Gender, mobility, and agency: from the theatre and performance studies perspective

In his manifesto, cultural critic Stephen Greenblatt asserts that mobility needs to be studied in both its literal and metaphorical sense.Footnote ¹² This is closely connected to how mobility operates in both the hidden and visible movements of peoples, images, ideas, and other cultural goods.Footnote ¹³ In theatre and performance studies, the question of mobility is complex, involving diverse forms of movement—both literal and metaphorical—occurring on-stage/on-screen or off-the-stage/behind-the-scenes. This can include travel undertaken by actors from their home(s) to work locations to join the media production units, as well as the representation of movement in literature, theatre, and cinema. In studying representations of ‘movement enacted, felt, perceived, expressed, metered, choreographed, appreciated and desired’,Footnote ¹⁴ its corporeality comes into sharp focus. The literary scholar Marshall Brown argues that ‘mobility and identity are dialectically inseparable’,Footnote ¹⁵ which has a huge impact on how we perceive agency. Hence, it becomes significant to explore how one’s social location and gender play a role in enabling processes of mobility or in creating new forms of im/mobility.

In the specific context of colonial India, the rise of woman performers in the public sphere was accompanied by their stigmatisation as ‘prostitutes’ and the ‘Other’ of the ‘honourable women’ in domestic spaces.Footnote ¹⁶ In her translation of the autobiography of the famous female Bengali actor Binodini Dasi, Rimli Bhattacharya highlights the ‘various kinds of estrangements and betrayals’ Dasi experienced from her teacher and guru, her patrons, and society when she tried to build a life beyond the theatre.Footnote ¹⁷ In northern India too, the apprehension around women on the public stage was palpable. Even ‘female supporters of actresses’ were concerned about the ‘sanctity of theatre’.Footnote ¹⁸ Such tensions were also present in Indian cinema. Film producer Dadasaheb Phalke expressed the need for ‘women from good families’ to act in films,Footnote ¹⁹ which would then accord them with a better reputation.Footnote ²⁰ Jyoti Prasad Agarwala’s Joymoti (1935) constructed a normative idea of womanhood, directly linking it to suffering and sacrifice in colonial times. This article examines whether Awahan Theatre’s stage adaptation of Joymoti (2021–2022) reproduces a stereotypical image of womanhood or resists it. The narratives portrayed on-screen/on-stage have wider ramifications for gender discourse in Assamese society, and these become apparent as we note the shifts and continuities as these texts move from colonial to contemporary contexts. Before tracing the links between representations and the history of women’s entry into theatre and performance spaces in colonial Assam, I will clarify my methodological framework.

Coacting in Assam: gendered negotiations

Mobile theatre as it exists today has its roots in open-air Jatra performances. Jatra as a performance art was introduced in western Assam from colonial Bengal during the second half of the nineteenth century and was performed in Bengali initially.Footnote ²⁵ The term Jatra, or yatra, ‘carries a sense of motion or dislocation’,Footnote ²⁶ but there is also a religious connotation attached to it. Inspired by Bengal’s Jatra performances, many Jatra groups or opera parties were formed in Assam. In the district of Barpeta, Tithiram Bayan formed the first Jatra group between 1860 and 1865.Footnote ²⁷ Then, in the same district, Jaydev Sarma of Murukuchi village began another Jatra troupe for commercial purposes, but in this case the earnings were mainly for the owner rather than for the artistes. Here, Brajanath Sarma’s initiative becomes significant as he was a social reformer, artist, and freedom fighter who took part in the non-cooperation movement in 1921. Upon his return from Bengal in 1921 (where he was deployed as part of the British Army), he founded the Shila Kalika Opera Party, which is considered the first professional Jatra group of Assam, in which artistes were paid for their performances.Footnote ²⁸

In the 1930s, when this group was disbanded, Sarma formed the Assam Kohinoor Opera Party, which laid the foundation for mobile theatre in Assam. Unlike the previous all-night performances, they now performed for just three hours and apart from changing the duration of the live performances, the Assam Kohinoor Opera Party also began to perform in halls instead of giving open-air performances.Footnote ²⁹ It was the Assam Kohinoor Opera Party that introduced coacting in the 1930s when the proscenium stage was set up.Footnote ³⁰ For the first time in Assam, female roles were played by women:Footnote ³¹ in the play Morān Jīorī (Moran’s daughter).Footnote ³² This initiative faced a lot of societal backlash: women’s performances on stage had to be discontinued, and Brajanath Sarma was boycotted.

