Read Martin Banham's original review which was published in Theatre Research International, 19, 2 (1994), p. 182.

In his review of Rustom Bharucha's Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (T&W), Martin Banham posits that ‘Theatre and the World makes an essential – and sceptical – contribution to any debate on interculturalism’.Footnote ¹ It has been thirty years since the book's publication and, in retrospect, Banham may have underestimated the impact of this work. T&W was not simply a critical, but also a revolutionary, contribution to the theory and practice of interculturalism. More significantly, it was an imperative and timely intervention in what were until then ‘normative’ ways of thinking about and making intercultural performance.

The book has three parts and, while seemingly varied in concerns, they converge on Bharucha's central argument about the need and possibility of alternatives to a Eurocentric appropriative model of intercultural theatre. Part I, ‘Points of Departure’, is perhaps the most widely read section. Here, Bharucha fiercely critiques Western practitioners (and scholars) of cross-cultural theatre modes: Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, Richard Schechner, Patrice Pavis and Peter Brook are exemplars of what Bharucha views as the West's persistent misappropriation, misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the ‘non-West’ in what Lo and Gilbert term cross-cultural theatres.Footnote ² With acuity and astuteness, Bharucha claims that when Western theatres perform some Other's culture (and here, we recall Richard Schechner's naive proclamation that ‘the more we, and everyone else too, can perform our own and other people's cultures the better’Footnote ³), they inevitably ignore the material conditions necessary for an informed and equitable, even respectful, exchange. Western interculturalists believed, on the pretext of ‘universal’ structures, that all cultures were commodities for the taking. For Bharucha, such approaches to making theatre were simply a continuation of Western imperialist/colonialist practices disguised as humanist benevolence (this mode of intercultural exchange is later described by Daphne Lei as HIT or ‘hegemonic intercultural theatre’).Footnote ⁴ The strongest criticisms are laid against Peter Brook and his infamous production The Mahabharata (1985), in a chapter which arguably is the most widely read of the book. In this brutal deconstruction of the controversial production, Bharucha charges Brook with flagrant misappropriation: stripping a sacred Hindu text of its religious and cultural specificities and reducing it to an ‘empty space’ of secular stereotypes.

The term ‘intracultural’ is introduced in the second and third parts of the book as an alternative to ‘intercultural’. While it is not an invented term, the adoption of ‘intraculturalism’ was necessary for Bharucha to demarcate the internal cultural differences existing within a nation state. Such was his realization when he adapted and staged the German play Request Concert, by Franz Xaver Kroetz, in three Indian cities: Calcutta, Bombay and Madras.Footnote ⁵ Having had to reconfigure the performance to each individual city to accommodate the cultural specificities of women's lives there and rooting the performance ‘in the indigenous cultural context of Asian cities’ (p. 92), the production became the author's way to explore ‘“other” cultures in their own environment’ (p. 149); it was an exemplification of what Bharucha regards as an authentic exchange of cultures (p. 92). More significantly, such a categorical creation is necessary because the ‘intracultural’ resists essentialist overlaps of ‘culture’ and ‘country’ that are often characteristic of Western interculturalism. The final section of the book could have alternatively been titled ‘The Third World Writes Back’. From a detailed and contextual description of the dance drama krishnattam, where Bharucha interrogates the concept of ‘folk’ and the ‘theatre of roots’, to the examination of the practices of the village-based theatre and film school Ninasam, in Heggodu, India, Bharucha demonstrates how writing about traditional Indian forms must be done with sensitivity and a ‘balance between utility and grace’ (p. 173). To Bharucha, the ‘intracultural possibilities’ (p. 240) of such forms of theatre can help bring people together in India.

