14 Indian Theatre in English: Genesis and Evolution

Dr. Saurabhi Sarmah

Origin of Indian Drama:

Drama as an art form has a long history of its origin and development in India. The earliest plays were written in Sanskrit based mainly on the stories of Vedas and Upanishads. These early Sanskrit plays dates back to the first century of the Christian era. Diverse in subject matter, they all subscribed to a common dramatic theory and practice of the Natyasastra. Natyasastra is the ancient Indian treatise on theatrical activities. Like the Poetics in the Western dramatic tradition, the Natyasatra is an integral part of the Indian theatrical tradition.

Thus the earliest drama in India was the product of Sanskrit literature. The earliest contributors to the field of Indian drama include—Bhasa, Bhavabuti, Bhatta Narayan, Vishakhadatta and Kalidasa to name a few. The influence of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala had spread to the West as well. The German poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe was much inspired by this play and mentions it in the beginning of his tragic play Faust. However, with the course of time, the Sanskrit plays were overshadowed by the advent of various regional language plays. Currently, Kuttiyattam is the only surviving form of Sanskrit theatre that we see in Kerala.

The Natyasastra: The roots of Indian theatre goes back to the Natyasatra—the treatise which is attributed to the sage Bharata; giving Indian theatre a religious origin. Considered as the fifth Veda, the Natyasastra deals with the issues like acting, dance, costume, music, dramaturgy, make-up, props, the reciprocal relationship between performers and spectators so and so forth. Natyasastra emphasises the importance of acting which has two aspects including realistic and conventional plays. The treatise emphasises the importance of performance; the prioritization of performance in the world of Indian started with the Indian theatre itself. It contains a detailed account of abinaya, music, dance and various forms of stage representation. Another important aspect of the treatise is its emphasis on the rasa theory. Abinaya or the performance produces rasa or aesthetic pleasure; it does so by drawing together the other elements of play such as dialogues, costume, music, gestures, emotions and the setting.

Various theatrical forms existing in India:

Indian traditional theatre: Kuttiyattam in Kerala, Bhavai in Gujrat, Bhaona and Ankiya Nats in Assam, Swang in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Malwa, Yakshangana in Karnataka, Jatra in Bengal, and also Katahkali in Kerala – these are some of the examples of Indian traditional theatre.

Indian puppet theatre – Puppetry is one of the ancient forms of entertainment in India. The history of puppetry goes back to the 5th century BC. Puppetry is more popular in states like Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Orissa. The themes of puppet theatre are mostly based on the tales of Ramayana and Mahabharata. The early puppet theatre in India represented the stories of great kings, heroes and mythological figures. These puppets are often made with leather and their movement is controlled by a string. Satire, fantasy, reality and farce – a puppet show can incorporate any of these themes in its storyline.

Indian street theatre: Indian street theatre is mainly concerned about representing the feeling of common people; it is often known as the theatre by the people and theatre for the people. Street theatre mainly projects the problems of common people. It becomes a popular means of expressing the social political and economic conditions of people in independent India. More than a form of entertainment, Indian street theatre is more focused on representing the social, political and economic concerns of people in India. Chargesheet (1949) is one of the earliest street plays performed in Calcutta for a group of audience consisting of thousands of workers. Street theatre has been successful in appealing to the minds of common people as it represents their stories and in their own language and allows them to be a part of it. Another leading contributor to Indian street theatre is Safdar Hashmi who had formed Jana Naya Manch in 1973 to generate awareness on various political issues. Jana Natya Manch has performed many street plays including Woman, Hallabol, and Machine etc. to create awareness on various political and social issues. Street theatre has also become popular in South India where dramatists like Chandrasekhar Patil and many others have used it to satirise the social evils. In states like Kerala, Assam and Tamilnadu, it has become a popular form of communication with the masses. Thus, the street theatre movement of India has a political goal and work for the development of the oppressed section of people. In the present time, street theatre has become a dominant mode of expression by many individuals and organisations to create awareness on various issues like family planning, HIV, corruption, violence etc. Eminent theatre practitioners such as Utpal Dutta and Badal Sircar also support this mode of theatre, and have worked for its growth.

