Several publics

It is not often realized that the first modern public was constituted in the capitals of the Eastern colonies of European empires as civic associations of expatriate Europeans demanding recognition by the colonial authority of their rights as free Europeans. In British India, for instance, the first modern public sphere was created in Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai in the early decades of the nineteenth century in the form of organized demands for freedom of the press, representation in matters of taxation and limits on the arbitrary exercise of power. European traders and professionals took the lead in these public debates but were joined by mixed-race Eurasians and even a few elite Indians who had become business and intellectual partners of Europeans. The language of this public was English.

We also know that a public culture of theatre-going developed among the European residents of these colonial cities in the early nineteenth century. Some of the performances at the new playhouses were put on by visiting troupes from Britain and Europe, usually on their way to Australia. But there were local dramatic productions as well, mainly light comedy and farce, in which the actors were mostly drawn from among British soldiers stationed in India. Gradually, English-educated Indian men began to be drawn to these European theatres. A few, such as Dwarakanath Tagore in Kolkata and Hormusjee Bomanjee and Jugonnath Sunkersett in Mumbai, even participated in their management. By the middle of the century, we also see some instances of the participation of Indian actors, such as Baishnabcharan Addy playing Othello at the Sans Souci Theatre in Kolkata in 1848.Footnote ² However, these isolated examples of racially mixed casts did not add up to a trend. On the contrary, from the middle of the century and especially after the suppression of the revolt of 1857, the social life of Europeans was sharply split from that of Indians in the colonial cities. There now emerged two distinct publics.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of the new Indian public theatre in Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. Plays in Bengali and Marathi began to be written and performed on the proscenium stage by professional companies for ticketed audiences. Alongside, there emerged in several cities the Parsi theatre, which toured all over north India with their plays in Urdu–Hindi and Gujarati; they appear to have had an impact even in Chennai. By the early twentieth century, the Company Nataka troupes performing in Kannada, the Sangit Natakam in Tamil and the various touring companies in Telugu became commercially successful. A new and expanding vernacular space was thus opened up for the modern theatre in India.

Much has been written on the varied formal properties and the literary and social content of this new theatre in the Indian languages. Drawing upon the relevant regional traditions of narrative performance, the new vernacular theatre frequently chose mythological themes. At the same time, the rise of a new generation of Indian men educated in English drew playwrights and producers to themes from Indian history that might be amenable to dramatic treatment in a Shakespearean style. In most cases, the early mythological and historical plays were in verse, suited to traditional modes of acting. But there also arose a new genre of social-reform plays, dealing with contemporary social questions such as child marriage, polygamy, the treatment of widows, caste discrimination, addiction to alcohol, and so on, that adopted the ordinary prose of everyday speech and used comic forms such as satire and farce. The frequent use of songs as a principal narrative device was widespread, doubtless indicating the persistence of older performance modes in the new theatrical form. Even when older practices of wearing masks had been given up, the actors of the new theatre, especially when performing mythological drama, often stuck to the reproduction of familiar types rather than the portrayal of complex individual characters. As far as women characters are concerned, the Bengali public theatre of Kolkata from its very birth in the 1870s had professional actresses drawn from the musically trained courtesan community in the city. Needless to say, this posed numerous problems for the social legitimacy of the new theatre, sponsored and produced by educated men from wealthy and respectable families who undertook to educate and train these women of ill repute to play the goddesses and queens of their mythological and historical plays. In Marathi theatre, on the other hand, the tradition of male actors playing female roles continued for a long time, with a star such as Bal Gandharva becoming a fashion icon for middle-class Marathi women in the early twentieth century.Footnote ³ Indeed, the early generation of women actors faced stiff competition from these experts in female impersonation until the demands of realism, boosted by the circulation through gramophone records and the cinema of the performing voices and bodies of real women, ended the practice.

The audience of the Indian public theatre in its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s was quite mixed. Initially, its patronage came from middle-class men who had some education in English and who no longer found the traditional forms of entertainment good enough to satisfy their newly acquired literary tastes and social sensibilities. But the novelty of the medium, its ability to use modern mechanical technology to create sensational illusions, and the drive for commercial success brought in wider sections of people into the theatre. Women from middle-class homes were at this time mostly unschooled and even unlettered, but they became enthusiastic theatre-goers in Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune and entire sections of the playhouse, usually the balcony, were reserved for women and their children. Then again, for poorer inhabitants and visitors to the city, a night at the theatre was a rare, somewhat expensive, urban experience. With the growing mass support of the nationalist movement, the Indian-language theatres deftly inserted anti-colonial and nationalist themes into the myths, histories and social commentary of their plays, further widening theatre-going's popular appeal. What emerged, then, was a stratification within the urban public sphere, which inevitably led to what I will now identify as the fundamental problem of the theatre of democracy.

