From the Periphery to the Mainstream: An Argument for and a Blueprint to Teaching Indian Performance

At the end of my first year of teaching a course on Indian performance in 2016, I attended a conference session on theatre history textbooks. The conversation that ensued reminded me of discussions led by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and Steve Tillis about "desperately seeking Asia" in theatre history curriculums and the need to revisit and reorient the eurocentrism of theatre history syllabi in North American universities respectively (Sorgenfrei; Tillis 2007). Nearly a decade since the publication of Tillis's arguments, a colleague remarked how Indian and Asian theatre forms were topics in his ancient theatre course, where they belonged. It seemed as if this colleague was completely oblivious of my presence just two seats down from him as a fellow panelist and a living, breathing Indian man specializing in contemporary Indian theatre, before relegating all of Asian theatre under the heading of "ancient theatre." This exchange made me think about the significance of not only devising, but also sharing a curriculum that drove home the point that India as well as other Asian countries were not frozen, foreign, archaic cultures, but complex, modern nations.

In a separate though related instance, a senior colleague, also an Asianist, advised me that despite our specializations, it was important to prove our ability to teach about Greeks, Romans, and Shakespeare—subjects that would get us hired. Another colleague, this time not an Asianist, insisted that I choose a Western subject matter for my teaching demonstration rather than "the Asian stuff." It is assumed, that no matter what we specialize in or excitedly write about, the academy will follow a straightjacketed approach that brackets off our lived experiences as Other and not part of the mainstream. As an educator, we are often expected to push our own expertise as Asianists to the back burner and cater to an erroneously organized partial historical narrative as a euphemism for "comprehensive historical overview." This is equally true of specialists in specific Euro-American theatre traditions; however, the difference lies in the extent of representation that those traditions command in a general curriculum, even if the luxury of delving in-depth into each individually is understandably absent.

Additionally, instructors may be wary of teaching Asian theatre due to the (supposed) cultural gap that separates domestic students from the course material. The curricular restrictions of covering a substantial spectrum of information compounds further the problem of teaching Asian material in non-Asian classrooms. This essay hopes to provide teachers of non-Western performance traditions a blueprint for teaching Asian performance in an American liberal-arts college setting. Being a theatre historian myself, the blueprint is drawn from my experience of leading/teaching histories, theories, and literatures rather than performance forms. It is also important to mention that my primary expertise is in contemporary Indian theatre. I possess a working vocabulary of enough Indian performance forms that I can curate a sixteen-week syllabus of classical, traditional, and contemporary Indian performance. The road map demonstrated herein, therefore, is based on my experience teaching Indian performance specifically, including feedback from student interactions and evaluations. Based on this course's success, as well as years of sitting in, taking, discussing, and teaching Asian performance beyond India; however, I contend that the strategies I adopted for this class could be applied to most non-Western curricula. As I will demonstrate throughout the essay, the content of the course described here (and other non-Western material) could very easily be incorporated into a conventional theatre history class. Doing so diversifies the curriculum, exposing students to a larger spectrum of performance practices from across the globe.

For those who are not already converts to having a more diverse curriculum, the essay should serve as an introduction to other (and I daresay more interesting) forms of performance to introduce to existing syllabi. And the essay does so not only by introducing genres, but also by presenting them within contexts that are not confined to curricular boundaries, but are global in their application. And for those that are already teaching non-Western performance, the essay is...