Contemporary Indian Theatre: An Overview

Theatre is an ancient aesthetic practice in India. Surviving play texts
and treatises all suggest that theatre existed in the Indian
subcontinent from the
dawn of civilization. According to the Natyashastra
(compiled probably between 2000 BCE and 2nd century CE) of Bharata, an
exhaustive treatise on the art of
performance, drama was a gift from the gods to the humans. The treatise
evinces how sophisticated ancient Indian theatre must have been. The
golden period of Indian theatre
is said to have lasted until the 5th century, soon after which the flow
of Sanskrit drama wanes. But even while dramatic literature receded,
performance traditions thrived
through dancers, musicians, singers, and storytellers, just as the
basic aesthetics of Bharata survived, morphed into various variants,
through the traditional folk and
classical forms.
Modern Indian theatre, as we know it today, has a legacy that is
influenced by and draws inspiration from various sources. Modern
theatre, or historically, what can be
clearly identified as the Western proscenium style of theatre, was not
introduced in India before the late eighteenth century at time of the
consolidation of the British
Empire in various parts of India. It was through the British that
Western proscenium style theatre reached Indian shores. However, the
first indigenous performance with
native actors happened in 1795 when a Russian violinist by the name of
Herasim Stepanovich Lebedeff staged a Hindi and Bengali mixed-language
version of a short play by Paul
Jodrell. Although a significant event on its own right, it did not
really galvanize a movement as such but planted its seeds. In the
1830s, under the patronage of the rich
native families, we had the first Bengali-language theatre, which was
outside the traditional format of indigenous folk performance genres.
However, folk traditions, folk
theatre and various other performative genres, indigenous to the soil
have been available all through, if not an unbroken, at least as a
fractured tradition, and there is of
course the venerable tradition of the Sanskrit classical theatre that
dates back far deeper in time. In the mean time, the British had
established a small professional
theatre outfit in Calcutta and it was here that for the first time an
Indian actor, Baishnab Charan Auddy, played Othello in 1848. He was the
second person of color in
recorded history, after Ira Aldridge in the US, ever to play
Shakespeare’s tragic Moor.
From the 1850s, we begin to see a number of Indian theatre enthusiasts
on their own private endeavors staging their own plays, in their
respective languages, in the Western
proscenium style, not only in Calcutta but also in Bombay, and several
parts of North and South India. The most noteworthy fact here is that
none of these new efforts came at
the cost of the extinction of other, pre-existing folk forms. The folk
forms continued to survive in myriad shapes and forms and there was
always a direct aesthetic
connection between the so-called Western style Indian theatre and the
folk forms. Western style Indian theatre, thus, from its very inception
called for a certain kind of
active hybridity in its aesthetic expressivity, claiming for itself a
unique definition that was neither Western nor indigenous, but rather
a‘new’ form of
emergent Indian aesthetic. In the 1870s, this hybrid formation of an
“Indian” (though) proscenium-style theatre changed homes and hands,
moving from the mansions
of the rich to
the ticketed theatre. By the last quarter of the 19th century,
proscenium Indian theatre had gone public and turned itself into a
commercial outfit that was capable of
clothing and
feeding those who worked for it.
The situation changed with the turn of the 20th century and World War
I. This commercial, urban, Western-style theatre industry was finding
itself stuck within the confines
of the theatre auditorium and plays were becoming commodities for sale,
repeating themselves with formulaic lighter fares, allowing the winds
of commerce to decide the future
of the industry. The light of creative discovery that had given birth
to this theatre in the 19th century was dimming out and that is around
when, from the early 1920s
through the 40s, the freedom movement in India was gaining momentum as
well. Then came World War II.
The Indian Communist Party had been founded between the war years, in
1922, and along with it came the Indian People’s Theatre Association
(IPTA), which was its cultural
wing. IPTA’s work took hold in the 1940s. The organization had branches
all over the country, but the ones in Bengal and Bombay particularly
had several talented people in
their ranks, all from the middle class with dreams of a classless
society. They came up with a kind of theatre that was entirely portable
and had a political agenda that was
obviously at the same time both anti-colonial as well as anti-fascist.
With the birth of the IPTA movement, it became increasingly evident
that the time had come to challenge
the convention of the commercial (and politically dispassionate and
non-ideological) Indian proscenium theatre that had been established
from the end of the 19th century to
over a period of approximately 70 years. However, IPTA’s challenge was
not so much a formal redefinition in terms of theatrical form or
formation of a recognizable national
identity as such. Rather, it was turning Indian theatre, even within
the formal containment of proscenium-style theatre, into an implement
of social and political change that
would be more concerned about reaching the masses.