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Harvest | Manjula Padmanabhan

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From “Harvest” by Manjula Padmanabhan, Hachette, Act I Scene 2 (Pages 25-37) and Act II Scene 4 (Pages 83-86).
Published with permission from Manjula Padmanabhan and Hachette.
Image Credit: A verger’s dream: Saints Cosmas and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg. Oil painting attributed to the Master of Los Balbases, ca. 1495. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Licence: Public Domain Mark

Mahesh Dattani | Abin Chakraborty

By Critical Biography, Drama No Comments
Cite this Essay

MLA:
Chakraborty, Abin. “Mahesh Dattani.” Indian Writing In English Online, 16 Sept. 2022, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/mahesh-dattani-abin-chakraborty/ .

Chicago:
Chakraborty, Abin. “Mahesh Dattani.” Indian Writing In English Online. September 16, 2022. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/mahesh-dattani-abin-chakraborty/ .

Winner of the Sahitya Akademi award in 1998, Mahesh Dattani is one of the foremost Indian playwrights writing in English. Born to Gujarati parents in Bengaluru on 7th August 1958, Dattani studied in the local Baldwin Boys’ High School, an English medium Christian missionary school where his only brush with theatre came in the form of a typical Christmas pageant in which he performed as an angel without dialogues. He then went on to study at St. Joseph’s College in Bengaluru and it was during his college years that he was introduced to Bangalore Little Theatre which significantly contributed to his subsequent immersion in theatre in its varied forms. Dattani wrote his first play in 1986 and has since continued his stellar journey in theatre and films, not just as a playwright, but also as an acclaimed actor, director, and screenplay writer. While his choice of language, his themes, and set-designs  set him apart in various ways from other contemporary or older Indian playwrights, what links him to his predecessors is a shared vision of the social responsibility of the artist and a commitment to serious theatre. His plays therefore offer piercing insights into various modes of exploitation and marginalisation, ingrained in different urban spaces, both within and outside the family and operating along both material and discursive axes. It is this consciousness that enables Dattani to explore subalternisation in urban spheres, especially along the lines of gender and sexuality.

Ranajit Guha defines subalterneity as “the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society, whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or any other way” (Guha, ‘Preface’ vii). The plurality of determinants which Guha’s definition foregrounds not only transcends mere economism but encapsulates the diverse processes through which subordination is ensured. While the question of class and the consequent problems still remain hauntingly palpable, classes themselves are fissured by conflicting forces of gender, community, and caste . and such forces are dexterously used by dominant discourses to perpetuate and consolidate processes of disempowerment that push the subalterns onto the margins. The post-independence nation-space is therefore marked by not only the exploitation of peasants and labourers or the massacre of Dalits, but also the ongoing marginalisation of religious minorities, subjugation of women across various classes, and the victimisation of sexual subalterns. However, Guha does not mention the issue of sexuality and the consequent production of ‘sexual subalterns’ (Bhaskaran 8) who are subjected to, on account of the pervasive dominance of the discourse of patriarchal heteronormativity, both social ostracisation and institutional discrimination, which are themselves conditioned by the differences of class, sex, race, nationality, region and such other determinants. What Dattani manages to do is to expand the horizons of postcolonial subalterneity itself by drawing our attention to the plural and diverse problems confronting these sexual minorities, along with subalternised women and religious minorities, who are subjected to an emotionally and at times physically traumatic crises of identity. Dattani’s plays highlight the fluid and dynamic modes through which heterogeneous individuals are subjected to varied forms of subalternisation which menacingly lurk beneath the veneer of sophisticated urban middle class families to which he himself belongs. As he notes:

I think the old cliché about writing what you know best holds good for any work or for any art (drama or literature). I think one has to be true to one’s own environment. Even if I attempted writing a play about the angst of rural Indian society, it wouldn’t ring true, it would be an outsider’s view – I could only hope to evoke sympathy, but never to really be a part of that unless I spend a lot of time there. I think there are enough issues and challenges in urban Indian society (the milieu I am a part of) and these automatically form the content of my work. (Multani 156-157)

