Published on 13 May 2022.

Despite noteworthy contributions in recent decades, Indian literature in English remains a fledgling discipline with vast regions of terra incognita lying unmapped, as well as frustrating due to the unavailability of primary material –  the books themselves. The absence of a culture of methodical library acquisition in India, compared to the repositories and networks in Europe and North America, the randomness of specific collections, and the haphazard manner in which most of them are stocked and catalogued (if at all), frequently result in the abandonment of projects simply because one cannot locate a rare title essential to one’s work, even after time-consuming and exhaustive searches. Ironically, these missing volumes do not date to a remote past, but to periods closer to us such as the nineteenth and even the early twentieth century.

The field suffers so much from these lacunae that it affects the writing of its authentic history. Many of its trailblazing books published in the early nineteenth century do not survive in our libraries. We may know their titles from secondary sources, but we cannot read them because we cannot trace them. Since many of the authors of these sources could not find them either, substantial misinformation about them circulates in print, recycled by later researchers who rely on those sources without investigating them. Dependable literary histories themselves become questionable: one can cite any number of instances where a scholar has claimed a particular book as a milestone, overlooking earlier ones that had certainly existed, though they may have vanished from our ken. The most celebrated and somewhat debated recent example is The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794), rediscovered in the 1990s and thereby automatically pushing back the start of Indian writing in English.

Let us narrow our scope to the area covered in this essay: Indian drama in English. For a long time, following K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s authoritative tome, Indian Writing in English (1962, up to its fifth edition, 1985), readers accepted that the first play in English by an Indian was Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Is This Called Civilization? (1871) [1] . As I have proved in a new anthology [2] , that was not the case, but many recent critical works continue to perpetuate this incorrect information, and sometimes even credit Dutt himself as the translator (he wrote the Bengali original, Ekei ki bale sabhyatā). In fact, my quest for this English rendition—one of those books referred to above that seem to have disappeared from the face of the earth—revealed that it was translated by D. N. (Dwarkanath) Banerjee, certainly not by Dutt [3]. If anyone stumbles upon a copy of this translation anywhere, please let me know.

Meanwhile, Kumudini Mehta’s doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Bombay in 1960, which gained notice much later because it remained unpublished, appeared to suggest that one of the fathers of Parsi theatre in Bombay, Cooverji Sorabjee Nazir, had composed and published a verse drama titled “The First Parsi Baronet” in 1866 [4]. Unlike her customary meticulous annotation, she did not provide bibliographical details for this book. I believe she confused it with the biography of Sir Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy by the same name (except for the spelling Parsee instead of “Parsi”) which Nazir indeed authored and published that same year, based partly on a poem by “Munsookh” [5]. It seems improbable that one person would have written an identically titled play and biography, both published in 1866. It is more plausible that Nazir, who did compose drama in English, may even have staged such a biographical play by himself in verse, but did not eventually print it. Only a researcher in Mumbai who can access archival collections and newspaper libraries may confirm or reject this speculation.

Proceeding backwards to the 1840s, we come across two early plays that do survive. One, Kishun Koovur: a tragedy in five acts by Soobrow, Dewan to the Raja of Travancore (Trivandrum: Government Press, 1840), has been digitised online by Google Books, thus allowing scholars to read and write about it [6]. The other, The Spirits of the East: a lyrical drama by “A Bengal Civilian” (Calcutta: Ostell and Lepage, 1844), exemplifies works by British temporary residents exclusively about their life in India, which does not fall within our purview, strictly speaking. For similar reasons but at an even further remove, we cannot admit the eighteenth-century tragedies by Alexander Dow, who spent a long period here in the employ of the East India Company, such as Zingis (1769, on Genghis Khan) and Sethona (1774, on ancient Egypt).

Indian Drama in English, illustrated by Guru G

The recent restoration of Krishna Mohana Banerjea’s The Persecuted, or Dramatic Scenes, Illustrative of the Present State of Hindoo Society, in Calcutta (1831) to its rightful chronological position marks the true commencement of Indian drama in English. Consequently, this genre too, alongside her sisters, poetry (with Henry Derozio) and fiction (with Kylash Chunder Dutt), debuted before Macaulay’s controversial and demonised Minute, which most detractors blame for the imposition of English on Indians after 1835. Evidently, many Indians chose English for their literary excursions prior to that date. Furthermore, it proves what may come as a matter of disbelief to many, that original Indian drama in English predates drama in any other modern Indian language. However, the lack of easy access to The Persecuted led to merely generalised comments on it in the history books [7]. Nobody could write a thoroughly-considered study of it. By reprinting it in my anthology, I hope to encourage critics to examine it closely, as well as the two other early original plays in English also made available to an English readership for the first time since their first publication. (As I observe there, a few books in Bengali have included the text by Banerjea and fragments of M. M. Dutt’s Rizia: Empress of Inde (written in 1849), but these collections would be unknown to non-Bengali audiences and, besides, they contain far too many typographical mistakes that misconstrue meanings.)

