113, 269,
Sterne, Lawrence: Tristram Shandy, 355 278–79, 290; Shantata! court chalu ahe,
Stoppard, Tom, 70, 358 77, 269, 276, 290, 331
street theatre, 312 Terayama, Shuji, 157
Strindberg, August, 95, 221, 272, 274, 358 text and performance, 8, 16, 17, 56–60,
Subaltern Studies, 219, 222 61–66, 90, 91, 93, 125, 147, 151, 225,
Subbanna, K. V., 52, 94, 96, 98–101, 102, 320–22, 327–28, 360–62
104, 108, 119, 369; activities at Thakur, Dinesh, 263, 275, 290
Ninasam, 96, 98–101, 114 Thakur Ram, 347
Subhash, Jyoti, 77 Thapar, Romesh, 255
Subhedar, Sunil, 22 Thapar, Romila, 249, 256
Sultan Padamsee Award, 303 Tharoor, Shashi, 174
Sutherland, Efua, 49 Theatre Academy, 62, 93, 273. See also
Suzuki, Tadashi, 157, 198 Patel, Jabbar
Swann, Darius L., 7, 152 theatre anthropology, 7; critique of, 155;
Swift, Jonathan, 355 erasure of modernity in, 155; neo-
Synge, J. M., 355 orientalism of, 150; reductive
approach of, 154–61
Tagore, Rabindranath, 60, 67, 95, 141, 143, Theatre Group, 43, 234, 303. See also
178, 193, 242, 358, 363, 366; as play- Alkazi, Ebrahim; Padamsee,
wright, 27, 56, 57; as theorist, 57–58 Alyque
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“theatre of roots,” 138, 140, 311, 323, 325, performance, 73, 78–81; relationship
327 of languages in, 81–84; of Western
Theatre Unit, 340, 361. See also Alkazi, drama, 11, 56, 143, 447n3
Ebrahim; Dubey, Satyadev Tretyakov, Sergei, 31, 373
theatres: Cornwallis, 57; Meghdoot, 98;
Minerva, 86; National, 86, 141; Star, 57 urban experience, 268–75, 386
Thiyam, Ratan, 49, 50, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, urban folk theatre, 3, 312–31; centrality
71, 73, 90, 94, 107, 108, 138, 145, 187, of gender in, 328–31, 341–45, 347–48,
198, 200, 211, 225, 275, 320, 321, 329; 351; as distinct from folk theatre,
Chakravyuha, 14, 48, 78, 105, 122, 145, 145, 318–22; performance of the
159, 182, 183, 210, 212–16, 217, 321, Mahabharata in, 181–85; problems of,
386; directing work, 79, 105, 167; 322–27; rebexivity of, 328, 335–37,
Karnabharam, 105, 182, 183, 212; 340–43. See also folk forms; folk
Mahabharata plays of, 167, 180, 181, theatre
182–84, 210–12, 217, 313; as theorist of urban theatre, 3, 17, 29, 35, 38, 72–73,
theatre and performance, 102, 105–6; 90, 94, 139, 141–45, 150–52, 166, 181,
Urubhangam, 182, 183, 212; Uttar 275, 328–29; critique of, 29–30, 39–
Priyadarshi, 105, 211 40, 135–36, 138–39, 150, 311–12;
Tiń, Helen, 12, 352, 355 urbanization, 145, 240, 284–85, 299,
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 173 324, 350
Tompkins, Joanne, 9, 10 urban versus rural, 45, 101–2, 272, 273,
tradition, 37, 69, 70, 104, 311; as basis of 299, 311–12, 317, 318, 320, 322–23, 326–
Indian culture, 42, 155; invention of, 27, 341; in relation to theatre and
140, 145–46; and modernity, 4, 11, 138, audience, 5, 39, 42, 50, 110, 114, 115,
149–50, 157, 158, 300, 310, 323, 328, 368; 123, 137, 312, 323, 324
romance of, 155–57
traditional Indian theatre and perfor- Vallabhadeva, 226
mance, 38–39, 133, 184–85; decnitions van Buitenen, J. A. B., 147, 178, 180
of, 310–11; incorporation of, 15, 49, Van der Veer, Peter, 127, 149, 171
64–65, 102–8, 144–45, 159, 181, 184–85, Van Erven, Eugène, 6, 367
198, 215–16, 312–15, 360; signiccance of, Varadpande, M. L., 22
2, 26, 30, 34, 42, 67, 69, 93, 102, 136–39, Varma, Bhagvati Charan, 230
142, 144, 145, 204, 209, 272, 311–12, Varma, Nirmal, 363
316; Western preoccupation with, Varma, Sarojini, 77
147–59 Vatsyayan, Kapila, 69, 136, 137, 143
traditionalism: critique of, 6, 69, 136–46, Vatsyayan, S. H., 211
160, 233, 242, 317, 323–27; as legacy of Vaze, Achyut, 111, 245
orientalism, 147–49 Vaze, Madhav, 245
translation: as basis of national theatre Vidyabinode, Kshirode Prasad, 55
movement, 71, 75, 76, 83–84; and village: critique of, 272–73, 323; decline
canon-formation, 78–80; English as of, 299, 312, 324–25; economic and
target language of, 77–78; forms of, cultural transformation of, 145, 240,
356–59; Hindi as target language of, 284, 297–99, 324; as location for
76–77, 81–82, 358, 363, 440n4; inter- theatre, 101–2, 115, 142, 150, 166, 272;
cultural (rupantar), 15, 358–63, 365, representation of, 240–41, 341–45,
447n2; interlingual (bhashantar), 3, 5, 346–51; as site of indigenous culture,
14, 54, 56, 73–78, 143, 357; and 272, 311–12, 341–45, 346–51
14Index.qxd 7/6/2005 8:20 AM Page 478
478 Index
Virgil, 226 White, Hayden, 218, 219, 220