This is evident from his very first play, Where There is a Will, (1986), which interrogates established patriarchal structures with a remarkable comic zest, and was written at a time when Dattani and his friends were staging European and American plays with their group, Playpen. It gives way to a more sombre and critical approach to power-structures and injustices undergirding families and societal networks in most of his other plays. Final Solutions (1993), for example, explores the subalternisation of Muslims in the context of Hindu fundamentalism, by focusing on the family of Ramnik Gandhi and their history. Similarly, in plays like Tara (1990), Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), and Thirty Days in September (2001), it is the relationship between siblings and other family members that forms the crux of the dramatic conflict and serves to highlight the varying modes of the subalternisation of women. While such plays use the generic features of family drama, they also end up problematising the very notion of the family in many ways. Though the dynamics of family structures have been explored by other playwrights, what distinguishes Dattani in his choice of themes is his ability to venture into uncharted territory by exploring such hitherto unexplored issues as homosexuality, transgender identities, sexual abuse of children and so on in plays like On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998), Seven Steps around the Fire (1999), and Do the Needful (1997). While the new millennium has seen other playwrights exploring such issues, Dattani was a pioneering figure during the 1990s in his exploration of alternate sexualities and the kind of subalternisation that sexual minorities were and still are subjected to. It is this exploration of what he once termed “invisible issues” (Multani 156), such as the subalternisation faced by homosexuals and transgender communities or the silence that shrouds the issue of sexual abuse of children even now, that endows Dattani’s plays with a unique radicalism.

Dattani is fully conscious of this radicalism and his responses to several questions regarding his choice of such subjects make us aware of his commitment to serious theatre and his sense of responsibility as an artist. As he explains to Erin B. Mee:

My own political stand came because I started doing theatre, not because I had something political to say and I used theatre as the platform – just the reverse. Since I’ve realized the potential of theatre as an agent, if not for social change, at least for reflection, I can’t be frivolous about it any more. Unless I have something strong to present, I wouldn’t write. (Multani 158)

If we apply these insights in the context of the urban middle class setting of Dattani’s plays, we realise that while most of his characters, in terms of class, do not necessarily belong to subaltern groups, the considerations of gender and sexuality often push them into subaltern positions in specific critical contexts. So while someone like Kamlesh in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai is very much a part of an upwardly mobile urban middle class, his identity as a closeted homosexual man locates him as a subaltern within the dominant heteronormative discourse exclusively on account of his sexual identity. At the same time, the same Kamlesh can act as a dominant character while using the caretaker for his sexual gratification. Similarly, while Alka and Dolly in Bravely Fought the Queen can be seen as subaltern characters who are humiliated and abused by their oppressive and indifferent husbands, they also play the role of the dominant characters in relation to the beggar woman who keeps visiting their houses and whom they are always eager to drive away. Even if the woman in question is financially independent she may still be subjected to domestic violence or sexual abuse within the space of ‘home’ and may thus be pushed into a subaltern position. It is this fluid multifaceted subalterneity within urban metropolitan spheres that Dattani so scrupulously and uncompromisingly continues to highlight. One can also cite in this context such figures as Hardika in Final Solutions or Baa in Bravely Fought the Queen. As someone who nurtures entrenched hatred of Muslims based on her experiences during the Partition, Hardika is part of the dominant discourse of majoritarian fundamentalism through which characters like Bobby and Javed are subalternised. At the same time, Hardika herself had been a victim of patriarchal subjugation after her marriage when she was incarcerated in a room for sharing a table during lunch with her Muslim friend Zarine. Likewise, while Baa herself had been physically abused by her husband, once she becomes the widowed matriarch of the family, she herself instigates violence against her daughter-in-law Dolly without any sense of the irony involved. Such duality is actually indicative of the “interpellated” nature of characters such as Baa who act as agents of the same discursive structure of patriarchy which had originally victimised them. The same pattern can also be seen in case of Bharati in Tara, who had given birth to Siamese twins – Chandan and Tara — who shared three legs between them. A surgery was scheduled to separate them and it was medically more viable to attach two legs to the daughter instead of the son. But along with her father it was Bharati who had pressured the surgeon to attach both legs to the son even though there was greater likelihood of rejection. In the process both her children ended up as cripples even though attaching the second leg to Tara could well have given her a more fulfilling life. Bharati here ends up acting as an agent of patriarchy against her own daughter and contributes to her subalternisation from her infancy. While she is able to initially use her father’s wealth and political power to generate greater agency for herself within the marriage, the failed surgery and her own subsequent guilt push her into a zone of acute vulnerability, eventually resulting in her own nervous breakdown. It is these fluid movements within the structures of power which Dattani so scrupulously maps.