Indian mobile theatre – Mobile theatre had its origin in Assam, and it is the only state where this mode of theatre currently exists. In mobile theatre, there is a group of actors for staging plays who travel from place to place along with singers, musicians, dancers. The whole crew travels together. Even the tent and chairs for the audience are carried with them. Achyut Lahkar is known as the father of mobile theatre which was first staged on 2nd October, 1963 in Pathshala, Assam. These are some of the different forms of theatre that exist in India along with the dominant presence of the written form of a play.

Indian drama in English:

Indian drama in English came into existence only after the influence of the British drama in the 18th century when the British introduced English in India mainly for their own benefits. Their main intention was to ensure administrative benefits by creating a class of employees who could speak and write in English, and also to preach Christianity. But, it turned out to be boon for the Indian people who got a chance to learn a new language and a culture. Gradually, the Indians came to be influenced by the rich culture and literature of the British, leading to a cultural encounter and exchange. The British theatre groups performed various plays in India including the plays by Shakespeare in places like Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta which started influencing the Indian literary minds to explore them further and follow their writings. Under this Western impact, many playwrights in India started writing plays in English. The first play in English was written by Krishna Mohan Banerji entitled The Persecuted in 1831. However, the real journey of Indian English drama began with Michael Madhusudhan Dutt’s Is This Civilization? that appeared on the literary horizon in 1871. But the growth of this genre has been very slow since its inception. Only in the contemporary period we have seen the emergence of a few playwrights writing plays originally in English and representing the various aspects of the Indian society and thereby supplementing the notion that theatre is a mirror to the society.

The slow pace of Indian English drama:

There are many reasons why Indian English drama has failed to garner the popularity that it deserves; or why it has failed to grow as an independent genre of Indian English Literature. One of the major reasons for this seems to be the fact that people in India, especially in the rural or semi urban areas are still unable to accept English as a language of communication and expressing emotions. The plays written in English are mostly influenced by western realism in terms of clothing, communication, and approach to life and so on. So, the majority of the Indian audiences do not feel the personal connect. They are not comfortable watching an English play. They can accept the stage construction and setting, but not the English language and the life style represented. For them, these plays lack the natural flavour, and hence they do not appeal to their minds. Another reason of their lack of popularity is that the actors who have a marked mother tongue influence fail to deliver the dialogues convincingly in English, thus leading to the failure of a performance.

However, after a long silence of many decades, Indian drama in English gathered momentum in the 20th century. This began only with the postcolonial period of Indian history. The plays written during this period follow the pattern of western realism and focus on the social, political and economic changes/problems of the time. Thus, Indian drama in English is a recent development with the playwrights like Mahesh Dattani, Manjula Padmanbhan, Dina Mehta, Ahishek Majumdar, Badal Sircar, Asif Currimbhoy, Pratap Sharma who have started scripting plays in English. All these writers belong to the postcolonial period of Indian drama and they have contributed a substantial number of plays to this new genre. These plays have achieved popularity among the urban youths and adult, but are yet to reach the rural audience. However, these plays do not follow the pattern prescribed by the Natyashastra; instead they mostly follow the western realistic tradition to represent the existing socio-political issues.

These post-independent / contemporary playwrights take up issues related to the urban, middle class, English speaking society which is undergoing a noticeable cultural change. Issues relating to the contemporary period such as violence, castes, homosexuality, patriarchy, gender, identity, and migration to name a few have become the major focus of these plays. The theme and plot structure of these plays follow the pattern of Western realist drama. The characters are realistic; they are very much a part of our everyday life. These plays represent the various strata of our society and are meant for the ordinary, middle class urban Indians. Simultaneously, the stage setting of these plays (including lighting and stage décor) has also undergone many changes with the advent of new technology. Indian drama in English does not have any resemblance to its predecessor Sanskrit drama. It is a blending of Indian and Western culture and both create a combined and unique postcolonial culture which is an attempt to reject the colonial influence and give Indian theatre its own distinctive identity. Social realism gets upper hand in the writing of this period. Social realism is the mode of writing which discusses or represents the everyday realities pertaining to the poor and marginalized classes through art and literature. Realism is an approach that attempts to describe life as it is. Although, realism is not limited to any one century or group of writers; its origin is generally attributed to the 19th-century French novelists like Flaubert and Balzac. In drama, Henrik Ibsen is the pioneer of this style of writing.

