The Theater and Classical India: Some Availability Issues

Quite apart from urgencies arising within the theater as an enterprise, it is independently necessary to bring the tools of speech-act theory to bear on the theater. This essay begins by redescribing the foundational moves of that theory in terms of drawing successive core-supplement boundaries. A third move, proposed here, extends this strategy of expanding the core in a performative direction. So extended, the central theoretical concern of speech-act theory converges with what one major tradition articulates as the way forward for theatrical performance. That tradition — which has traveled from Stanislavski’s Russia, via Grotowski’s Poland, to Badal Sircar’s India — is in the business of giving democracy theatrical teeth. While Sircar does not explicitly claim a classical Indian ancestry for his work, serious Indology will find it easy to place him in that context.