A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1850 to the Present ed. by Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker (review)

A Poetics of Modernity, a massive volume, reflects the viewpoints of some seventy modern theatre practitioners, playwrights, and critics. The selections represent a range of Indian languages – most prominently English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi, but also Kannada, Urdu, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam. Editor Aparna Dharwadker has gathered these viewpoints from an impressive array of sources, including prefaces, introductions, and after-words to published plays; essays and articles; books and treatises; speeches and interviews; autobiographies and letters; and public proceedings from forums like conferences and workshops, in about that order (lix–lxv). About a third of these appear here in English translation for the first time, and some were translated by Dharwadker herself. The volume greatly expands our understanding of the development of India’s modern theatre, thanks to Dharwadker’s thoughtful choice and editing of highly dispersed writings and oral addresses, many of them “off the grid” of English-language catalogues and indexes. Consequently, her painstaking work contributes greatly to the “retrieval of the multilingual archive” (xli; emphasis in original). Although Dharwadker emphasizes that the volume does not “aim to present a ‘history’ or ‘historical overview’ of modern Indian theatre” (xliv), reading the chapters together, it is hard not to feel – with some exhilaration – that one is indeed being guided through decades of modern Indian theatre by some of its most significant creators and exponents.

In her general introduction, Dharwadker helpfully walks us through some of the periods, trends, and ideologies of modern Indian theatre from 1850 to the present. Continuing themes introduced in her earlier book Theatres of Independence (2005), Dharwadker here expresses the distinctive modernity of Indian theatre. “Modernity,” she argues, “is the appropriate inclusive category for designating those colonial and postcolonial formations in urban Indian theatre that are historically unprecedented, and culturally transformative” (xxxiv; emphasis in original). Modern theatre in this context is largely urban, middle-class, commercial, secular, syncretic, print-/text-based, and multilingual. While accentuating the newness and complexity of India’s theatrical present, Dharwadker critically attunes us to what she calls the “cultural recursiveness” of modern Indian theatre:

The recursive presence of the past is evident everywhere in contemporary Indian theatre – in the cultural–nationalist insistence on the “longue duree” of Indian theatre history, in the resurgence of the natak form, in the ubiquitous narratives of myth, history, and folklore, and in definitions of authenticity and Indianness that valorize precolonial traditions of aesthetics and performance.

(xc)

Dharwadker also foregrounds the emergence of modern authorship in Indian theatre, explaining how in the post-independence period, a disjuncture no longer exists between print and performance, since playwrights are so fully immersed in the economies of both (lv–lix). In another insightful discussion, she writes of the robust history of translations of plays in India since independence, prompting us to ruminate on the enterprise of translation itself, especially in terms of the transregional linkages and dialogues that are engendered through the translation of Indian plays from one regional language into other Indian languages, which she cites as a new marker of their critical success (lxviii).

The theorists featured in the volume traverse a broad range of themes and issues, both practical and theoretical. They weigh in on Indian theatre’s relationship to the past – specifically to classical (Sanskrit) theatre and contemporary folk/Indigenous performance forms. They also show collectively that Indian theatre makers have largely disengaged from works and forms of Euro-American theatre in the postcolonial period. The push to reclaim and embrace pre-colonial, indigenous styles of performance and related narratives is the driving force behind the “theatre of roots” movement, discussed by several of the contributors. But what comes through especially in A Poetics of Modernity is the great diversity of thought and creative experimentation in Indian theatre, despite immense structural challenges and other hurdles. During the colonial period, the British censored and brutally suppressed theatre, reflected in the Dramatic Performances Control Act...