Another area where Indian drama in English has to face challenges and criticisms is the field of language. The plays written and performed in English are still struggling to occupy a space in the world of mainstream Indian drama. A cursory glance would reveal that drama written originally in English is still in its formative stage. According to Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, these “Anglophone” playwrights need to be “butchered” and “castrated”. Commenting on his response to the plays written in English, Christopher Balme points out that the Indian English playwrights and their plays from its beginning till date have suffered from economic, artistic, and ideological pressures of being submerged in a rich theatrical culture of popular, religious and commercial performance traditions.

However, despite the various challenges faced by these playwrights, they have started writing in English under various constraints. These playwrights include – Mahesh Dattani, ManjulaPadmanabhan, Pratap Sharma, Gurucharan Das, Dina Mehta, Poile Sengupta and a few others. Meanwhile, the plays written by these playwrights are rarely staged as performances often are failures because of the lack of audience’s support, except in the case of metropolises where they do receive adequate audience support. While drama in English is constantly struggling to stand and popularise itself, the plays written in regional languages by playwrights like VijayTendulkar, Girish Karnad, Badal Sircar, Usha Ganguli, and Mahesweta Devi thrive.

Among the playwrights who have started writing plays in English originally, it is the plays of Mahesh Dattani depicting the issues pertaining to contemporary urban India that have become successful in achieving wide popularity both in India and abroad. Simultaneously, a gradual shift in the audience’s response to the plays written in English and their performances on stage is noticeable, especially among the young generation. Dattani’s plays have been successful in catching the attention of audience, and also in changing their perception about theatre in English. Plays like Thirty Days in September, Tara, and Bravely Fought the Queen have achieved significant popularity while the plays of Dina Mehta and Manjula Padmanabhan, written in English are still awaiting such a platform both in terms of staging and academic popularity. On the other hand Vijay Tendulkar’s plays, originally written in Marathi and translated into English, are widely staged and read. In this regard, Vasudha Dalmia points out that both English and Hindi continue to share the honour of being the two important target languages of translation in the 1970s. When the question of print arises, the English language occupies an important position, as it can contribute for national visibility of the plays. But in the field of performance, Hindi and other regional languages always get the upper hand.

As we look at the current scenario, we see a number of young playwrights coming up with their theatrical debut in English. Bangalore based Abhishek Majumdar is one such playwright whose plays has been performed many times in India and abroad and are included in academic syllabi. The metros like Bangalore and Mumbai are providing a good platform and scope for the young playwrights to write plays in English, and thereby generate audiences, too. Many organisations India and abroad have started sponsoring playwrights in India to write in English, given the increasing foreign interest in Indian English literature.

Simultaneously, we see another trend in Indian theatre which also focuses on representing the contemporary Indian society, and makes an attempt to rescue Indian theatre from the bondage of colonialism by going back to Indian roots and traditional performance art. So we have the playwrights who follow the Western realist traditions to represent the Indian society while on the other hand we have the followers of the “Theatre of the Roots” movement who attempt self-representation through the use of myth, history, folk tale and other traditional modes. The socio-cultural changes that took place in India during the post-independent period shaped the present state of Indian drama in English, as also in the regional languages. The practitioners coming in the later phase of modern Indian drama “Indianised” this genre by adding Indian traditional modes of performance that existed in the pre-colonial past.

