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Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre

Siyuan Liu

Modern Indian theatre

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Aparna Dharwadker
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Modern theatre in Asia

Part III
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11
Modern Indian theatre
Aparna Dharwadker

Anatomy of modernity
The ‘modern period’ in Indian theatre is said to begin with the new forms of dramatic writing
and institutionalized performance that emerged under Anglo-European influences in colonial
cities such as Calcutta and Bombay during the later nineteenth century, and have evolved over
time to constitute an increasingly visible, multilingual field of postcolonial practice.1 In the current
critical schemes of periods and periodization in Indian theatre, however, ‘modernity’ functions
in turn as a superfluous category, a simplistic principle of chronological demarcation without
clear qualitative referents, or an essentially contested term entangled in postcolonial debates over
cultural authenticity. For 200 years, scholars and critics in the west have brought the steadily
expanding disciplinary orientations of Indology, philology, anthropology, history of religion,
performance studies and area studies to bear on the subject of Indian theatre, but their focus
has been primarily on the classical period of Sanskrit theatre, or the numerous premodern genres
of religious, traditional, ritualistic, folk and intermediary performance. In India the field of criticism
is dominated by studies that are concerned with theatre in a single language and region, or
collections that present ‘Indian theatre’ as the simple sum of descriptive histories covering fourteen
or sixteen major modern languages; neither approach can historicize modernity as a temporally
determined aggregation of qualities that is transregional and pan-Indian in scope. A third model
– that of ‘nationalist’ theatre histories – seeks to establish the antiquity, unity and continuity of
Indian theatre and performance traditions over two millennia, but inevitably reduces the
relatively recent colonial/postcolonial continuum to an inconclusive coda. In marked contrast
to these strategies of omission, an overtly decolonizing strain in post-independence theory and
criticism has characterized westernized conventions of representation in urban theatre (especially
the proscenium stage) as damaging colonialist legacies that must be countered through a return
to precolonial, indigenous traditions of performance. As I have noted elsewhere, ‘[w]ithin these
discursive polarities, definitions of theatrical modernity are usually under- or over-determined:
they denote either a hazy set of qualities with uncertain historical coordinates, or practices that
must be placed under ideological erasure because of their manifest links to colonialism’
(Dharwadker 2011: 426).
In this chapter I use ‘modernity’ as the appropriate inclusive concept for defining the key
features of urban Indian theatre and charting its development over nearly two centuries, in full

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recognition of the attendant paradoxes and contradictions. In its broadest form, the problem is
one of relating precolonial traditions appropriately to the historically unprecedented formations
of the colonial and postcolonial periods. The ‘long history’ of representational forms on the
subcontinent included the pan-Indian traditions of classical Sanskrit drama, which had begun
to decline after the twelfth century CE, as well as the vast array of postclassical performance
genres, which had maintained a varied presence in the lives of particular communities in specific
regions for several hundred years (c. 1200–1800 CE). In relation to this history, the new western-
influenced urban theatre had the qualities of a ‘modern revolution’ ranged against precolonial
traditions at the levels of both cultural discourse and practice. After a lengthy period of erratic
entrepreneurship and upper-class patronage (c. 1790–1860), during which performances took
place in makeshift theatres, open-air spaces and private homes, in the 1870s theatre in both
Calcutta and Bombay moved fully into the marketplace, incorporating many of the institutional
features of European, especially British, theatre. Enclosed theatre buildings, darkened auditor-
iums, proscenium stages, painted scenery, props and mechanical stage apparatuses made their
appearance in India for the first time. The borrowed practice of commercial ticket sales tapped
into a growing body of educated middle-class viewers who were drawn to the new forms of
commodified entertainment, and selectively accepted women on the stage as well as in the
audience. The large-scale investment of capital in urban proscenium theatres and touring com-
panies, especially by Bombay’s enterprising Parsi community, also led to the first ‘professional’
establishments (with resident managers, playwrights, actors, musicians and technicians), which
expanded their operations beyond the city to semi-urban, and even rural, areas in particular
regions of the country. Over the same period of time, the cross-fertilization of Indian and western
textual models produced a substantial body of literary drama, closet drama and dramatic theory
in various modern Indian languages, reflecting a deep investment in the idea of theatre as cultural
praxis. By the turn of the century, ‘drama’ had thus emerged as an institution of colonial modernity
with a distinctive textual, performative and theoretical presence in urban India – differing, of
course, in scale and developmental level from its Anglo-European correlates, and marking a
decisive departure from all premodern Indian traditions of performance, classical and postclassical.
Despite the apparent dominance of western influences, however, the overwhelming cre-
ative impulse in modern Indian theatre of the later nineteenth century was to indigenize and
assimilate the ‘foreign’ models to performative structures that would be intelligible in the linguistic
and cultural registers of their immediate audiences. The subjects of representation were drawn
from the repertoire of Indian myth, history, legend and folklore that was familiar and culturally
resonant in itself, and could also give figurative expression to the emerging socio-political concerns
of a reform-minded colonized society. While modes such as realism, naturalism and symbolism
informed the text of drama, indigenous traditions of music, dance and spectacle came to dom-
inate the styles of presentation. More ambitiously, the creative and theoretical constituents
of modernity were carefully accommodated to classically derived concepts such as natya
(aestheticized performance), sahitya (literature), natak (drama), rangmanch (the stage, or the theatre
more broadly), prekshan (spectatorship) and rasa (aesthetic experience). Instead of English, major
Indian languages such as Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati and Kannada emerged as the
primary media of original theatrical composition for both print and performance. They also
served as recipient languages for the prolific translation and adaptation of European and Indian
canonical plays, and as the media of interlingual circulation within the modern oeuvre, thus
establishing the models of intercultural and intracultural exchange that continue to mark urban
performance culture prominently in India today. As the imperial language, English served as
the all-important conduit through which European discourses entered the Indian languages, for
effective circulation and transregional absorption. After 1870, urban theatre also took on an

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increasingly active and interventionist role in colonial politics, leading to the Dramatic
Performances Control Act in 1876, and widespread suppression and censorship by the colonial
government during the following five decades.
These colonial formations in theatre began to weaken after the arrival of talking cinema
(c. 1930), and became the objects of stringent critique during the years of war, famine,
progressive Left politics and militant anticolonialism in the 1940s. Since independence in 1947,
still newer forms of authorship, textuality, production and reception have reshaped and
transformed urban Indian theatre, in conjunction with postcolonial discourses which have
thoroughly problematized the concepts of modernity, tradition and contemporaneity by creating
radical connections between the past and the present. The history of modern urban theatre in
India is thus a complex interplay of continuities and disjunctions, and from an early-twenty-
first century vantage point, it seems to fall into four broad phases:

1 The period of inception (c. 1790–1870), which was marked by a strong critical interest among
the urban intelligentsia, especially in the Calcutta and Bombay regions, in the potential
value of Western-style theatre for Indian audiences in Indian languages. This led to limited
forms of entrepreneurship, the founding of culturally conscious amateur theatre societies,
and upper-class support for performances in private theatres of various kinds. In Calcutta,
the capital of British India, theatre activity also oscillated for quite some time between the
poles of Bengali and English, with Indian actors performing occasionally in British produc-
tions, theatre societies producing work in both languages, and major authors practising
bilingual writing. These developments gave the theatre great prominence as a new urban
genre, but did not create stable forms of artistic, institutional and material organization (for
a discussion of key institutions and events during this period, see Chatterjee 2007: 17–68).
2 The period of consolidation (c. 1870–1930), when theatre became a fully-fledged commercial
as well as literary form, and Indian languages came into their own as theatrical media. The
Bengali public theatre in Calcutta, and two Bombay-based institutions – the Parsi theatre
(using Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati) and the Marathi natak mandalis (theatre troupes) devoted
to sangeet nataks (musical plays) – were the principal forms of entertainment-oriented
commercial activity during this period, with primary locations in metropolitan areas but
access to a wider national audience. Focusing on theatre as a business, all three organizational
models gave primacy to performance over text, and depended on resident or closely associated
playwrights whose work had a shifting relationship with the medium of print. However,
as a literary genre, ‘drama’ also attracted the attention of major and minor authors who
theorized its role in a national cultural renaissance, and practised it (in verse or prose) on
a scale large enough to give it literary visibility in a number of languages that were theatrically
less active than Bengali and Marathi – notably Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu
and Malayalam. Some of these authors were successful on stage while others remained closet
playwrights, but collectively they forged a lasting connection between theatre and the modern
culture of print. The high colonial period in theatre was thus a complex conjuncture of
art and commerce, with playwrights, impresarios, actors and artists creating a very wide
range of permutations between highbrow textuality and lowbrow live entertainment.
3 The period of revision (c. 1940–1955), when global crises, competition with the medium of
film, cultural movements on the Left and new conceptions of a ‘national theatre’ came
together in an emphatic rejection of the forms and institutions of colonial-era theatre. The
displacement of commercial theatre by cinema was a ‘natural’ process to some extent because
films yoked capital more efficiently to mechanically reproducible mass entertainment, and
had superior technological means for negotiating realism and spectacle. But colonial theatre