T&W's publication marked a critical turn in thinking about the politics of cultural practice – which also happens to be the title of Bharucha's equally important sequel.Footnote ⁶ In both works, Bharucha urges us to think about the possibility of equitable cultural exchange and the ethical obligations in performance praxis. ‘Cross-cultural’ or ‘intercultural’ theatre dominated by Western dramaturgies and devices had until that point lacked self-reflexivity with regard to its political, cultural and economic privilege; Western directors believed they could speak for and perform the Other in pursuit of illusory ‘“pre-cultural”, “transcultural” or “universal” values and sources’ (p. 240). T&W was among the very first sustained works to critique Western interculturalism's blind spots. Yet when one contests established practices and people, conflict ensues and T&W consequently sparked what Ric Knowles terms the ‘interculture wars’ – the (theatre) world split into a ‘West and the rest’ binary.Footnote ⁷ Triggered primarily by Bharucha's response to The Mahabharata, the interculture wars saw post-colonial scholars, such as Una Chaudhuri, Gautam Dasgupta, Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, fiercely critiquing Brook's ‘perpetuation of the colonial project’ (p. 22) and those, mostly European, scholars such as Patrice Pavis, Erika Fischer-Lichte and David Williams supporting this neo-humanist production. In the war's aftermath, however, arose an expanded understanding of interculturalism as scholars sought to think of cultural interchange beyond simplistic binaries, beyond the source–target model posited by Patrice Pavis. T&W not only compelled scholars who once shared in the optimistic myth of universal syncretism to re-examine their First World, Western elite positions but also inspired subsequent waves of intercultural critique and practice – what Una Chaudhuri and Ric Knowles term ‘New Interculturalism’, and what Daphne Lei and Charlotte McIvor label ‘Other Interculturalisms’. In Lei and McIvor's new book, The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance (2020), McIvor and Nakase note the proliferation of intercultural methodologies and theories that have moved the discourse beyond deterministic binaries to consider more fluid, ephemeral and minoritarian perspectives:Footnote ⁸ ‘interculturalism-from-below’, ‘rhizomatic interculturalism’, ‘Asian interculturalism’, ‘intersectional interculturalism’, ‘social interculturalism’, ‘reflexive interculturalism’ and ‘interweaving’ are some of the more recent ways of thinking about intercultural flows. These critical trajectories, indubitably, are a consequence of the debates that T&W provoked. Furthermore, while T&W draws attention to orientalist practices of the Western stage, its most significant contribution is the call to more ethical stage practices when performing cultural (and religious) texts or forms. Bharucha firmly believes in an attentive, ‘grounded’ – contextualized and historicized – relational praxis that must keep in sight an ethics of representation, particularly since, ontologically, theatre is always already representational. Some of the most powerful lines that resonate this conviction include: ‘There are no universal values in the theatre. There are only personal needs which get transformed into social and political actions, rooted in the individual histories of theatre’ (p. 68); ‘One cannot separate a reflection of [the work's] modalities from the particular contradictions of the historical context in which the work is placed. No theory or critique of interculturalism can begin, to my mind, without confronting the politics of its location’ (p. 240).

Any discussion of interculturalism or forms of cross-cultural theatre, and post-colonial theatre, today cannot exclude T&W (and The Politics of Cultural Practice); this is testament to the critical impact the book has had on theatre scholarship. It has become necessary reading for students encountering interculturalism and when I see my students inspired by the arguments Bharucha puts forward in the book, I recall my initial encounters with the book as a graduate student. T&W was foundational to my thinking on, approach to, and writings on acoustic interculturalisms; his meticulous critique of Brook and other interculturalists shaped much of my attitudes toward cross-cultural theatres and intercultural relations. More significantly, even as some consider Bharucha's style controversial and polemical given his uncompromising stand and passionate assertions (for example, Bharucha posits that most interculturalists are simply legitimizing their own authority by asserting cultural superiority and are not truly keen on representing other cultures in their own contexts), his frank and fearless rhetoric inspired my own critical voice in a time of an emerging post-colonial consciousness.Footnote ⁹

Even after thirty years, T&W remains highly relevant and I might argue more so given the precarious times we now live in where fissures along nationalist, political, cultural, racial and religious lines are widening; often, these differences become exaggerated because of essentialist, decontextualist and monistic perspectives of identity affiliations. Furthermore, the globalization of culture and the arts festival circuits that ride on these currents have led to the multiplication of theatres and performances that involve or invoke cultural difference not simply in their modes of production but also in their ways of engaging and framing spectatorship – there exists an intercultural ethics occurring between performer/performance and audience(s) that must be given due consideration. Rereading T&W for ‘Double Take’, I am reminded that because theatre has the capacity to enact social and political change, it must prioritize an ethics of representation; it must advocate for collaborative discourses rooted in materialist understandings of cultural plurality and pluralism. As Bharucha posits, it is only in thinking about our ‘own collisions of culture, the shock of these moments, the lessons learned from them, the transformations possible through them’ while attending to those ‘historical contradictions’, that we can then begin to ‘search for what is real in theatre’ (p. 250; original emphasis).