Looking back through the field of theatre research in India has reminded me of how diverse and, at times, confusing all of this is given our multiculturalism and the impact this has had on how theatre is studied and practised in India. As scholars and practitioners we all struggle with how our work is to address the specificities of geocultural backgrounds, sociopolitical environments, the colours of vernacular languages, and so on. Moreover, while both our theatre and our multiculturalism, in all of their complexities, are centuries old, scholarly research is relatively new to Indian theatre and methodological modes of enquiry are still in their infancy. Nonetheless, three kinds of theatre in India have been instrumental in mapping out a field of scholarship:

1. 1. Traditional theatre and theatre traditions, which include the study of classical Sanskrit theatre, its traditions and performance conventions, and regional and vernacular theatre. This has also involved considerations of playwriting and the use of performance space.

2. 2. Theatre in the colonial period: English theatre under British colonial rule, theatre of protest, and its commercial offshoots, and theatre during the struggle for independence.

3. 3. Theatre after independence (post 1947): a period of redefining cultural identity in the new sociopolitical environment.

What follows is a chronological, two-part overview of the origins and the development of theatre research and publication in a post-independence India.

Part one examines theatre research from the 1950s until the 1990s, as the period of new economic thinking and a liberalization of sociocultural values, or as a period defined by the conflict between tradition and modernity fuelled by the new economic thinking. During this time theatre activists and playwrights struggled with how to create a modern theatre that would also give expression to an Indian identity that synthesized the modern with the traditional and the indigenous. Identity issues and the idea of a national theatre were paramount. Post-independence, playwrights and directors of regional theatre in Marathi, Bengali, Kannada and Hindi experimented with traditional folk forms and rejuvenated the vernacular languages of theatre, such as Gujrati, Asami, Orria, Tamil, Telgu, Malayalam, Punjabi or Rajasthani. These practitioners worked with myth, history, folk legend and religiocentric traditions to try to understand and to reflect on contemporary situations.

Part two focuses on theatre research and publications from the year 2000 onwards that have analysed the concept of modernity in theory and practice, and begun to address questions of form, style, space and performativity while also addressing urgent social issues. Surveyed in the publications charted in part two are the issues of gender conflict and dalit;Footnote ¹ the interpretation of drama as a performative art; the history of drama and theatre; the use of myth, adaptation and translation; and the political and socioeconomic conditions of India.

Part one: period of transition

With the foundation of the National School of Drama (NSD) in 1959 in the Indian capital of New Delhi, providing a national focus for theatre arts, came the possibility of developing theatre research. However, as the NSD was, understandably, more inclined towards the practice rather than the study of theatre, the only kind of research undertaken in the early years was that deemed necessary for mounting productions. Nevertheless, the establishment of the NSD revolutionized theatre practice in India given its innovative and experimental approaches to performance. The NSD's fusion of Western and Indian theatre traditions generated a new sensibility in the theatre arts that in turn encouraged other playwrights and directors to adopt experimental approaches to form, style and content. Crucially, it also fostered the idea that the study of theatre was urgently needed and, as a result, there was an outcrop of theatre books and articles, arguably and understandably more descriptive in this first wave of publication than later scholarship, but important nonetheless. Examples of this early work include the following publications in Hindi: Balwant Gargi's Rangmanch (Theatre) (1958), Dashrath Ojha's Nātya Samikshā (Theatre Criticism) (1959), Raghuvansh's Nātya Kala (Art of Theatre) (1961), Sita Ram Chaturvedi's Bhtiya Evam Pāschātya Rangmanch (Indian and Western Theatre) (1964) and N. C. Jain's Hindi Nātak Evam Rangmanch (Hindi Drama and Theatre) (1976). Theatre publications in English included Balwant Gargi's Theatre in India (1962), J. C. Mathur's Drama in Ritual India (1967) and Sudha Desai's Bhawai (1972). The formation of the National Academy of Music and Drama, Sangit Natak Akademi (SNA),Footnote ² was the main centre for providing research grants for theatre publications. There were a few publication houses, such as ENACT, Mārg, National Centre for Performing Arts (Bombay), Institute of Traditional Culture, Mythical Society, Arts & Ideas, Natrang and Chhāyānat.Footnote ³