Contrarily, in Natya Parampara, local historian Munindra Nath Sarma asserts that it was the Dubi Parihareswar Jatra group that pioneered coacting in Assam.Footnote ³³ Female performers associated with devadasi nritya (dance of devadasis) in Parihareswar temple, Dubi village, Barpeta district, which later came to be referred to as natinach (dance of natis), were part of this Jatra group formed in 1927.Footnote ³⁴ This historical account is based on M. N. Sarma’s interviews with two artists from the group, namely Baliram Bharali and Sasibala Das.Footnote ³⁵ According to M. Deka, the social status of devadasis (female performers associated with a caste-based performance art) in Assam is ambiguous as they ‘belonged to the nat community of the Kalita caste’, which is considered upper caste, yet the natis ‘also held at once a low and at the same time a somewhat elevated, though not defined, status in society and religion’.Footnote ³⁶ Historical sources also highlight that ‘while the natis were regarded not as “common prostitutes”, they were “prostitutes” nevertheless’.Footnote ³⁷

Therefore, due to their social location and gender identity, the female performers associated with the Dubi Parihareswar Jatra group were doubly marginalised. Their involvement with the performance art form and their profession were mainly viewed in a negative light and stigmatised. Brajanath Sarma had also planned to stage two women from the now-disbanded Jatra group, Savitri and Sajani, but due to opposition from some local individuals who exerted their power, they were unable to join his opera party.Footnote ³⁸

Breaking away from the rigid code of theatre in 1933, the opera party then recruited women from eastern Assam (which was geographically closer to the performance location). They included women actors such as Sarbeswari Das, Golapi Das, Sailabala Devi, Binada Gogoi, Phuleswari Das, and Labanya Das, who acted on-stage in the Doomdooma Natya Mandir public auditorium.Footnote ³⁹ Thus, Sarma’s was the second group to stage a coacting play.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet, what needs to be emphasised here is the controlled mobility of devadasis. Their social/caste status rendered them ‘immobile’, limiting them to temple spaces and open-air Jatra performances and denying them access to the proscenium stage in public auditoriums, which speaks to the prevalent power dynamics. Some accounts also mention that three female performers from the Dubi Parihareswar temple—Savitribala, Sarojinibala, and Rohinibala—did advance to the training stage; however, they had to return to their village as they could not ‘fit into’ the mobile theatre culture and were ultimately not included in the stage performances in Doomdooma.Footnote ⁴¹ The women recruited by the opera party seemed to have belonged to diverse communities, so the question of mobility is complex here: Did the stigma attached to devadasis render them unsuitable for the proscenium stage even though they were part of Jatra?Footnote ⁴² Or was it the long distance from western to eastern districts of Assam that made it difficult for some female performers to be part of the stage performances? Or was linguistic politics between the two districts at play? The linguistic politics between eastern Assam (Ujani) and western Assam (Namoni) is worth noting here, as the standardised Assamese spoken in eastern Assam and dialects like Kamrupiya and Goalpariya, prevalent in western Assam, ‘creates a relation of domination and subordination’, respectively.Footnote ⁴³ In this regard, Greenblatt’s theorising on cultural mobility is particularly apt: ‘in given historical circumstances, structures of power seek to mobilise some individuals and immobilise others’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The 1930s were significant with regard to female performers as the first Assamese film, Joymoti (1935), was directed by Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, starring Aideu Handique as its eponymous heroine. Handique portrayed the role of a ‘devoted wife’ in the film and ‘bore facial features that fit in well with given conceptualizations of beauty’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The film also exposed the double standards of the audience of the time as ‘they lapped up the represented image and shunned the vehicle of the said representation’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Handique, who remained unmarried in real life, faced ostracisation as she addressed her on-screen husband as ‘Baṅahar Deo’, meaning ‘Dear Husband’. While the male director of the film gained praise and recognition, Handique was treated as an outcast and forced to stay unmarried and live a solitary life. In the context of their search for female actors for Agarwala’s film Joymoti (1935), Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty has recently reported on how ‘stories about Jyoti Prasad and a few friends being chased away by villagers suspecting to be chōwālī cōr (stealing girls) in parts of upper Assam is common knowledge’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Pisharoty further elaborates:

The entry of Indian women on the public stage had given rise to moral panic, especially in the colonial period. By the end of the fourth decade of the twentieth century, the image of Sati Joymoti in Assam had become a composite symbol, integrating heroic nationalism with the pativratā (chaste wife) ideal and was popularised.Footnote ⁴⁹ In addition to a patriarchal society and gendered roles, this also needs to be understood within the context of Gandhian nationalism, which had a significant influence on the political scenario in Assam. In 1926, the women’s association known as Assam Mahila Samiti (AMS) was formed against the backdrop of the anti-colonial mass movement. It was led by Chandraprabha Saikiani, a feminist figure belonging to a mixed caste (Sut/Boria) who ‘mobilized a gendered public in the Brahmaputra valley in colonial Assam’.Footnote ⁵⁰ During the first annual conference of AMS in 1927, in Saikiani’s address as secretary, she linked ‘education to women’s freedom, including the freedom to move about outside the home’.Footnote ⁵¹ In the early twentieth century, questions about women’s access to public spaces and mobility, raised in the context of women’s liberation, also paved the way for women’s participation on the public stage. However, the entry of women performers on stage was fraught with moral tensions and social ostracisation.

At the age of 13, Aideu Handique entered the world of films, courtesy of her maternal uncle, Dimba Gohain. He lured her into acting and took her to the studio set up by Agarwala—an ‘act of treachery’ that highlights how the control over female performers’ agency and mobility remained firmly in the hands of their male counterparts during the first half of the twentieth century. In an interview with Bobbeeta Sharma in 1997, Handique shared that:

This was corroborated by a family member of Aideu Handique, S, who shared the difficulties faced by Handique who was bedridden in the later years of her life. S had married one of the sons of Aideu Handique’s younger brother in 1984, and much of the caregiving work fell on her shoulders once she became part of the family:

In the pursuit of a ‘realistic’ portrayal, Handique also suffered physically, which impacted her mobility later in life. The 1930s were a crucial decade for performance arts and female performers in Assam, marking the introduction of coacting on stage and on screen. However, the experiences of female performers’ remain largely invisible in theatre and performance historiography. While interviewing S regarding the Aideu Handique Museum in the Golaghat district of Assam, she mentioned how Handique wanted the archival materials to be retained in the family home instead of in the museum (which stays closed/locked, with its keys in the hands of the Sahitya Sabha committee members). Thus, by exercising her agency and taking an ‘anti-archival’ stance,Footnote ⁵³ Handique foregrounds the family/community while rejecting the official archival space that had historically marginalised her. The Jyoti Chitrabon Film Studio in Guwahati, named after Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, houses a digitised music archive and film sets. Although the museum narrates the story of its foundation and the contribution of Agarwala, Aideu Handique’s work and life experiences are nowhere to be found. Cultural theorist Brahma Prakash points out the ‘deep Brahmanical and colonial legacies’ of archives in India.Footnote ⁵⁴ I extend this critique to argue that archival practices have an inherent gender bias as the archival marginalisation of women’s work serves as a stark reminder of the gendered imbalance that persists in the way we remember history of the arts and women’s roles in it. My search for travelling female performers also led me to Mumbai’s National Museum of Indian Cinema (NMIC), which acknowledged that Joymoti (1935) was the first Assamese talkie to be screened in America. While it visibilised images and video clips of Aideu Handique as Joymoti, it remained silent about the im/mobilisation she faced in her life off-screen. Therefore, to explore questions of mobility and agency, studying the lived experiences of travelling female performers in conjunction with their portrayals on-screen and on-stage becomes a significant area of focus, which will be delineated next.

Joymoti on-screen/on-stage: analysing texts and contexts

In this section, a close reading of representations of movement and stasis through the characterisation of the female protagonist in the performance texts of Joymoti will be explored. In Jyoti Prasad Agarwala’s Joymoti (1935),Footnote ⁵⁵ Aideu Handique plays the lead female role, Princess Joymoti, and is shown as a devout, married woman, offering prayers at home and looking after her children, Lai and Lechai. Amidst political turmoil, the Ahom king Sulikpha (Ratnadhwaj Singha), known as Lora Roja (Boy King), plans to kill Prince Gadapani (Gadadhar Singha) as he is perceived to be a threat to his throne. During a private conversation with Gadapani, Joymoti places her head on his lap while sitting on the floor (reinforcing a subjugated position), trying to convince him to flee the kingdom. Later, when the soldiers do not find Gadapani, they take Joymoti to the king’s court, which is the first instance in the narrative when Joymoti’s character ventures into the public space. Following the king’s orders, Joymoti is shown travelling in a palanquin supported by two male bearers. In the court, when asked about her husband’s whereabouts, she maintains her silence.