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was also the target of an extended ideological critique from three distinct quarters: the Indian
People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), the nationwide populist movement founded in 1943;
cultural theorists and bureaucrats who imagined a utopian role for theatre in the artistic
life of the new nation; and theatre artists (playwrights, directors, actors) who found the
profit -motive incompatible with their creative goals. These divergent arguments led to a
common outcome – the delinking of serious urban theatre from commercial modes
of production – which still continues to define the conditions for theatre work in India
today.
4 The period of post-independence expansion (c. 1955 to the present), during which urban Indian
theatre has emerged as a major ‘new national and postcolonial’ field of theory and practice,
historically unprecedented in its scale and variety, and largely non-commercial in its modes
of material organization. The early post-independence decades (1955–1975) were shaped
by major playwrights and directors who chose to redefine theatre as a verbal and social art
by distancing themselves equally from the obsolete modernity of colonial theatre, both literary
and popular; from Left populism; and from the dictates of the nation-state about how ‘the
future Indian drama’ could contribute to cultural reconstruction. This formative phase
produced classic plays grounded in the narratives of myth and history or belonging to social-
realist, anti-realist, existentialist, absurdist and Left-political modes, all but the last category
containable under the expansive umbrella of modernism. Since the 1970s, modernist impulses
have been counterbalanced by the ‘theatre of roots’ movement, which has critiqued
Westernized conventions of representation, especially proscenium realism, as derivative and
‘extrinsic’, and argued for an authentically Indian modernity derived from ‘intrinsic’ styles
of anti-realistic and environmental presentation. Hence the contest over alternative
conceptions of Indianness and Indian modernity is an inherent feature of contemporary
theatre discourse, creating antitheses such as realism versus anti-realism, modern versus tradi-
tional conventions of staging, urban versus rural modes of existence and cosmopolitanism
versus cultural nationalism, to name some key points of contention. There are also a number
of significant contemporary practices that position themselves outside the polemic of the
modern/anti-modern and colonial/postcolonial debates: street theatre, protest theatre,
feminist theatre, performance art by practitioners of both genders, the theatre of marginalized
communities such as Dalits, or ostracized groups of transgender/transvestite performers
around the country.

This synoptic view of the ‘modern period’ underscores the central generative paradox, that
Indian theatrical modernity is at once inseparable from, and impossible to contain within, the
parameters of Euro-modernity, because it represents the intersection of colonial and postcolonial
processes with a much older, multilingual and multigeneric indigenous theatre and performance
culture. For the same reason, Indian theatre has a nebulous relation to models of colonial and
postcolonial cultural expression – for example, those dominant in the ex-colonies of sub-Saharan
Africa and the Caribbean – that are predicated on the primacy of European languages as the
media of original composition. As art, entertainment and social text, contemporary Indian theatre
thus connects in various ways with theatre practices around the world; as a multilingual site of
aesthetic and political contests in a non-western nation moving towards and beyond political
independence, it constitutes a unique postcolonial field.
The remainder of this chapter takes up some key formations of the post-1850 period, and
considers their constitutive role in the evolution of Indian theatrical modernity across the
colonial/postcolonial divide. The sphere of modern Indian theatre is too large, heterogeneous
and dispersed for a descriptive chronological survey to be feasible: I focus, instead, on discrete

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processes and events that have exerted a shaping influence for well over a century, and continue
to inform the volatile conditions of the present. I am concerned, first, with a form of ‘cultural
recursivess’ that finds expression in the mid-nineteenth century, and has made the ‘modernity’
of the new urban theatre deeply intertextual with premodern ‘tradition’ at the levels of theory,
taxonomy and practice. Second, the emergence and phenomenal growth of print culture during
the nineteenth century leads to a fundamental redefinition of authorship in urban theatre, and
creates a new set of relations between playwriting, print and performance that adjust to the
transformations of the post-independence period. Third, India’s intracultural history of multi-
lingual literacy, and the sustained intercultural encounter between major indigenous languages
and the western literary-theatrical canon, have stimulated the activities of translation, trans-
culturation and multilingual circulation on a scale that has gradually encompassed the nation as
well as the world. Fourth, challenges to commercial modes of organization in urban theatre
even during the high period of colonial-era commercialism, and the seemingly irrevocable
dismantling of the theatrical marketplace in the mid-twentieth century, have destabilized the
material conditions of production, and created a culture of urban performance that offers
work of ‘professional’ quality without the concomitant support structures. Finally, an overview
of the post-independence period from an early-twenty-first century standpoint indicates the
presence of a ‘new national’ canon in urban theatre, but the plurality and increasing
decentralization of theatre practices in India make it imperative for scholars and critics to postulate
modernity in terms that go well beyond the nation and any one canon.

Cultural recursiveness
The secular and commercialized colonial theatre in cities such as Calcutta and Bombay was a
new historical formation that could not have appeared without the direct influence of English
touring companies, Victorian-style theatre architecture and European drama, especially the plays
of Shakespeare. It is interesting to note, therefore, that by the mid-nineteenth century, the new
modes were perceived mainly as a means of restoring theatre to its ancient pre-eminence as an
Indian cultural form. The seminal event in this process was the European ‘discovery’ of classical
Sanskrit theatre, which began with Sir William Jones’ 1789 translation of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala,
and was continued by translators and/or scholars such as H. H. Wilson, Sylvain Lévi, Sten
Konow, Ernest Horrwitz and A. B. Keith (c. 1830–1930), who established drama as the premier
Sanskrit genre and Kalidasa as its pre-eminent practitioner – an iconic and precocious ‘Indian
Shakespeare’. This conspicuous orientalist investment in India’s classical past offered Indian authors
a cultural system of their ‘own’ that was equal in complexity and prestige to the new foreign
models, and could join with them to produce an admirable new synchresis that would be both
Indian and modern.
The very first full-length modern Indian prose play, Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Sharmishtha,
is a paradigmatic example of these intersecting temporalities and cultural systems. Dutt based
the play on a well-known episode in the Mahabharata, in which the celebrated King Yayati is
cursed to premature old age, but escapes that fate by persuading his youngest son, Puru, to
assume the curse. Dutt wrote it in a few weeks in 1858 because he wanted to offer a worthwhile
Bengali play for performance at the Belgatchia Villa theatre in north Calcutta, which was
patronized by the Rajas of Paikpara. ‘The genius of the Drama,’ he felt, ‘ha[d] not yet received
even a moderate degree of development in this country’, and the objective in Sharmishtha was
to create not merely a ‘dramatic poem’ but a stageable work (Dutt 1982: 571). Dutt’s English
translation appeared the following year under the anglicized title of Sermista, and in the brief
advertisement he described the original play as ‘the first attempt in the Bengali language to

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produce a classical and regular Drama’ of the kind that could contribute to ‘our rising national
Theatre’ (Dutt 1859: ix).
The Sharmishtha/Sermista pairing exhibits Dutt’s plural cultural allegiances in that it attempts
to create western-style drama in Bengali with classical myth and Sanskrit dramaturgy as the
building blocks, and English as a new translational medium for disseminating the hybrid product
nationally and internationally. This is the balancing act of being ‘Bengali/Indian and English/
western at the same stroke’, of connecting to a high cultural indigenous past while ‘following
the modernist principles of European culture as reflected in the theories and praxis of European
theatre’ (Chatterjee 2007: 107). As Dutt’s references to the ‘genius of the drama’ and the model
of a ‘classical and regular Drama’ also make clear, his goal is nothing less than to restore this
genre to the premier status it had in classical culture. The past thus emerges as the highest form
of cultural capital in the nationalist project of regeneration, which becomes the Bengal, and
subsequently the Indian, Renaissance.
My second example of the long reach of the past involves a range of classical Sanskrit
genre-terms that resurface in the nineteenth century, and continue in the twentieth, to function
as formal, theoretical and taxonomic signifiers in modern Indian theatre. The most important
of these – ‘natak’ – appears in chapter 20 of Bharata’s Natyasastra, at the head of a system of
classification that names the ten principal kinds of drama and establishes qualitative differences
between them. As in the Aristotelian description of tragedy, the defining features of the natak
are familiarity, seriousness, unity and amplitude. It ‘has for its subject-matter a well-known story,
[and] for its Hero a celebrated person of exalted nature’; in an appropriate number of ‘richly
furnished’ acts, it describes the hero’s ‘many superhuman powers and exploits such as, success
[in different undertakings] and amorous pastimes’ (Ghosh 1950: 356). Moreover, it focuses on
a few main characters rather than on a large cast, and enforces social hierarchies by placing
elevated characters in the regular acts and servants only in the interludes. Of the remaining
dramatic kinds discussed in the Natyasastra, the most significant for modern practice are the
prakanran (full-length play with an invented plot), prahasan (farce), vyayog (episode covering a
single day) and ank (act), while the term rupak refers to dramatic form in general.
The influence that the Sanskrit system of classification has exerted on the Indian languages
since the early nineteenth century is an accurate measure of the complex process by which
‘tradition’, recovered and mediated by orientalism, informs and legitimizes ‘modernity’ in Indian
theatre. In the formative stages of modern urban dramatic writing, the old terminology
establishes a genealogical and generic connection between classical and modern drama to
underscore two general principles: that the modern forms have a high classical heritage, and
that modern authors are conscious of this heritage and equal to the challenge of sustaining it
in the present. In the modern history of the natak as both concept and artefact, for instance,
three facets are worth highlighting. The first is the compulsion among modern practitioners to
name the genre by making it an intrinsic part of the title or subtitle of a play – a practice they
borrow directly from the ancients. Thus the seventh-century Venisamhara natak of Narayana
Bhatt in Sanskrit has an exact titular counterpart in the mid-nineteenth century Sharmishtha
natak of Michael Madhusudan Dutt in Bengali. Second, natak emerges even in the early modern
decades as a versatile term for a wide range of modern dramatic practices which include new
plays in the Indian languages as well as translations of western plays, such as Harchandra Ghosh’s
Bhanumati chittabilas natak (a version of The Merchant of Venice, Bengali, 1853), or G. B. Deval’s
Jhunjharrao natak (an adaptation of Othello, Marathi, 1890). Third, and most important, natak
serves as the stable qualifying term in the naming of a plethora of modern dramatic genres,
resulting in a versatile taxonomy that ranges from samajik natak (social play), aitihasik natak (history
play) and sangeet natak (musical play), to samasya natak (problem play), nukkad natak (street-corner

