Indian+Performance+Pre+and+Post-Independence

Overview of British influence on India The roots of what is considered “modern” Indian theatre, stretch back to the day of British rule in India. The presence of the British in India dates back to the early part of the seventeenth century. Merchants in the United Kingdom at the time demanded a royal charter for a new trading company, “The Governor and Company of Merchants in London, Trading into the East Indies.” Many describe conventional British rule in India as having begun in 1757 with the Battle of Plassey. The forces of the British East India company defeated the army of Siraj-ud-daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. The battle only lasted a few hours, with many soldiers being bribed by the British to throw away their weapons and to turn in other solders.

After the British victory, the East India Company rose from an association of traders in India, to rulers who were able to exercise political authority over the land and people. The Company enjoyed a monopoly over all British Trade in India. During this time period, the British angered the Hindu population of India. They made English the official language of India, rather than Persian. They prohibited sacred acts of Hinduism, as sanctioning missionary activity, and allowed widows to remarry.

After years of growing political power, a mutiny caused a major shift in political power. The Sepoy mutiny, began with a revolt by Muslim and Hindu soldiers, who were outraged that in order to reload a rifle, they had to first bite the end of the cartridge, which was greased in pig fat and beef tallow. The revolt began, which eventually turned into a disorganized and chaotic national rebellion. The British were eventually able to stop the massive peasant uprising.

On August 2, 1858, the Government of India Act was passed by the British Parliament. The officially transferred authority from the East India Company to the British monarchy. The Suez Canal was completed in 1869, which reduced the time for sea passage to India from three months to three weeks. A separate “British society” developed. Also, more British goods were being imported to India, which removed the necessity of Indian craft. By the end of the 19th Century, a majority of the British population were farmers. At the same time, and increased number of factories, railroads, and hospitals were built. The East India Company was nationalized in 1858, and Queen Victoria was declared the Queen of India. It was under this political turmoil and uprising, that the British were able to take control, and from this political squelching that the rebellious quality of art was eventually put to use. But not before the British defined what “proper” Indian theatre should be.

__Timeline__

1756: The first English theatre established in Calcutta called the playhouse.

1775: The second English stage, the New Playhouse, was built, and performed European plays.

1795: Stepanovich lebedeff translated The Disguise into Bengali with Bengali actors.

1800 – 1900: 14 Hindu translations of Shakespeare’s plays were produced.

1831: The Sanskrit classic, Uttararama-carita, was staged.

1843: Performance of Sita Swayamvara, which was the first non=traditional, non ritualistic, non-polk dramatic performance in Marathi. It was considered a play by colonial definition.

1858: India falls under direct rule of British crown after a failed Indian mutiny.

1867-1895: 65 translations of Shakespeare’s plays into Marahthi

1857: Bengal produced the first original play, Kutina Kalasarvasva, a social tragedy.

1870-1920: 91 translations of Shakespeare’s plays into Tamil.

1917: The first feature film, Satyabadi Raja Harishchandra, was made by Madan’s Elphinstone Bioscope Company in Bengal.

1931: Bhanagavram Vitthal Warekar introduced a new dramaturgical structure into Marathi style theatre. This was a form of naturalism.

1933: Andnalyanah Shaka, (School for the Blind), was produced.

1942 – The formation of the Indain People’s Theatre Association in Calcutta and Bombay. The people began to create a new theatre of their own.

1942-43: Quit India movement

August 15, 1947 – India became an independent nation. Jawaharlal Nehru is sworn in as the first Prime Minister of India.

1948: Mahatma Gandhi assassinated.

1950: India becomes a republic. Dr. Rajendra Prasad is the first president of India.

1950s: Ashadh ka ek din was the first realist prose play.

1952: Separation started between the upper and lower classes on performances based in English, versus the traditional Indian style.

1958: Mother India became the first Hindi film to be nominated for an oscar.

1959: The National School of Drama was established in Delhi.

Pre-Independence India: A paradox

Once the East India Company gained power in India during the 18th Century, art was already on the move. Rather than cultivate the ancient practices of performance in India, the British immediately began imposing their own views of “proper” theatre, upon the Indian culture. Before colonization, theatre in India could be found in villages and homes. There was no concept of the “proscenium stage”.