As the heroine of the first Assamese talkie film, Jyoti Prasad Agarwala aimed to use the historical/literary/mythical figure of Joymoti to speak to the contemporary nationalist sentiments in colonial Assam. Regarding Joymoti’s portrayal on screen, Agarwala wrote:

With a traditional Assamese mēkhēlā cādar covering her head,Footnote ⁵⁷ as depicted in Figure 1, Joymoti becomes the epitome of silent suffering and sacrifice in the name of one’s husband and for the cause of the ‘nation’. Moreover, through the sartorial depiction here, Agarwala prioritised markers of a generic ‘Assamese’ identity instead of highlighting distinct Ahom traits in order to invoke a nationalist sentiment that was pan-Indian and anti-British.Footnote ⁵⁸

Figure 1.

Aideu Handique as Joymoti, wearing a mēkhēlā cādar covering her head while being presented at the king’s court. Source: YouTube.

Figure 1 Long description

A woman, identified as Joymoti, is shown wearing traditional attire with a head covering. The image includes subtitles that read, 'So, Joymoti, for your mere husband you're disdaining the king's word...' indicating a scene of defiance or confrontation. The setting suggests a formal or significant context, possibly a court or important gathering.

On the other hand, in Awahan Theatre’s stage adaptation of Joymoti (2021–2022),Footnote ⁵⁹ Prastuti Porasor, who takes on the role of the protagonist, is showcased both before and after her marriage to Gadapani. As a young unmarried woman, she is asked by her father to accompany Gadapani to a nearby pond (enabling a form of mobility) and is also introduced on stage through a Bihu dance sequence. This characterisation is imbued with a sense of agency as, being impressed by the young prince’s strength and integrity, she makes the decision to marry him. The caklaṃ wedding sequence with 101 earthen lamps lit for the ceremony is used as a pertinent semiotic device to assert Ahom identity, achieved through sartorial refashioning with the actors donning traditional Ahom attire.Footnote ⁶⁰ Post-marriage, Joymoti convinces Gadapani to leave the kingdom with the rise in political turmoil. She also questions why women are kept away from politics.Footnote ⁶¹ Then, Joymoti and Gadapani embrace each other on stage (as equals?), just before Gadapani flees to save his life. The soldiers interrogate Joymoti about Gadapani’s whereabouts but are met with silence. Later, Joymoti enters the court on her own and refuses to bow and pay respect to the king. Instead, she delivers a powerful dialogue about the ideal ruler and the rightful heir to the throne, with a distinctive shift in body language and movements like the hand gestures depicted in Figure 2. When threatened with punishment, she laughs in the face of patriarchal oppression, thereby transgressing societal norms.

Figure 2.

Prastuti Porasor, as Joymoti, faces the hearing at the king’s court and voices her political opinions. Source: YouTube.

Figure 2 Long description

Five people are standing on a stage. Prastuti Porasor, a woman, is positioned in the center, wearing traditional attire and gesturing with her right hand raised. To her left, a man in traditional clothing stands with his hands clasped. To her right, another man is dressed similarly, facing forward. Two men are positioned at either end of the stage, both shirtless and wearing traditional lower garments. The stage is decorated with spears and shields and a large archway is visible in the background.

Separated by almost nine decades, the film and the theatrical text point to the prevalent codes in a given culture’s system of constraint and mobility.Footnote ⁶² In both texts, however, Joymoti plans her husband’s escape successfully but ends up im/mobilising herself—in Figure 3, Joymoti is tied to a tree as she sits on the ground, and in Figure 4, she is standing while being tied against a tree. By aiding Gadapani’s mobility, although his life is at risk as a fugitive, the gendered nature of Joymoti’s sacrifice is glorified. After several days of torture in Jereṅā Pathār (lit. ‘a field of thorns’),Footnote ⁶³ Aideo Handique’s Joymoti utters the following words before her death, ‘Ah! My lord, my husband … let the country prosper, let our people strive…’.

Figure 3.

Joymoti is punished in Jereṅā Pathār. Tied to a tree, she sits on the ground, surrounded by royal executioners. Source: YouTube.