The most important theatre scholar to emerge from the 1960s is Adya Rangacharyya from Karnataka, a province of southern India. Rangacharyya was the first scholar to publish significant, innovative theatre research. Before Rangacharyya, only Mulkraj Anand's Indian Theatre, published in the United States in the 1950s, that provided a comprehensive overview of the history and development of theatre in India, could be said to have achieved any significant scholarly standing. However, what distinguished Rangacharyya's work was his pioneering of theatre workshops, especially for teachers. He was instrumental in promoting the NSD and encouraging talented students, from all social classes, to train there, offering them both advice and financial support. Rangacharyya's works include twelve novels and a number of scholarly books on Indian theatre, Sanskrit drama, The Bhagavadgita and a translation of Bharata's Nātyashāstra, though it is as a dramatist that he has been most influential.Footnote ⁴ Classical influences permeate all of Rangacharyya's mature writing, including his plays and critical writings. This is particularly noteworthy because he was writing at a time when Romantic transcendentalism dictated creative expression in Kannada. To be a classicist then was a revolutionary act and the theatre movement which Rangacharyya pioneered isolated him from the mainstream and made him a cultural outsider. In terms of his critical rather than creative work, Rangacharyya's most important contribution was his translation of the Nātyashāstra into Kannada, with a commentary that had not appeared in earlier translations by M. M. Ghosh and Christopher Brisky. His faith in reason inspired both by his study of the Upanishads and the rational philosophy associated with the Advaita school of Vedānta,Footnote ⁵ and his exposure to the West at a formative stage of his life, brought new and influential insights to the Nātyashāstra. In 1971 Rangacharyya's Nātyashāstra was translated into English and Hindi.

During the 1960s, C. C. Mehta of the Theatre Department of the M. S. University at Baroda published the first anthology of Indian plays: Anthology of Plays in Different Languages of India. This was a pioneering attempt to offer an overview of theatre in India. Also of note during this decade were Balwant Gargi's Theatre in India (1962) and Folk Theatre of India (1966), both published in the United States. Gargi was the founder of two university drama departments in northern India – at Punjab University, Chandigarh and Punjabi University, Patiala. Both departments were established with an eye to theatre research, though both gradually became practice-oriented, perhaps because the drama faculty in these departments were NSD graduates. Further publications to mention from the 1960s are J. C. Mathur's Drama in Rural India (1967), examining rituals in rural theatre to juxtapose them with urban theatre, and, from SNA, Goverdhana Panchal's article on Kutambalam (traditional theatre halls of Kerala, 1968), V. Raghvan's The Kutiyattam: Its Form and Significance as Sanskrit Drama (1964) and L. S. Rajgopalan's Music in Kutiyattam (1968). These SNA publications focused on theatre in Kerala, as did K. S. Karanth's Yakshagāna (1966), Mohan Khokar's Chāu – Mask Dance of Sarāikala (1969) and Balwant Gargi's Rāmlilā in Rāmnagar (1969). Dashrath Ojha's insightful research into the ‘origin and development of Hindi Theatre’, Hindi Nātak Kā Udhvava aur Vikās, was published in 1969.

India in the 1970s saw a number of historico-political events: the nationalization of banks, the abolition of the Privy Purse to the ex-rulers of India (before independence there were more than 650 rulers in different parts of the country), the Indo-Pakistan war, the division of Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh. Dalit issues, gender issues and tribal issues also became the focus of national debate and were widely taken up in literature and the arts. In 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of internal emergency after opposition parties made a case against her in the Supreme Court about rigging in the national elections. Every citizen's fundamental rights were suspended during this period and any kind of protest against the ruling government was banned. It is considered to be one of the most shameful periods in the history of independent India, during which the press was censored, men were forced to undergo vasectomies, and governmental powers were widely abused by the members of the Congress Party.