By pure happenstance, the dramatic representation in my anthology originated from British-ruled Calcutta. Of course, it could be argued that Dutt lived, wrote and printed fragments of Rizia in Madras (in 1849-50), but he returned to his hometown Calcutta afterwards and won renown as a Bengali author based there. The writer of the third play, Kaminee: The Virgin Widow (1874), preferred to remain anonymous and may not have been an Indian by birth, but it seems likely that he (she?) resided in Calcutta, since they deal with urban Bengali society, and published it from a respectable Calcutta press. Most significantly from our contemporary perspective, these three plays spanning forty years offer important themes — from religious orthodoxy and persecution of liberal youths (The Persecuted) to the historical tragedy of a Muslim queen victimised by sexism and racism (Rizia) to the social restrictions on teenage widows (Kaminee). I do not claim that they constitute excellent drama, but no literary tradition produced a masterpiece at its beginning, whereas these three do present core issues that concern us today. They were not written for entertainment.

A different point that should be made—and one that might explain a certain amateurishness in their composition—is that none of these plays made it to the stage, as far as we know. English-language theatre did exist in India at the time, but mainly by the British and for the British, while “native” students at the academies and colleges only recited and enacted scenes from Shakespeare supervised as part of their education. Thus, Banerjea and Dutt, both pupils at Hindoo College in Calcutta, not only knew their Shakespeare perfectly but also performed in Shakespearean roles for invited audiences in public spaces: Banerjea as Horatio in 1829 at Government House, Dutt as Gloucester (Henry VI) in 1834 at Town Hall [8]. We can therefore discern the influence of a somewhat dated English in the dialogues of their own contrivance, as they could not test their writing in the theatres.

On the other hand, I should draw readers’ attention to a relatively little-known fact: “as Samachar Darpan in its issue of 17 September 1831 reports, a Committee was formed for establishing a theatre on the model of the English theatre. The plays, it was said, would be presented in English”[9]. The committee consisted of prominent Bengali Hindus, one of whom, Prosunno Coomar (Prasanna Kumar) Tagore, acted on the resolution and established the Hindu Theatre at his garden estate in Narkeldanga, Calcutta. The stage historian Sushil Kumar Mukherjee describes it as “the first theatre founded by a Bengali, housed in the Bengali quarter of the city, for a Bengali audience.” It opened on 28 December 1831, just a month after Banerjea published The Persecuted, but not with an original play. The programme, performed by students of the Hindoo and Sanskrit Colleges as well as others, for a private invited audience of Europeans and Indians, started with Act I of Bhavabhuti’s Sanskrit classic Uttara-Rāma-charita, translated into English by an eminent member of the management of Hindoo College, H. H. Wilson, and ended with Act V of Julius Caesar. On 29 March 1832, Hindu Theatre staged a slight farce with an oriental theme, titled Nothing Superfluous.

Into the 1850s, before turning once and for all to the performance of new drama in their mother tongue, Bengalis cultivated publicly their theatrical aspirations in English. Two amateur initiatives in mainly Bengali-inhabited north Calcutta introduced ticketed shows (not exclusively for invitees) of Shakespeare in English: the Oriental Theatre presented Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV (1853–55) and the Jorasanko Theatre (not the later, more famous one of the same name set up by the Tagores) produced Julius Caesar in 1854. Lest we forget, Dutt was writing Rizia in Madras at this time. Thus, we should not presume that conditions were not conducive for theatre by Indians in English, though they naturally favoured Shakespeare, whereas dissenting scripts on controversial matters by young dramatists may indeed have not interested the ruling elite.