Figure 3 Long description

Joymoti is tied to a tree, sitting on the ground in a field. She is surrounded by five men, who appear to be royal executioners. The men are standing and sitting in various positions around her, with some leaning against the tree and others standing nearby. The setting is an open area with sparse vegetation visible in the background.

Figure 4.

Gadadhar, in Naga attire, along with Watlong, a Naga girl, visit Joymoti in Jereṅā Pathār. Source: YouTube.

Figure 4 Long description

Gadadhar, a man dressed in traditional Naga attire, stands to the right of Joymoti, who is tied to a tree. Joymoti is positioned on the left, with ropes securing her to the tree. Watlong, a Naga girl, stands to the right of Gadadhar, observing the scene. The setting is dimly lit, emphasizing the dramatic nature of the scene.

In Awahan Theatre’s version, Joymoti recovers her agency even in her im/mobile state. Through her impactful dialogue delivery, she challenges the power of the state, which amplifies her status from a woman/wife/mother to ‘Nation’ personified. One of the ministers is shown to fall at her feet asking for forgiveness. Hence, she mobilises her voice to awaken people’s consciousness, urging them to take action for political change, thereby taking an agential role.

In Lakshminath Bezbaruah’s Joymoti Konwari (1915), he introduces a new character in Act 3, Scene 2: Dalimi, a Naga woman.Footnote ⁶⁴ During Gadapani’s stay with the village headman’s family in the Naga hills, he meets their daughter Dalimi, who falls in love with him. She is characterised as Nature’s child and is shown to roam around in the hills. When Gadapani decides to leave for the valley to visit Joymoti, a heartbroken Dalimi takes her own life by jumping off a cliff. Maitri Baruah illustrates how Dalimi provides a counterpoint to the gendered modernity in Joymoti’s representation within the construct of Ahom–Vaishnav unity and thus Dalimi’s ‘final erasure keeps her outside the imagined frame of modern Assam’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Her simple pastoral verses as opposed to Joymoti’s literary (high) language consolidates hierarchies between the Asamīẏā and the other linguistic groups and tribal communities in the region.Footnote ⁶⁶ While scholars and intellectuals dismiss Dalimi as a work of Assamese literary fiction, anthropologist Dolly Kikon traces the burial site of Dalimi in a town called Naginimora in the north-eastern state of Nagaland.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, Kikon foregrounds the story from a Phom Naga village where the villagers claimed that Dalimi belonged to their tribe and was known as Watlong.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Awahan Theatre’s adaptation, a binary ‘hills’ versus ‘valley’ narrative is established through Watlong’s character. Watlong accompanies Ang (lit. ‘king’, Gadapani’s Naga name as a fugitive) when he visits Joymoti in Jereṅā Pathār, thus travelling from the hills to the valley (in contrast to Joymoti’s stillness), a departure from Dalimi’s portrayal in Bezbaruah’s play and Agarwala’s cinematic text. In the theatrical adaptation, Watlong then jumps into the river when her love is unreciprocated. A hierarchy is constructed as the sacrifice made for love by the Naga tribal woman Watlong is overlooked, while Joymoti’s sacrifice to save her husband for the nation’s cause catapults her into the image of the ‘ideal woman’. Her death, as Gaurav Rajkhowa asserts, ‘only sanctifies the satitva that was immanent all along’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Significantly, the actor playing Watlong’s role, Jinu Boro, belongs to the tribal Bodo community. Her career trajectory illustrates an upward mobility that exists within mobile theatre groups—she initially joined as a dancer but now takes on meaningful acting roles on stage. However, in casting Porasor (an upper-caste Brahmin woman) in the role of an Ahom character, there is an appropriation of the Ahom identity with the caste-Hindu Assamese identity. It could be a deliberate move given the shift in mobile theatre from popular to populist representations in the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁷⁰ It needs to be emphasised that Porasor is also the producer of the Awahan Theatre group and occupies the unique position of being the only female producer-cum-lead actor in the mobile theatre culture-scape. Unlike the social media channels of other theatre groups, Porasor uploads video recordings of the live theatre plays through her own YouTube channel, a form of agency, as she commands a celebrity status in Assam and has a huge audience/fan base.