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play) and kavya natak (verse play). Instead of representing just one of ten distinct dramatic kinds
(as in the Natyasastra), in modern Indian usage natak comes to stand for a dramatic work of
varying length, subject matter and linguistic style which the author and/or audience perceive
as a work of literary and artistic merit. The recursive reference to the cultural past that began
in the mid-nineteenth century has thus not only continued but proliferated in the present: the
‘poetics’ of Indian theatrical modernity is to a significant extent the ‘history’ of the formative
and generative value of the classical terminology for playwrights, theatre professionals and
audiences alike.

Authorship, print and performance

Authorship is a critical but constantly shifting avocation in modern Indian theatre because of
the complex ways in which the categories of drama, theatre, print and performance intersect
with the processes of orality and writing, both historically and in specific colonial and postcolonial
contexts. The classical, postclassical and premodern ‘legacies’ in theatre are mainly of literary
authorship dissociated from the performance event (as in the case of playwrights such as Kalidasa
and Bhasa), or the performance event dissociated from proprietary authorship, literary or other-
wise (as in the extensive array of ritualistic, devotional, folk-popular and balletic performance
genres that constitute premodern Indian ‘theatre’ between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries).
As a modern institution, therefore, authorship takes shape in India only over the course of the
nineteenth century, and in the specific fields of drama and theatre it is mediated by two entirely
new configurations: the culture of print, which arrives belatedly around 1800, and urban
commercial theatre, which assumes its fully developed metropolitan form by the 1870s. At one
end, the conjuncture of modern subjectivity, print and the burden of the (newly rediscovered)
past foregrounds the figure of the author and sutures drama to literary ambition, programmes
of nationalist cultural renewal and projects of social reform. At the other end, the dominance
of the profit motive in new forms of commercial urban performance orients theatre towards
entertainment and spectacle, and turns the author into one more kind of ‘theatre worker’.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Indian playwrights have occupied numerous positions
between these polarities, creating a wide range of oppositional as well as complementary rela-
tions between the mediums of print and performance. In the commercial urban theatre of
colonial cities such as Calcutta and Bombay, for example, the unstable relationships between
print and theatre form along three axes that can be defined respectively as the predominantly
or exclusively literary, the literary-performative and the predominantly or exclusively perform-
ative. The literary pole, definable heuristically as ‘drama’, implies authorial self-consciousness,
writing, textuality, print, ambitious programmes of cultural enlightenment and reform, and
communities of readers. The performative pole, definable as ‘theatre’, implies authorial abjection,
orality, institutionalized performance, competitive commercial production, popular entertain-
ment, the profit motive and communities of viewers. The middle position, representing more
the exception than the norm in colonial India, implies practices that draw drama and theatre
together through work that is relatively ‘serious’ or ‘highbrow’, but intended primarily for success
on the stage. These distinctions, which seem quite anomalous in comparison with western
practices, capture quite accurately the authorial positions of the 1860–1940 period.
The first notable cluster consists of playwrights for whom the dramatic form is an important
exercise of authorship within the sphere of modern print culture, and whose work consequently
has its primary, though not its only, existence in print. Michel Madhusudan Dutt (1824–73),
Dinabandhu Mitra (1830–73) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) in Bengali, and Bhartendu
Harishchandra (1850–86) and Jaishankar Prasad (1889–1937) in Hindi, are the principal authors

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in this category, covering a working time-span from the late 1850s to the 1930s. As foundational
literary figures who exercise a transformative influence on the multiple genres they practise,
they are acutely conscious of the classical origins of the natak form, its proximity to the western
‘play’ and its high cultural value in the present, but their connection to the theatre is erratic,
adversarial or non-existent.
The second important type of colonial authorship involves a large body of dramatic writing
that is produced specifically for performance, but also leaves a substantial, if not always
‘significant’, impression in print. In the Calcutta public theatre, impresarios such as Girish Chandra
Ghosh (1844–1912) and Sisir Kumar Bhaduri (1889–1959) were playwright-actor-theatre
managers in the tradition of David Garrick, functioning as key organizational figures at the Great
National Theatre and the Star Theatre, respectively, in two different generations. Among the
professional playwrights who were supported by this system, Kshirode Prasad Bidyabinode
(1863–1927) and D. L. Roy (1863–1913) were the most prolific and significant, keeping up a
steady supply of plays based on myth, history and social issues. In Marathi theatre, the
resident/itinerant natak mandalis were founded by (and often named after) seminal figures such
as Annasaheb Kirloskar (1843–85), Bal Gandharva (1888–1967) and Keshavrao Bhonsle
(1890–1921), with resident playwrights who were also sometimes actors and directors. Two
generations of leading Marathi playwrights – Govind Ballal Deval (1855–1916), Shripad Krishna
Kolhatkar (1871–1934), Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar (1872–1948) and Ram Ganesh Gadkari
(1885–1919) – wrote for the natak mandalis, and collectively moulded the form of the sangeet
natak as the vehicle for old and new narratives to produce the distinctive colonial culture of
performance in Marathi theatre history. Other concurrent traditions in Marathi that became
much stronger in the 1930s were those of the ‘social problem’ play, contemporary urban comedy
and farce, with Mama Warerkar (1883–1964), Shridhar V. Vartak (1885–1950) and M. G.
Rangnekar (b. 1907) as the leading authors, and Ibsen as the major European influence.
The third major category of colonial-era writers consists of ‘playwrights’ who were actually
salaried employees of the Parsi theatre companies, producing scripts that had a much more erratic
relation to print at the time of original composition. The textual impress that Parsi theatre created
during its most active periods was very small in comparison with its large-scale theatrical presence
over nearly a century, and its hold on the popular imagination. Among the three leading
‘professional’ playwrights of the Parsi theatre, Narayan Prasad Betab (1872–1945) follows the
pattern of near-invisibility in print. The output of Pandit Radheshyam Kathavachak (1890–1963),
in contrast, displays the print/performance complementarity typical of the literary-popular
playwrights, though his plays are distinctly lowbrow, and the total output includes an
autobiography (reprinted in 2004) as well as texts that the author produced as a professional
‘reciter of religious/mythic tales’ (katha-vachak). For Agha Hashra Kashmiri (1879–1935), an
almost mythical figure in Parsi and Urdu theatre, the publication record is scanty until the early
1950s, but after 1954 there is an unbroken succession of individual plays in multiple editions,
collections of two or three plays and one-volume ‘selected works’, with the multi-volume
collected works appearing in 2004. Kashmiri is therefore the professional playwright chosen for
the most determined effort at authorial recuperation and rehabilitation by those who wish to
preserve the legacy of Parsi theatre, and the performance culture it fostered in Urdu and Hindi
(see Hansen 2011).
In the post-independence period, the colonial models of authorship have undergone
substantial revision. The binarism of ‘literary/textual’ and ‘popular/performative’ has ceased to
exist, and the intermediary category of the literary-performative has evolved as the instrumental
condition, both in itself and as a corrective to the extremes on either side. In fact, the
text/performance opposition becomes unsustainable in a situation where the activity of