Such subalternising processes generally come to the foreground in his plays through the orchestration of dramatic conflicts,, combining the typical suspense and climactic unraveling associated with detective stories. Interestingly, all such twists and turns and the corresponding crises generally take place within the domain of a typical urban middle-class family whose façade of normalcy or prosperity is progressively shattered. Such progression either occurs owing to a gradual intensification of fissures embedded in everyday reality or the convergence of unexpected circumstances. The domestic space thus goes on to become a microcosmic embodiment of the macrocosmic space of the nation-state where various forces such as patriarchy, communalism, and heteronormativity keep colliding with individual desires in manifold ways. Here again, Dattani explores what Aparna Dharwadker calls the “typology of home” as “the testing ground of…social and political relations” (269-70). In the process, Dattani helps refashion the space of the home, continuing a pattern initiated by his predecessors such as Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, G.P. Deshpande, Satish Alekar, and Mohan Rakesh, and thereby releases the ‘unhomely’, the ‘other’ that inhabits the assiduously crafted but unacknowledged niches of our homes, society and nation. One might refer here to the misogynistic violence unleashed against Dolly by her husband Jiten after being instigated by his mother in Bravely Fought the Queen, the suicide of the minister’s son Subbu on his wedding night because of the murder of his beloved Kamla, a eunuch in Seven Steps around the Fire, or the generational trauma faced by both Mala and Shanta because of sexual abuse at the hands of a family member in Thirty Days in September. These are all examples of such irruptions of the uncanny which destabilise the facades of domestic familial bliss. It is in this sense that the formal aspects of his plays become entwined with their thematic thrust, which not only aids in his dramatic quest for a critical, hybrid Indianness, at once moored in its boundless pluralities and critical of its own limitations, but also renders possible the emergence of those subalternised characters and voices who endow his plays with their distinctive radical energy. Whether it is Dolly’s anguished imitation of her spastic daughter’s uncoordinated movements, the surreal scene where Subbu embraces the dead Kamla, dressed as a bride, on a separate level of the stage, or the scene between Kamlesh and Ed/Prakash where they express their mutual love which the world cannot see – these are illustrative of those uniquely evocative moments which Dattani distinctively creates in his plays.

This distinctiveness is also evident from the multi-level sets that Dattani often uses in his plays through which we are introduced not only to the hierarchised spaces within bourgeois homes and the subalterns located therein, but also to those peripheral spaces that lie beyond the purview of bourgeois homes, as something of a mote in the eye – a presence you seek to erase but are unable to overlook because of the discomfort it creates. Again and again, such spaces and the voices associated with them intrude into ordinary homes and upset the comforting delusions of peace and harmony we try to cling on to. One may refer here again to the beggar woman, wrapped in tarpaulin, outside the home of the Trivedis in Bravely Fought the Queen or the caretaker or the gardener who fleetingly enter the space of the bourgeois homes before retreating beyond the space of representation. In Final Solutions, Dattani also uses the space of the stage to switch between time periods and thereby implicate the traumatic past into the troubled present, as well as suggest the continuity and accretion of violence within the structures of family, home, and the nation. While Dattani remains aware of the forces of subalternisation that exist within bourgeois homes in terms of gender or sexuality or religion, he is also aware of those that lie beyond the pale of bourgeois homes or those whose voices remain outside the idiom of that discursive matrix within which he himself is located as an author. Therefore, he repeatedly reminds us of the silences and occlusions that are built into his own plays, despite their forays into hitherto unchartered territories. This self-conscious appraisal of his own limitations enables him to implant those precise elements which the careful reader or mindful spectator may use to raise other questions that may force us to re-orient our perceptions or re-configure our spaces. As Dattani states, “It’s only when you are left hanging in the air you start to question your own personality, perceptions…the theatre is a collective experience and the audience have to finish in their own heads what the playwright began” (Nair).