Thus, in Indian theatre we see two trends developing simultaneously. One is the theatre of the roots and the other is Western realistic theatre. Theatre of the Roots is kind of reaction against the Western realist practices in Indian theatre.

Western Realism and contemporary Indian drama:

As we have already mentioned that the practitioners of Western realist tradition tend to write social realist drama by representing the social reality as it is, both in English and regional languages. In the post-independence period, playwrights like Mahesh Dattani, Vijay Tendulkar, Tripurari Sharma have written plays representing the existing social realities without taking recourse to myth and history and other traditional forms of representations. Among these playwrights, it is Mahesh Dattani who writes originally in English for an urban audience. These playwrights particularly write for a proscenium stage, a remnant of British influence. The British rule brought Indian theatre into direct contact with Western theatre; and from then onward, Indian theatre picked up the tradition of realism. For the first time in India, the writing and practice of theatre is geared fully towards realistic or naturalistic presentation and the stories of common people gained much importance in these writings. The contemporary Indian theatre developed during the middle 19th century contains many plays which are based on social realism and in many Indian languages. It used the proscenium stage for representation. The first proscenium theatres were established in Bombay and Calcutta in the 1860s. Then it passed to the North and South Indian states. These new forms of the Indian theatre had started overshadowing all other traditional forms of theatre. These plays particularly focus on the life of the poor and marginalised class of our society, representing their everyday lives and being critical of the social structures which create such circumstances. The growing modernist sensibility in India which developed with the coming of the British in the eighteenth century helped in the growth of the social realist plays in the post-independence period which explores as well as represents the various aspects of Indian society. According to Nandi Bhatia, the works of the playwrights and practitioners of the mid-1960s to the mid 1970s, a period known as the Renaissance of Indian theatre, reveals intense experimentation that saw on the one hand the collapse of well-made play while on the other hand simultaneously engaged with the Western forms like Brechtian forms in combination with local forms and conventions.

Commenting on the practice of Western realist tradition by a number of contemporary Indian playwrights, Habib Tanvir says that the urban theatre of Indian only practically reflects the fundamental features of Indian culture. It is imitative by and large and tries to ape the conventions of the Western theatre. At its worst, it represents the pale copy of the most worn- out Western theatre traditions and at its best it reflects new Western forms recently evolved through a rigorous process of experimentation. However, there are theatre groups in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and many other places who have engaged in experimentation with Indian folk theatre form, creating original work of a valuable nature ( in Bhatia 2009: 64 ). By this statement Tanvir refers to the Theatre of the Roots movement started by the theatre persona like Girish Karnad and many others.

Theatre of the Roots:

The Theatre of the Roots which we have already mentioned in our above discussion is a post- independence phenomenon in the world of Indian theatre. This movement is led by a group of playwrights who wanted to free Indian theatre from the Western influence by revisiting the Indian past and trying to make it alive in drama. Since, these playwrights turn to their root to create a world of modern Indian theatre, this movement is known as the Theatre of the Roots movement. The playwrights belonging to this group encourage the growth of Indian drama in regional languages. Erin Mee refers to this effort as an act of decolonizing Indian theatre. According to Mee, the theatre of roots, street theatre, and English language theatre are three among the many kinds of theatre flourishing in India today, on the proscenium and non- proscenium stages in various locations of the country in different languages, structures, and forms (1997: 4-5). These playwrights have made a concentrated effort to go back to the traditional roots and liberate Indian theatre from the Western impacts. Girish Karnad, K.N. Panikkar, Ratan Thiyam, Habib Tanvir are some of the leading spirits of this movement.

According to Suresh Awasthi, who coined the term Theatre of the roots, the modern Indian theatre is a product of a colonial culture and that it needed a break, to go back and search for roots most intensely to match its violent dislocation from the tradition. Besides, it is a rejection of the proscenium stage by the directors and playwrights and the use of a variety of performance spaces to establish a close relationship between audience and the actors.

Although the practice of following Western realist tradition has been criticised and challenged, the Theatre of the Roots could not exactly free Indian theatre from the Western influences that continues to exert its impact upon Indian art and literature.

