Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre

Essays on the Theatres of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka

A. Sengupta

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137375148
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica teatrales

While remapping the region by examining enduring historical and cultural connections, this study discusses multiple traditions and practices of theatre and performance in five South Asian countries within their specific political and socio-cultural contexts.

1

Introduction: Setting the Stage

Ashis Sengupta

I Rethinking South Asia: a region, an idea, and this book

South Asia occupies a significant place on the cultural and political map of the world today. This is as much due to its long and richly diverse cultural traditions as to its current place in the global market, scientific and technological capabilities and its vital strategic importance in world politics. I choose to define the term ‘South Asia’ primarily as an enormous geographical space comprising the nation-states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka with their shared yet different political and cultural histories. I have left out Afghanistan, Bhutan, and the Maldives mostly for space constraints. I am aware, though, that any such exercise (where ‘selection’ automatically implies ‘elimination’) can be accused of arbitrariness and bias, or of the politics of inclusion/exclusion, to an extent. Merely a six-decade old Western construction, initially to designate in ‘neutral parlance’¹ a geographical region and later used more in politico-strategic contexts, ‘South Asia’ obviously no longer means either the Western/Orientalist imagining of the ‘Indian subcontinent’ as an exotic land or a sheer backward region of illiteracy and poverty. ‘South Asia’ should mean today a region of immense possibilities and complexities embedded in the ‘affinities’ and ‘contradictions’ of nation, nationality, caste, creed, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, and economics. Contemporary South Asia also means a volatile region embroiled in the ‘twin dialectics’ of nation and state, center and region, region and community, secularism and religious extremism, neoliberalism and the fading idea of welfare state.² It is thanks to such overwhelming contradictions and strange connections – between the countries in the region and within them each – that the category of ‘South Asian’ at once evokes and frustrates a common or shared identity. No less important is it to understand that South Asia simultaneously exists within South Asia and outside its geopolitical boundaries through its diasporic presence across the globe.

There are several books on South Asia that read more as studies in political and economic history; but no single scholarly volume has so far put together the diverse yet interconnected theatres of South Asian countries, encompassing the complex interplay of the region’s history (sociopolitical/cultural) and its theatre. Lothar Lutze’s collection of essays, Drama in Contemporary South Asia (1984),³ focuses on premodern folk and ritual drama, and largely excludes post-independence, modern, contemporary theatre in South Asia altogether. Utpal K. Banerjee’s Theatre in South Asia: Frontiers of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Overseas (2012) is but an encyclopedic volume of entries on theatre groups, playwrights, directors, individual plays from four South Asian countries and on some ‘overseas’ productions showcased at theatre festivals in the region.⁴ Books on contemporary theatres of individual South Asian countries,⁵ except on Indian theatre published since 2004, are surprisingly few, too. Moreover, the few significant books belonging to the last mentioned category have their own preferred focal areas even when they discuss the theatre of a particular country or culture, thus mostly leaving out what this book picks up for careful study – genres and locations of theatre that are germane to a comprehensive, critical understanding of the sociohistorical and politicocultural narratives of contemporary/postcolonial South Asian nation-states, three of which once made up an undivided India. Several of those books are again collections of previously published material or lack critical depth and organization. And most of the remaining critical literature on (contemporary) South Asian theatre, not much in volume, is in regional/local languages and therefore not easily ‘accessible’ to the rest of the world.

This book is not meant to be a mere survey or overview of South Asian drama and theatre. With a postcolonial-cultural-theatre/performance studies approach, it aims at a multidisciplinary study of contemporary South Asian theatres as being reflective as well as partly constitutive of the post-independence societies and ‘national’ cultures they grow out of, deal with and question, too. Mapping through contemporary theatre the multifaceted histories of South Asian countries (as ex-colonies in a state of chaos and/or as postcolonial/contemporary nations with their own aspirations and interrogations) should be a rewarding experience because no history of a society is truly complete without a history of its culture, theatre being its most live form. It is more so in the case of a politically volatile and culturally vibrant South Asia because a closer, two-way relationship mostly exists here between the course of contemporary history and the history of contemporary theatre. Nepal’s prodemocracy movement, virtually catalyzed by street theatre which in turn thrived on it, serves as an ideal example that may not be taken, though, as a model for studying the relationship between the history of another South Asian country and the course of its theatre. The book, on the whole, seeks to demonstrate how the history of drama/theatre (with its poetics and politics), political history, and sociocultural process are embedded in one another, in varied ways of course.