Vishakhadatta, 130, 167; Mudrarakshasa, White, Patrick, 354
167 Williams, Raymond, 311
Viswanathan, Ashoke, 123 Williams, Tennessee, 111, 358
Vivekananda, Swami, 173, 178 Wilson, August, 10
Vyasa, 177, 190, 204–5 Wilson, H. H., 67, 128, 129, 130
Wilson, Robert, 85
Walcott, Derek, 10, 49, 86, 102 Windish, Ernst, 130
Wallace, John M., 225
Weber, Carl, 366, 368 Yadav, Rajendra, 358
Wells, Henry W., 147 Yarrow, Ralph, 8
Wesker, Arnold, 116
Western inbuences: in drama and theatre, Zaehner, R. C., 147
2, 3, 11, 15, 40, 42, 43, 67, 133, 135–36, zamindari system, 297, 305
140–46, 148–49, 273; in literature, 67, Zarrilli, Phillip, 7, 78, 103, 152
132–35, 143, 172, 386–87, 448n6 Zelliott, Eleanor, 289
15authors.qxd 7/6/2005 8:21 AM Page 479
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Studies in Theatre History and Culture

Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker

university of iowa press, iowa city

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242

Design by Neil West, BN Typographics West

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any

The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is

Printed on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

For Vinay, Aneesha, and Sachin

Part of the world persists

1. Postcolonial Frames and the Subject of

viii Genres in Context

7. The Ironic History of the Nation 218

Scholars and writers of my generation from India have typically had

families for warmth and hospitality during my many work-related trips.

It is not possible to date Indian plays of the post-independence period

xvi Author’s Note

is limited to a handful of metropolitan and provincial institutions, such

Author’s Note xvii

BB Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal

Postcolonial Frames and the

2 Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

in the past decade as important areas of inquiry, ready for assimilation

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre 3

4 Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre 5

the contemporary mass-cultural and popular media of clm, television,

6 Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre 7

Western scholarship and commentary on Indian theatre have had the

8 Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilli—seeks to communicate “the complexi-

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre 9

translation, and the varying relation between colonial and indigenous

10 Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

collaborative study is the crst sustained work of criticism that relates

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre 11

forty years. In other words, while postcolonial studies is in a unique posi-

12 Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

the oppositional energy in contemporary theatre, in any case, is not

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre 13

14 Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre 15

resistant to the dominant narratives of o´cial and/or institutionalized

16 Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

nuanced application of this inbuential critical position to contemporary

Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre 17

theatrical—and vice versa—and both together account for the resonance

18 Postcolonial Frames and Modern Indian Theatre

some languages over others, or—at the other extreme—to distribute my

The Formation of a New

Theatre and Nation

22 The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

in the resources they o,er for understanding the development of ex-

The Formation of a New “National Canon” 23

Sanskrit period at one end and post-independence developments at the

When we speak of national theatre we do so with almost no knowledge

24 The Field of Indian Theatre after Independence

Deshpande adds that the alarming decline in the culture of “regional”

The Formation of a New “National Canon” 25