Gender, Culture and Performance: Marathi Theatre and Cinema before Independence by Meera Kosambi (review)

Part dramatic history, part theatre history, part film history, and part social history, Meera Kosambi’s Gender, Culture and Performance adroitly provides an encyclopedic overview of nearly a century of Marathi-language theatre, from the 1850s to 1940s, as well as the early years of Marathi cinema. Focused largely on the cities of Mumbai (Bombay), Pune and various smaller towns in the vicinity of western India, her book also consolidates the understanding of a theatre tradition whose geographic reach was roughly the size of modern-day France and whose legacy has been an influential aspect of postcolonial drama in India, as well as of Bollywood cinema. While the influence of these performance traditions may well be ample reason to read Kosambi’s work, she presents the book’s main focus—theatre and film—in the rich, varied, and vibrant fullness that it deserves. The range of material is tied together through her main argument, that Marathi theatre and cinema fashioned and refashioned “a liminal society” in western India by transcending its ludic function during the time period covered in the book. She divides the book into two parts: one on theatre, and one (shorter) part on cinema. Each is further subdivided into sections that discuss various thematic aspects of Marathi theatre during the entirety of the book’s time span.

One of the consequences of Kosambi’s subdivisions, each of which covers the entire time span, is that we see a recurring cast of characters and topics of analysis, allowing her to expose many-layered nuances. The first section, “Phases of Evolution,” is most closely an analysis of the changing styles and formal techniques of the Marathi theatre. The stylistic arc analyzed began with Vishnu Amrut (“Vishnudas”) Bhave’s first performances, which, although largely modeled on early modern forms, prompted various literati to translate and stage both Sanskrit and English plays in cities throughout the region. These early Marathi-language theatre pieces had the explicit aim of creating a high literary idiom for the stage, in parallel with the ideals of the colonial educational system. The real explosion, however, came in the early 1880s when playwright B. P. Kirloskar successfully managed to unite the musical aspects of the Bhave-style plays with the latter literary, scripted dialogues, ushering in what has been hailed as the “Golden Age” of Marathi drama. This arc reaches its other end in the social-realist drama of the late 1920s and ’30s, with a style that most closely resembles Western norms of representation.

Sections 2 and 3, “Plays and Playwrights” and “Theatrescapes” respectively, ground us firmly in the details of Kosambi’s narrative arc. These two sections present an almost overwhelming amount of information about both playwrights and plays, as well as their varied social contexts. Kosambi foregrounds the playwrights Kirloskar (1843–85), Kolhatkar (1871–1934), Deval (1855–1916), and Khadilkar (1872–1948), but also dedicates a substantial amount of time to other significant ones, such as Varerkar (1883–1964), Atre (1898–1969), Savarkar (1883–1966), and others. Each of these playwrights’ work merits Kosambi’s detailed analysis: a few penned works are still performed, and nearly all retain a prominent place in cultural memory. While Kirloskar, Kolhatkar, and Deval are foundational to modern Marathi drama and wrote plays based on the epics and Sanskrit drama, Savarkar and Khadilkar are exemplary anti-colonial playwrights whose plays were most often censored. Atre’s work, meanwhile, reminds one of Noel Coward’s wit and humor. These playwrights, their associates, the actors, and the companies that staged their plays are at the heart of Kosambi’s section on “Theatrescapes.” In these two sections we learn about the operations of theatre troupes, methods of patronage, and information on the commercialism of the theatre and its music. This section, more than the others, also attempts to make connections to other contemporaneous theatrical traditions, such as Parsi theatre, as well as to North Indian classical music. Specialists in Indian theatre will be particularly...