In colonial India, European, Eurasian and mixed-blood communities established themselves as superior due to their race and ethnicity. They enjoyed privileges such as access to resources, entertainment, English-language education, jobs and civil rights. Over time, the fight for Indian independence increasingly dismantled the reservation system that institutionalized this access, allowing other Indians to have a chance at taking on key positions in governance, transport and housing, among others. In particular, elite Indian communities gained access to English-medium education. In Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), both St Xavier's Collegiate School, founded in 1860 by a small group of Belgian Jesuits headed by Father Henry Depelchin, and Loreto House School, founded in 1842 by a group of nuns led by Mother Delphine Hart, continued in the postcolonial period as premier ‘English-medium’ schools.Footnote 1 Initially meant for European and Eurasian children, over time these schools began accepting elite Bengali students.Footnote 2
The schools were prestigious and were held in high esteem, since they enabled Indian children to become fluent in English language, customs and culture: up until the mid-1970s, these schools adhered to the Senior Cambridge system wherein the curriculum, examination and grading systems were set in Britain.Footnote 3 At the same time, they granted their pupils access to critical and theoretical discourse, and, through extracurricular activities such as drama and elocution, a means to express their growing critical consciousness. In this article, I examine St Xavier's Collegiate School and College, where a generation of Anglo-Indians and elite Bengalis attained adulthood at the time of independence.Footnote 4 The dramatic activities pursued at the time as part of the school curriculum trained a number of students in acting and directorial skills, encouraging them to take up active roles in a new theatrical public sphere: ‘new’ in that this group of young aspirants had no connections with the existing Bengali theatre.Footnote 5 Pre-eminent, though by no means alone among these students, was noted actor–director Utpal Dutt.
Emergence of the postcolonial theatre
The connection between the English-medium school education and the new postcolonial Indian theatre can be traced by focusing on several Indian theatre personalities of the new generation. The new postcolonial theatre was different from the (Indian) colonial theatre, which operated in the northern part of Calcutta city as a commercial enterprise. One way of thinking about this new theatre, which emerged in the late 1940s and came into maturity in the 1960s, is as being initiated by what Nicholas Ridout would call ‘passionate amateurs’:
those who attempt, in this sphere of [industrial] capitalism, to realize something that looks and feels like the true realm of freedom – not the ‘free time’ of capitalist leisure – but knowing, very often, that in that very attempt, they risk subsuming their labors of love entirely to the demands of the sphere of necessity in which they must make their living.Footnote 6
These newly independent Indian citizens were able to activate a cultural sphere as a group of theatre practitioners who willingly called themselves ‘amateurs’ and were passionate in building a form of theatre that was neither indigenous in format (like Indian folk theatre) nor nationalistic in treatment. Instead, against the backdrop of a multicultural milieu, they adapted and interpreted Shakespeare and other English-language plays.
In order to understand the ‘passion’ behind these amateur theatre groups, one must first reflect on the cultural currency that the English language enjoyed after the end of colonialism. In postcolonial India, English remained a currency that would allow audiences to connect with Western classics and English-language texts in creative formats that were aligned with the global sociopolitics of the time.Footnote 7 Samik Bandopadhyay describes this as ‘the great re-discovery and resurgence of Shakespeare in the British theatre of the 1940s’.Footnote 8 Its direct impact on India was mainly through the ‘touring company called Shakespereana, led by Geoffrey Kendal, who followed up his first Indian tour for the entertainment of the National Service association with a series of tours from 1946 onward’.Footnote 9 The Kendals were an English family touring company that would go around the country performing plays by Shakespeare, Wilde, Sheridan and Shaw. Their audiences ranged from villagers, to school students, to packed auditoriums with world leaders in the audience.Footnote 10
A regular visitor to St Xavier's College, Geoffrey Kendal selected a young student, Utpal Dutt, to join the touring company in 1947. Dutt toured with the Kendals from August 1947 to the end of 1948, and again from February 1953 to the end of 1954.Footnote 11 One of the stalwarts of the Bengali political theatre dominating the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, Dutt's initiation into theatre at St Xavier's College is indicative of how a colonial-era education system laid the groundwork for postcolonial theatrical forms.
Dutt's engagement with Shakespeare came from the classroom curriculum at St Xavier's, which involved close study of Shakespeare texts from the secondary level. These would be analysed, with scenes enacted in class or in the large proscenium-style school theatre.Footnote 12 Dutt subsequently recalled the experience as inspirational, writing,
My earliest appearance in a Shakespeare play was as the Second Gravedigger in Hamlet at St. Xavier's School in 1942. From that date till 1955, I acted in a succession of Shakespeare plays, many of which I produced. I owe a lot to the late Father Weaver of St. Xavier's College who was a member of Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre before he joined the Church.Footnote 13
Indeed, Dutt was a fine example of the first generation of citizens who came of age in post-independence India, and derived from his education the social and cultural capital to build the new multicultural ‘amateur’ theatre that critically engaged with ideas of citizenship. Dutt went on to study English literature in his undergraduate courses at St Xavier's College and continued with his theatre activities. The college had its own theatre, known during the war as the Garrison Theatre, where ENSA (Entertainment National Service Association) personnel, including Jack Hawkins and Noel Coward, performed for the troops.Footnote 14 Under the aegis of the ‘Amateur Shakespeareans’, student productions found an audience among the local population of the neighbourhood and anglicized Bengalis. The leading English daily of the city, The Statesman, followed the young actors and their productions, as did the college journal edited by P. Lal, who would later become well known as a writer, scholar and poet.
