The Colonial Staged: Theatre in Colonial Calcutta (review)

Analytical dramatic histories in English are still relevantly uncommon in the Indian subcontinent. Most often it is playscripts that are regularly circulated as literature. Their nonfiction counterparts, biographies and autobiographies of famous actors and directors, fall into the iconic, emulative modalities of memoir readership. With a more sinister bureaucratic purpose, chronicles of “Indian” performances, plays, and groups survey the field as purveyors of (high) culture. What are repeatedly elided in all these renditions are the performative lives of plays on the stage and the socioeconomic enablers of theater making. It is not that critical thought has not been applied to performance traditions in the subcontinent. It is that, until recently, even until the last decades of the twentieth century, analysis of Indian theater happened regionally in the vernacular. This is especially remarkable in a region like Bengal, where not only many of the debates and discussions surrounding the theater but also on occasion the plays themselves were in English, from the twentieth century on. Sudipto Chatterjee’s The Colonial Staged intervenes to fill precisely this lacuna. As a much-needed, insightful, chronological look at the formations of modern Bengali theater at the height of British influence in colonial Calcutta, it is therefore indispensable to any theater scholar interested in the region.

As the title suggests, tracing the history of the Bengali stage in the colonial era is not so much about how the physical performance stage evolved and was configured under colonial influence. Although venues did change drastically, from the erstwhile improvised outdoor, courtyard, or living room theaters to professional auditoriums, they were in fact symptomatic of a larger shift—the identity of the theater maker himself (for the ones defining and negotiating the parameters of colonial self-identity were always male). Chatterjee expertly unravels in each instance of dramatic utterance the politico-social underpinning of the playwright, director, and actor drawn together in their collaborative enterprise. Theater, and in particular under British occupation theater in one’s mother tongue of Bengali, becomes a particularly potent medium of expressing, challenging, and changing collective identity.

Colonial theater, as even this briefest of introductions indicates, was then by its very nature a hybrid performance. Chatterjee deploys Michael Taussig’s theorization of mimesis and alterity as the containing and illuminating framework for his book, where the colonial subject, through his attempts at mimicking the civilizational/civilizing cultural genres of the colonizer, succeeds most strongly in highlighting his own difference from his colonial master. The case of performance becomes most poignant in this overall ambition since racialized bodies onstage are the surest marker of the futility of camouflaging otherness. In an early production, when a “native” did appear in an expatriate British performance of Othello in Calcutta in 1848, as “the real unpainted nigger” with his racial specificity erased save for his dark skin (59), the burden of this taxonomic symbology was too much even for this admittedly talented actor. While reviewers alike remarked favorably on Bustomchurn Addy’s acting skills, the audacity of the enterprise did not cease to gall. Even the most benign English reviewer could not rid himself of condescension while ultimately suggesting that theater, in its superior Western garb, was simply beyond the ken of the native. The Bengalis then, summarily excluded from the British theater of Calcutta, had no choice but to devise their own theater.

This process was not always as progressive or redemptive as the exercise suggests. Chatterjee deftly points out that the players at the vanguard of this self-fashioning were the babus—the elite, educated, wealthy class of feudal Bengal whose patterns of dependence on, admiration for, and/or opposition to their colonial masters were very complicated. A straightforward repudiation of British influence in the cultural realm, often rather obdurately disassociated from the political and economic realm, was neither possible nor desirable. Even when the theater passed on from the exclusive purview of babudom to a more egalitarian, “secular” (119) domain of professional theater without patronage, it retained many of...