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“Traditional” Indian Theatre and the Status of Folk Forms In the theoretical and polemical discourses that have elaborated contemporary Indian theatre’s “encounter with tradition” since the 1960s, the notion of “tradition” usually encapsulates the full range of indigenous modes of drama, theatre, and performance that emerged diachronically over two millennia but have assumed a synchronous existence in the present . Hence the term “traditional Indian theatre” signices, in the singular or as a mass noun, the secular and classical Sanskrit drama of Kalidasa, Bhasa, and Shudraka; postclassical North Indian religious forms, such as ramlila and raslila; classically derived balletic forms, such as kathakali and kudiyattam (Kerala); regional folk forms, such as yakshagana (Karnataka) and bhavai (Gujarat); and intermediary popular forms, such as nautanki (Uttar Pradesh), tamasha (Maharashtra), and jatra (Bengal). As suggested earlier, such promiscuity of signiccation is essential for maintaining the near-Manichaean and resolutely ahistorical opposition between “Indian tradition” and “Western modernity.” In nativist, revivalist, or culturalnationalist perspectives, all indigenous forms that predate colonialism or lie outside the sphere of European norms are valorized as natural, organic, and transcendent, whereas the products of Western inbuence are dismissed as articcial, derivative, and trivial. Moreover, such monolithic constructions of an always redemptive Indian tradition are justiced in these perspectives by reference to the cultural continuity, formal 310 chapter 9 # Alternative Stages Antirealism, Gender, and Contemporary “Folk” Theatre interconnectedness, and aesthetic unity of so-called traditional forms— all qualities that supposedly manifest themselves unproblematically in the present. Writing “in defense of the ‘theatre of roots’” in 1985, after two decades of intense experimentation by Indian playwrights, directors, and performers in the contemporary use of traditional forms, Suresh Awasthi thus asserts that “never before during the last one century and more was theatre practised in such diversiced form, and at the same time with such unity in essential theatrical values” (“Defence,” 85). In practice, however, the repository of “tradition” has been neither as inclusive nor as eclectic as such arguments suggest. Most of the critical and creative engagement with indigenous forms in the post-independence period has come to center on the folk performance genres popular in various rural regions throughout the country because the category of “folk” brings into play the most complex range of ideological, political, sociocultural, and aesthetic polarities in contemporary India. In one major scheme of polarization, the term “folk” complements and opposes the term “classical” on a continuum that decnes the two dominant Indian modes of cultural transmission and preservation, whether the object in question is language, literary form, dance, music, the plastic and visual arts, ritual, performance, or everyday life.The classical/folk duality in turn corresponds to a series of binaries in which the crst term is implicitly privileged in relation to the second—metropolitan/provincial, elite/popular , sophisticated/crude, urban/rural, and written/oral. In a second scheme of polarization, folk forms embody the culture of the village rather than that of the city at an ideological moment when the sociocultural disjunctions and economic inequalities between these two domains have become persistent “national” problems. Commenting on the “unfortunate dichotomy between urban and rural life . . . [which] is expressed in disparities in economic standards, services, educational levels and cultural developments ,” Badal Sircar links the historical development of the Indian city with “colonial interests” and that of the village with a “traditional indigenous culture” that even colonialism could not destroy (Third Theatre, 1). The city-village relation in India thus becomes (perhaps unintentionally) a version of Raymond Williams’s analysis of unequal city-country relations in the feudal and industrial West, conferring the same priority on the village as a materially exploited but culturally resilient space (see Williams, 46–54). With specicc reference to theatre, this ideological conception of the village creates its own oppositions. The energy and vitality of folk performance genres appear all the more remarkable in view of the subservient Alternative Stages 311 socioeconomic position of the village in the modern period, while the sophisticated cultural forms of the city seem self-indulgent and lifeless. In terms of aesthetic form, the essentially stylized, antimodern, antirealistic , open-air, environmental qualities of folk performance constitute a form of “total theatre” antithetical to the seemingly regimented products of the enclosed proscenium stage. Similarly, as the participant in a compensatory collective ritual that fulclls the needs of the community, the rural spectator stands in signal contrast to the isolated urban theatregoer in a darkened auditorium. The political conception of folk theatre as a people’s theatre evokes in...

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