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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
This new brand of theatre was exemplified by many of the playwrights who were directors as well, like Habib Tanvir, and K.N. Panikkar. Among directors,
you find stalwarts like B.V. Karanth, Prasanna, M.K. Raina, Jabbar Patel, Satish Alekar, et al. In production, these plays called for a flexible kind of stylized theatre,
with affordable production expenses, that did not necessarily rely on realism as the principle for staging. The emphasis was on physicalization of the stage with stylized
movement, music, dance, and very often a representational style of acting. As a result, they emphasis shifted from heavily loaded texts to performative inspiration, drawing
from traditional modes of performance to create a performance text that challenged the sanctity of the written text through physically crystallized stage poetry, pushing the
boundaries of performative expressivity, politically and culturally. In terms of performance aesthetics, both the playwrights and the directors were interested in
discovering/inventing a new performative language for the new nation that would claim its own space, independent of Eurocentric aesthetics.
This new movement in Indian theatre of the 60s and early 70s was arguably labeled by Suresh Awasthi, a cultural bureaucrat-scholar, as the theatre of ‘roots,’ for most of the
writers and directors themselves never accepted the definition. The word roots, at the phonetic level at least, can also be taken as “r-o-u-t-e-s,” for it was indeed going in
several directions. Regardless of which region of the country it represented, this new theatre was trying find itself in the rediscovery of the traditional, the reinvention
of the indigenous in hybrid postcolonial formations to proclaim, if not newcessarily (or successfully) fashion, a cultural self-identity on the national stage. This
negotiation (or “encounter,” as Awasthi had put it) with tradition took two distinctly noticeable directions. This way or that, the endeavor was always to find a unique
cultural expression that could be called Indian, either by: (1) “weaving” or “fitting” pre-existent folk performance elements into the performance text for the enhancement of
the play; or, (2) “re-discovering” old classical Sanskrit plays and staging them in a modern idiom. The foremost example of the former category can be found in the works of
Habib Tanvir, who worked in the Chhattisgarh area in Central India, with local (often illiterate) actors in the local dialect, but using plays ranging from local folktales to
Shakespeare, Brecht and even Sanskrit drama. In the latter category, the best example is to be seen in the works of Kavalam Narayan Panikkar in the southern state of Kerala,
especially in his groundbreaking staging of the ancient Sanskrit dramatist Bhasa’s work in Sanskrit. The rationale behind this divided pull towards indigenous performance
practice, be it folk or classical, to create a modern Indian drama, according to Girish Karnad, "was not to find and reuse forms that had worked successfully in some other
cultural context. The hope, rather, was to discover whether there was a structure of expectations—and conventions—about entertainment underlying these forms from which one
could learn."
This was the fraught, though exciting, state of contemporary Indian theatre when a new voice emerged on the Indian stage from an expected corner of the country: Ratan Thiyam,
from the distant Northeastern state of Manipur (whose only recognized contribution to the banquet table of national culture until then was Manipuri classical dance). A former
student of India’s National School of Drama, Thiyam had returned to his native state to form his own company, the Chorus Repertory. In Thiyam’s work with the Repertory we
find an assimilative reconciliation of the bifurcated pull between the folk and the classical Indian theatre of the mid-70s at large was experiencing. Thiyam’s range of work
confronted all facile readings of Indian theatre’s “encounter” with tradition. His was more of an exigent engagement than encounter, because in the visually stunning Manipuri
retellings of pan-Indian classics he was somehow able to talk about his own regional location with the double-speak of a theatrical language that could go beyond spoken
words. Neither Thiyam’s “roots,” nor his “routes” followed a singular course, be they under or over the landscape of Indian theatre. His root followed the route of a rhizome:
a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals. The shoots and roots coming out/going deeper to punctuate
the intervals in his career were the scintillating stagings that, with each arrival, kept redefining Indian theatre, continuously raising the bar. It was in Ratan Thiyam’s
work that contemporary Indian theatre in the last quarter of the twentieth century found a totally realized form of theatrical performance that integrated and engaged several
disparate binaries at one stroke—national and regional, folk and classical, modern and traditional, mythic and contemporary, cultural and political, form and content, and,
theatrical and performative. Thiyam’s work, thus, offered to the international continuum a form of theatre that could perhaps begin to define itself as truly “Indian,”
reflecting all its myriad contradictions crystallized with startling clarity and splendor.
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