The modern vernacular formations

But there is one more historical question on which we need more clarity. The literature of theatre history that we now routinely read has accustomed us to think of a single formation called the modern Indian theatre with several regional branches consisting of the theatres in each of the modern Indian languages. This is a view that is consistent with the teleological perspective that uses the contemporary Indian state as the frame for constructing the cultural history of the nation. But this view is deceptive since it prevents us from seeing those aspects of the modern vernacular cultures that make each of them so distinct that one begins to doubt if they were part of the same historical formation at all. This is not merely a problem of theatre history. I will argue that the rich results of the research carried out in the last two decades into the print literatures in the modern Indian languages allow us to take a relativist rather than a singular view of the nation. My argument is not that there is no such thing as the Indian nation, but that the description of that entity varies according to the language formation within which one is positioned. The nation is imagined and contested in different ways in Tamil, Marathi, Urdu, Hindi or Bengali; and alongside different genres of literature, music and art, theatre too participates in this project of imagination. But even when the entity may be called the Indian nation, it actually looks different from each regional perspective. My argument, therefore, is that we can only, and necessarily, get a relativist view of the nation, since there is no available linguistic perspective from which we can obtain an invariant view of the object.Footnote ⁴

By looking at the modern vernacular theatres from a relativist rather than singular point of view, we will come upon many interesting, even startling, findings. For instance, in Marathi literature as well as theatre, the nation was represented as male, with Shivaji as the iconic warrior-hero ruler. From Vasudevshastri Khare's Shiv-sambhav (1919), which ended with an infant Shivaji in his cradle signifying the birth of the nation, to the recent extravaganza Jaanataa Raja, by Babasaheb Purandare, episodes from Shivaji's life have been an immensely popular source of nationalist theatre in Maharashtra.Footnote ⁵ Contrast this with Bengal, for instance, where Bankimchandra's depiction in his novel Anandamath of the nation as the once resplendent but now violated mother became iconic in theatre and art as Bharat Mata, even though Bankim had originally imagined the mother-nation as Bengal, not India.Footnote ⁶ The feminine image of the nation as mother was widely adopted in northern India, and Hindi literature and theatre had a major role to play in that project of imagination.Footnote ⁷

The centrality of language in the imagination of nationhood was sharply posed in the Tamil region, where the Tamil language itself was deified in the iconic maternal image of Tamil tai. When the earlier Brahmin identification with Aryan Hinduism was challenged by the non-Brahmin movement in the mid-twentieth century, the public register of the Tamil language in the theatre, in cinema and in political oratory was classicized by replacing Sanskrit with pure Tamil words (words used in the Tamil language that are not etymologically derived from Sanskrit or other languages).Footnote ⁸ This was the reverse of what happened with most north Indian languages which produced a modern vocabulary for public use by adopting or coining neologisms out of Sanskrit words.

To take another example from the north of the country, the official language of bureaucracy and education in Punjab in the colonial period was Urdu. As a result, the modern high literary culture of the province was built through the medium of Urdu. But the regional and cultural identity signified by Urdu was much larger than Punjab. When the Arya Samaj tried to build a reformed Hindu identity in Punjab, it preferred to use Hindi as its chosen language since Hindi too occupied an equally large cultural space. Ironically, therefore, Punjabi, which was the ordinary spoken language of most Punjabis, did not acquire the full dimensions of a modern print vernacular before the partition of the province in 1947.Footnote ⁹ Instead of the novel or romantic poetry or drama or newspaper editorials, Punjabi lived on in the older popular narrative forms of the jhagrra and kissa: the medieval ballads of Heer Ranjha and Sohni Mahiwal continued to be sung and performed in their unreconstructed shapes.Footnote ¹⁰

Finally, take the case of Manipur, which now occupies such an important place in contemporary Indian theatre. The struggle to create a modern theatre in the Manipuri language began in the 1930s as a struggle against the cultural hegemony of Bengali, put in place by a Bengali religious and bureaucratic elite. The Bengali and Sanskrit vocabulary of the refined and courtly theatre began to be replaced by a purer Manipuri vocabulary; popular genres of performance involving grotesque representations and clowning were introduced.Footnote ¹¹ These beginnings may have a great deal to do with the remarkable vigour and physicality of contemporary Manipuri theatre, which is both political and popular in its opposition to Indian nationalist domination as well as militant oppression. What are we to say of the imagining of the nation from the perspective of Manipur?

