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CONTEMPORARY INDIAN THEATRE:
AN OVERVIEW
RATAN THIYAM:
ELUSIVE DISSENT
EVERYONE’S AN ARTIST
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By Dr. Sudipto Chatterjee PART 1 | PART
2 | PART 3
Post-Independence Indian theatre was marked by a concomitant search in all aspects of public life, particularly in the cultural sector, for a common
“national” identity. This identity would distinguish the nascent post-colonial country as a unified, unique entity that was held together by threads of common cultural
contiguities imbricating across various cultures and ethnicities that went into this formation of a single-nation called the "socialist, secular, democratic, republic" of
INDIA. There was a tone of celebration of an emergent identity that was anathema to the influences of British colonialism as well as a build-up on the national borders
defined (in ideology as well as administrative logistics) by the departing colonizers. The task was not easy, but culture-makers from various corners of the country, in a
myriad range of expressivity, contributed to the problematic project (optimistic at best and impossible at worst) of creating a certain kind of Indian-ness.
Just as World War II was nearing an end, and India was about to be independent, the Communist Party decided to remove itself from active support of the anti-colonial
independence movement led by the Indian National Congress. The party did not extend their support, for example, to Mahatma Gandhi’s “Quit India” movement in 1942, emphasizing
an internationalist anti-fascist line instead. Unfortunately, this strategy hurt them in terms of popular support, and that gave the IPTA movement a jolt. Therefore, by the
early 1950s, although the country was independent and the IPTA was still around, its movers and the shakers found themselves walking away from party lines and establishing
their own theatres. This new trend, which has subsequently been identified as the Group Theatre movement, was still a proscenium-bound, city-centric theatre but not one that
obeyed the rules of the commercial market. It was an alternative to the commercially driven theatre industry, serious in socio-political content. Nowhere was this movement as
sharply delineated as in West Bengal, where it resulted in the birth of the Group Theatre, led by stalwarts like Shombhu Mitra, Utpal Dutt, Bijon Bhattacharya, et al.
The Group Theatre movement had a kind of avant-garde momentum though perhaps not form. Although it was still confined to the proscenium space, catering largely to urban
audiences, it had started to open up Indian theatre to international drama. By the 1960s, Sophocles, Pirandello, Ibsen, Brecht, and Chekhov were being adapted into Bengali,
alongside the neglected plays of Rabindranath Tagore, hitherto dismissed as “unstageable” by the doyens of commercial theatre. Prolific playwrights like Utpal Dutt were
writing plays that spoke not only about Indian subjects, but also addressed issues like the Vietnam War, fascism in Germany, or even racism in America. However, they were
still bound by the Western-style proscenium stage. Here again, folk aesthetics were assimilated but always in terms of how they could be presented on a one-side open,
auditorium-bound theatre. It was as if the proscenium stage was the only venue for any viable theatre. The question of alternate spaces and alternative modes of performance
were quite irrelevant to most theatre-makers, barring a few exceptions like Badal Sircar.
The much-needed change started in the late ’60s, almost all of it outside West Bengal, when some playwrights like Girish Karnad (from Karnataka), and K. N. Panikkar (Kerala)
from the South, and, Vijay Tendulkar (Maharashtra), Habib Tanvir (Madhya Pradesh), and Mohan Rakesh (Uttar Pradesh) from the North and West, started writing plays of a very
different ilk. Their plays negotiated relentlessly with tradition, looking for new languages of performative expression, bringing together various Indian traditions and
histories (culled out of both folk and classical), often in highly syncretic combinations with Western dramaturgy, at a very different level of hybridity that looked to merge
form with content. Although many of these plays, too, are somewhat proscenium-bound, and often Western in their allegiances; nonetheless, Karnad, Tendulkar, Rakesh and their
generation still spoke to an audience that was situated really in the interstices between the fabrics of traditions that had come together to represent post-colonial India.
This was a different kind of theatre, an extended version of the hybridity that had marked 19th century Indian theatre, but a hundred years later. Though still concerned with
social and political issues, the work of these new playwrights could be performed in proscenium-style auditoria, but they certainly did not need it as a pre-requisite. This
was one of their major differences with the Group Theatre.
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