In one of the field sites, during a rehearsal (ākharā) session, I observed that lead actors were seated on the left side of the stage, one of the senior female actors was shifting from one side to the other occupying both spaces, while the dancers were seated on the right side. They were also being served tea in different types of cups—the senior artists would pick up the ceramic cups, while the steel cups would be picked up by the junior artists. A subtle form of hierarchy is practised, although it is termed as ‘discipline’ by the performers. There seemed to be a divide between ‘glamour’ artists and junior artists/dancers. Some women performers had joined mobile theatre before or after their matriculation exams, while a few of them had completed their graduation and post-graduation as well. During my interview with one of the leading female actors, Nandita, she invoked Aideu Handique to reflect on the situation during the early twentieth century and whether it has changed:

In the above statement, it is important to notice the contestation amidst which mobile theatre actors pursue their work in public spaces. What Nandita refers to as ‘an extra medium’, I interpret as engagement with a public medium, since she refers to the family and domestic realm as a contrast immediately after that. My interviews with male producers of mobile theatre mostly point towards a tussle between power and control.Footnote ⁷¹ They made decisions around mobility in and out of the rehearsal camps, and these rules differed for male and female actors. Yet, this form of entertainment came with a nine-month contract, so actors could also negotiate their position and remuneration based on their decision to continue with the same theatre group or to join another competitive one the following season. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been a pattern of ‘reverse mobility’ in which film stars/celebrities and popular television actors migrate towards mobile theatre as it is comparatively more lucrative. In this regard, Chandrima, a senior female actor with 26 years of experience shared that:

Chandrima points out how this movement of ‘glamour’ actors from one medium to another ensured higher pay and better living conditions at times. Female performers are mainly employed as actors and dancers, and as they grow in seniority and experience, they acquire more power to negotiate. During an interview, Dilip, a veteran male producer spoke about the concerns around mobility for the female performers within the theatre spaces:

Such restrictive practices are prevalent even today. In the name of decorum and discipline, the mobility of female performers is controlled, especially during the rehearsal period in the theatre camps. Such decisions are mainly taken by the all-male management teams of the theatre groups, headed by the mostly male proprietors.

To say that women performers are marginalised within mobile theatre spaces would be an overly simplified demarcation. It is important to note that while there is a power hierarchy that exists amongst the female performers (not a homogenous category) within each mobile theatre group, they still depend on the male members for major decision-making processes. Among my respondents, women performers of mobile theatre groups belonged to diverse social locations, including tribal indigenous women, but only Brahmin and upper-caste women were cast in lead roles as the ‘heroine’. Their experiences are varied and determined by their social and class position. A few leading female protagonist ‘stars’ have been on stage since the late 1990s, but such cases are quite rare. Usually, after a certain amount of time, they move on from playing the roles of ‘heroine’ to other supporting roles, while senior male actors continue to be cast as the main lead or take up additional responsibilities like script-writing and directing.

Depending on their seniority, current role, and past experiences, their agency within the theatre space brings out myriad narratives. For instance, Priyanka is a female protagonist who debuted in 1997–1998, and regarding choosing her roles on stage, she said:

Along with the agency to decide on on-stage roles,Footnote ⁷² the way one navigates the theatre space is also important. When I asked about the newcomers in the industry and the newer trends and latest changes that have taken place, Priyanka said:

This form of behaviour is portrayed as acceptable in the name of dedication to and respect for the craft. Priyanka talks about yesteryear with a sense of nostalgia. Yet, this form of violence and control exercised by the senior male members of theatre groups cannot be overlooked. Mostly, (male) producers or management teams make the final call on the suitability of actors for particular roles. On the surface level, this seems to be part of the working process, but when it centres around the female performer’s indigenous identity, it becomes very problematic. Tribal, indigenous community members and Muslim women are never considered for the role of the female protagonist. In this regard, I met Munmi, who introduced herself by claiming her Mising tribal identity.Footnote ⁷³ She shared the trials and tribulations she underwent when joining a mobile theatre group in 2017–2018:

Munmi was in her early 20s when she first joined the theatre, and her excitement was palpable as she talked about her initial aspirations. Her experience showcased how theatre spaces could also become exploitative and exclusionary. As part of the informal economy, members generally work on contracts, and the position they hold within the theatre group determines how much power and agency they can assert. This exclusionary act based on the female actor’s identity exposes a bigger issue for the cultural sphere and the politics of representation both on- and off-stage. Since the early twentieth century, female travelling performers have struggled to traverse long distances and although at times they found roles in mobile theatre and films, these very spaces have not always been inclusive.