The stratified democratic public

Early attempts at producing a modern theatrical repertoire in Bengali, Marathi or Hindi were severely limited by the constraints of patronage. In Bengal, the early patrons of plays written by Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Dinabandhu Mitra were wealthy landlords who made available their spacious Kolkata mansions for these edifying dramatic productions meant for a culturally sophisticated audience. But the professional theatre that soon made its appearance could not afford to be elitist in the same way. It needed the support of a larger public that could be induced into buying tickets for an evening's entertainment. Unlike the modern European theatre of the same period, the professional theatres of Mumbai, Pune or Kolkata could not survive solely on the patronage of an educated middle class. Consequently, the new Indian theatre turned out to be neither courtly nor bourgeois. It had to invent a different theatrical style in order to deal with the fundamental problem of all democratic regimes, namely how to elicit the support of the masses for the rule of property and privilege.

The solution was found in the melodrama. The crucial importance of this narrative genre has been noted in recent studies of the Indian cinema.Footnote ¹² But its significance has not been sufficiently stressed, I feel, in histories of Indian theatre. In fact, one could argue that the dramatic form that became so pervasive, even formulaic, in the cinema was actually developed and polished earlier in the Indian theatre. It is worth sketching out here a schematic account of this development.

Romanticism was perhaps the most powerful aesthetic impulse derived from the exposure in the late nineteenth century of educated Indians to European, especially English, literature. Attempts by writers in Bengali, Marathi and Hindi in this period to produce a new literature that would break away from the conventions of Sanskrit kāvya or the regional bhakti canon took the shape of heroic ballads, based on myth or history and suited for dramatic elocution. This provided a major linguistic resource for the drama of Girish Chandra Ghosh or Bharatendu Harischandra when they sought to address a new urban public.Footnote ¹³ The sonorous cadence of their poetry often proved attractive, but the psychological complexities of character or the subtle intricacies of plot were frequently lost on an audience uninitiated in the literary protocols of romantic tragedy. The slide towards melodrama was almost inevitable.

The world of melodrama, we know, is simple. It is peopled by suffering heroes and heroines, scheming villains and well-meaning buffoons. There is good on one side and bad on the other. The plot is sentimental and moral. In the end, virtue is protected and vice punished. This was the narrative formula that was deployed by theatre producers in the early twentieth century when the spread of secondary education and the rise of nationalist politics created the heterogeneous domain of a democratic public. Nationalism invented the romantic idea of the people as the perennial repository of the authentic nation, unsullied by the corrupt touch of colonialism.

In the theatre of the early twentieth century, melodrama was romantic nationalism reduced to a formula in which the suffering of the hero or heroine always confirmed that the people were steadfastly committed to all that was true and good. The Swadeshi movement in Bengal in 1905–10, for instance, provided the backdrop to the hugely popular historical plays of Girish Ghosh and D. L. Roy. But by the 1920s, nationalist drama was reduced to a formula as described, for instance, in this savage caricature by a respected critic:

In Marathi, early attempts to present historical or social themes in tightly plotted Shakespearean structures had to give way to the Kirloskar Company's popular sangit natak musical melodrama, where a minimum of fifty songs was routine for a four-hour performance, with some getting seven or eight encores; there are even instances of plays with as many as two hundred songs.Footnote ¹⁵

In subsequent decades, the more democracy expanded to include heterogeneous social groups within its ambit and the more its politics turned manipulative and cynical, the greater became the power of melodrama to simplify the representation of the social world into a moral tale of good and evil. True, a skilled dramatist or director could sometimes extract from a melodramatic plot characters with complex motivations or scenes with ambiguous moral meanings. But the form would become an enduring feature not merely of the theatre or the cinema but of Indian public life: to this day, melodrama remains the dominant narrative form of populist democracy.

I believe the possibilities of melodrama as a performative genre that could unify in a simple moral narrative the real diversity of a heterogeneous people were well developed in the nationalist theatre of the early twentieth century. The ground thus prepared by the theatre was subsequently usurped by the technologically more resourceful medium of cinema. From the 1940s, and certainly in the decades after independence, the commercial theatres of Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata came under pressure. The public that had been schooled into the protocols of dramatic spectatorship by the nationalist theatre of melodrama was now available for mobilization on a far wider scale by the new combination of cinematic technology and capitalist enterprise. In this uneven battle, it was inevitable that the commercial theatre would lose out.

