Sharmistha Saha's study of the curious place of the theatre in the turbulent formation of a national identity in colonial India is full of remarkable historical details and vignettes. We learn how the ‘discovery’ and translation of Sanskrit dramatic texts into English in the eighteenth century dovetailed with the administrative project of restoring to the colonial subjects their supposedly authentic, lost past. We follow the correspondences of colonial officials about their pursuits of theatrical entertainment in Bombay and Calcutta, and the scandals and excesses that accompanied these. We encounter the writings of well-known nationalist figures reflecting on the significance of the theatre, what they felt it should or should not be as a bearer of an emerging national sentiment. Reading the book against the backdrop of contemporary Indian revisionist cultural politics, the study reveals that today's nationalist narrative of a supposedly stable and authentic Indian theatre and culture is deeply entangled with the imperial project it ironically claims to oppose.

How did a set of practices come to be configured as ‘theatre’ and what did their attribution as ‘Indian’ do in bringing into being the idea of a national identity? The study investigates the cultural practices of both the colonial British population in India and the native urban elite in Bombay and Calcutta. It grapples with the many-layered interactions between the two populations and the role that theatre played in this process. It delineates theatre's complicated association with both the colonial civilizational mission and the burgeoning nationalist politics of respectability. The study argues that theatre in colonial India is neither theatre nor performance in the anglophone senses of the terms, nor is it some indigenous articulation that can be restored in a pristine form, uncontaminated by imperialism. The study historicizes theatre in India in its hybrid relations to the political, socio-economic and cultural conditions of colonialism, i.e. in the way theatre contributed to giving a material form to the idea of a nation. This implied that at times theatre was embraced as a noble symbol of cultural identity and that at other times it was rejected as obscene, decadent and unbefitting the national cause.

The first part of the book investigates the forms of sociability that accompanied colonial theatre in Calcutta and Bombay. Saha pores through literary gazettes, letters and institutional archives, navigating sources in English, Hindi and Bengali, describing how urban theatres brought the colonial population together in a nostalgic invocation of their distant homeland. It attends to how the British East India Company monitored what was perceived as the excessive and wasteful entertainment activities of its officers and coopted elite rulers in India, concerned that these activities contributed to the decrease in revenue and growing debts of the company. A second chapter is dedicated to the emergence of the Dramatic Performance Act of 1876 and the way in which a politics of respectability and decorum was deployed in regulating theatrical expressions and introducing cultural censorship in colonial governance. The regulation of theatre thus becomes a means of regulating gender relations and moral norms and the limits of public conduct. The case of jatra performance, a popular music theatre genre, in Bengal is investigated in some detail. The debates around its exemption from censorship and sedition laws until the early twentieth century illustrate the contradictory moves of a colonial government, seeking to control the distinctions between the religious and profane, between public and private, or classical and folk. The final section of the book analyses the cultural activities of the Central Squad of the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), the cultural troupe of the Communist Party of India. It describes the IPTA's theatre aesthetic of amalgamating diverse elements from different parts of India, in line with their political urge to forge a national culture.

Saha's theorization of Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of ‘groupuscules’ and the idea of ‘coagulating communities’ (p. 23) is inadequately elaborated. Various other theoretical references tend to be mentioned in passing. Notwithstanding some editorial issues and concerns for theoretical coherence, the study offers a pertinent analysis of theatre in its historical encounter with colonialism. The book is an important addition to the growing body of scholarship on theatre, performance and colonialism.