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‘authorship’ has to be charted along a continuum connecting the textual and performative poles.
The first group of major post-independence authors, such as Dharamvir Bharati (1926–1997),
Mohan Rakesh (1925–1972), Girish Karnad (b. 1938) and Mahesh Elkunchwar (b. 1939), are
literary playwrights of the same kind as Tagore and Harishchandra, but like popular playwrights
such as Khadilkar and Atre (and to a much greater extent), they also belong simultaneously to
the economies of print and performance, and produce work that is ‘serious’ as well as ‘successful’
in both modes (Figure 11.1). The second group includes figures such as Vijay Tendulkar
(1928–2008), Satish Alekar (b. 1949) and Chandrashekhar Kambar (b. 1938), who maintain
equally strong literary identities, but collaborate actively and over the long term with specific
theatre groups as resident playwrights, actors and directors, especially of their own work. The
third category involves playwrights who take on the full spectrum of theatrical roles. Utpal Dutt
(1929–1993), Badal Sircar (1925–2011), Habib Tanvir (1923–2009), K. N. Panikkar (b. 1928),
Ratan Thiyam (b. 1948) and Mahesh Dattani (b. 1958) are authors, actors, directors and founder-
managers of their own non-commercial theatre groups. Tanvir, Panikkar and Thiyam are also
the leading director–authors who have developed a range of non-realistic, non-proscenium forms
by drawing upon indigenous folk, tribal, classical, ritualistic and martial arts traditions. Sircar,
in contrast, was interested in creating a minimalist theatre that could provide an alternative to

Figure 11.1 Scene from Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha yug (Blind Epoch, 1954), directed for the
National School of Drama Repertory Company by Ebrahim Alkazi, New Delhi,
1974. The open-air stage is located within Purana Qila (Old Fort), a sixteenth-
century fortification on an ancient archaeological site by the Yamuna river.
(Courtesy of National School of Drama)

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urban realist drama as well as rural folk forms. Influenced by Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’
and Richard Schechner’s ‘environmental theatre, his idea of a ‘Third Theatre’ resulted in largely
non-verbal, body-centred vehicles for non-proscenium indoor and outdoor performance, in
cities and villages. In addition, a growing body of authors/auteurs outside the ‘mainstream’ have
opened up possibilities for the strategic exercise of authorship from many other political-cultural
positions. Two key figures in the street theatre movement – Safdar Hashmi, a founding mem-
ber of Jana Natya Manch (JANAM), and Prasanna, the founder of Samudaya – are published
playwrights and theorists as well as activists. A similar balance of activism and articulation is
visible in the theatre work of feminist authors, organizers, and performers (see concluding section,
below).
Except for some forms of street theatre, protest theatre and feminist performance, then, the
constitution of authorship through print is now a ubiquitous four-part process, regardless of
the kind of theatre a playwright practises. 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, is followed by wider circulation through translation into multiple Indian
languages, including and especially English. The process of critical recognition brings a play
much wider attention than performance-related commentary, and institutionalization within
the academy absorbs it into the pedagogy of literature. This cycle of print, translation, criticism
and pedagogy is as relevant to the indigenized, body-centred, aurally and visually oriented
total theatre of Tanvir, Panikkar et al. as to the text-centred theatre of Rakesh, Tendulkar and
Karnad. Performance may be the primary intended mode of existence in many contemporary
forms of theatre, but with the work of every major author available to readers, often in multiple
languages, the printed text has come to represent an equally continuous parallel mode.

Multilingual literacy, translation, and transculturation

The unbroken history of multilingual literacy on the Indian subcontinent over two and a half
millennia is, as Sheldon Pollock suggests, ‘a story of complex creativity and textual devotion
with few parallels in history’ (2003: 31), with the inherent heterogeneity of indigenous
formations being complicated much further by successive waves of foreign conquest and
colonization. As the subcontinental equivalent of Greek and Latin, Sanskrit gave rise to more
than twelve major modern Indian languages of the Indo-European family, but after 1200 CE
made way for Persian, and then for English, as the pan-Indian languages of the ruling class.
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the orientalist recovery of India’s classical past forged
positive connections between Sanskrit and the modern European languages that deviated radically
from the usual reductive hierarchy of colonial power relations. Contrapuntally, the institution-
alization of English as the medium of education in British India after 1835 connected it on a
monumental scale to the modern Indian languages, and made it the vital point of contact between
India and the west.
This plurality and interconnectedness of languages has determined the historical conditions
germane to modern Indian theatre in its various modes of existence (writing, publication and
performance), and the primary vehicle of linguistic-cultural exchange is the activity of translation.
From the vantage point of the present, the modes of connection can be analysed into the following
chronologically overlapping strands: (i) the translation of Sanskrit plays into the modern Indian
languages; (ii) the translation of Sanskrit plays into the modern European languages; (iii) the
translation of Shakespeare into the modern Indian languages; (iv) the translation of other English,
European, American and world theatre into the modern Indian languages; and (v) the translation
of modern plays from one Indian language into another, including English, which is now both

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an Indian and a western language. Categories (i) and (v) are intracultural modes of exchange
between the Indian languages that give individual works and textual clusters both transregional and
national currency. Category (ii) represents the only substantial intercultural carrying across of
Indian drama into western mediums, with the translated works belonging exclusively to the classical
Sanskrit period. The two remaining categories – (iii) and (iv) – are intercultural or transcultural
modes of colonial and postcolonial exchange in which the Indian languages serve as recipient
media for Euro-American and world theatre from all periods.
In this network of connections, there is a fundamental theoretical distinction to be made
between two forms of exchange: interlingual translation and intercultural or transcultural
appropriation. The most common Indian terms for interlingual translation are bhashantar
or bhashantaran (literally the ‘difference’ or ‘movement’ of language), and anuvad (repetition or
emulation). From the beginning of the modern period, however, the ‘translation’ of western
and world drama into Indian languages has consisted mainly in a form of transculturation for
which the general Indian terms are rupantar or rupantaran (the ‘difference’ or ‘movement’ of
form; ‘changed or new form, transformation; version, rendering, adaptation’), and anuyojan (the
remaking of ancient narratives or unfamiliar forms of expression through a new artistic
consciousness). This alternative terminology denotes a search for equivalence in cultural as well
as linguistic signs, and a meticulous ‘translation of difference’ so that a play embodies the cultural
system as well as the language of its receiving audience. The original works as well as their
‘adaptations’ can therefore be conceived of as ‘transcultural intertexts’, bound in a relationship
that postcolonial theory describes mainly as the ex-colonial periphery ‘writing back’ to the ex-
imperial centre. In India, however, the practice began during the colonial period itself with the
large-scale transculturation of Shakespeare, and has grown immeasurably since independence,
as the canon not only of western but world drama has found its way onto the Indian stage, and
into the print culture of all the major Indian languages, including English. What appears
cumulatively over two centuries in urban India is an interest in translating, ‘rewriting’ and
appropriating earlier drama and performance that is almost as compelling and pervasive as the
impulse towards original composition.
All five strands of translation/transculturation have had a notable impact on modern Indian
theatre, and merit brief discussion. The simultaneous translation of Sanskrit drama into the modern
European as well as Indian languages by European and Indian translators (scholars, poets,
playwrights, philologists, enthusiasts) was a singular event in colonial and postcolonial literary-
cultural history because it involved a uniquely triangulated transhistorical exchange: it made a
redemptive cultural past available to both the colonizer and the colonized (albeit for very different
cultural ends), and inserted ‘tradition’ instrumentally into ‘modernity’. The bibliographic record
of this cultural interweaving is impressive in scale: for the 1800–2012 period, the Library of
Congress catalogue lists almost 4,000 translations of the eight principal Sanskrit playwrights
(Kalidasa, Bhasa, Shudraka, Bhavabhuti, Shri Harsha, Vishakhadutt, Krishna Mishra and
Mahendra Vikram Varman) into languages such as English, French, German, Italian and Spanish,
and about 1,800 translations of the same playwrights into the Indian languages, notably Hindi,
Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Kannada and Gujarati.
In post-independence India, the Sanskrit dramatic heritage has assumed a complex and
multidimensional cultural role in the theatre that goes well beyond the boundaries of textual
translation, both Indian and western. New scholarly editions of the principal playwrights have
appeared both in the original Sanskrit and in translation in most major languages, including
works of high cultural capital such as the versions of Shudraka’s Mrichchhakatika (The Little Clay
Cart, 1961) and Kalidasa’s Shakuntala (1965) by the leading Hindi playwright Mohan Rakesh.
Sanskrit plays are performed in the original (productions by K. N. Panikkar, Chandradasan), in