The first major theatres were built in Bombay and Calcutta. These were two major port cities, developed by the British East India Company. In 1753, the first English theater opened in Calcutta, called the Playhouse. It was followed in 1775 by the New Playhouse. The first theater house in Bombay was called the Amateur Theater. The theatre buildings themselves had no recognition of the Indian culture or traditions that had proceeded. Instead, the theatre houses were exact copies of the theatres found in Britain at the time. They contained a pit, a gallery, painted scenery and backdrops, footlights, chandeliers, and a large front curtain.

During this time, theatre was simply used as a means to remind the British colonists of home. It was also intended to provide an escape for British officers. The theatres were not successful at first, mostly because they were in complete contradiction to Indian culture up to that point in time. However, once Balcrustnath Sunkerset, one of the wealthiest men in Bombay at the time, bought two tickets to see The Rivals, the attendance changed. The Indian people began to see theater. We can also see a shift in the location of the theatres. The Amateur Theatre in Bombay was eventually closed and demolished due to bankruptcy. Jugonnath Sunkersett, an Indian man, rebuilt the theatre in his own town, which contained mostly Indian people. Here we can see the British ideals of art reaching further and further into the towns and culture of the Indian people, redefining, for them, the “proper” aspects of art.

We can also begin to see the massive conflict between the two cultures, due to the imposition of the British. The British defined their conventions of theatre as high art, and therefore all other forms of performance were not considered worthy of their time. Here we see the clash between urban theatre, which was deemed high class, and rural theatre, then considered by the upper classes to be low class. For example, Mrs. Deacle, an actress who came from Calcutta to run the Grant Road Theater, wanted to reserve the front of boxes exclusively for Europeans. She believed that the red turbans of the Parsi’s obstructed the view of the audience.

However, the English continued to use the theatre as a political tool to further their artistic agenda. Through the performances of European theatre, the English language, as well as their manners and habits, were forced on the Indian people, so that their aspects of culture became something that needed to be acquired. At the same time, the theatre became a teaching tool in new universities and colleges. Thomas Bobingon Maculay stated - “no one could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (45). As Shakespeare became more popular in Indian theater, it began to take on a western based literary focus. A play had to be considered high literature in order to be viewed as legitimate theatre by the upper class. The first Bengali tragedy, //Kirtibilas //, by Jogendrachandra Gupta was modeled after English tragedies. The British tradition of dramatic literature, which included a very linear and singular narrative, a heavy emphasis on language, a unity of space and time, a rarely unbroken five act plot structure, a style of acting based more on emotion than dance, and the idea of a spectacle was upheld as necessary and paramount in the British Indian theatre.

However, during the late 1800’s, a large separation emerged between the upper and lower classes. As Amitava Roy stated in 1995, “What we do on the proscenium stage is theater, what our folks have been doing throughout centuries is best termed “performance”. The paradox of defining art for an entire culture continues to be broken today by the Indian people. However, before independence, the theatre shifted from an art form to please the British, to an art form to protest their rule. The Indian people began to take the conventions forced upon them for so many years, and use it against the “upper classes”. The paradox turns around. What once overshadowed traditional Indian culture, became the tool to fight for change.

A Close Reading: The Indian People's Theater Association

In 1943 a famine was created by the British government in Bengal. The government had used the Indian people's harvest that year to feed soldiers in the Pacific during WWII. It is estimated that 3 million people died of starvation. Around the same time, The Quit India Movement, when acts of civil disobedience occurred across the country in response to Gandhi's call for immediate Independence, was suppressed by the British government. Most of the Indian National Congress leadership, including Gandhi, was imprisoned; many of them spent the rest of WWII in jail. Both of these events created outrage and a unification of many Indians to stand up for Independence against the British. Uprisings occurred all across the country, especially in Ballia, which resulted in 100,000 detentions and public floggings. This was a time when the artists of India had had enough and began to take action.

The IPTA was a collective effort of artists to "raise their voices against the injustices of the Nations' rulers." (Segal p.31). The first meeting of the Indian People’s Theatre association occurred in Bombay. “(It) has been formed to coordinate and strengthen all the progressive tendencies that have so far manifested themselves in the nature of Drama. . .it is not imposed from above but one which seeks to revive the lost in that heritage by reinterpreting, adopting and integrating it with the most significant facts of our people’s lives.” (Dalmia p.161). Many conventions occurred all over the country in which artists from every discipline shared ideas, synthesized artistic mediums, staged performances with political messages, and exposed others to domestic artistic traditions long forgotten or unseen to people from different geographic areas. There was little boundary between 'folk' and 'classical' theater to be drawn from. The IPTA allowed the lower class to participate in productions, which had never been allowed before. The plays were based on stories about the general public as opposed to the elite. The IPTA conventions supported a new emphasis on “Indianness”, a enthusiasm for the culture of the people, and a patriotism that condemned Indian rule. They wanted to use folk forms to directly communicate and creatively collaborate with the people.