Recalling the earlier reference to the ‘unhomely’, it might be argued that the task of interrogating personalities and perceptions also entails an encounter with the ‘other’, the ‘double’, and considering the focus on bourgeois homes, this ‘other’ is precisely the ‘subaltern’, inside and outside the home, whom Dattani repeatedly foregrounds, either through direct portrayal or through a strategy of presence-in-absence that proves to be all the more disconcerting.

We may refer here to the character of the seventy-five-year-old former Devadasi, Chenni amma, in Dance like a Man (1989), from whom Ratna sought to learn forgotten compositions and arts of ‘abhinaya’. However, her father-in-law strenuously objects to such an association, on account of the moral stigma attached to devadasis, and neither permits Ratna to continue her training with her nor allows her to come to the familial home. Victims of earlier patriarchal structures, such as former devadasis, thus act as the silenced ‘other’ in opposition to which the good middle-class woman must shape her identity. This is not to suggest that Ratna becomes free from patriarchal constraints at the expense of Chenni amma – instead both women continue to struggle against patriarchal impositions, one to retain her individual identity both as a performer and a married woman, and the other to free herself from moral stigma and the attendant material deprivation. The homeless Chenni amma occupies that silence which constitutes the successful middle-class home of Jayaraj and Ratna and thus raises critical questions regarding the moral basis of such homes and by extension such nation-spaces. The nation-space also demands codified performances of masculinity in accordance with conventional gender roles and Jayaraj’s choice of dance as a profession not only goes against such orthodox gender roles but also heightens inter-generational conflicts within the family – a recurrent theme in Dattani’s oeuvre. As Sindhu Nagaraj remarks in a recent review in The Hindu, “The patriarchal figure, Amritlal…does not like his son, Jairaj, becoming a dancer — something he considered a female profession. Decades later, we still find ourselves asking the same questions on the stigmas that prevail in society” (Nagaraj, 17 December 2021). This parallels a similar focus on the collapse of the family and the familial home in other modern realistic plays of the post-Independence era of which Dharwadker remarks:

The disintegration of the home points to a fundamental conceptual flaw which destroys the nation…These are conscious allegories of the crisis of secular nationhood in India, which is an important referent in the postcolonial theorizing of the nation. (Dharwadker 307)

Foregrounding the cacophonous silences generated by orthodox discourses of class, creed or gender, Dattani allegorises the different ways in which the secular nationhood of India is threatened by the dominant discourses and the attendant parochialism. The death of Ratna and Jayaraj’s first-born thus becomes a telling commentary on the systematic erosion of the idealised hopes and expectations of a postcolonial nation-state.

In this context, it is also worth analysing Dattani’s choice of English as the language of dramatic communication and the politics in which such a choice is invariably implicated.  Dattani’s English plays do not suffer from those stifling artificialities that choked the early efforts of some of his predecessors such as Asif Currimbhoy or Nissim Ezekiel. Instead, he writes with a confidence and fluidity that confirms the position of English as another Indian language that is part of our lived experience in all its bristling multiplicity and unabashedly defends his right to perform Indian theatre in English in such ways that they may truly become, in his own words “metaphors for life” (Multani 171). A brief example from Tara may serve to illumine the nature and extent of this confident artistry:

Tara: This is Chandan.

Chandan: Hi.

Roopa: Hi. And you’re twins? Funny, you don’t resemble each other.

Chandan: Not all twins are peas in pods.

Roopa: (not understanding). Huh?

Chandan: Two peas in a pod. That’s something we aren’t.

Roopa: Uh, yes. Yes. Very funny.

Chandan: Is it? I didn’t think so.

Roopa: You know – two peas in a pot. Isn’t that funny?

