In April 2011, after thirty-five years in power, the left-oriented progressive rule in Bengal, India, was brought down. Masterminding the overthrow was Mamata Banerjee. Banerjee has enjoyed a political career spanning over twenty years, during which time she has succeeded in maintaining a high public profile in the media and public sphere to become Bengal's first ‘woman’ chief minister. Surprisingly, during her campaign Banerjee neither asserted her identity as a woman nor as the non-feminine, monstrous presence of the public woman (à la Indira Ghandi's media presence in the 1970s), but rather performed a non-threatening, gender-neutral didi (elder sister in Bengali). I attribute this ‘smooth’ identity construction to a comfortable entente between a Western globalized visual culture, indigenous images commodified and circulating on the periphery, and the sudden expansion of electronic media. The convergence of all these factors served to create a non-dialectical identity construction which stood against all feminist politics or, as I would call it, feminism with a political imagination.

This is in stark contrast to the progressive theatre movement in post-independent India that, from its inception in 1943 with the Indian People's Theatre Association until 2000, committed to imagining an alternative political and social system and critiquing the adverse social position of women in India. Abetting this progressive theatre was second-wave feminism of the 1970s, which built a close relationship between left parties and women's groups. Even after agonistic politics were abandoned in the 1980s, this countercultural theatre continued to imagine a better, more socially progressive, world. Banerjee's new regime in West Bengal has tried to win support from the theatre and to appropriate the tactics of the left for its own ends, but without success. The progressive theatre movement has refused to betray its history of political imagining, has resisted being coerced into portraying the defeat of its own ideology by endorsing a capitalist ‘utopia’ to which it has always been and remains firmly opposed.

Looking back, it is important to remember that the postcolonial theatre of India, in dialogue with political events, created radical interventions in its staging of women, even though the representation of female subjects remained under the controlling influence of the director/author. In challenging the middle-class elite Hindu nationalist hero, dramatic narratives had first to attack and dismantle the myth of domestic conjugality which remained at the core of nationalist texts. Kallol (Sound of the Waves), first staged in 1964, ran for four years, retelling the story of a ‘violent’ naval mutiny which occurred in 1946, on the eve of independence. The Congress government, entrenched as the dominant party in power, duly banned the play and the director, Utpal Dutt, was arrested under the Preventive Detention Act. One of the first documentary plays of the independence movement, Kallol was also one of the new Marxist genre which caught the public imagination, generating large-scale public debate about the play's content, its censorship and the arrest of its director. What theatre history ignores, however, is how the play balances male violence with a radical feminist violence which in effect dismantles the narrative of domestic conjugality. While the sailors mutiny at sea in an exclusive male space, the sailors’ home, comprising the largest slum in Bombay, also breaks out in revolt led by a seasoned elderly lady and other marginalized, disabled people, invisible to the gaze of the British India Navy. Protests of this kind, embodied in female characters, became an important marker of the new repertoire, demanding new acting and delivery and even new body presentation skills.

The issues touched on here are dealt with more fully in Dutt's later play, The Tin Sword (1972). Set against the backdrop of colonial theatre, The Tin Sword dramatizes the well known story of actor–manager Girish Ghosh and his protégée, the first Bengali star actress, Binodini. Dutt's Marxist interpretation of the Ghosh–Binodini phenomenon creates a radical feminist perspective which neither the popular-media versions, nor even the expressly feminist adaptation by Amal Allana in 2006, have been able to achieve.Footnote ¹ In Dutt's play, Ghosh ‘rescues’ Binodini from selling vegetables on the streets and transforms her into the star of the newly formed National Theatre by selling her to the financier of the theatre company, a member of the comprador bourgeoisie that was emerging under colonialism. Thereafter, she refuses the offer of marriage and the chance of domestic respectability, choosing instead to remain the mistress of the financier, an actress and a public commodity. In this complex gesture of defiance the play refuses the trap of a utopian, ‘romantic’ solution to the woman's question.

The woman's question and issues of identity continued to find their way into the leftist politics of post-independence India. The larger political agitation of the 1970s saw mass struggles that brought middle-class and working-class women together, but after the Emergency this broke down, and the divisions of class and caste remained. At the same time, the progressive theatre movement embraced identity politics, providing strong feminist roles for women, important both to the women who played them and to the women who came to see them. This work went beyond the limits of realism, and inspired women in the mainstream to break away and create alternative, grassroots theatre.

However, from the 1990s onwards, feminist politics, both on- and offstage, became a casualty of the rise of consensus politics. The decline of left-oriented theatre has eroded the space for women not only inside theatre, but also outside in the public sphere. Today, women's activism appears reduced to little more than a performance, like the new chief minister's media circus. Even in India's recent adoption of the slut walk (July 2011) or gay parades there is no real sense of political engagement or commitment.Footnote ² This is, I would argue, because the state succeeds in containing resistance, converting the unsafe spaces of public protest into safe spaces with police protection. So participants in the July slut walk were more than ready to agree to wear jeans, instead of shorts, or to gather together instead of marching. To think of the history of the progressive theatre movement beside these recent public events is to be reminded of the unsafe, politically productive spaces this movement has helped to create in India – especially in terms of feminism as exemplified by Dutt's defiant Binodini. Feminism with a political imagination, in and out of the theatre, is what feels urgently needed in India today.