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translation (productions by Shanta Gandhi, Vijaya Mehta, Ebrahim Alkazi, Ratan Thiyam) and
in inventive adaptations (Habib Tanvir’s ‘folk’ versions of Mrichchhakatika as Mitti ki gadi, Bhasa’s
Urubhangam (The Shattered Thighs) as Duryodhana and Vishakhadutt’s Mudrarakshasa).
Traditionalist scholars and practitioners, especially proponents of the ‘theatre of roots’, have
urged a return to the Natyasastra as the foundation for a contemporary representational aesthetic
in all the performing arts, with the premodern indigenous forms restoring a cultural unity that
was lost during the colonial period. In a decolonizing post-independence culture, Sanskrit drama
and poetics thus represent an elite tradition that offers the richest resources for the recovery of
indigeneity, cultural authenticity and Indianness, whether it is re-presented in its pristine forms
or transformed in the present. At every level, the Sanskrit legacy in the original and in
translation continues to inform modern theatre.
Even more pervasive and influential than the Sanskrit networks, however, is the translation
and transculturation (bhashantar and rupantar) of Anglo-European-American drama. The first
major phase in this process was the arrival of Shakespeare in the colonial Indian classroom
and the dissemination of his works across the full spectrum of modern Indian languages
(c. 1850–1920). From the beginning, the absorption of Shakespeare was dominated by trans-
cultural adaptations rather than interlingual translations because of the pressing desire among
theatre professionals to Indianize the playwright for the stage. The ‘popular’ end of this process
was represented by plays such as G. B. Deval’s Jhunjharrao (Marathi, 1890), a sensational stage
musical version of Othello, and Urdu adaptations for the Parsi stage such as Betab’s Gorakh dhandha
(The Comedy of Errors, 1912) or Kashmiri’s Dilfaroza (The Merchant of Venice, 1900), Safed khoon
(King Lear, 1906) and Shaheed-i-naaz (Measure for Measure, 1914). At the ‘literary’ end, Bhartendu
Harishchandra, the ‘father’ of modern Hindi literature, adapted The Merchant of Venice as
Durlabh bandhu (Invaluable Friend), and the social reformer Gopal Ganesh Agarkar adapted Hamlet
into Marathi under the title Wikara vilasita in 1882, using the play as an example of the
‘malformations’ caused by sensual self-indulgence among those who are socially privileged.
Since the 1940s, Shakespeare has been enmeshed in the post-independence literary-artistic
renaissance in even more complex ways. Leading poets such as Harivansha Rai Bachchan and
Raghuvir Sahay (Hindi), Vinda Karandikar and V. V. Shirwadkar (Marathi), Masti Venkatesha
Iyengar (Kannada) and Firaq Gorakhpuri (Urdu) have translated or adapted Shakespeare’s major
tragedies, comedies and romances. These and other versions have been brought to the stage
by leading directors such as Utpal Dutt, Ebrahim Alkazi, K. V. Subbanna, Alyque Padamsee
and the East German director Fritz Bennewitz, best known for his collaborative productions
of Bertolt Brecht in India. Performance acquires perhaps its greatest level of complexity when
the Shakespearean adaptation incorporates a major indigenous form or presentational style, as
in B. V. Karanth’s yakshagana version of Macbeth (translated by Sahay as Barnam vana; see Figure
11.2), Sadanam Balakrishnan’s Kathakali King Lear and Othello and Habib Tanvir’s Midsummer
Night’s Dream (Kamdeva ka apna, vasant ritu ka sapna, 1993) in the Chhattisgarhi folk style (for
a detailed discussion of Shakespeare in India, see Shormishtha Panja’s chapter in this volume).
Since the 1920s, the translation of other foreign drama into Indian languages has moved well
beyond Shakespeare and the exigencies of commercial theatre performance, and now represents
an ever-expanding field of published texts and notable performances, although the geography
of translation continues to be circumscribed. The example of Hindi, the language containing
the largest body of world drama in modern translation, shows that western Europe has retained
its centrality as the locus of original works, while the sphere of translation has expanded backwards
to include the classical Greek playwrights, and forwards to include many early modern and middle
modern authors, such as Calderón, Ben Jonson, Molière, Racine, Rostand, Beaumarchais,
Goldoni, Giradoux, Sheridan, Lessing and Büchner. The core energy in translation, however,

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Figure 11.2 Uttara Baokar as Lady Macbeth in Barnam vana (Shakespeare’s Macbeth),
translated into Hindi by Raghuvir Sahay, and directed for the National School
of Drama Repertory Company by B. V. Karanth, New Delhi, 1979.
(Courtesy National School of Drama)

is focused on the major modern/ist figures of northern and western Europe – Ibsen, Chekhov,
Gogol, Gorki, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw, Maeterlinck, Pirandello, Galsworthy, Brecht, Lorca,
Anouilh, Sartre, Camus, Dürenmatt, Beckett, Ionesco, Wesker and Fo, among others. The interest
in American drama has remained mainly limited to Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and
Tennessee Williams, with an occasional play by William Saroyan varying the sequence of classics
by the older trifecta.
The value placed on translation is fully reflected in the succession of major authors in various
languages who have taken on the task of translating western plays. In addition to the major
translations of Shakespeare mentioned earlier, in Hindi the notable translator–author pairings
include Premchand and John Galsworthy (c. 1930); Rajendra Yadav and Chekhov (1958);
Kamleshwar and Brecht (1970); Raghuvir Sahay and Lorca (1985); and Safdar Hashmi and Gorky
(1989). In Marathi, another rich target language, Acharya Atre translated Molière; P. L.
Deshpande adapted Gogol, Sophocles and Somerset Maugham; Vijay Tendulkar and Vyankatesh
Madgulkar adapted Tennessee Williams; and V. V. Shirwadkar translated Maeterlinck, Oscar
Wilde and Tolstoy. Brecht is the playwright with the strongest list of Indian translators,
including C. T. Khanolkar, Madgulkar and P. L. Deshpande in Marathi, Badal Sircar in Bengali,
Habib Tanvir in Chhattisgarhi and K. V. Subbanna in Kannada. The scale and significance of
the translation activity cannot, however, obscure the issue that large regions of the world have
been left virtually untouched, among them Japan, China, Canada, Australia, the Caribbean, the
Middle East and Africa.

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The final process – the translation of modern Indian plays into multiple Indian languages,
including English – is intraculturally the most significant one. The transregional circulation of
plays during the colonial period was sporadic, but the decades since independence have
demonstrated that in Indian theatre the prompt recognition of new plays as contemporary classics
depends not so much on publication or performance in the original language of composition
as on the rapidity with which the plays are performed and (secondarily) published in other
languages. Such proliferation keeps a play in constant circulation among readers and viewers,
creating the layers of textual meaning and stage interpretation that become the measure of its
significance. This method of dissemination also generates – and has already generated – a body
of nationally circulating texts and performance vehicles that offers more convincing evidence
of the existence of a ‘national theatre’ than any other institutional, linguistic or bureaucratic
conception.
There are very specific mechanisms and artistic choices that have made the culture of trans-
lingual circulation possible in contemporary Indian theatre. The nationwide theatre movement
of the 1960s, which began the first major transregional initiatives, gave high priority to the
translation of important new plays, and succeeded in forging strong connections between the
Indian languages. Leading directors such as Satyadev Dubey (Bombay), Shyamanand Jalan
(Calcutta) and Rajinder Nath (Delhi) made a commitment to focus exclusively or mainly on
the production of new Indian plays, rather than foreign plays from any language or period.
Other prominent directors, such as Shombhu Mitra, Alkazi, Subbanna, Karanth and Arvind
Deshpande were more eclectic in their choices, but made productions of new works in
translation a key component of their practice. In addition, major playwrights translated each
other’s work so that important new plays could reach a larger audience of spectators and readers.
Girish Karnad translated Badal Sircar’s classic Ebong Indrajit (And Indrajit) into English, and Vijay
Tendulkar translated Karnad’s Tughlaq and Sircar’s Indrajit into Marathi. A cadre of accomplished
translators – among them Pratibha Agrawal, Santvana Nigam, Vasant Dev, B. R. Narayan, Shanta
Gokhale and Samik Bandyopadhyay – variously forged and sustained interlingual connections
between Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Hindi and English. Oxford University Press began
publishing Indian drama in English translation under its Three Crowns imprint in 1972, and
has since made the plays of Badal Sircar, Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar, Satish Alekar and
Mahesh Elkunchwar available to national and international audiences. In 1983, the Seagull
Foundation for the Arts in Calcutta also launched an ambitious programme of plays in English
translation, and over three decades the list has expanded to become the largest single archive
of contemporary Indian plays in a single target language.
Beyond these particularities, multilingualism and circulation in their post-independence forms
have had a profound effect on dramatic authorship, theatre theory, the textual life of drama and
the culture of performance: essentially, drama and theatre in each theatrically active language
are enhanced by the output in every other active language. Playwrights who fashion 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. They also construct authorship
and authority as activities that must extend across languages in order to sustain a national theatre
movement in a multilingual society. Significantly, although playwrights such as Tendulkar,
Mahesh Elkunchwar, Chandrashekhar Kambar and G. P. Deshpande write their plays exclusively
in their respective regional languages, much of their criticism appears directly in English.
Collectively, playwrights and directors have constructed 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 respective provinces as well as those of the nation.

