THE search for a unipolar Indian theatre initiated by the Indian state and its official cultural agencies in the 1950s, collapsed in the 1970s, as the post-Emergency political upheavals threw up new regional-political identities which assumed authority and power in the different states, thereby opening up the possibility of many more such regional-political identities. However, with the reinstallation of the pre Emergency power frame, there was a fresh attempt to impose the older model by invoking the compulsion of the Festivals of India agenda.

It is another matter that as the festival bonanza completed its course, the state appeared to have lost interest in politically using theatre, thus allowing it a respite and the freedom to rediscover itself in terms of local cultures. This was not necessarily around a language and its cultural field, but covered the trajectory from the linguistic-cultural domain to new fields being redefined/identified out of histories of deprivation and denial. All this calls for a fresh mapping of Indian theatre, particularly in view of the emergence of new theatre constituencies.¹

The mapping becomes an obligation even as yet another agenda of homogenization confronts us in the form of the new cultural policy suggested by the National Knowledge Commission, one that brings performance under the nomenclature of Creative Industries, seen essentially as a component of the industry of tourism. As a component of an enormous international tourism venture, Indian performance culture and practice is required to be standardized into an easily understandable ‘common’ cultural commodity.

Under these circumstances, the mapping itself is a strategy of defence and resistance for the distinctive locales of Indian theatre, sited at the points where the performer’s body forms a seamless continuum with the historied body of a community. If theatre/performance is the product/expression of the actor’s body, the body in turn is the product of a culture defined as a way of living. A body that has to negotiate the slush on which we walk uses its limbs and bears them in a way very different from the practice and habits of a body that is more accustomed to a paved floor. That is only a simple and somewhat basic instance of the body’s ways and means.

Even when trained into skills and gestures and styles that are not elements of habit or natural practice, the body needs to retain forms of the primary stimuli to bring forth the look of familiarity that makes first contact with the body of the community. The wide range of elements that go into making the actor’s body include daily acts as well as of means of living, diet, the way we eat, what we wear, the way we speak, the physical and natural surroundings. Even when the body acquires a style, it does not quite abdicate itself; rather it accommodates the style.

 

The body of the community, more than an agglomeration of the bodies of its individuals, carries its political and cultural history in itself. I shall draw instances from the two linguistic-cultural communities that I have had the opportunity of knowing somewhat closely, viz. the Bengalis and the Manipuris. Musicality and radicalism have been important historical ingredients of the Bengali sensibility. Outsiders find it difficult to recognize the place of Rabindra sangeet – the songs written and set to music by Tagore – in the lives of Bengalis. Its place in Bengali expression, memory, association and evocation alike is not directly connected to the iconic presence of (and simultaneously scepticism about) Rabindranath Tagore.

The Bengali radicalism that had distanced Bengali nationalism from the Gandhian programme and had set up the Lal-Bal-Pal (Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal) icon in the 1920s, had a poetic-musical component that first came into prominence in 1905 with the first partition of Bengal. The massive political demonstration against it took the form of day long processions throughout the city, singing songs composed for the occasion by Tagore, with (at times) Tagore himself joining the procession and singing. Hindus and Muslims (who were to be divided into the two segments of the state) tied colourful rakhis on one another’s wrists in a gesture of solidarity.

Bengali theatre, drawing on this convergence of musicality and radicalism, has developed a theatric tonality of performance with which the Bengali community/audience is at ease, while others out of tune with this historied culture find it ‘sentimental’, ‘melodramatic’, and/or ‘loud’. Memories of two famines and the displacement of partition, and/or a whole series of radical and terrorist actions and reprisals, give the Bengali sensibility a political concern and a motivation to activism and agitation that often embarrass the more ‘aesthetically’ oriented outsiders who would prefer a more distanced/mythicized polities.

 

Similarly, in Manipur, the actor’s body, ‘made’ in the matrices of both its lived physical experience and its order of rituals, ceremonies and martial practice, the criss-crossing of different religions, matriarchy, women’s battles and political resistance to the Raj, and the body of the community, steeped in myriad rhythms and tunes and violence, find a different theatric body. It is only in this context that one can read the revolutionary potency and violence of Sabitri stripping in Kanhailal’s Draupadi, from Mahasweta Devi’s story set in tribal Bengal, where the protagonist’s choice of nudity is the ultimate protest against the humiliation of the woman’s body by the organized might of the state. The Manipuri right, reading it in terms of artistic violation, sought to suppress its revolutionary potency, which the body of the community could read and recognize in its continuity with the long line of Nupi battles. The great act of nude protest by a group of Manipur women before the gates of the Kangla Fort, the bastion of the Indian state’s military might in Imphal, a few months later, brought revolutionary practice and theatrical act together in a way which could have happened in Manipur alone.

 

In a country with such a multiplicity of theatrical ‘locales’, it may be asking for too much to expect viewers to recognize every such cultural locus and locate its theatric product accordingly. But surely the least one can expect is an acknowledgement of the difference/differences. And that is what is lacking in the authoritarian critical judgment that the state and the media and the newly emerging cultural establishment seem to nurture collectively in a concerted conspiracy against the critical voices that challenge the growing authoritarianism of the state under pretence of democratic practice.

To cite a final instance of this dangerous trend, even at the risk of what may appear an over-reading. Is it merely innocent ignorance and a little pretentiousness when the drama critic of the Calcutta Telegraph ignores the direct reference to Shahir Amar Sheik and his musical tradition (the rich history of the appropriation of the Powada by the militant working class of the forties and fifties) and links the music of the play Cotton 56 Polyester 84 to ‘another extinct tradition, the Sangeet-Natak’, and identifies the ‘two out-of-work heroes as great fans and even singers of that form’, complaining that the songs consume precious time without furthering the action (exactly like Sangeet-Natak, so acceptably retro but only up to a point)?’²

 

Footnotes:

1. Taking advantage of preparing a written text of a presentation after more presentations have been made, I would refer to the theatre spaces being explored by Devi and Praja Natya Mandali, Andhra Pradesh, and Dakxinkumar Nandlal Bajrange in Chharanagar in Gujarat as new community constituencies beyond linguistic-cultural constituencies.

2. Ananda Lal, ‘Unhappy Arrangement’, The Telegraph (Calcutta), 7 July 2007. Ananda Lal is editor of the Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre, OUP, 2004.