In the theatre, several dramatists, directors and actors, along with political leaders and activists, were either arrested or were confined to their homes. Plays by several important playwrights, such as Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena or Mohit Chaterjee, were banned during this period. Many of their scripts, for example Ab Ghareebi Hatao (Eliminate Poverty Now) by Saveshwara or Guinea Pig by Mohit Chaterjee, along with several other short plays written for street theatre, were either banned or heavily censored. In brief, until 1979, when the state of emergency was lifted, underground theatre and performances took place all over India.

The 1970s saw the emergence of several new theatre departments in various universities across the country with enhanced state funding. These departments hosted a series of national and regional seminars and symposia to debate the identity of a national theatre and a definition of Indian theatre against a social and political backdrop that viewed Indian identity as being in crisis. A growth in theatre research culture saw efforts concentrated in one of two directions: focused either on classical traditions or on contemporary sociopolitical theatre formations. Additionally, research into the various vernacular languages of regional theatre was innovative and informative for mainstream theatre at this time.Footnote ⁶

Several theatre publications engaged with redefining ancient traditions and with examining the rituals of folk theatre and their contemporary relevance. M. L. Varadpande, a prominent scholar and senior fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research, published Traditions of Indian Theatre (National Book Trust of India, 1978). Shyam Parmar, professor and scholar in the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, published several studies on folk theatre forms, folk media and folk music. His Traditional Folk Media in India, Folklore of Madhya Pradesh, and Folk Music and Mass Media are widely regarded as seminal publications in this field. The study of Parsi theatre – the commercial and popular theatres of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – also began to receive attention – notably through the doctoral research of Somnath Gupta and Laxmi Narayn Lal's Pārsi Hindi Rangmanch (Parsi Hindi Theatre, 1973). Lal's study provides not only a comprehensive and detailed account of production conventions, but also a history of Parsi Hindi theatre – its evolution, influences and also the important role this theatre played during British colonial rule in creating a voice of protest. The study also deals with the effect of the Dramatic Performance Act (1876).Footnote ⁷

Another influential scholar from the 1970s is Pramod Kale (Pune University), who undertook extensive research to redefine the Nātyashāstra, publishing his first study on the subject, Theatric Universe, in 1974. N. C. Jain, a critic and scholar at the NSD, published an edited collection on modern Hindi drama and theatre, Ādhunik Hindi Drama and Theatre (1978). It was a collection that brought together scholars seeking to define Hindi theatre and to explore the ways in which this style of Indian theatre had been dominated by ‘Western idiom’ in a post-independence India, as this review of the work evidences:

Among the first scholarly publications of the next decade was Kapila Vatsyayan's Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams (National Book Trust of India, 1980). This was a pioneering and influential study of theatre that is neither ‘folk’ nor ‘classical’ in the strictest sense, but combines elements of both forms. While these two forms are radically different from each other, Vatsyayan's study was the first to suggest that in combination they present an ‘organic cohesiveness and a world-view which typically as well as traditionally, are Indian’.Footnote ⁹ This study sought ‘to identify levels of societal structure, the development of literature in their dimension of continuity with Sanskrit literature on the one hand, and the evolution of the regional literature as departure from the Sanskrit tradition, on the other’.Footnote ¹⁰ Subsequently, there were a few other important works on folk and traditional theatre of India, including some by foreign scholars, such as Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance by Darius L. Swann and Phillip B. Zarrilli (1990) and Ground for Play by Kathryn Hansen (1992). Significant among publications on contemporary Hindi theatre in the 1980s were Jaidev Taneja's Āj ke Hindi Rang Nātak (Contemporary Hindi Drama, 1980) and Andha Yug aur Bhārti ke Anya Prayog (Blind Age and Other Experiments of Bharti, 1982).

The most illuminating and exciting study on the sociopolitical landscape of theatre in India was Rustom Bharucha's Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theatre of Bengal, published by Seagull Books, Calcutta, in 1983. Rehearsals of Revolution analyses Calcutta's tradition of political theatre. After a brief historical description of Bengali theatre under British rule, Bharucha moves to an analysis of the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) and continues through to the contemporary movement of Badal Sircar's ‘Third Theatre’. Rehearsals of Revolution was the first political theatre study of its kind in India, inspiring many scholars to pursue political theatre research.