In fact, they did not even interest the Bengali aristocracy, as Dutt learnt unfortunately when he proposed to his Raja patrons that he could present them with Rizia in Bengali for their new theatre. I have recounted in my anthology the pure circumstantial luck behind my discovery of Dutt’s English manuscript—something that Indian researchers rarely encounter, unlike our counterparts in the developed world who can avail of comparatively easier access to authorial scripts and typescripts thanks to the advanced culture there of acquiring and preserving such literary material. Nevertheless, my serendipity emboldens me to suggest that fellow Indian researchers could be just as lucky as I was in locating nineteenth-century writings that we did not even know existed. Or, as in the case of Kaminee, which I traced to the British Library, finding in a foreign archive a copy of an Indian book that has vanished from India.

Proceeding to the first half of the twentieth century, we obviously come across many more plays by Indians in English, but these too have not received the kind of critical commentary routinely and fashionably lavished on our postcolonial drama. Shanta Gokhale named several of these neglected dramatists in her article on the genre in my Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre [10], but we should mention some of them here to serve the purpose of a comprehensive overview [11]. We have expatriates like Niranjan Pal, who wrote The Goddess (1924) and other plays, and started a group in London, The Indian Players, to produce them. While Sri Aurobindo’s closet dramas have attracted attention owing to his venerable stature and poetic accomplishments, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya’s have not.

The Indian characteristic of writing bilingually also deserves separate treatment. The greater proportion of this output arises from self-translation by an author, usually into English, of his own originals composed in his mother tongue. Since the author translated them himself, taking liberties that only he could, they can qualify as original literature according to many theorists. The respectable lineage of this tradition begins with Dutt himself (Sermista, 1859, from Sharmishtha), goes on to the international phenomenon called Tagore, and continues to the works of Girish Karnad. However, we also have the intriguing pre-Independence split-creativity of T. P. Kailasam, who wrote one kind of drama in Kannada (colloquial and contemporary) and a completely different kind in English (mythical and epic).

Tagore’s self-translated plays require special notice. Whereas other translators are credited on the title pages for some of his plays (like The Post Office), he did not acknowledge a few that remain under his own name and therefore these should be regarded technically as his originals even though we know who did the translating, while he himself actually translated several more. His celebrity status after the Nobel Prize led to a spate of theatrical productions worldwide that demand investigation and, if nothing else, disprove Girish Karnad’s pronouncements that Tagore was an inferior dramatist and that Karnad’s plays in English were the first modern Indian plays staged in the US or UK [12]. We must also research early Indian performances of Tagore’s English translations, which unquestionably inspired readers across our own country. I have discovered that the world premieres of two Tagore classics occurred in their English versions (and not in Bengali) in India: Lucknow University’s The Waterfall (Muktadhārā) in 1923, and the Bombay production of Red Oleanders at New High School for Girls in 1928[13]. Primary documentation needs to be unearthed from these cities to reconstruct as much of these historic performances as possible.

We need to pay proper tribute and appreciation to the long-forgotten pioneers of Indian drama in English and their pre-1947 successors, rather than chase the done-and-dusted plays written after Independence that monopolise the critical discourse quite predictably and boringly, as if India has produced only half a dozen worthwhile playwrights in English over two hundred years. True, the number of plays increases exponentially after 1947[14], yet the relatively few scholars of the genre (including those conducting doctoral studies) have followed a safe and well-trodden path, confined mainly to the canonical works by Asif Currimbhoy, Girish Karnad, and Mahesh Dattani, regurgitated ad nauseam. Readers should not misunderstand: I consider them great playwrights, but I am disappointed by the shortage of originality and imagination among critics, despite the availability of other roads less travelled. Next to that trio, the few plays written by Nissim Ezekiel, Dina Mehta, Partap Sharma, Gieve Patel, Gurcharan Das and Manjula Padmanabhan have drawn some appraisal, but since drama has not been the main creative focus of these authors, their poetry or prose has garnered greater attention.

Because there is considerably more knowledge in circulation about the contemporary scenario, I do not think it necessary to explicate it in detail like I have for earlier times. Still, I wish to see definitive monographs on ignored playwrights with a substantial output like Joseph M. Lobo Prabhu, who wrote on social reform, and Leo Brooks Fredericks, who had a penchant for exotic settings. They may have produced quantity rather than quality; nevertheless, their individual trajectories and thematic preoccupations merit study for a deep evaluation of the entire movement. Among the seniors now, Poile Sengupta and Gowri Ramnarayan have proved themselves repeatedly on the stage, but have surprisingly not received analysis commensurate with their achievement. A whole new generation of younger dramatists work and have published in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Kolkata – some even facing political trouble like Abhishek Majumdar – without any critical assessment whatsoever. Scholars have also not tapped the genres of radio drama and television drama, many scripts of which were written in English.