Performance capitalism

Benedict Anderson has given us the concept of print capitalism to analyse the combination of print technology and capitalism that provided the material foundation for the imagination of the nation as a community united by tangible but anonymous bonds of fraternity.Footnote ¹⁶ He points to the circulation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Europe of newspapers and novels, bureaucratic notifications and school textbooks, which not only instituted modern and standardized vernaculars but created the homogenized cultural space for the experience in common of a national public life. If we extend Anderson's story into the twentieth century and after, we have to take account of the cultural consequences of technologies such as the gramophone, radio, cinema, television and the new electronic media. Print is no longer the principal technology in the field of culture. Capitalist enterprise has seized each of these later technologies to create performance-based cultural commodities to capture regional, national and even global markets. Theatre today is just one relatively minor segment of performance-capitalist production.

If one looks at Indian theatre from this perspective, certain broad features become apparent. The most professionally managed and successful form of the commercial theatre in the first half of the twentieth century was the privately owned company, usually maintaining a permanent base in a playhouse in the city and going out on tours to other cities and smaller towns. Of these, the Kirloskar Company of Pune probably had the longest life. But in Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai as well as in the Parsi theatre, there were several successful companies with single proprietors or partners. And yet the entire history of the commercial theatre is dotted with stories of indebted companies, uncertain finance, corruption, fraud, poaching of star actors and playwrights and other unseemly affairs. It seems the commercial theatre, even at the best of times, never quite acquired the stable form of a corporate business enterprise. Nevertheless, it is this fledgling performance capitalism which created for each major language region, in alliance with newspaper advertising and the gramophone record industry, a unified although internally differentiated public attuned to the textual, visual and aural practices of modern dramatic narration.

The connections between the commercial theatre and the early talkies of the 1930s and 1940s are easy to trace for the Hindi–Urdu cinema of Mumbai and Lahore, the Marathi cinema of Pune, Mumbai and Kolhapur, the Bengali cinema of Kolkata, and the Tamil and Telugu cinema of Chennai. Not only was there a migration of producer–directors, actors and writers, but, perhaps more significantly, there was a movement of capital into the potentially more lucrative sector of film production. Ultimately, as we know, by the 1950s, the Hindi cinema of Mumbai and the Tamil and Telugu cinema of Chennai were producing hundreds of films every year, many with budgets that were astronomical when compared with those of even the most successful theatres. Cinema now occupied the commanding heights of the performance-capitalist economy.

Bringing in the state

Had private capital been the only effective force in the field of public culture, theatre would have died a natural death. That it did not was because the state stepped in. Keen to provide the official stamp of national modernity on various branches of cultural production, the postcolonial state created institutions such as the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the National School of Drama to extend financial, infrastructural and pedagogical support to the theatre. In the process, it managed to bring into being what private capital, operating within the regional linguistic spheres, had failed to do: the postcolonial state gave birth to the Indian national theatre.

In seeking to gather the diverse regional and local dramatic genres tightly under the umbrella of a national theatrical tradition, the Sangeet Natak Akademi in its initial phase repeatedly emphasized the primacy of the classical Sanskrit canon as the authoritative source of the Indian theatrical style. This included elements such as the sūtradhāra (narrator), the buffoon, the preliminaries and benediction at the beginning and end of a performance, music, dance, verse dialogue, masks, and so on.Footnote ¹⁷ Even after this overemphasis on the classical was lessened in the 1960s, the definition of the national still had to be sought within some notion of the traditional, as distinct from the Western. This is where a new emphasis on integrating elements of local performance traditions into a modern dramatic repertoire provided the impetus towards defining an Indian national theatre. Suresh Awasthi called this movement the ‘theatre of roots’, seeking ‘liberation from Western realistic theatre’, thus giving a common name to diverse efforts in different linguistic regions that tried to use traditional performance styles from Kerala, Karnataka, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Manipur and other places. More specifically, the Sangeet Natak Akademi, along with the National School of Drama and the Ministry of Culture, by giving financial support and enabling translations, touring, festivals, conferences, training workshops and teaching curricula, created the material ground for the assembling of theatre producers and performers on a national platform.Footnote ¹⁸ The production of an Indian national theatre since the 1960s was almost entirely a state-sponsored enterprise.

