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

Since the appearance of The Empire Writes Back (1989), Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin's assertion that the term "postcolonial" covers "all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day" (2) has strengthened the argument that postcolonialism is "not a naive teleological sequence which supersedes colonialism [… but] an engagement with and contestation of colonialism's discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies" (Gilbert and Tompkins 2). Despite this expanded definition, however, studies of postcolonial theatre (as well as those of other literary genres) have typically focused on modes of textual and cultural resistance that appear after the formal end of colonialism rather than on the challenges to colonial authority during the period of foreign control. Given the theoretical preoccupation with the continuing effects of imperial processes, much of the criticism also concentrates on europhone (primarily anglophone) writing and performance rather than on productions in the indigenous lan-guage(s) of the former colonies. Bruce King's Post-Colonial English Drama (1992) is limited chronologically to the period since 1960, geopolitically to the British Commonwealth countries, and linguistically to English. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins' Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (1996) has a broader geographical range but similarly contemporary perspectives; although the authors recognize a challenge to European languages as an important form of postcolonial resistance, English is the base language of most of the works discussed in their book.

In defining "theatre and politics in colonial and postcolonial India" as her subject and in dealing with primary materials from Indian languages, such as Bengali, Marathi, and Hindi, in addition to English, Nandi Bhatia, therefore, breaks important new ground in both Indian and postcolonial theatre studies. The theoretical stimulus for the study comes mainly from the methodology of subaltern studies, the collective project in Indian historiography that aims to construct revisionary post/colonial histories by recovering the silenced but resistant subaltern voice from a variety of discourses and events. Bhatia acknowledges that "the representational project of theater, through its fictional dramatization of events, is not identical to the historiographical project of these historians" but argues that "the project of recuperating alternative histories through cultural texts" is valid in itself and the "representational apparatus of theater […] impart[s] yet another layer to the cultural investments of colonial and postcolonial texts in framing, organizing, and presenting alternative stories" (3). She also regards these theoretical questions as equally relevant to other colonial societies and non-Indian materials. With specific reference to colonial Indian theatre, Bhatia's concern with resistance uncovers the paradoxical nature of an urban (and initially elite) institution that took shape as a result of Anglo-European influences in the mid-nineteenth century, assimilated both western and indigenous traditions of performance, and posed a sufficiently serious challenge to the Raj to invite censorship and suppression by the colonial government for several decades. Similarly, in relation to the period after independence (from 1947 on), the idea of resistance focuses attention on the problematic transition from colonialism to its aftermath and on the new political, economic, and cultural realities of the postcolonial Indian nation-state, especially for underprivileged groups. In both contexts, theatrical "acts of resistance" were aimed sometimes against forms of textual and cultural domination and at other times against structures of authority that had hardened into institutionalized forms of political repression, economic exploitation, and racial/ethnic injustice.

The structure of Bhatia's study incorporates this dual perspective and considers multiple points of intersection between politics and theatre over more than a century. The introduction argues for a clearer recognition of the significance of theatre: as a vehicle for anticolonial nationalism; as a tool of resistance in a culture where numerous "popular" theatrical forms can reach illiterate audiences; and as a post/colonial genre that competes with print literature, especially the novel. Chapter two, "Censorship and the Politics of Nationalist Drama," uses the...