Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare by Joerg Esleben, Rolf Rohmer, David G. John (review)

I begin by applauding Joerg Esleben and his collaborators on the painstaking compiling, translating, and editing that this book must have entailed. Thus, in Fritz Bennewitz in India, we have not only a meticulous archiving of the legacy of one man—a thespian from Germany who spent his life working in the structures and institutions that comprise the Modern Indian Theatre; in a larger sense, this book is equally a history of Modern Indian Theatre itself. Contextually, Bennewitz’s legacy far predates his arrival and immediate historical presence in India. It represents a historical longue durée that frames the histoire événementielle chronicled in letters to his friends and colleagues—bookended, but not exhausted, by the two playwrights mentioned in the book’s title.

The bulk of the book comprises letters Bennewitz penned over nearly three decades, documenting his early work with the National School of Drama (NSD) in New Delhi on productions of Brecht’s plays in the 1970s, proceeding chronologically to letters from his time in Lucknow and then Dhaka in Bangladesh in the 1980s, and finally his last years in Mumbai working with Vijaya Mehta on a production of Faust I in Hindi in the late 1990s. These letters document his interactions with luminaries in Modern Indian Theatre like Ebrahim Alkazi, M.S. Sathyu, Shama Zaidi, Vijaya Mehta, Badal Sircar, Utpal Dutt, Habib Tanvir, Shambhu Mitra, and many more. As a director, he worked with and trained artists like Pankaj Kapoor and Nasseeruddin Shah—respected veteran actors in Indian theatre and cinema today. Correspondences compiled in this volume document not only Bennewitz’s growth as a dramaturge, but also his deepening appreciation of interculturality in the practice of theatre and the evolution of a new dramatic lexicon. His reflections on working in India can be understood on two levels. First, on the level of personal and evental chronicling, they present a thespian’s Bildungsroman, or more specifically an artist’s Künstlerroman—Bennewitz’s ruminations on his own artistry in confrontation with a variety of foreign performative traditions and theatrical styles. These encounters would prompt him to re-evaluate and reconfigure his own notions of theatricality, performativity, and the dramatic arts, in moving towards an understanding of “Intercultural Theatre.” They are also illuminating on a second level of history, historiography, and metahistory. Bennewitz’s presence in India coincides with a crucial juncture in the history of the Modern Indian Theatre. It is to the understanding of such historical processes that Bennewitz provides a fresh pair of eyes. He was first invited to the NSD, through diplomatic relations India shared with the then German Democratic Republic, for his acclaimed work on Brecht. The NSD was instrumental in experiments with Brechtian dramaturgy in India and furthering the training of future generations of theatre and cinema actors, directors, and scriptwriters since its foundation in 1959 by the efforts of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the National Academy for Music, Dance, and Drama, itself a nascent body established in 1952. The Akademi was founded under the auspices of the Indian Ministry of Culture to promote development and research in Indian performative traditions and fine arts.

The NSD, through its close ties with the Akademi, worked towards the creation of a holistically national theatre against the historical backdrop of a recently independent Indian Republic. To that end, attempts were made to bridge gaps between a dominant colonially Western-influenced “Urban Theatre” scene and the diverse indigenous performative traditions extant across the sub-continent—an approach, as Habib Tanvir points out, initiated by the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA) in the 1940s (Habib Tanvir, “Theatre is in the Villages,” Social Scientist, Vol. 2, No. 10 [May 1974]: 32–41). The IPTA, like the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), was a collective comprising leftist thinkers, writers, and artists in pre-independence and pre-partition...