Originally an instrument of European colonialism, traditional ‘area studies’ became for the United Sates a pattern of ideological and political mapping especially during the Cold War era that was aimed at dominating world affairs. However, insofar as mapping is ‘a culturally formative representational [and therefore strategic] practice,’⁶ cartographic details of a country/region may also be re-conceptualized, to extend the metaphor, by way of interrogating the ‘fixed’ contours and constituents of the terrain whose map was/is drawn by the ruling regime, colonial or neocolonial. It is important to note here that even though a ‘global technoscientific civilization’ pervades post-Cold War times, imagining the earth as ‘flattened’ and the nation-state almost non-existent, globalism eventually fails to recognize local contexts due to its tendency to grow into an overarching narrative – however different it may be from the earlier concept of world civilization that sold Western civilization as a ‘blueprint for the rest of the world.’⁷ At the other extreme, localism with its exclusive focus on local phenomena tends to disregard ‘global contexts’ altogether. The kind of mapping this book aims at is to examine the course of events in specific geopolitical, geocultural contexts and yet connect them, wherever necessary, with the machinations of power and cultural phenomena outside. This helps in at once capturing the complex realities of a place in an alternative local perspective and projecting its changing character through time by way of its interface with a plethora of politicoeconomic and sociocultural elements that transcends national borders.

Mapping in this perspective becomes a process that pays attention to formerly neglected or currently contested sites of ‘historical memory and [ . . . ] contexts, cultures, stories, languages, experiences, desires and hopes that course through’ the body of the place and beyond.⁸ This mapping, when done through theatre, is especially interesting because theatre – a cultural product of historical, geopolitical, and ideological conditions – is also capable of reconstructing those conditions by mediating sociopolitical formations. It is worth mapping how South Asian theatre is as much a representation of offstage ‘realities’ as a space where ‘realities’ are equally formed and re-formed through human performance, exploring in the process a complex relationship between world, text, performance, viewing, and reception. It would be wrong to presume that the body of work under study here fully expresses ‘contemporary South Asia’ through theatre, or ‘contemporary South Asian theatre,’ for that matter, because the subject is so vast and diverse in terms of geography, nationality, language, religion, and theatre history and practice that its representation (or mapping) is bound to be far from complete within the space of a single book. The study also leaves out South Asian diaspora theatre, a genre which demands a full-length study, even while admitting in principle that the location of performance may sometimes extend beyond the homeland as South Asian playwrights and performers are more mobile today than ever before.

Contemporary South Asian theatre: meaning and scope

Orientalist theatre scholarship always ‘privileged classical Sanskrit literature over the postclassical vernacular traditions,’ Aparna Dharwadker correctly maintains, making the theatre of the Indian subcontinent, especially of India, ‘virtually synonymous with the poetically exquisite “national theatre of the Hindus” exemplified by Kalidasa.’⁹ The understanding of ‘theatre,’ or ‘theatre studies,’ in the West has undergone a paradigm shift in the wake of recent enthusiasm around ‘performance’ and ‘performance theory.’ While performance by the early 1980s came to be ‘defined in opposition to theatre structures and conventions,’¹⁰ theatre was simultaneously defined by the likes of Richard Schechner as a subgenre of performance which broadly includes within its scope the performing arts, rituals, popular entertainments, and even everyday social performance. Anthropologists, area and religious studies scholars, and interculturalists in the West have taken greater interest ever since in ‘genres of premodern or nonmodern performance’ that can be located within ‘the ritualistic, religious or social [and folk] life of particular cultural communities.’¹¹ South Asian theatre, in this perspective, has come to mean rituals, dances and performances such as the Madar Pirer Gan of Bangladesh, the Bhand performance and Lok theatre of Pakistan, the Kolam and Kooththu of Sri Lanka, the Lakhe dance and the Gaijatra festival of Nepal, and the rural, folk and ritual theatre of India including Raslila, Ramlila, Kathakali, and Nautanki. On the other hand, the decolonizing drive that ran through South Asian theatre practice and criticism for quite some time from the late 1950s – especially in India and in Sri Lanka – resulted in the virtual dismissal of the Western aesthetics of representation as in the proscenium theatre, though not always of the modern stage itself, the return of Sanskrit classics in the original or in translation, and in the emergence of the ‘theatre of roots’ that appropriated traditional/folk performance forms to create the theatre idiom of the day. This ‘revivalist’ surge in theatre was often accompanied by a search for a ‘national’ theatre, based on the dominant, homogenizing construct of indigenous culture and heritage. It was almost forgotten that South Asian theatre, mostly of Indian origins, had long been a truly composite art form, comprising words, acting, and other performance constituents that in turn articulated the region’s cultural plurality together with borrowings from Western theatre traditions. Many genres of modern and contemporary urban South Asian drama and theatre consequently failed to capture the attention of Anglo-American as well as South Asian scholars and performers for a long time.¹² And this category sometimes included even the script-based street theatre.