Branches of the IPTA sprouted up all over the country. They worked underneath the British radar, performing on the streets and in non-conventional buildings. Urban theater groups toured all over the country, especially to illiterate areas, educating the people about British subjugation and other political issues. Many productions were created with very simple scenery and costumes contradicting the spectacle of the western stage. The actors slipped in between “characters” and social activists who invited the audience to participate in politics which “made for ‘naturalistic theater of a different variety” (Dalmia, p.162).

On one hand Indian artists consciously rejected any British influenced theater. They used theatrical elements and styles that were purely indigenous and opposite from British theatrical style. On the other hand, they embraced British influences that they thought were more dramatically useful and fused them with Indian aesthetics and dramatic elements. One particular artist working with the IPTA, Dina Gandhi, used the traditional dance drama form of Gujaret, but she weaved a strong narrative line into the music and infused political content such as rationing during WWII into the short narrative skits that comprised the form. It was performed on a makeshift proscenium stage all over streets and buildings in Bombay. Another artist within the IPTA, K.A Abbas, drew upon the urban British influenced naturalistic style of acting and fused it with rural processional songs to create a documentary play that reflected a living newspaper about religion and a Muslim household. One of IPTA's most famous productions was, Nabanna or "New Harvest". The play was based on the Bengal famine of 1942 and 1943. The story emphasized the fact that the famine was not a natural disaster because the British used the harvests as food for their soldiers. The play broke up the narrative line by switching to many places focusing on different social realities. The audience was shocked by the realism and simplicity of the set and costumes; they had become so used to the sensationalism and melodrama of the professional theater.

The IPTA movement drew upon the extraordinarily unique and diverse lifestyles and crafts of the people and used them for new purposes in their reclaiming of roots. This is exemplified by the singing mendicant, a folk performer who used to wander form town to town, diagnosing diseases and sharing wisdom for alms. Artists retained that old style but used it for diagnosing social diseases as opposed to medical ones.

Eventually the official IPTA movement petered out only shortly after Independence. This was due to the fact that once independence was gained there was less of a unified cause to rally behind and many artists in the movement disagreed with the IPTA's strong connection with the Communist party in India. These few, what has been considered utopian, years of the theater had a huge impact on the direction of Indian performance and identity. It also layed the groundwork for the Theatre of Roots movement.

Theater of Roots:

The Theatre of Roots was a post-independence effort to challenge the aesthetics of British artistic influences and to create a new way of perceiving the world which was not dictated by the colonizers: "Because theatre was used (by the British) to disseminate colonial culture and demonstrate cultural superiority, it became a powerful tool with which to challenge that same colonial authority"(Mee, p.4). The effort was in essence a "decolonization" of Indian theatre. This was part of a larger national movement inspired by Gandhi's goal for the country to reclaim what was wholly Indian. The beginnings of the "roots" movement coincided with a national desire by the people and the new government to reclaim India as a unique nation with its’ own identity. This later manifested in the governments push in the 1970's and 1980's for a national theater with a uniform national aesthetic by using a variety folk elements. This idea was rejected by many artists involved in the movement because they thought that trying to create one aesthetic was giving in to the western image of India as one nation and culture; when it was in fact made up of hundreds of groups, dialects, and cultural practices. Many of the artists wanted work that celebrated the diversity of the country.

The medium of Indian theater was re-infused with many of its pre-colonial folk elements. The linear five act Aristotelian narrative imposed by the English was broken apart, including multiple perspectives, jumping from place to place, the goal not being to create a perfectly logical story. There were performances that contained 30 different poetic song narratives. There was sometimes a comic character that popped out of the plot to comment on social realities. A familiar story (usually mythological) was interrupted by long segments of dance. The text in many forms such as Kathakali was used as a basis for improvisation to explore emotional depth and social commentary through physical gesture. Kavalam Pannikar, an eminent practitioner in the theatre of Roots movement, used a chorus of puppets and told the same story many different ways. Many performances focused much less on the text. Pannikar's work used vocalizations and physical gesture as an equal vessel of communication as language. He also placed language in the body, so the words came out of specific gestures. The dominance of literature in Drama was imposed by the colonizers, much of the movement was an effort to break that imposition.