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‘Anti-theatricality’ and the critique of commerce

Since the early modern period, the marketing of theatre as a form of commodified leisure in
the west has not precluded the valuation of drama and theatre as forms of cultural capital. However
powerful the theoretical attacks on ‘culinary’ or ‘opulent’ theatre, in practice commercial
superstructures such as those of Broadway and the West End have continued to serve as ultimate
forms of legitimation for not just popular but serious art. In India, the shift from patronal to
commercial relations took place in the course of the nineteenth century and entrepreneurial
energies fuelled urban theatre in the colonial metropolis for a time, making the entertainment-
for-profit model more or less viable from about 1870 to 1940. But the material transaction
between profit-seeking producers and paying consumers emerged as an intractable issue during
the transition from colonial to postcolonial modalities, and the profit motive shifted with a
vengeance from theatre to cinema during the 1940s. What we might describe as the second
‘modern revolution’ of the post-independence period has therefore taken place in a largely non-
commercial performance culture.
There were, in fact, two forms of opposition to mainstream colonial commercial practices
within the colonial period itself: the theory and practice of leading literary figures such as
Harishchandra, Tagore and Prasad, who were prolific playwrights but did not participate in the
culture of public performance; and the large body of more or less obscure printed drama which
showed an extraordinary engagement with drama as a form, but again independent of
performance contexts. The theoretical positions of Tagore et al. can be described as a ‘proto-
modernist antitheatricalism’ which, like the ‘constructive antitheatricalism’ of high-modernist
playwrights in Europe, devalues ‘stage performance’ precisely because of the high value placed
on ‘drama’ (see Puchner 2002: 2). All three writers use Sanskrit theatre as a touchstone and
poetry as the privileged creative medium at the heart of drama. Bharatendu persistently refers
to an individual play as a grantha – that is, a text or tome that has its primary existence in the
world of writing and print. Tagore rejects Wagner’s concept of the unified art work (which
brings together poetry, dance and music), western realism and even the notion that a play is
realized fully only in performance, just as Prasad rejects the idea that plays should be written
for the stage as a ‘serious misconception about the theatre: the real effort should in fact be to
provide a stage for drama’ (Prasad 1936: 414). The anti-theatricalism of these judgements is
both pointed and precise because all three authors have a common object of attack in the Parsi
theatre, which Prasad dismisses in his 1936 essay, ‘Rangmanch’ (‘The Stage’, 1936), as a repugnant
spectacle parading men in women’s roles.
The two decades following Prasad’s essay are singular in Indian theatre history not only because
the much-maligned colonial commercial structures came to a decisive end, but because serious
theatre was delinked from commercialized performance by a process that has yet to be reversed.
The first serious critique of colonial practices came from the Indian People’s Theatre Association
(IPTA), the nationwide theatre movement that was also linked to anti-Fascist and anti-
imperialist movements around the world. Its 1943 manifesto declared that art and literature
could have a future only if they expressed and inspired ‘the people’s struggles for freedom and
culture’ – a test that urban drama of the previous 70 years had failed signally because of its
dependence on middle-class conventionality, or its escape into ‘bad history and senseless
mythology’ (Pradhan 1979–1985: 1: 134, 136). An important part of the IPTA’s activist pro-
gramme was therefore to revive the traditional, folk and intermediary performance genres from
which nineteenth-century urban practitioners had distanced themselves, but which now appeared
to have exactly the qualities that would dislodge bourgeois urban forms (Figure 11.3).

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Figure 11.3 A scene from Bijon Bhattacharya’s Nabanna (The New Harvest, 1944), the play
produced most successfully around the nation by the Indian People’s Theatre
Association, under the direction of Shombhu Mitra.
(Courtesy of Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi)

As this Left cultural movement declined in the 1950s, the newly independent nation-state
stepped in to mediate a second phase of de-commercialization, this time in the name of a resurgent
Indianness. At the landmark 5-day Drama Seminar organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi
in April 1956, the unsuitability of colonial practices to a new national theatre culture and the
need to rescue theatre from the marketplace were two major topics. Influential discussants such
as the Indian-English novelist Mulk Raj Anand and the actor Balraj Sahni argued that the enclosed
auditorium, the proscenium stage, commercial ticket sales and naturalist staging were all
imperialist impositions alien to Indian habits of performance and spectatorship. The association
of drama with theatre companies was also a deterrent to serious playwriting, and had caused a
serious shortage of reputable playwrights and ‘good actable plays’ after independence. To create
a conceptual basis for their positions, the seminar participants devalued ‘professional’ (commercial)
theatre in the same measure that they valorized ‘amateur’ (non-commercial theatre), and con-
cluded that the ‘future hope for the establishment of a national theatre and dramatic renaissance’
lay in the ‘encouragement and promotion’ of amateur theatre (Kastuar 2007: 287–9, 305–6,
323).
The final strain in the rejection of commerce has proved to be the most powerful, and it
consists in a modernist rupture from the forms of colonial modernity in the work of the first
generation of post-independence playwrights. Major early-postcolonial modernists such as
Bharati, Tendulkar, Sircar, Karnad and Rakesh distance themselves equally from commercialism,
anti-theatrical literariness, IPTA-style populism and bureaucratic nationalism. During the 1950s
and 1960s (the formative decades for modernism), serious playwriting reveals either an unconscious

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attraction to the dramatic form on the part of playwrights who have no overt concern with
performance, or a conscious commitment to drama on the part of those who both desire and
expect performance, but not with any certainty. The availability of stable institutional theatre
structures is therefore not necessary to the existence of drama. But instead of producing closet
plays, these conditions produce major performable works that are in fact performed in multiple
languages with great success. Even at the beginning of their respective careers, the playwrights
mentioned above seem to be fully formed authors, while being acutely aware that they are not
part of any ongoing theatrical tradition. The performance culture that their work demands comes
into existence gradually, as the result of strategic collaborations between like-minded theatre
groups, directors, translators, actors and technical personnel. But market conditions continue
to be largely absent from theatre culture in India today, mainly because film, television and
video have come to stay as the dominant commercialized forms, while playwrights and theatre
artists have adjusted to, or actively embraced, a non-commercial ethic.

Twenty-first-century perspectives: centre, periphery, and plurality

At the 1956 Drama Seminar, Mulk Raj Anand described post-independence theatre practitioners
as ‘infants with clean slates in their hands’, well positioned to determine a utopian future course
for Indian drama. Six decades later, a more appropriate metaphor for the field of theatre is that
of a dense palimpsest in which the contours of a ‘new national canon’ are unmistakably, inevitably
visible. Many recent commentators have justly criticized this emergent centre for its predom-
inantly urban, middle-class, male outlook, and its separation from subaltern perspectives on gender,
sexuality, nation, class and caste. However, it is both reductive and misguided to argue (as Shayoni
Mitra does in a recent survey) that the accelerated processes of canon-formation after
independence were legislated by some ‘original proponents of postcolonial culture’ who wished
to institute ‘hegemonies of space, gender, language, and caste’ and functioned as ‘caretakers of
modern Indian theatre’ (2014: 66, 87) Such arguments fail to distinguish between the state’s
propagandist rhetoric and artistic practices that were in fact counter-hegemonic, strongly critical
of the nation-state and subject to impossible material conditions of survival. The energetic theatre
movement of the 1955–75 period became possible mainly because theatre artists around the
country grappled with the unstable conditions of writing and production, collaborated with
each other and brought new work onto the stage. Certain authors and works also now appear
central not because of carefully orchestrated processes of inclusion and exclusion, but because
readers, viewers and theatre makers have chosen to engage with them repeatedly: ‘canonicity’
in these cases is an effect that follows, not a cause that precedes, the always-changing parameters
of artistic value.
The so-called canon, moreover, does not privilege any one style or content and, beyond its
obvious limitations, is inclusive in its own way. Plays such as Tanvir’s Charandas chor (Charandas
the Thief, 1974) and Thiyam’s Chakravyuha (Battle Formation, 1984), which represent forms
of total theatre inspired by regional traditions of music, dance and/or martial arts, are no less
‘canonical’ than Rakesh’s Ashadh ka ek din (One Day in the Season of Rain, 1958), a modernist
reimagining of the life of Kalidasa, or Elkunchwar’s Wada chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion, 1985),
a masterpiece of domestic realism. Mahesh Dattani, the playwright in English who from the
beginning has challenged the status quo in relation to gender, class and sexuality in plays such
as Tara (1990) and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998), is no less visible than Girish Karnad,
whose groundbreaking plays in Kannada (such as Tughlaq, 1964, Hayavadana [Horse-Head], 1971
and Naga-mandala [Play with a Cobra], 1987) demystified the premodern narratives of myth,
history and folklore. As an urban practitioner of experimental-absurdist theatre in Marathi (e.g.