In the 1980s some theatre departments began to register doctoral students (e.g. at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata or Pondichery University, Pondichery). Doctoral research at this time tended to focus on issues related to theatre history and the languages and practices of different regions. Alongside this, the curricula in Hindi, English and Sanskrit university departments continued to offer analytical studies of well-known play texts – their aesthetics, craft and content. However, there was also a shift in the 1980s away from historically focused studies towards research topics related to the analysis of modern problem plays that looked at relationships between men and women, sociopolitical disintegration, the impact of growing urbanization and industrialization, or the effect of Western theatre on Indian playwriting. Examples of this shift include U. Sonambekar's Psychological Study of Female Characters of Post Independence Hindi Drama (Poona University, 1980), Rekha Dhingara's Problem Plays of Hindi with Reference to Modernity (Delhi University, 1983), Anupama Sharma's Myth and Reality in Contemporary Hindi Drama (Punjab University, 1983), Shakuntala Yadav's Modern Hindi Drama Forms with Reference to Communicability (Punjab University, 1984), Santosh Kumari's Comparative Study of Post-Independence Comedy Plays of Malayalam and Hindi Languages (Kerala University, 1984), Sudharani's Marxist Consciousness in Hindi One Act Plays (Lucknow University, 1984) and Changing Family Relations in Post Independence Hindi Drama by Rameshwar Dangi (Ranchi University, 1985). This trend continued in the latter half of the decade with Tradition and Experimentation in Post Independence Hindi Drama (1987) by Kusumlata (Calcutta University, 1987), Anitarani's Dramatic Tension in Modern Drama (Punjab University, 1986–7), and Communism in Post 1960 Dramas by Anjali Jha (Sagar University, 1988).

In the 1990s doctoral research continued to grow and to explore new directions, as exemplified by scholarship at Punjab University, Chandigarh, the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, the M.S. University of Baroda, School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi), the Ravindra Bharti University of Calcutta and the Pondichery University in South India. Published doctoral studies from the 1990s include Sunita Dhir's analytical commentary on various popular Indian acting styles (1991), Duttatrey Dutt's work on Western aesthetics from an Indian point of view (1999) and my own study of a multidisciplinary approach to aesthetics and art criticism (1996).Footnote ¹¹

By the close of the 1990s Bharucha emerged as a prominent theatre thinker in India, with four books published during this decade. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (1993) is a passionate and controversial work: the first major critique of intercultural theatre from a ‘Third World’ perspective. Bharucha questions the assumptions underlying the theatrical vision of some of the twentieth century's most prominent theatre practitioners and theorists, including Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook. He contends that Indian theatre has been grossly mythologized and taken out of context by Western directors and critics, and presents a detailed dramaturgical analysis of what he describes as an intracultural theatre project, providing an alternative vision of the possibilities of a real cultural pluralism. His other book, Theatre of Kanhailal: Pebet and Memoirs of Africa (1992), offers a detailed and close examination of Kanhailal, in which his own theatre is so firmly rooted. Pebet is a folk tale deeply entrenched in the psyche of the Manipuri people. It tells of a mother bird who fights to protect her children from a predatory cat. Kanhailal politicizes this familiar story, turning it into a struggle against the political and cultural colonization of Manipur. Memoirs of Africa is a short piece of theatre based on a poem by L. Somorendra Singh in which the history of oppression in Africa stands for oppression anywhere in the world. In his controversial study In the Name of the Secular: Cultural Practice and Activism in India Today (1997) Bharucha analyses a wide range of cultural activities, from film to street theatre, painting and literature, which strive to counter the threats of communalism and globalization. Drawing on the anti-fascist and anti-imperialist legacy of movements from the 1940s, Bharucha questions what it means to be secular in India today. Finally, in Chandralekha: Woman, Dance, Resistance (1995) Bharucha discusses the gender issues and feminist protest surrounding the prominent Bharatnātyam dancer Chandralekha, whose concept of ardhanarishwara – ‘God as half man and half woman’ was banned by the Indian government during the Festival of India in Moscow in 1988.