Dutt, meanwhile, was also responding to emergent grass-roots political movements concerning peasant and worker's struggles and the formation of a left-wing ideological orientation. In the post-war context, these political developments would also have an impact on his group. As he would later say, ‘Left ideology was entering our thoughts and minds. It is important to remember that our group was constituted of Jews and others who had just emerged victorious from the Nazis. The anti-imperialism fervor within the country inspired our theatre activities’.Footnote 15
Dutt's Julius Caesar, performed by the Amateur Shakespeareans on 15–17 July 1949 at the St Xavier's College Auditorium, was seen as the group's most successful adaptation, and highly political for a school production.Footnote 16 The handbill advertised ‘Shakespeare for the first time in modern costume in India’, and, as the all-male cast list indicated, the group was multiracial: it is possible to pick out Indian Bengali, Anglo-Indian, Jewish and British names among the line-up.Footnote 17 A programme printed for the show also provided labels that identified Caesar as a ‘dictator’; Octavius, Mark Antony and Lepidus as ‘Fascists’; Brutus as a socialist; and Cassius and Casca as communists. The play was set in Fascist Italy under Mussolini. In The Statesman of 17 July 1949, Lindsay Emerson wrote,
The play was rendered with distinction and intelligence . . . Producing Julius Caesar in modern dress is not in itself a novel idea . . . Yet this performance contained several ingenious features. An extremely effective example was that Brutus's and Antony's funeral speeches were delivered over the radio . . . Production was much slicker than in most amateur shows we have seen, and was aided by some effective sets . . . Both the headquarters at Philippi (with a notably adequate ghost) and the Capitol with Cubist stained-glass designs in the background were notably successful.Footnote 18
Not having Brutus and Antony onstage in the famous funeral scene to exhibit histrionic skills was a significant intervention in the play's climax. The use of the radio as a prop was not only for auditory effect but to introduce a contemporary technological medium that was steeped in history and deeply intertwined with people's lives both internationally and nationally: the declaration of Indian independence was not watched by most Indians but heard on their new radio sets.
It is possible that Dutt's later engagement with an active political theatre that would intervene in debates in the public sphere of the new nation and its democratic experiments was being formed in the portrayal of Caesar as a Fascist. The review noted that Caesar, ‘in hat and overcoat, recalled the early Hitler. Antony, as a cross between Goebbels and Baldur von Schirach, displayed a combination of unscrupulousness with sensitive intelligence’.Footnote 19 The reviewer mentions particularly an intervention in the dramaturgy in the conspiracy scene, ‘where a tormented Central European of the Kafka period hinted at the idealist shortly to be crushed in the world of dirty politics’.Footnote 20
Dutt's own acting as Brutus drew praise – ‘As the noblest Roman of them all, Utpal Dutt played Brutus with distinction’ – and we can see him identifying clearly with the contemporary international and national political scenario.Footnote 21 Deeply suspicious of the way Indian independence came to be attained, with power being monopolized by the dominant Congress Party, Dutt felt that Congress and its leadership, representing only an exclusive class-based community of predominantly elite Hindus, would restrict democratic practice. That said, the reviewer found the portrayal of the conspirators in Julius Ceasar as socialists and communists ‘questionable’ and ‘unconvincing’.Footnote 22
Creating the third space
The multi-ethnic composition of the theatre company as a collective entity would play an important role in the first phase of Dutt's activities, but has not been acknowledged in the history of a modern Indian theatre. In the coverage provided by The Statesman, and in the programmes, a number of names from the cast list of Julius Caesar recur in other productions. These were not high-class and high-caste Bengalis, but a heterogeneous group of Jews, Armenians, Anglo-Indians and remnants of the British population. The names of the women who performed with Dutt when female actors were required, such as in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, were all English names: Grace Mackertich, Thelma Martin, Jean Wood and Joyce Bernard, among others, who could be of English or of mixed European descent.Footnote 23 It is likely that these young actors studied in other premier English-medium institutions such as Loreto House. Along with some of the men, they stayed on with Dutt for a number of years and were an integral part of his Amateur Shakespeareans, which in 1949 was renamed the Little Theatre Group (LTG).
Deeply engaged in constructing an active political theatre, however, Dutt chose to transform his LTG into a Bengali theatre group in 1953.Footnote 24 He would later write,
I was a much disturbed person then, busy with useless English plays in Calcutta, fruitlessly exploring Shakespeare, Shaw and Odets and devastated by my distance from the people. I was filled with hatred for the way I had been brought up and refused to see the merits of a Jesuitical education which had opened up the world of books to me, including Marx and Engels, Rousseau and Voltaire, Hegel and Feuerbach. I considered myself a moron for being moved by Latin poetry and for being able to recite Virgil. I went about in quest of an identity.Footnote 25
Coming together as an ensemble to make theatre with interventions which were both artistic and political, there would have been a certain degree of congregation and forming of a community, based not on narrow identity politics but on artistic and cultural decisions. This is an example of where segregations between the communities of Anglo-Indians, Bengalis, Jews, Armenians and English would likely give way to a common cultural space. We can imagine that the rehearsal spaces would be full of debates and arguments: a modern community of young citizens meeting as individuals. The memoirs of both R. H. Lesser and Solomon Bekhor refer to the team spirit and the democratic running of the group.Footnote 26
Theatre history, like other cultural histories and even political history, is most often written in terms of individuals and iconic figures. Most of my sources from Dutt's co-actors/theatre-makers wrote these pieces in an anecdotal style as a tribute to Dutt on his death in 1993. By including minority communities, disenfranchised citizens and mixed-race communities, post-independence Indian theatre history can be re-examined in a more textured and nuanced light.
