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4 Performance and Protest in the Indian People’s Theatre Association If the theatre loses its mass-audience, it loses its life, its meaning, its raison d’être. To alienate the theatre from the masses is to alienate oneself still further from the social activity of men, and end in an intellectual madhouse.1 In 1942, a group of progressive writers who recognized the potential of popular theater as an effective weapon in the ‹ght for national liberation from British imperialism and from fascism and in the struggles of peasants, workers , and other oppressed classes formed a group called the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). The primary aim of the IPTA, as its organizers identi‹ed it in the “All Indian People’s Theatre Conference Draft Resolution ,” was to mobilize “a people’s theatre movement throughout the whole of India as the means of revitalizing the stage and the traditional arts and making them at once the expression and organiser of our people’s struggle for freedom, cultural progress and economic justice.”2 Accordingly, they described the IPTA not as “a movement which is imposed from above but one which has its roots deep down in the cultural awakening of the masses of India,” not “a movement which discards our rich cultural heritage, but one which seeks to revive the lost in that heritage by re-interpreting, adopting and integrating it with the most signi‹cant facts of our peoples’ lives and aspirations in the present epoch.”3 What began in 1942 as an organization in Bombay and Calcutta expanded by 1945 into a nationwide movement organized around three divisions: the song and dance division, the drama division, and the ‹lm division. This chapter examines the ways in which the drama division of the IPTA participated in the political process before independence in 1947 and in the postindependence years. Through an innovative and experimental drama 76 that derived its inspiration and ideas partly from Western and from Chinese practices, but was rooted in India’s own cultural and social practices, the IPTA challenged existing hegemonic structures, both colonial and those intrinsic to Indian society. For example, the Little Theatre Groups in England , the Works Progress Administration theater project in the United States in the 1930s, the Soviet theaters, and the strolling players in China who staged antifascist plays to protest Japanese exploitation exerted tremendous in›uence on the IPTA.4 Inspired by these cultural challenges abroad, IPTA members turned to theater as a political weapon amid the political turmoil at home, created by the war in Europe, increasing repression from British imperialism, and deepening nationalist sentiments manifested in the Quit India movement of 1942. In order to seek the “widest possible mass basis for its activities,” the IPTA turned to indigenous popular traditions of different regions such as the jatra of Bengal, tamasha of Maharashtra, and burrakatha of Andhra Pradesh.5 Given the linguistic, cultural, and geographical diversity of the Indian subcontinent, choices about language, theatrical space, and stylistic devices were important, involving, as they did, questions of viewership and audience. For instance, an audience in a working-class district in Bombay might appreciate a play in Marathi instead of English, or a peasant audience in a Bengal village might need to see a play about the famine in a familiar dialect and surroundings. Linguistic and cultural diversity among a group of people can cause what Immanuel Wallerstein refers to as “problems of cohesion .” According to Wallerstein, however, “[To] the extent that ‘national’ sentiment develops, these threats [of internal chaos and colonial consolidation ] are lessened.”6 To intervene collectively in counterhegemonic schemes, a “national sentiment” that overcomes this lack of cohesion has to be generated. By presenting the same plays in a range of different languages, the IPTA organizers attempted to overcome the “lack of cohesion” among a heterogeneous populace. This was done in the interest of establishing links among the “people” through the people’s identi‹cation with day-to-day struggles. Performing for “mass” audience in villages, towns, and working-class districts required open-air presentations. Hence most of the IPTA plays were performed in outdoor theaters such as the Kamgar Maidan in Bombay, which—instead of the limited capacity provided by an enclosed theater— could accommodate up to twenty thousand people. Similarly, stylistic considerations constituted an important feature of IPTA productions. In Calcutta , for example, Nabanna, a play about the Bengal famine, was performed on a revolving stage to achieve the desired realistic effects for a...

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