Tara: (observes she hasn’t understood). Oh, yes of course. (Nudges Chandan) Very funny. Two peas in a (distinctly) pot. (Dattani: 1, 336-337)

Such a sequence highlights the ease with which Dattani weaves his English dialogues, without either deliberate affectation or ostentatious anxiety of Indianness. He even makes room for humour and banter based on such misuse of language that serves to highlight class-identities and the role of the English language as a marker of locational and occupational privilege (or the lack thereof) as an integral aspect of characterisation. Linguistic dexterity also becomes evident in those scenes where the otherwise bleak discussion at times becomes lightened through the use of humours, such as in the following excerpt from A Muggy Night in Mumbai:

Kamlesh: …For the first time in my life I wished I wasn’t gay.

Ranjit: Oh, come, dear fellow. At some point or another we all wish to be something we are not.

Kamlesh: Of course I don’t feel that way anymore. I realized where that feeling was coming from. The psychiatrist I was seeing.

Sharad: Oh no! Every Wednesday morning, right? And I thought you were seeing another man!

Kamlesh: I was. Only a straight homophobic psychiatrist. (Dattani 69)

This is precisely why Sudeep Sen, while reviewing a production of Dattani’s Bravely Fought the Queen in England, remarks that “Dattani writes with a pungency that is skilfully disguised, employing language that resorts to clarity and sharpness, one that pushes the limits of the spoken word and the pregnant silences in between” (Sen 1996).

It is not as if Dattani is unaware of the difficulties of such a choice. In the preface to the first volume of his collected plays, he categorically states, “I now realize that I am practising theatre in an extremely imperfect world where the politics of doing theatre in English looms large over anything else one does” (Dattani: 1, xiv). While on the one hand the remarkable commercial success of Dattani’s plays obviously testifies to their appeal across a wide cross-section of Indian audiences, on the other hand, it is also undeniable that a large section shies away from his plays because of the fact that his chosen language as English is still riddled with implications of class, privilege, and location (Rukmini S., 2019). At the same time, one also has to acknowledge that Dattani’s plays target a primarily metropolitan educated urban middle class audience whose hypocrisy and sophisticated veneer hide entrenched ideological and discursive frameworks that ensure the perpetuation of those processes of subalternisation that he so assiduously critiques. It is in acknowledgment of this particular reality that Dattani writes in his preface:

I love it when I am confronted with remarks such as ‘Your plays are preaching to the converted. You should do Final Solutions in the villages’. Such prejudice! How can anyone be so blind to their own remarks? Assumptions galore that cityfied English-speaking people are all liberal-minded and villagers are communal and bigoted. Worse is when that particular remark is followed by ‘It would make sense in Hindi or Kannada’. Meaning, ‘We are not bigots, it’s those bloody vernacs who need to think about all this.’ That too in the same breath as professing to be liberal-minded and secular! (Dattani: 1, xi)

It is by taking the exploration of subalterneity within the households of such avowedly ‘liberal-minded and secular’ people that Dattani breaks new ground and adds a distinctive dimension to his own brand of postcolonial theatre.

This exploration also leads to the generation of what Nancy Fraser calls “subaltern counterpublics” which operate as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser 66-67). According to her analysis, such counterpublics not only contribute to the “widening of discursive contestation” but also as “spaces of withdrawal and regroupment” in the face of dominant, exclusionary and exploitative practices. Dattani’s plays are also remarkable for their representation of such counterpublics which we keep witnessing in several different plays. Whether it is the congregation of queer characters in Kamlesh’s flat in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai or the intervention by the eunuchs in Seven Steps around the Fire or the playful interaction between Bobby, Javed and Smita in Final Solutions – Dattani repeatedly manages to foreground counterpublics that challenge dominant prejudices based on gender, creed or sexual orientation. Particularly significant are the moments of affection and intimacy, shared by queer characters on stage: be it Ed and Kamlesh in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai or Subbu and Kamala the eunuch in Seven Steps around the Fire. Such moments defamiliarise heteronormative notions of love and intimacy and serve to emphasise those “oppositional interpretations” and “widening of discursive horizons” (Fraser 66-68). Furthermore, the staging of queer desire and intimacy as dramatic spectacle also serves to foreground some of those emancipatory potentialities and utopian energies which often constellate within counterpublics. These features not only underscore Dattani’s own identity as a stalwart postcolonial playwright but also represent post-independence urban Indian theatre.

