The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics

The Eurocolonial Reception of Sanskrit Poetics

The Eurocolonial Reception of Sanskrit Poetics SUE-ELLEN CASE The Orient functions as a theater, a stage on which a performance is repeated, to be seen from a privileged standpoint. I treat ethnography itselfas a performance emplotted by powerful stories. -James Clifford, Writing Culture Research in contemporary feminist criticism has focused, in part, on what are termed "differences." A refinement of earlier identity politics, these differences operate to situate both the perspective of the criticlhistorian and the object of research within specific institutional, historical, sexual, gender, race, and class affiliations. This focus has occasioned a new critical theory, a new historicism, and even a new epistemology . Both the scholar and the object of study are now configured within a multiple, shifting, often self-contradictory identity made up, as Teresa de Lauretis has phrased it, of "heterogenous and heteronomous representations." 1 This new construct of positionality came primarily from women of color working within ethnic communities in the United States. More recently, Third World women and men have brought a new dimension to "differences" and positionality through Edward Said's critique of Orientalism, the postcolonial critique of history, and literature written by Indian scholars working in subaltern studies. Within intercultural studies, this new notion of positionality has transIII I I 2 Deconstruction formed the way in which the critic/historian confronts a text or tradition from another culture. Here the title of James Clifford's book speaks directly to the re-vision of the project: Writing Culture. In his introduction, Clifford describes the interdisciplinary intersection of studies that is producing a new methodology and epistemology for intercultural work, containing , among others: historical ethnography, cultural poetics, cultural criticism, the critique of hegemonic structures, the semiotics of exotic worlds and fantastic spaces, the study of scientific communities, and, a category Clifford elides, feminist theory.2 The compound of literary studies with ethnography, in conjunction with techniques of materialist history and materialist culture, and the postcolonial critique has produced the kinds of strategies deconstructed or otherwise employed in the following analysis of ellipsis, concealment, and partial disclosure. Thus, as a feminist scholar, this critique of differences, along with an awareness of the politics of First World study of the Third World, turned my studies to the postcolonial critique. More immediately, Avanthi Meduri's performance and critique in the Women and Theatre Program and the high visibility of Peter Brook's Mahabharata prompted me to review theatrical scholarship of what is deemed "classical" Indian theater. To this end, I would like to execute a preliminary application of some strategies within the postcolonial critique to the reception of Sanskrit poetics and Brook's Mahabharata in order to illustrate the way in which these studies alter the methodology and received knowledge of the theater critic/historian. As this approach illustrates, this reception is marked with a colonialist ideology which originated near the beginning of the nineteenth century and carries into contemporary times. It hinges upon the reception of Sanskrit in European studies and the studied promulgation of the English language and literature in colonial India. "DISCIPLINING" SANSKRIT The project of creating Sanskrit as a "classical" language entails all of the presuppositions informing periodization that Thomas Postlewaite critiques in his article "The Criteria for Periodization in Theatre History": causality, narrativity, and unity.3 But even more importantly here, this Eurocolonial Reception of Sanskrit Poetics : I I} notion of the "classical" displaces the phenomenon of Sanskrit drama from its indigenous ground of meaning to a eurocentric one. The notion abounds with resonances of nineteenth-century German Romanticism, British empiricism, and the British systems of a "classical" and a colonial education. Intimations of a glory long past-an aesthetic plenitude now spentmark the German Romantic reception of both Sanskrit drama and the language itself. Heine, Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Goethe praised the recently translated Sanskrit play Sakuntala. Goethe rhapsodized about its plenitudinous powers in this oft-quoted little poem: If I want the first blooms, the late-ripening fruits What charms and enchants; what nourishes and fulfills Heaven and earth-in one nameSakuntala , I call you, and that says it all.4 Likewise, Sanskrit itself was situated as the source of grammatical plenitude. The assimilative project began in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century with the new science of linguistics, founded, in part, by Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel's Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, written in 1808, asserts the common origin of Sanskrit and the principal...