STUDY MATERIAL on Generic Elective (ENGLISH) Paper TEXT AND PERFORMANCE
THEATRE OF ROOTS
The search for a new ‘Indian’ idiom in independent India generated many debates and took several trajectories. One of the most primary questions addressed was regarding the future direction that India theatre should take and the constituents of this ‘Indianness’. Many playwrights and directors felt that the British period disrupted the continuity of Indian traditions and was therefore an aberration in the theatre history of India. As a corrective, western impositions needed to be done away with and ‘pure’ and unadulterated Indian traditions were to be recovered as an attempt at decolonization. They saw modern theatre as largely imitative of realistic western theatrical practices and unsuited to Indian reality and asked for a theatre which made use of folk forms and indigenous material.
The practitioners of the theatre of roots believe that the traditional and the folk practices are more authentic and Indian and using this idiom grounds them to their roots. Although the theatre of Habib Tanvir, Chandrashekhar Kambar, K.N.Panikkar and Ratan Thiyam has evolved differently, they have together shaped a major trend in post colonial Indian theatre that has engaged with folk and traditional forms in a very wholesome way. In their work, folk elements do not merely exist as museum pieces, decontextualized from their origins but are integrated into the modern social and political contexts.
Vijay Tendulkar in Ghashiram Kotwal (1972), Girish Karnad in Yayati (1961), Tughlaq (1964),
Nagamandala (1988), Badal Sircar in Ebong Indrajit (1962), Pagla Ghoda (1967) and Utpal Dutt in Angar (1959), Mahabidroh (1985) variously use folk forms, sometimes to universalize social and political oppressions and at other times to widen their repertoire and to carry political messages.
Amrish Puri in Girish Karnad’s Yayati
Contemporary Indian Theatre scene looks very promising with the emergence of new playwrights, writing both in English and Indian languages. Manjula Padmanabhan and Mahesh Dattani, for example, are playwrights who have chosen to express themselves in English. Bansi Kaul, Feroz Khan, Usha Ganguly, Arvind Deshpande, Vijaya Mehta, Ranjeet Kapoor, Arvind Gaur, Ebrahim Alkazi, Satyadev Dube, and others have contributed to Indian Language Theatres through their productions. These theatre practitioners have been engaged in experimental, innovative and socially relevant theatre. Theatre has also been an effective medium to engage with issues of identity, group rights, and caste, class and gender oppression.
A significant new theme that has emerged in the works of some women directors is their gendered experience and the construction of gender on stage. Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry’s productions of Yerma, Madwoman and Fida, Amal Allana’s Himmatmai, Anuradha Kapur’s The Job and Sundari : An Actor Prepares and Anamika Haksar’s Antar Yatra not only question inflexible constructions of identity but also seek to rupture conventional dramatic presentations. Theatre thus continues to challenge social conventions through experiments in form.