In 1996 Kapila Vatsyayan published a fresh reinterpretation of Nātyashāstra: Bharata: The Nātyashāstra. Here Vatsyayan re-examined issues of authorship, dating, primary material, orality and text. In addition to these seminal publications, further research focused on regional issues. Significant here are Mallika Sarabhai's study of Kerala's performing arts, Performing Arts of Kerala (1995) and Utpal K. Banerjee's study tracing the history of Bengali theatre, Bengali Theatre: 200 Years (1999).

Part two: the new wave

The turn of the millennium was significant for several reasons. There was a change in government: a coalition of conservative and regional parties. Despite conflicting ideologies, the liberal economic system generated a new-found style of national confidence, while at the same time all aspects of contemporary Indian life went through a period of soul-searching. Haunting the Indian psyche were the growing tensions of communalism and fundamentalism. Shashi Tharoor captured these in India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997). Reviewing this book, Shampa Chaterjee writes,

Contradicting Shashi's positive outlook, however, were the mounting internal tensions that resulted in the Gujarat carnage in 2002, increasing terrorism, a general feeling of insecurity and the assaults on dalits and women. Moreover, globalization and its promotion of a monoculture based on consumerism and commercialism were rapidly eroding ethnic identities. More than ever before theatre and theatre research was concerned with and intervened in these issues. Bharucha's The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (2000) focused on questions of globalization and increasing communalism. Here, Bharucha looked to emergent cultures of secular struggle in contemporary India in order to engage with the global issues of intellectual property rights, cultural tourism and the marking of minorities on the basis of religion, caste, language, gender and sexuality. In his thoughtful and insightful Indersabhā (based on the Parsi theatre tradition, 2000), senior critic and author Ranbir Sinh reinterpreted India's contemporary sociopolitical environment through history. Indersabhā represents a genuine effort to analyse the communal tensions, terrorism and dalit and women's issues, through India's social and cultural past. Interviewing Sinh, I asked him why there was a need for a new study of Parsi theatre when so many comprehensive studies had already been published. Categorically and confidently he replied that it was never his intention simply to add one more book to this field, but rather to re-examine Parsi theatre in the light of the country's new emerging socio-religious realities. In Sinh's view Parsi theatre arose out of the struggle against British imperialism and therefore had the potential to address neo-imperialist forms of globalization.Footnote ¹³

As millennial theatre research increasingly focused on women's and dalit issues there were several politically provocative studies by women scholars. The majority of these point to the emergence of the new Indian woman who was not confined to the home, who objected to discrimination against her sex, who was sexually liberated and ready to fight against social injustices. The number of women scholars concerned with theatre and women's issues include Poonam Trivedi of Delhi University, who has taken up a feminist approach to Shakespearean productions in India, and Minoti Chaterjee, also from Delhi University, who has explored the political theatre of Bengal and the ways in which the Bengali state has been at the centre of negotiation and conflict between India and the British, and the effects of this on theatre spatially, thematically and technically. Chatterjee engages with how theories and practices of theatre underwent change given the emergence of Bengal as a conscious nation-space. Pankaj K. Singh of Himachal University, in her study Re-Presenting Woman: Tradition, Legend and Panjabi Drama (2000), juxtaposes the textualities of legend and drama to reveal how post-independence drama re-presents woman along more just, realistic and humanistic lines as opposed to the pervasive marginalization and misrepresentation of traditional narratives. It examines woman's construction in the context of patriarchal paradigms, particularly in the context of love, sexuality and marriage. The appropriation of woman in pre-independence Panjabi drama is also considered. All of these studies are important for two main reasons: for their analysis of post-independence Indian theatre and for the anthologies of plays emphasizing feminist resistant dramas.