A major lacuna in our academic criticism is theatre history and appreciation. The West gives respect to theatre as an art, and many developed countries teach it formally in university departments, adding to its cachet. But its neglect in India rubs off on the negligible secondary literature on it. The large majority of publications on Indian drama deal exclusively with its texts from a literary perspective, although the plays were intended for the stage, and some even had considerable success there. This huge unexplored territory is waiting to be researched, whether going back in time to the importation of the proscenium arch in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, or down to recent theatrical activities.

Every city has its own fascinating history of English-language theatre, which has not been recorded, except by Kumudini Mehta for early Bombay. This statement applies not just to the metropolises, but also to smaller places like Lucknow (as mentioned above) or Shimla, Shillong or far-off Aizawl with its Christmas plays. The nativisation of English on stage throws up many interesting facets, as for example the integration of British and local actors, dating back to the sensational “real unpainted nigger Othello” in 1848 in Calcutta. There are sociological, political, and even legal aspects to be examined, like the ban in Bombay on Currimbhoy’s The Doldrummers (1961) and Sharma’s A Touch of Brightness (1965). Directors who specialised in English theatre by Indians—Ebrahim Alkazi, Alyque Padamsee, Lillete Dubey—and groups like The Madras Players in Chennai, Yatrik in Delhi, and The Red Curtain in Calcutta demand documentation. In the 21st century, mainstream as well as radical productions of originally-written drama continue in the hands of such active groups as Prime Time Theatre (Delhi), Rage and QTP (Mumbai), Padatik (Kolkata), JustUs Repertory (Chennai), and Centre for Film and Drama (Bengaluru).

And in terms of language, the fact that English has now been appropriated by Hindi theatre into a miscegenated “Hinglish”, that seems to have a certain commercial potential for a nationally-growing English-knowing audience willing to pay for an evening’s entertainment, raises linguistic and economic implications worth discussion. Do we possibly have here the seeds of a Parsi theatre-like reincarnation in the live performance industry, more democratic in reach compared to the elite spectators of English previously? Even better, since Indians are naturally bilingual if not multilingual in their day-to-day communication, can we hope that hybridised Englishes may form a medium of our thought-provoking urban theatre in future? For that is the reality of an increasingly globalised world, that would indeed be verisimilitude, and I see experiments in that direction already happening in Kolkata and Mumbai.

Notes:

[1] K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, 5th ed. (New Delhi: Sterling, 1985), p. 226. Repeated in such standard books as S. Krishna Bhatta, Indian English Drama (New Delhi: Sterling, 1987), p. 6, and reference works as Amaresh Datta, ed., Encyclopedia of Indian Literature, volume II (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988), p. 1069.

[2] Ananda Lal, ed., Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings (Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2019).

[3] “Bengal Library Catalogue of Books”, Appendix (No. II) to The Calcutta Gazette, 20 September 1871, pp. 18-19. The slim play had 42 pages and was published by Light Press, Calcutta.

[4] Kumudini A. Mehta, “English Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eighteenth Century and in the Nineteenth Century”, p. 180.

[5] Preface to Cooverji Sorabjee Nazir, The First Parsee Baronet (Bombay: Union Press, 1866), vi. Munsookh, or Mansukh, was the pen name of Muncherji Cawasji Shapurji, a prolific Parsi Gujarati author.

[6] https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Soobrow_Kishun_Koovur?id=HV5gAAAAcAAJ

[7] For example in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, ed., An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 6 and 337.

[8] Ananda Lal and Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., Shakespeare on the Calcutta Stage: A Checklist (Calcutta: Papyrus, 2001), pp. 25-26.

[9] Sushil Kumar Mukherjee, The Story of the Calcutta Theatres: 1753–1980 (Calcutta: K P Bagchi, 1982), p. 13. The next quotation also comes from this page.

[10] SG, “English theatre”, in Ananda Lal, ed., The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), updated in Ananda Lal, ed. Theatres of India: A Concise Companion (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[11] For a very helpful bibliography of this early period, see the University of Washington South Asian Studies checklist under Drama in https://guides.lib.uw.edu/c.php?g=341864&p=2301845#9577519

[12] A full account of the reception of Tagore’s drama abroad in English, through book reviews and theatre criticism, can be found in the introduction to Ananda Lal, trans. and ed., Rabindranath Tagore: Three Plays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[13] I have described briefly the revolutionary political circumstances of the Bombay production in Ananda Lal, “Rabindranath Tagore: Drama and Performance”, in Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 119.