One important result was the construction of an immediately recognizable canon of the national modern. Karanth, Panikkar, Karnad, Habib Tanvir, Tendulkar, Badal Sarkar, Ratan Thiyam – one can easily run off a dozen or more names of director–playwrights of the last four or five decades who, even as they worked in different languages and regional contexts, are collectively said to have developed a distinctly modern Indian style of theatre. Yet, even as one recognizes the unquestioned artistic integrity of the work of each of these masters, one cannot but notice that their inclusion in a state-sponsored series of the national modern occurs at the cost of their place within particular regional or linguistic theatrical formations. Once a play by a modern master is included within the national canon, its significance as a Kannada or Marathi play is devalued: it now begins to be authoritatively read in terms of the new official language of the national modern. It is even possible now to write and produce a play with a view to locating it within this newly constructed field of the national. The particular language in which it is written then becomes incidental, since it is not meant to belong to the dramatic tradition in that linguistic region. As a result, what could never have been achieved by the regionally based performance-capitalist formation of the theatre companies is now made possible by the sponsorship of the national state. Official support can enable theatre artists to produce plays for an officially sponsored audience. Indeed, it is theoretically possible even to produce plays for no particular audience at all. Unlike the conditions imposed by a performance-capitalist economy, therefore, state-sponsored theatre largely relieves the producer of the need to think about the audience. At the best of times, this can encourage experimentation, taking risks with form and content, or going against prevalent styles and mindsets. In other words, it could, in principle, open up a space for avant-garde theatre. More commonly, however, it perpetuates a conformist theatre that merely recycles the officially favoured political and social ideology. At its worst, it becomes a machine for patronage distribution by the party in power or the bureaucracy.

However, there is another form of activist theatre that has tried to open up spaces outside both the performance-capitalist sector and the state sector by associating itself with an ongoing political or social movement. The trail was blazed in the 1940s by the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), which operated closely with the Communist Party and performed at events organized by trade unions and peasant organizations. Forced to function with limited funds and makeshift stages, and seeking to communicate a specific political message to audiences that were not necessarily attuned to the spectatorial practices of modern theatre, IPTA branches in different parts of the country made many bold innovations in stagecraft, narrative and acting styles, and social content. Indeed, what would come to be known as the modern national theatre under state sponsorship in the 1960s and 1970s owed a great deal to the work of IPTA artistes of the previous decades. Despite its location outside the sphere of commercial entertainment, IPTA, because of its political agenda, had to be mindful of its audience. As a result, it had to wed its modernist aesthetic with dramatic and narrative forms that were more familiar to its working-class and rural audiences. It should not surprise us, therefore, that in this democratizing effort, IPTA productions often resorted to that time-tested ploy, melodrama. Reading a play like Nabanna (1944) by Bijon Bhattacharya, one cannot but be struck today by the high emotional pitch and the many melodramatic moments that mark the episodic structure of that legendary production which inaugurated a new era of political theatre in Bengal. If my analysis of the relation between melodrama and democracy is correct, then we must not see this as a negative feature of the play at all but rather as an innovative effort to combine a boldly realist depiction of poverty and exploitation with an effectively simple political message distinguishing a devastated but morally upright people from its immoral enemies.

But the inherent limits of activist political theatre of this kind were also revealed by the history of IPTA. There was always a problem of balancing the aesthetic ambitions of the theatre with the political demands of the movement and its party organization. There was no guarantee that the latter would not impose its will over the former. Further, differences and disputes in the political domain were liable to spill over into the domain of the theatre. As it happened, the best days of IPTA were over by the mid-1950s. Some of its activists now decided that the project of forging a non-commercial sector of democratic theatre was better carried out by the new cultural institutions of the post-colonial nation state.

Nonetheless, activist political theatre in West Bengal had its most creative and glorious period in the 1960s and 1970s in the form of the Group Theatre movement in which several dozen groups, large and small, mostly linked to one or the other political party of the left, produced plays that were both theatrically novel and politically and socially progressive. What was most remarkable about the Group Theatre movement was its turning away from the earlier tradition of Bengali theatre. Rejecting the heritage of mythological, nationalist and family melodrama produced by the Bengali commercial stage since the late nineteenth century, the theatre groups looked to modern European and American theatre to inject an entirely new and largely modernist aesthetic sensibility into their texts, acting style and stagecraft. Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and above all Brecht were probably the most frequently translated or adapted playwrights, but in the course of their movement the group theatres made available to a new, culturally sophisticated and politically alert urban audience virtually the entire repository of modern Western theatre.