These qualities serve to ensure the abiding popularity of Mahesh Dattani, once credited by the late Alyque Padamsee as someone who gave “sixty-million English speaking Indians an identity” (qtd. in De 2001), as a playwright, not just in India, but in countries such as the UK, the USA, Canada, Sri Lanka, and the UAE (Ali 2005; De 2001). He continues to surprise his audience and readers with his sheer versatility as he explores such utterly diverse issues as the Partition (Where did I Leave my Purdah – 2012), the anguish of terminal cancer patients (Brief Candle – 2009) or even the life of inspiring figures such as Kalpana Chawla (The Girl who Touched the Stars – 2007) and their impact on others. In all of these explorations, however, Dattani’s sensitivity towards issues related to gender, patriarchal violence, and the trauma of unspeakable secrets of the past remains constant and it is this insightful exploration of the manifold facets of the human predicament that ensures his continued relevance.

 

Works Cited

Ali, Firdaus. “Play it Wright, Mahesh”. July 20, 2005. Indiacurrents.com. Accessed on 17.05.2022. < https://indiacurrents.com/play-it-wright-mahesh/>

Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. Vol. I & II. Penguin, 2000-2005.

______. Brief Candle: Three Plays. Penguin, 2010.

______. Me and My Plays. Penguin, 2014.

De, Aditi. “The Drama in Mahesh Dattani’s Life”. 2001. N.p Accessed on 17.05.2022. < https://www.mansworldindia.com/currentedition/from-the-magazine/drama-mahesh-dattanis-life/>

Dharwadker, Aparna. Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory and Urban Performance in India since 1947. University of Iowa Press, 2005.

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”. Social Text. No. 25/26, (1990). 56-80.

Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India”. Subaltern Studies, I. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Oxford UP, 1982, pp.1-8.

Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Routledge, 2006.

Multani, Angelie, ed. Mahesh Dattani’s Plays: Critical Perspectives. Pencraft International, 2011.

Nagaraj, Sindhu. “Dance Like a Man keeps time to inherent family tunes”. The Hindu. 17 December, 2021. Accessed on 17 May 2022.  <https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/theatre/dance-like-a-man-keeps-time-to-inherent-family-tunes/article37978517.ece>

Nair, Anita. “Mahesh Dattani – The Invisible Observer”. N.p. N.d. 10 August 2011. <http://www.anitanair.net/profiles/profile-mahesh-dattani.htm>.

S, Rukmini. “In India, who speaks in English, and where?” Mint. 14 May 2019. Accessed on 6 July 2022. < https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-english-and-where-1557814101428.html>

Sen, Sudeep. “BRAVELY FOUGHT THE QUEEN – reviewed by Sudeep Sen”. June 1996. N.p. Accessed on 17 May  2022. < https://www.bordercrossings.org.uk/bravely-fought-queen-reviewed-sudeep-sen>

 

 

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Dance Like A Man
Two books; the cover of one shows a nib that doubles as the curtains on a stage and chairs that make up the theatre audience; a second book, bearing the title of the essay shows a group of people in folk attire.

Indian Drama in English | Ananda Lal

By Drama, Survey No Comments
Published on 13 May 2022.
Cite this Essay

MLA:
Lal, Ananda. “Indian Drama in English.” Indian Writing In English Online, 13 May 2022,  INDIAN DRAMA IN ENGLISH Ananda Lal – Indian Writing In English (uohyd.ac.in) .

Chicago:
Lal, Ananda. “Indian Drama in English.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 13, 2022.  INDIAN DRAMA IN ENGLISH Ananda Lal – Indian Writing In English (uohyd.ac.in) .

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).

Two books; the cover of one shows a nib that doubles as the curtains on a stage and chairs that make up the theatre audience; a second book, bearing the title of the essay shows a group of people in folk attire.

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.

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