Aparna Dharkar's study of the history of Indian theatre, Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 (2005), has opened up several new lines of enquiry. Her approach is to juxtapose the idea of tradition with an idea of post-independent modernity consequent upon the history of India's colonial past. She combines theatre history with theoretical analysis and literary interpretation, examines the unprecedented conditions for writing and performance that the experience of new nationhood created in a dozen major Indian languages and offers detailed discussions of the major plays, playwrights, directors, dramatic genres and theories of drama that have made the contemporary Indian stage a vital part of postcolonial and world theatre. The first part of Dharwadker's study deals with the new dramatic canon that emerged after 1950 and the variety of ways in which plays are written, produced, translated, circulated and received in a multilingual national culture. The second part traces the formation of significant postcolonial dramatic genres from their origins in myth, history, folk narrative and sociopolitical experience, and the intertextual connections between Indian, European, British and American drama.Footnote ¹⁴

Tutun Mukherjee's Staging Resistance (2005) is the first major collection of theatre by Indian women playwrights. It brings together eighteen plays by women drawn from ten different Indian languages, all translated into English. In its own way, each dramatic work engages with social issues from a woman's perspective. The plays variously dramatize women's resistance to conservative social and cultural pressures and make explicit the different kinds of oppression and violence that form part of many women's daily lives in India. The collection is important to those concerned with women's writing in India, to practitioners of theatre, and to scholars interested in the translation and cultural reproduction of dramatic texts.

Since the year 2000 the list of important theatre research publications has grown exponentially and it is impossible, given the limitations of space, to mention them all. I have made a brief selection representative of comparative aesthetics, history, collections from seminars, symposia or conferences, and anthologies of plays. For example, Dramatic Concepts: Greek and Indian: A Study of the Poetics and the Nātyashāstra by Bharat Gupt (2006) offers a new approach by comparing the dramatic theories of ancient Greece and India. Instead of treating the Poetics and the Nātyashāstra as Western and Eastern viewpoints respectively, it places them within a broad framework of ancient Indo-European culture and the art of sacred drama. Flowering of Indian Drama: Growth and Development, edited by K. Venkata Reddy and R. K. Dhawan (2004), is innovative in its wide-ranging and comprehensive coverage of Indian playwrights, and in its analysis of their major works. Contemporary Indian Dramatists, edited by Shubha Tiwari (2007), includes a commentary on Indian dramatic theory and a selection of contemporary Indian plays. Contemporary Indian Drama: Astride Two Traditions, edited by Urmil Talwar and Bandana Chakrabarty and published by Rawat Publications (2005), is a collection of twenty-two essays, an interview and a few poems translated from Hindi into English on metatheatre. The essays treat a variety of issues related to dramaturgy, interpretative processes and directorial interventions. Vasudha Dalmia's Poetics, Plays, and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian Theatre (2006) addresses the political and aesthetic concerns of modern Indian theatre that have been fuelled by an urban interest in folk theatre in connection with Brecht. Part II of her study, ‘The Nation and Its Folk’, in particular analyses the Brechtian impact on Indian theatre. The recent study by Utpal K. Banerjee, Indian Theatre in 21st Century, published in 2009 to commemorate the golden jubilee of the NSD and its repertory company, gives an historical account of India's national theatre. The book examines some religious scriptures and the influences of Greek theatre, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Molière, Kafka, Chekov and so on, who have been an inspiration to Indian dramatists and whose works have also been adapted for performance in India.

As this overview reflects, it is clear that after a comparatively late and slow start the field of theatre research in India is now in a state of growth. With a greater sociopolitical awareness has come women's theatre activism and writing, a particularly important challenge to traditional Indian culture and society. Alongside this, serious efforts are also being made to examine critically how theatre can deal with issues such as globalization, communalism, terrorism and religious fundamentalism, which has created a situation of paralegal censorship of liberal art activities. There is a strong feeling that university drama departments should redefine their responsibilities and priorities so that issues related to the sociopolitical landscape of India are as much represented in academic studies as they are in contemporary theatre practice. This is a significant task facing the small number of university drama departments (only twenty-five universities have drama departments out of around more than five hundred universities in the country) – a curious imbalance when one thinks of India as having one of the oldest theatre traditions in the world.