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Mahanirvan [The Great Departure], 1974), Satish Alekar has been no less influential than the
Kannada playwright Chandrashekhar Kambar, who is rooted in village culture and draws
extensively on folk narratives (as in Jokumaraswamy [1972]). The overtly political theatre of G.
P. Deshpande (Uddhwasta dharmashala [A Man in Dark Times], 1974) and Utpal Dutt (Mahavidroh
[The Great Rebellion], 1985) is just as visible as the avant-garde but no less political Third
Theatre of Badal Sircar (Spartacus, 1972; Procession, 1974). In the house of post-independence
theatre, there have been many mansions from the beginning, and cultural prescriptions of one
kind or another have had limited influence. Mitra is right, however, in arguing that the energies
of the originary post-independence movement have dissipated, and the 1990s have ushered in
‘a far more contingent and contestatory approach, a tactic of surviving in an increasingly neoliberal
and globalizing cultural landscape’ (2014: 65). My task in this concluding section is to underscore
the irreducible plurality of Indian theatre in the early twenty-first century, and to focus briefly
on two ‘representative’ sites of contestation – the ‘theatre of roots’ and the expanding sphere
of experimental theatre activity on the part of women practitioners.
In contemporary India, theatre is written and produced in about fifteen languages that vary
in their levels of activity, and exist in a hierarchical relation that adjusts to changes over a period
of time. In terms of original composition, Bengali and Marathi continue to be the two leading
languages, followed by Hindi, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Manipuri in
a second cluster, and English, Assamese, Oriya, Punjabi, Sindhi and Kashmiri in a third. Languages
in the first two clusters were already either prominent or visible during the colonial period;
those in the last cluster have emerged mainly after independence. As mentioned earlier, the
activity of translation has modified this hierarchy considerably, with Hindi and English (the
national link languages) emerging as the two most important target languages for translation
from the viewpoints of performance and publication, respectively. The medium of English also
makes Indian plays potentially available to a worldwide audience of readers, scholars, students
and theatre professionals, bridging the gap that has traditionally existed between these works
and Europhone/global audiences.
The locations of theatre activity around the country correspond to the complex linguistic
map outlined above. The three most active theatrical cities are the megapolises of Bombay,
Calcutta and Delhi, and each hosts theatre in multiple languages: Bombay has Marathi, Gujarati,
English and Hindi, Calcutta has Bengali, English and Hindi, and Delhi has Hindi, English,
Punjabi and Urdu. The second tier consists of two unusually active ‘regional’ venues, Pune and
Bangalore, and the city of Madras (Chennai), which was the capital of the Madras Presidency
in British India, and is now the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu. Pune, a city of 2.5 million
about 90 miles southeast of Bombay, has been home to many leading Marathi playwrights,
directors, theatre groups and actors, and offers both serious and popular theatre on a scale that
equals the output of the largest cities. Bangalore, the capital of the southern state of Karnataka,
is an information technology hub which experienced a 50 per cent increase in its population
between 2001 and 2011 (from 6.3 million to 9.6 million). Its dominant theatre language is
Kannada, followed by English, and a conjunction of major creative talent, entrepreneurship
and institutional support has made the city a hub on the national theatre map as well. Madras
is unusual because it has a significant tradition of theatre in English as well as in Tamil, in addition
to well-known experimental theatre groups and activist performance artists. It resembles
Bangalore in the quality, variety and quantity of theatre activity. The third tier consists of cities
such as Chandigarh, Bhopal, Heggodu, Trivandrum and Imphal, where the regional language
is dominant, although English or Hindi may make an occasional appearance. The prominence
of these venues in recent decades is explained at least in part by the presence of major
practitioners – Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry in Chandigarh, Habib Tanvir in Bhopal, K. V.

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Subbanna and his organization Ninasam in Heggodu, K. N. Panikkar in Trivandrum and Ratan
Thiyam, H. Kanhailal and Lokendra Arambam in Imphal. The final tier consists of cities such
as Lucknow, Jaipur, Patna, Sagar, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Nagpur, Hyderabad and Mysore, which
are important regional nodes in the national network, but are not associated with the creation
of important original work in theatre (Figure 11.4).
In material terms, how does this geographically dispersed and multilingual but non-
commercial field manage to survive and occasionally even thrive? To understand post-
independence theatre as an operative terrain we have to understand its institutional structures
and patterns of interpersonal connection. In the absence of a functioning marketplace and any
predictable or regular channels of production, the performance event in urban Indian theatre
has come to depend on a few critical factors. The first is the founding of a theatre group by a
director who remains connected with it for an extended period of time, providing artistic
leadership and shepherding resources. Shombhu Mitra’s Bohurupee, Utpal Dutt’s People’s Little
Theatre and Shyamanand Jalan’s Padatik in Calcutta, Vijaya Mehta’s Rangayan, Satyadev
Dubey’s Theatre Unit and Alyque Padamsee’s Theatre Group in Bombay, and Habib Tanvir’s
Naya Theatre, Rajinder Nath’s Abhiyan and Arvind Gaur’s Asmita in Delhi are metropolitan
examples of a model of long-term association that is also replicated in smaller cities around the
country. The groups maintain a precarious existence through private and corporate funding,
ticket sales and subsidized theatre spaces; there is no regular annual season; rehearsal space is
difficult to arrange and afford; actors are not always paid; and audiences are small though often
stable and supportive of the work of particular directors and groups. In their turn, playwrights
develop lifelong creative partnerships with one or more directors, often with very little
expectation of financial return. The major exceptions to this structure are state-supported
institutions of theatre training and patronage, notably the National School of Drama, which
launched a Repertory Company in 1964, and the Sangeet Natak Akademi, which provides
fellowships, grants, awards and production subsidies at the regional and national levels. The
second factor is an active commitment on the part of key directors to new Indian plays, which
otherwise compete in the sphere of performance with world drama in translation. The third
factor is geographical dispersal, at the regional level through multiple productions in the original
language of composition, and at the national level through translation.
Over six decades, other patterns of patronage and support have also had a chance to establish
themselves. A great deal of production activity is enabled by private and public cultural
organizations such as the Shri Ram Centre for Art and Culture in New Delhi, the National
Centre for the Performing Arts and Prithvi Theatre in Bombay, Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal and
the India Foundation for the Arts in Bangalore. Leading theatre organizations such as Nandikar
in Calcutta, Ranga Shankara in Bangalore and Ninasam in Heggodu also organize theatre festivals
that showcase old and new work. The NSD’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav (India Theatre Festival)
has become the largest state-supported annual forum for national and international work, and
despite their smaller scale, the privately endowed Mahindra Awards for Excellence in Theatre
have become a highly anticipated annual event. Multinational companies, industrial houses, large
businesses and philanthropic organizations underwrite festivals and events of all shapes and sizes.
A recent initiative that exemplifies the move towards autonomy among theatre professionals is
Studio Safdar in New Delhi (named after Safdar Hashmi of JANAM), which advertises itself as
an ‘independent, non-funded arts and activism space’. Since it opened in 2012, the Studio has
hosted dozens of performances, film screenings, lectures and book-launches, enabled workshops
and meetings for activist groups and provided rehearsal space for theatre groups. Finally, at least
in the metropolitan areas, audiences loyal to the work of particular playwrights and theatre groups
have grown, despite economic hardship and distractions from the popular media.

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Figure 11.4 Scene from Kalidasa’s Malavikagnimitram (Malavika and Agnimitra), adapted by
K. V. Subbanna and directed by Iqbal Ahmed for Ninasam Tirugata (Heggodu,
Karnataka), 2001.
(Courtesy of K. V. Akshara)
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The ‘theatre of roots’ movement is worth juxtaposing against this unruly backdrop because
it represents a concerted effort by the state to promote a particular cultural agenda. The term
was coined in a 1985 essay by the scholar, administrator and cultural critic Suresh Awasthi to
describe ‘the new unconventional theatre, which ha[d] been evolving as a result of its encounter
with tradition for some two decades,’ and was ‘part of the whole process of decolonization of
our lifestyle, values, social institutions, creative forms, and cultural modes’ (1985: 85). Awasthi
argued for an outright rejection of proscenium staging, for stylization and physicality rather than
realism, for the actor’s body as the primary source of a ‘theatre language’ and for the fluidity
of the performance text over the alleged fixity of the authorial text. Among contemporary
practitioners, he singled out Tanvir, Panikkar, Thiyam, Karanth and Sircar as playwrights/
directors whose art was fully liberated from proscenium aesthetics, and considered their work
as evidence that Indian theatre of the modern period had never been ‘practiced in such diversified
form, and at the same time with such unity in essential theatre values’ (85). Awasthi’s overall
approach summed up the principal cultural-nationalist arguments of the post-independence period
– westernized urban theatre was an alien imposition that did not and cannot flourish in India;
the end of colonialism offers the best opportunity for correcting this aberration; and the formal,
aesthetic and representational principles of indigenous performance genres offer the only
possibility of an authentic alternative modernity in Indian theatre.
As this description indicates, the theatre of roots movement (hereafter TOR) is the clearest
contemporary expression of what I have called cultural recursiveness – an appeal to the
precolonial past as a redemptive cultural force in the colonial or postcolonial present. It is also
the Indian equivalent of the specifically postcolonial space-clearing urge that the Kenyan writer
Ngugi wa Thiong’o describes as ‘decolonizing the mind’. The strength of the movement lies
in the conceptual coherence it provides for the work of leading practitioners (such as those
mentioned by Awasthi) who offer cutting-edge alternatives to proscenium realism, and the support
it has extended to particular kinds of theatre work in a marketplace of scarce resources. For
example, the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s multi-year ‘Scheme for Assistance to Young Theatre
Workers’, which organized four zonal festivals and one national festival annually from 1984 to
1991, advanced the work of many young directors who have emerged as major talents in the
post-1980 period – notably Ratan Thiyam, Bansi Kaul, Prasanna, Probir Guha, Bhanu Bharati,
B. Jayshree, Waman Kendre, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry and A. Mangai. Erin Mee’s recent
book-length study of TOR delves systematically into theatre history, theory and contemporary
practice to uncover what is most substantive about the movement: it seeks to redefine Indian
modernity, ‘explains’ the practice of innovators such as Panikkar, Thiyam and Karnad, and
continues to be a shaping influence on a new generation of theatre artists.
The polemical thrust of TOR, however, points to the self-defeating nature of positions that
seek to impose uniformity on a heterogeneous field. From the beginning, proponents of the
movement have adopted an exclusionary cultural rhetoric that describes all theatre outside the
‘traditional idiom’ as sterile, barren, ‘western-oriented imitative work’ that is fundamentally un-
Indian and devoid of value. Not only is this an arrogant dismissal of the multidimensional post-
independence renaissance in theatre; it also drastically simplifies the complex interchange
between western and Indian systems of representation over two centuries, and the creation of
syncretic cultural forms that are scrupulously Indianized (as we have noted) at the levels of form,
content and experience. In another self-privileging move, TOR is presented as ‘the most pervasive
and influential post-Independence theatrical movement in India’ and ‘the answer’ to questions
about the future shape of ‘modern Indian theatre’ (Mee 2008: 12, 263), although the state’s
crucial financial and organizational role in sustaining the initiative is widely known. An even
more aggressive form of bureaucratic intervention is the packaging of TOR as the ‘real’ Indian