For a fuller understanding of contemporary South Asian theatre, let us first clarify what ‘contemporary’ should mean as an adjective (conceptually) and, then, in relation to South Asia and finally to South Asian theatre and criticism. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2007) defines it as ‘belonging to the present time; modern.’ But the present often seems ungraspable in representation if not unrepresentable altogether. When sought to be represented in cultural forms as well as in history, it is either already a recent past or a near future. One may try to fixate the contemporary as an epoch; but then an epoch is presumed to have a coherence of its own that tends to elide other times intruding into it. Therefore, one may instead view the contemporary (‘con-’ meaning ‘together’) as the now containing ‘times together.’¹³ It is obviously not a collapse of plural times into a single, homogenized space that flattens the globe to feed the imperialist gaze. Nor is it ‘a synchronic presence,’ as Homi K. Bhabha notes. Rather, it can be ‘a way of keeping time and company, with others, with other times, with others’ times.’¹⁴ This meaning of ‘contemporary’ also helps us measure time – since it is perhaps not possible to live and act (writing or critiquing is an act, too) in a timeless universe – without recuperating the theory of an all-pervasive evolving time or the idea of a universal historical narrative with an unbroken continuity and yet acknowledging the passing of time, of one’s own time with its progressions and discontinuities, recurrences and overlaps. In this perspective, the contemporary is a site of ‘conjoined yet incommensurate’ elements, both past and present, in ‘multiple configurations and variations,’¹⁵ a site of what could be described as different and competing temporalities, multiple and alternative modernities, one transecting another.

Insofar as the contemporary is a question of ‘whose time it is,’ and not ‘what time it is,’ it recognizes ‘a number of temporalities in various relations’¹⁶ and helps find the meaning of temporality in a postcolonial perspective. The contemporary in and about ‘South Asia,’ in this light, can more or less be considered as synonymous with ‘post-independence’ – especially with regard to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka – but without designating it as a uniform, coherent era and also beyond the predominant Western understanding of it as a distinctly post-World War II phenomenon. Other times, others’ times, and contestatory temporalities characterize this ‘post-independence’ contemporary that is also ‘postcolonial’ in history- and culture-specific ways. ‘Contemporary’ in the case of Nepal, which was never a ‘colony’ as such, should mean the stretch of time since the dissolution of the Rana oligarchy (1951), during which different forms of democracy have been experimented with, resulting more recently in violence and counter-violence and in the eventual ousting of the monarch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Aparna Dharwadker
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Setting the Stage
• 2 Dispatches from the Margins: Theatre in India since the 1990s
• 3 Theatre Chronicles: Framing Theatre Narratives in Pakistan’s Sociopolitical Context
• 4 Designs of Living in the Contemporary Theatre of Bangladesh
• 5 Towards an Engaged Stage: Nepali Theatre in Uncertain Times
• 6 From Narratives of National Origin to Bloodied Streets: Contemporary Sinhala and Tamil Theatre in Sri Lanka
• Select Bibliography
• Index