Many artists within the movement reconnected the theatre with religion. They brought back religious myths that were familiar to many Indians, as well as religious symbols that had specific understood meanings to Indian audiences. These elements were used as a basis for creating new theatre work. Folk forms of theatre, dance, and storytelling from all over the country were reinvigorated. In addition, a text in English was looked down upon and Hindi was used as the main language for plays.

Although the roots movement took at times a vehemently anti-western tone, "practitioners were still searching for a theatre that could reflect the complex political, historical, social, and cultural realities of a newly independent nation, which often meant using elements of 'western' theatre"(Mee p.10). Many plays were still text based and used the western naturalistic tradition. The performances fully embraced reintegrating traditional Indian elements, but the social contexts in which it performed were very western. For example, a proscenium stage was used, they played to urban audiences at a pre-announced time for a fixed number of hours, and tickets were sold. The Roots movement strived to find a way to modernize in their own way as opposed to just copying the western world.

Hyperlink to the Native Americans

Many cultures around the world were devastated by either colonialism or dictatorship. Dance movements emerged out of a need to redefine a broken cultural identity. The people of India and the Native Americans became foreigners in their own country, paradoxically looked down upon by the western ideals of the Europeans. While cultural traditions were put on stage in India, Native American tribes performed sacred ceremonial rituals to inform the public of their customs. Both cultures had to succumb to western ideas of performance in order to keep a sense of cultural identity alive.

When the Europeans invaded the Americas, many Native American tribes were put under extreme circumstances, overcome by disease and forced to move from their homeland. Criticism of sacred ceremonial traditions was inevitable. The westerners crudely shaped ideals, and exploited the sacred dances of the Pueblo tribe by deeming them “savage”. The dances were pushed into the ground. Tribes such as the Pomo, Miwok, Wappo and Winton joined together to recreate a form of their old dances and traditions through a dance movement called the Bole Maru. Western values such as abolition of alcohol, gambling, and abstinence were necessary for the survival of their movement. This connects to the British disseminating their morals through implementing Shakespeare and other western writers into mainstream Indian education. Shakespeare, unlike most Indian forms of performance such as the Jatra, has a set structure and a clear plot line. When Jatra was put on stage, a hybridity between the western five-act plot-line and the traditional storytelling structure of Jatra was necessary in order for western audiences to accept it as a form of theater. The Native American movement of the Bole Maru and Indian performances such as the Jatra were both manipulated by western ideals in order to be accepted by the newly westernized society.

Similar to the Indian Peoples Theater Association (IPTA) the American Indian Dance Theater (AIDT) was created in the 1970’s by the multiple tribes across the country in order to gain back a sense of cultural identity. In 1978 congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) to protect American Indians and their inherent right to believe and express themselves (Murphy, 198). The fact that an act had to be passed in order for this to be established is very telling in itself. AIDT contemporized traditional dances in order to make them more relevant to their struggles at the present time. Although performing these dances to larger audiences has raised more awareness of Native American ceremonies what is being presented has been manipulated for decades to fit western standards of morality. IPTA modernized Indian traditions as well to reach a larger audience and successfully reestablish a sense of cultural acceptance. Performances by IPTA were set on proscenium stage makes a clear parallel to the circumstances of AIDT. The only way the cultures could regain their roots was by placing their traditions in a western frame of performance.

Citations:

Crossing boundaries / edited by Geeti Sen. New Delhi : Orient Longman, 1997 TC Wilson Library Ames DS379 .C49 1997

Dalmia, Vasudha. //Poetics, Plays, and Performances The Politics of Modern Theatre//. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. 

Mee, Erin. //Theatre of Roots//. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007. Print.

Sarris, Greg. Keeping slug woman alive : a holistic approach to American Indian texts / Greg Sarris. Berkeley : University of California Press, c1993. 

Shea Murphy, Jacqueline, 1964- The people have never stopped dancing : Native American modern dance histories / Jacqueline Shea Murphy. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2007.