In this context, it may be useful to note the particular place that Bertolt Brecht came to occupy in the new Indian theatre of the 1960s and 1970s. The phenomenon has remained a source of much wondrous comment.Footnote ¹⁹ There is no doubt that at a moment when the non-commercial and politically engaged theatre in India was seeking to forge a satisfactory combination of aesthetic modernism and traditional or folk performance styles, Brecht's plays came as a godsend. The original European context of Brecht's intervention in realist bourgeois theatre was not particularly relevant in India; his specific political address to the industrial working class of Germany was also not picked up by most Indian directors. Even the biting irony of Brecht's poetry and songs was more often than not lost in their translation into Indian languages. What proved most attractive, however, was the open episodic structure of the dramatic narrative, which could be easily interrupted and embellished by the insertion of songs, dance, poetry and other elements of folk performance. It is significant that the Brecht works that were most frequently performed in different parts of India in different Indian languages were the parable-like plays such as The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Good Woman of Schezuan, set in fabulous places in indeterminate times, with gods and goddesses descending onstage to create the dramatic situations in which contemporary political and moral dilemmas could be posed. The exotic Eastern settings were for Brecht a distancing mechanism that might allow his European audience to move away from their ingrained conventions of viewing and think of issues from an altogether unfamiliar perspective. Transplanted to India, however, the oriental elements were seized upon as signs of deep familiarity. ‘Of all Western playwrights’, said Ebrahim Alkazi in 1971,

Habib Tanvir put it more straightforwardly: ‘To be more Brechtian is to be more Indian’.Footnote ²¹ Surveying the phenomenon of Brecht in India, Vasudha Dalmia concludes that as the political charge of Brecht's plays tended to get diffused, his epic style was largely appropriated within the folk-revival impulse of the theatre of roots.Footnote ²²

In West Bengal at this time, doing Europe-inspired political theatre in the 1960s and 1970s was not easy. Theatre groups were regularly attacked by agents of the ruling Congress party and harassed by the police. They were denied access to theatre halls and several leading performers spent time in prison. But those days of theatre as the democratic opposition ended with the formation of the Left Front government in 1977. Theatre groups now began to enjoy government support in the form of exemption from amusement tax, access to state-owned theatres, generous grants, prizes and awards. Trade unions, student and youth organizations and cultural associations affiliated to the left parties now had enough resources to offer handsome payments to the major theatre groups to perform in district towns and rural areas. Soon, West Bengal developed its own version of state-sponsored theatre – repetitious, predictable and non-threatening. The limits of activist political theatre were shown up once more.

The dilemma of a theatre of democracy

The main problem faced by a theatre that chooses to engage with a democratic public was formulated with characteristic precision by Utpal Dutt, the leading actor–director–playwright of the leftist group theatre movement in West Bengal. In a note presented at a round table organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1971, he said that the problem was ‘how to be at once popular and elevating’.Footnote ²³ It is worth looking a little more closely at the dilemma he presented and the possible ways of grappling with it.

Why must the theatre be popular? We have seen that the commercial theatre of the early twentieth century sought popularity to generate revenues for the company and profits for its proprietors. This economic logic imposed certain conditions on the thematic content and dramaturgical form of the production. The play had to appeal to a large enough cross-section of the heterogeneous public in a linguistic region in order to enable repeated shows over several months in the city theatre as well as tours of other towns and rural areas in the region. We must remember here that the commercial theatre operated on the completely new premise, unknown in traditional culture, of an audience consisting of individual ticket-buyers instead of a gathering of invited guests or members of a local community. The result was the invention of the mythological, nationalist or family melodrama as the most widely applied formula in the commercial theatre.

If we bear in mind the general conditions of democratic political representation, we should not be surprised by this result. Democratic representation is based on the assumption of equal individual membership of a democratic body. The opinion of each member counts equally, since each person is supposed to be the autonomous and best judge of his or her interests. Hence the rule of one person one vote. The collective choice is then made on the basis of a decision rule that accords with the choice of the greatest number. But demands in a large democratic body can vary a great deal. How can those who seek to represent the people offer a set of promises that meet the diverse demands of a sufficiently large number of electors? They do this by simplifying those demands into a singular form that can encompass the disparate grievances of many. This is how the moral narrative of a virtuous people faced with a group of vicious enemies makes its appearance in popular democratic politics.Footnote ²⁴ Not surprisingly, therefore, representatives in a democratic body tend to satisfy the demands of the largest number of their constituents by finding effective rhetorical means to present a generally comprehensible account of the problem and a simple set of solutions. In short, instead of recognizing the complexities of rational policy-making and administration, popular democratic choices tend to reflect the generally prevailing and frequently irrational proclivities and desires of the largest sections of the people.