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theatre for consumption outside India, especially on the international festival circuit. The immense
variety of contemporary theatre is cancelled out by these acts of cultural guardianship: India’s
rich precolonial theatrical legacy clearly has relevance in the present, but TOR has chosen to
define that relevance in ahistorical, impossibly unitary terms.
In contrast, the growing presence of women in every sphere of theatre activity marks a
multifaceted creative response to the conditions that have marginalized female practitioners in
modern theatre. Both the Marathi natak mandalis and the Parsi theatre fostered the cult of the
cross-dressing male actor; Binodini Dasi (1862–1941), the protégé of Girish Ghosh in the Bengali
public theatre, was perhaps the only actress of the colonial period comparable in stature to the
legendary Bal Gandharva (1888–1967) and Jaishankar Sundari (1889–1975). Women became
much more visible as theatre actresses from the 1940s onward, and a few directors such as Shanta
Gandhi, Vijaya Mehta and Joy Michael appeared in the 1950s to counterbalance the rapidly
increasing roster of influential male directors. However, the persistent absence of female
authors from the medium of text-based printed drama amounts to a virtual erasure of women
as playwrights in the conventional sense. Mahasweta Devi’s theatrical adaptations of her own
Bengali short stories (Five Plays, 1997) make up the only available collection of plays in English
translation by an Indian woman playwright, augmenting a handful of individual titles by Shanta
Gokhale, Dina Mehta and Manjula Padmanabhan, among others. The imbalance of gender
continues in recent anthologies: again, Mahasweta Devi’s The Mother of 1084 is the only play
by a woman author in G. P. Deshpande’s Modern Indian Drama: An Anthology (2000), while
Chandrashekhar Kambar’s Modern Indian Plays (also 2000) excludes women altogether. Erin Mee’s
DramaContemporary: India (2001) includes two women authors (Usha Ganguli and Tripurari
Sharma) among the six playwrights featured in her selection, and Body Blows: Women, Violence,
and Survival (2000) is the first thematically organized ‘feminist’ collection in English bringing
together plays by Padmanabhan, Mehta and Poile Sengupta. Tutun Mukherjee’s Staging Resist-
ance: Plays by Women in Translation (2005) broke substantial new ground by bringing together
eighteen plays from ten languages, but these numbers represented more than a century of
playwriting by women (from 1855 to the 1960s). Mukherjee connects this problematic lack
to ‘the discourse of “gender as genre,”’ which ‘reveals the way [the] sex-gender system operates
in the art and practice of drama and theatre and controls their cultural reproduction’ (2005: 4).
Unlike the autonomy and comforting privacy of print, the public, performative, collaborative
and materially demanding medium of theatre seems to place women at a distinct disadvantage,
especially in India, where the vast majority of them are still circumscribed within the domestic
sphere.
Since the 1980s, however, the work of female professionals has indicated that instead of
deploring the ‘absence’ of women playwrights, criticism needs to effect a conceptual shift from
the category of ‘author’ to that of ‘auteur’, ‘performer’ or ‘collaborator’, and hence to recognize
the distinctive and important ‘texts’ as well as ‘works’ that women artists have been producing
for urban Indian theatre for three decades. There seem to be three important forms of female
intervention and authorship in Indian theatre that can be juxtaposed against the concurrent male
traditions. In the first, a female director takes up a play (Indian, western, or non-western) that
already has an established text, and gives it her distinctive stage interpretation. This category
would include Shanta Gandhi’s revivals of the Sanskrit playwright Bhasa’s Madhyam Vyayog (The
Middle One) and Urubhangam (1965–66); Vijaya Mehta’s revivals of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala
(1979) and Vishakhadutt’s Mudrarakshasa (1975), and her productions of Karnad’s Hayavadana
and Elkunchwar’s Wada chirebandi (1985); Amal Allana’s productions of Brecht’s Mother Courage
(1993), Alekar’s Begum Barve (1996) and Karnad’s Naga-mandala (1999); and Usha Ganguli’s
productions of plays by Ibsen, Gorki, Brecht and Wesker (1978–98). Each of these examples

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represents the conjunction of a male playwright with a female director capable of transforming
the aesthetic and cultural potential of the play in question, with the resulting product being
much more than a conventional directing venture.
Second, through an individual or collective process, a female director develops a text for
performance that has antecedent sources and sometimes an earlier play as a model, but no prior
existence in the form in which it is brought upon the stage. The term ‘auteur’ is most appro-
priate for this form of writing, which combines elements of acting, directing and authorship.
This category includes Usha Ganguli’s collaboration with Mahasweta Devi to adapt her short
story ‘Rudali’ for the stage; Tripurari Sharma’s play about the 1857 rebellion, Azizunnisa: san
sattavan ka kissa (Azizunnisa: the Tale of ‘57); and Anuradha Kapur’s Sundari, a play about the
cross-dressing Parsi theatre actor. Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry’s acclaimed versions of
Giradoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot (‘Sheher mere di pagal aurat,’ 1995), Racine’s Phaedra
(‘Fida,’ 1997) and Lorca’s Yerma (1999) also belong here. In all such productions, a play comes
into existence only because of the artistic leanings of a specific director, and it belongs uniquely
to her.
Third, a female artist develops an original text for either solo or group performance, and
‘authors’ a work that tends to be non-linear, open, anti-realistic, resistant and process oriented.
The works in this category are fully indigenized forms of feminist representation, variously
exemplified by Saoli Mitra’s Nathabati anathabat (Five Lords, Yet None a Protector, 2002),
Usha Ganguli’s Antar-yatra (Interior Journey, 2002; Figure 11.5), the street performances of
A. Mangai and Tripurari Sharma, and the performance pieces of Maya Krishna Rao, Anamika
Haksar and Kalairani, among others. The focus on performance also maximizes the potential

Figure 11.5 Usha Ganguli in Antar-yatra (The Interior Journey, 2002), a solo performance
piece written and directed by her. This performance was in Calcutta in 2007.
(Courtesy of Usha Ganguli)

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for activism. The December 2012 ‘Nirbhaya’ rape case in Delhi, for example, has generated a
nationwide feminist response in the form of performances that include ‘Hai haya!’ (Shame on
You) by Sohag Sen, a protest event called ‘Take Back the Night’, Rasika Agashe’s devised piece
titled ‘Museum of Species in Danger’, organized loitering by young women in public places in
Bombay, Maya Rao’s solo performance piece ‘Walk’ and a week-long commemoration titled
Jurrat (Daring) in Delhi, which brought together activists and performance artists from different
fields. Contained by this conflicted public sphere, Indian theatre in the present moment is not
quite ready to be redefined as a subgenre of performance. But women’s activism is only one
sign of the broadening contexts of protest, opposition, interrogation and critique from subaltern
positions which make up a field very different from the self-critical, cosmopolitan, even
universalist engagements of the early-postcolonial decades.

Note
1 Since the 1990s, a number of Indian metropolises and smaller cities have officially changed their names
in order to counteract British colonial orthography and history. Bombay is now Mumbai, Calcutta is
Kolkata, Madras is Chennai, Bangalore is Bengaluru, Baroda is Vadodara and Trivandrum is
Thiruvananthapuram. In this chapter, I have retained the older names for two reasons. First, they are
intimately connected with specific phases in the history of modern theatre. For example, it would be
anachronistic to state that modern urban commercial theatre first emerged in ‘Mumbai’ and ‘Kolkata’
in the mid-nineteenth century. Second, Seagull Books, a major publishing house for theatre based in
Calcutta, has continued to use the older name on all its materials, and the bibliography has to reflect
that choice. The use of the new city names in the chapter would therefore be inconsistent and
unnecessarily confusing. For the nation’s capital, I have used ‘Delhi’ to refer to the city as a theatrical
venue, because the activities of playwrights, directors and theatre groups based in various parts of the
city encompass the metropolitan area in its entirety. However, I have used ‘New Delhi’ to designate
the location of specific institutions such as the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the National School of Drama
and the Shri Ram Centre for Art and Culture, because such a designation is more precise.

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