Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. Home Department Proceedings, “Dramatic Performances Bill. Minute by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, dated 13th June 1876,” August 1876, National Archives of India, Delhi. 2. For the full text of the play, see the 1972 reprint of the 1860 version of Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Durpan; or, The Indigo Planting Mirror, translated from the Bengali by a Native, ed. Sankar Sen Gupta (Calcutta: Indian Publications, 1972). All subsequent references are to this edition of the play. This 1860 version invited the initial ban against the play. For the sake of convenience and because most discussions of Nil Darpan and other plays discussed in this book use the vernacular titles, I generally use the vernacular titles rather than their English translations, which I have provided in parenthesis with the initial reference to each play. Nil Darpan has also been spelled variously as “Nil Durpan,” “Neel-Darpan” or “Nil Darpan.” 3. This famous incident is recorded as an eyewitness account by Binodini Dasi, an actress in the play, in her autobiography, My Story and My Life as an Actress, ed. and trans. Rimli Bhattacharya (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), 146. Binodini writes: “Immediately there was a hue and cry from among the saheb spectators. They all rose from their seats and the people behind them rushed up to gather before the footlights. It was quite a sight! Some of the red-faced goras unsheathed their swords and jumped on the stage. Half a dozen people were hard-pressed trying to control them. Such a running away and such a rushing around there was! The drop was pulled down immediately. We trembled and cried. We thought that this was the end, there was nothing to be done, now they would surely cut us up into pieces.” 4. Most of these folk theaters have their roots in local legends, rituals, and 125 oral histories. For example, the jatra, which literally means “to go in a procession ,” is a traveling theater popular in Bengal, Orissa, and eastern Bihar. A typical jatra performance contains about sixty songs and lasts a couple of days. According to Kironmoy Raha, Bengali Theatre (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978), 4, the jatra has its roots in religious mythology. The commonly accepted view, says Raha, traces the origins of the word in “the ritualistic musical processions that formed part of religious festivals in which the deity was carried from one place to another.” Some scholars trace its origins to the dialogue and hymns of the Vedas, the ancient Hindu texts or in the fertility rites of tribals inhabiting the borders of West Bengal. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the newly rising middle class in Bengal relegated the jatra to the status of “low” culture. Tamasha, a popular theater form of Maharashtra, contains songs that are accompanied by two drummers. Burrakatha is a popular folk narrative of Andhra Pradesh that depicts the lives of ordinary people in song and dance with the aid of the burra, a clay instrument. For a description of the different regional languages folk theaters, see Balwant Gargi, Folk Theatre of India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966). For a description of the ramlila, see Richard Schechner, “The Ramlila of Ramnagar,” Drama Review 21, no. 3 (1977): 51–82, and Anuradha Kapoor, “Raja and Praja: Presentational Conventions in the Ramlila at Ramnagar,” in Ramayana and Ramayanas, ed. Monika ThielHorstmann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), 153–68. 5. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), 10. 6. Ranajit Guha, preface to Subaltern Studies III, ed. Ranajit Guha (New York: Oxford University Press, [1984] 1992), viii. 7. Aparna Dharwadker in “Historical Fictions and Postcolonial Representation : Reading Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq,” PMLA 110, no. 1 (1995): 43–58, astutely reveals the strategic function of ‹ctional forms of historical writing in intervening in historical discourses. In a similar vein, Stephen Slemon in “Reading for Resistance in Post-colonial Literatures,” in A Shaping of Connections: Commonwealth Literature Studies—Then and Now, ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek, Kirsten Holst Peterson, and Anna Rutherford (Sydney: Dangaroo, 1989), 103, argues in favor of the political function of postcolonial texts in reconstructing history in the cultural sphere: “This social emplacement of the literary text,” he contends, “affords post-colonial criticism a material referent in social struggle.” 8. In “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Standayani ,’” in Subaltern Studies, vol. 5, Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 91, Gayatri Spivak urges...