In the theatre too, to the extent that popularity becomes the criterion of aesthetic choice, the representation of social and political themes will tend to accord with the tastes of the largest section of the audience. If both buy tickets to watch the same show, a university professor's response must have the same value as that of a day labourer. The greater the pressure on the producer to sell more tickets, the more he must pack his production with material that will make the show more popular. This was the democratic logic of the commercial theatre of the past; this remains the primary democratic logic of the popular cinema and the television serial today. If theatre has to address democracy, it cannot but engage with the question of popularity.

Then why should the theatre also have to be elevating? This is where another aspect of democratic modernity makes its appearance, especially in contemporary post-colonial countries. While the legal–constitutional norm is that of the theoretical equality of citizens, the political practice of democracy presupposes that the people are always in the process of becoming citizens. Hence there has to be an unceasing pedagogical process through which an enlightened leadership must elevate the masses into the desired cultural standard of modern democratic citizenship. From this perspective, the representative cannot simply reflect the current views of his or her constituents. Rather, the future-oriented task of democratic representation is to educate.

How can the theatre do this? What is the productive force that can support a performance economy whose task is pedagogy rather than entertainment? We have seen that the post-colonial state could, for political–ideological reasons, step in to promote non-commercial theatre that does not need to operate on the principle of popularity. Moreover, association with political and social movements could also give rise to a theatre that seeks to elevate the masses. I have also described the limits within which such non-commercial efforts by an enlightened vanguard can operate under conditions of post-colonial democracy. Let me conclude this discussion by making some remarks on what I see as the possibilities today of engaging with the twin democratic tasks of popularity and pedagogy.

Possibilities and limits

The place to start, it seems to me, is the product itself. Unlike the film or television drama where a particular performance-based product can be mechanically, and now digitally, reproduced numerous times to reach millions of viewers, the theatre performance is viewed immediately, usually by an audience of a few hundred. This is the principal technical limitation that led to the flight of performance capital from the theatre to cinema and television. The enormously expanded scale of production made possible by technology and the organization of capital has turned cinema and television into immensely powerful media of communication in all modern democracies. And yet what appears to be its chief deficiency could, it seems to me, be turned into an asset by the theatre of democracy.

The fact that a theatre performance can address only small numbers at a time means that it has the opportunity to deal not with large heterogeneous publics but with small and relatively homogeneous groups. If the democratic public, before it is aggregated into the simple ideational form of a people, is in actual fact diverse, then the theatre, much more than cinema or television, can, merely by its smaller scale of production, address those diverse democratic groups separately. The advantage is that each performance can be tuned to a specific, relatively uniform, audience. There is no pressure here to spread the net wide to catch a disparate collection of views and interests and thus to simplify the dramatic representation of a complex social or political reality. In short, there is a favourable condition here for the theatre to perform the task of edification that cannot be carried out by the cinema or television.

But then what about popularity? Can the theatre claim to be democratic if it does not attempt to be popular? Would it not then fall into the familiar trap of the avant-garde which, in its impatience to reject the conventional and chase after formal innovation, often develops contempt for the audience? I think the popularity question needs to be addressed through a flexible and mixed strategy. Instead of thinking about its popular audience as a singular whole, as the commercial theatre used to do in its heyday several decades ago, theatre producers may think of texts and performances as variable, geared to particular segments of the public, addressing concerns that resonate in the immediacy of a specific encounter between actors and their audience. It is a truism that no two performances onstage are identical. But this can be a strategic resource for the democratic theatre. Unlike in the cinema, popularity in the theatre does not have to be achieved by a single finished product that is then endlessly reproduced in identical form. The people constituted by multiple audiences can be reached serially, one by one, through a succession of non-identical performances: popularity then becomes the cumulative result of many encounters between the same set of actors and a heterogeneous variety of audiences, each addressed differently and each responding differently. ‘Size up the audience every time’, the famous actor–playwright of the Italian left, Dario Fo, once said at a theatre workshop. ‘Adapt the text to differing situations. Even classic texts need to be adapted to answer to the requests and needs of the audience’.Footnote ²⁵ I should add that the task of addressing different audiences does not have to be performed solely by adapting the same text for different performances. A troupe could also develop a repertoire of plays, each suited to a different type of audience. The crucial point is for theatre practitioners, including writers, directors and actors, to consider the variability of the democratic public as an essential component of their practice.