Emergence of women playwrights in India:

Another important aspect of modern Indian theatre is the emergence of women’s theatre in India. “Women’s theatre” refers to the whole gamut of productions and scripts by women about women, and characterised by the consciousness of women as women; while women conscious plays may include plays about women by man as well. Consciousness raising regarding the issues concerning women’s existence seems to be major aim of both woman conscious plays and women’s theatre. Many women’s organisations in India during the 1980s and 1990s adopted the concept of street theatre as a powerful medium for creating awareness on a variety of social issues including the issue of violence against women.

Women’s theatre is an exclusively women’s domain while the feminist theatre in the Indian context, unlike in the West, also includes plays about women by men. For example, the plays such as Silence! The Court is in Session by Vijay Tendulkar, and Nagamandala by Girish Karnad are also considered feminist plays. The well-known street play Women (Aurat) by Jan Natya Manch (People’s theatre of India) led by Safdar Hashmi – a male playwright, is also popularly known as a feminist play.

In the Indian context, Tutun Mukherjee offers an appropriate and convincing definition of the term women’s theatre; it is a politically nuanced theatre that is oriented towards change and produced by women with feminine concerns. She calls it a forward-looking step trying to break away from reductionism, and locates gender identity in the flux of socio-historical processes. It is the product of feminism; feminine awareness shapes the making of the play (2005:14). An important strand of women’s theatre in India is its intervention in areas which directly concern women. It has been used to voice those issues which are largely suppressed or considered as non-existent by mainstream theatre (Subramanyam 2002: 31). The mainstream theatre in India is dominated by the male authored plays, representing the issues concerning women from a socially/ideologically constructed male perspective. The entry of the plays by women playwrights into the mainstream theatre world of India is only a recent phenomenon.

In the recent past, a striking growth is seen in the field of women’s theatre. One of the important factors that help in the emergence of the women playwrights is the re-discovery of women’s theatre history in the West in 1980s. This development encourages the women playwrights across the globe to write “women’s theatre”.

In the Indian theatrical scenario, the appearance of the women playwrights is a rather late development. The achievements of women in the field of theatre have not received adequate importance yet. Tutun Mukherjee says that in India, the emergence of women’s theatre history is a late nineteenth century phenomenon. Before that also plays were written about women and women were a part of dramatic performance, but they remained hidden. In the entire history of development of Sanskrit drama, there was hardly any discussion of a play written and directed by a woman. There were women performers, dance choreographers, but they were not visible till the late nineteenth century (2005:6). A remarkable increase in women’s participation in theatre as playwrights/director/performers was seen in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The lives of Indian women are far more circumscribed than their Western counterparts; and the Indian women playwrights try to represent it via their dramatic writings. These playwrights share the same thematic pattern such as the representation of women’s relationship, their struggles, and their journey towards emancipation and so on. They are not resistant to the influence of Western feminism, but their chief motive seems to be to sensitise the receiver of their text to the problems faced by women in the Indian society.

Off late, a number of playwrights like Dinta Mehta, Poile Sengupta and Manjula Padmanabhan have started writing plays in English scriptin the concerns of women in India. Besides, there are a number of playwrights such as Mahasweta Devi, Usha Ganguli, Shanta Gokhale to name a few whose works have been translated into English and made available in both regional languages and in English by scholars like Tutun Mukherjee. Mukherjee’s Staging Resistance: Plays by Women in Translation is a noteworthy collection of plays written by women in India, a supporting document of women’s theatre in India which contains a number of plays written by women about women. The plays included in this deals with the various problems faced by women in Indian society.

While discussing Indian theatre in the present time, we often tend to use the two terms “modern” and “contemporary” very loosely to refer to the theatre developed in the post- independence period, without taking into account the fact that the influence of modernity in India was felt in the pre-colonial period itself, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Hence, the term contemporary would be more convincing to refer to the theatre developed and produced during the post-independent period.

Reference

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