[14] See an exhaustive list and individual appraisals in Abhijit Sengupta, In Order of Appearance: A Compendium of Indian Playwrights in English 1947-2010 (Amazon e-book: Kindle edition, 2018).

Works Cited

Anonymous. Kaminee: The Virgin Widow. In Lal, Ananda, ed. Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2019.

Aurobindo, Sri. Collected Poems and Plays. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1942.

Banerjea, Krishna Mohana. The Persecuted, or Dramatic Scenes, Illustrative of the Present State of Hindoo Society, in Calcutta. In Lal, Ananda, ed. Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2019.

A Bengal Civilian. The Spirits of the East: a lyrical drama. Calcutta: Ostell and Lepage, 1844.

“Bengal Library Catalogue of Books”, Appendix (No. II) to The Calcutta Gazette, 20 September 1871.

Chattopadhyaya, Harindranath. Five Plays. London: Fowler Wright, 1929.

Currimbhoy, Asif. The Doldrummers. Bombay: Soraya, 1962.

Das, Gurcharan. Three English Plays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Datta, Amaresh, ed. Encyclopedia of Indian Literature, volume II. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988.

“Drama”. University of Washington South Asian Studies Bibliographies. https://guides.lib.uw.edu/c.php?g=341864&p=2301845#9577519

Dutt, Michael Madhusudan. Rizia: Empress of Inde. In Lal, Ananda, ed. Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2019.

——-. Sermista. Calcutta: Stanhope Press, 1859.

Ezekiel, Nissim. Three Plays. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1969.

Fredericks, Leo. Individual plays published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta.

Kailasam, T. P. Individual plays published by Madhava and Sons, Bangalore.

Krishna Bhatta, S. Indian English Drama. New Delhi: Sterling, 1987.

Lal, Ananda, ed. Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2019.

Lal, Ananda. “Rabindranath Tagore: Drama and Performance”. In Chaudhuri, Sukanta, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Lal, Ananda, and Sukanta Chaudhuri, eds. Shakespeare on the Calcutta Stage: A Checklist. Calcutta: Papyrus, 2001.

Lobo-Prabhu, Joseph. Collected Plays. Madras: Royal, 1954.

Majumdar, Abhishek. The Djinns of Eidgah. London: Oberon, Bloomsbury, 2013.

Mehta, Dina. Brides Are Not for Burning. New Delhi: Rupa, 1993.

Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, ed. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.

Mehta, Kumudini A. “English Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eighteenth Century and in the Nineteenth Century”. Ph. D. dissertation. University of Bombay, 1960.

Mukherjee, Sushil Kumar. The Story of the Calcutta Theatres: 1753–1980. Calcutta: K P Bagchi, 1982.

Nazir, Cooverji Sorabjee. The First Parsee Baronet. Bombay: Union Press, 1866.

Padmanabhan, Manjula. Blood and Laughter. Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2020.

Pal, Niranjan. The Goddess. London: Indian Players, 1924.

Patel, Gieve. “Mister Behram” and Other Plays. Kolkata: Seagull, 2008.

Ramnarayan, Gowri. “Dark Horse” and Other Plays. Chennai: Wordcraft, 2017.

Sengupta, Abhijit. In Order of Appearance: A Compendium of Indian Playwrights in English 1947-2010. Amazon e-book: Kindle edition, 2018.

Sengupta, Poile. Women Centre Stage. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010.

SG [Shanta Gokhale]. “English theatre”. In Lal, Ananda, ed. The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. Updated in Lal, Ananda, ed. Theatres of India: A Concise Companion. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Sharma, Partap. A Touch of Brightness. New York: Grove Press, 1968.

Soobrow. Kishun Koovur: a tragedy in five acts. Trivandrum: Government Press, 1840. See https://books.google.co.in/books?id=HV5gAAAAcAAJ

Srinivasa Iyengar, K. R. Indian Writing in English, 5th ed. New Delhi: Sterling, 1985.

Tagore, Rabindranath. The English Writings, volume II. Ed. by Sisir Kumar Das. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Three Plays. Trans. and ed. by Ananda Lal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Sections of this essay appeared in Lal, Ananda. “Introduction.” Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings, Jadavpur University Press, 2019.