Who is to fund this theatre? My short answer is: let us be strategic. Private or state, corporate or non-profit – there are many options available for the relatively modest production costs of the theatre we are talking about. The point is to find the resources without becoming so dependent that one begins to tailor the performance to the requirements of the next grant rather than to the audience one will face. That is a challenge that is both aesthetic and political.

Having explained what I think are the possibilities for a theatre of democracy today, I would now like to modify Utpal Dutt's description of the problem. Our task, I think, is to be at once realistic and critical. By realistic, I am not referring to narrative or scenographic style. Rather, I mean having a realistic sense of the possibilities of a performance engaging a public in issues of social reality. There is realism involved here at both levels – that of the prevailing social situation and that of the location of a performance in relation to the public. To be critical, on the other hand, is to engage in critique. It is not to dismiss or condemn. On the contrary, it is to examine both the conditions of possibility and the limits of what is being critiqued. To engage in a critique of neoliberalism, for instance, is not to heap scorn and abuse on it, but to explain how it came to dominance, how it has reshaped the institutional structures of contemporary states and economies, and how it continues to exercise such intellectual power over so many people. The issues are complex, and the temptations are immense for theatre performers to slip into an easy moral condemnation instead of an engagement with the real difficulties that stand in the way of effective political action. But that is the challenge.

To recall the example with which I began this article, just as the Indian nation was imaginatively brought into existence by writers, artists and political leaders working in their separate linguistic regions with distinct cultural traditions, so might the theatre achieve a construction of the democratic people that would look different from the location of each distinct social group and yet establish at the same time the sense of belonging together in solidarity. I believe this would be a construction of the popular that would be far more true because complex and varied than the false simplicity of cinematic melodrama.

Let me reiterate my plea. The task of a democratic theatre is to refuse the easy path of simplifying the complex realities of our social and political life. Cinema and television will do the job of popular simplification far more effectively than the theatre can ever hope to do. Theatre artistes who have now been abandoned by profit-seeking capitalists and are suspicious of the cultural agenda of state agencies would do well to address the pressing problems of our time by exploring the real complexities of democratic choice from the perspective of different sections of the people. We know that the recent deepening of capitalist accumulation and the dispossession of millions have been accompanied by a routinized democratic politics that is nothing more than the cynical pursuit of electoral success. When much of the nominal opposition has been coopted, theatre can and must act as the voice of democratic opposition.

But the challenge is to avoid the slippage to simple moral solutions. Thus, for instance, the vilification of the corrupt politician and his ultimate defeat at the hands of the avenging hero is a perennial favourite of film melodrama. The reality is that these corrupt leaders often enjoy considerable support among sections of the people who are, in complicated ways, themselves deeply entangled in the social web of corruption. An irrigation or mining project may mean dispossession and loss of livelihood for many and yet for other sections of underprivileged people it could mean new opportunities of making a living. The enduring contrast between the idyllic village and the corrupt city, recently displaced into the globalized contrast between the moral East and the immoral West, which still provides emotional sustenance to cinematic melodrama, must be questioned by the reality today of the preponderance of non-agricultural activities and urban lifestyles in most of rural India. Theatre does have the dramaturgical resources to present complex pictures of reality by interrupting the simple linear flow of narrative. Irony, satire, burlesque, the grotesque, the episodic style, direct address – all of those techniques that we learnt from Brecht can be imaginatively deployed not only to introduce ambiguity and multiple perspectives but also, by suitably modifying the performance for specific audiences, to do so from the point of view of different social groups with different demands. This is a somewhat unique resource that theatre possesses. To invoke Dario Fo once more, ‘It is our professional task as theatre practitioners to devise a way of talking about reality that permits us, with the chemistry of imagination, with the scepticism of reason and with irony, to smash standardized schemes’.Footnote ²⁶ We must also remember that mass spectatorial practices are being thoroughly transformed today, even in the Indian countryside, by the globally powerful media of cinema and television. The option of resorting to traditional or folk forms which seemed so attractive two or three decades ago may no longer have the same significance today. It is in these rapidly changing material conditions that the theatre must play the interrogative, disruptive and subversive role of the democratic opposition.