During the national emergency in India (1975–77),. short dramatic fragment was penned by the playwright, director, and actor Utpal Dutt. This fragment titled Theater-er Dialectics (Dialectics of Theater, hereafter DoT), which was first published in 1976 in. journal called Epic Theatre, is the object of study in this article. Epic Theatre served as the mouthpiece of the Brecht Society of India (BSI), which was founded in Kolkata in 1964 as part of the cultural cooperation between the governments of India and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The BSI operated through theater groups—first the Little Theater Group (LTG) and later the Peoples’ Little Theater (PLT), with which Dutt was associated—to introduce Brecht to theater lovers in India. The BSI facilitated Indo-GDR cultural exchanges particularly dealing with actor training, German language courses, and drama translations, along with an emphasis on theatrical productions, including performances of Brecht's plays. Epic Theatre, first published in 1964 with Dutt as the editor, introduced articles, dramas, and translated poems concerning Brecht in particular and Marxist culture in general, with. special emphasis on the Soviet Bloc and the superstructural conditions prevalent in communist states.

It is against such an ideological backdrop, taking shape through the effects of the cold war discourse on arts and culture on. global scale, that Dutt's dramatic fragment might be suitably placed. Without detailing the journal's manifold emphases, which brought the cold war context to the fore (a task beyond the scope of this study),. only point out one of its major aspects here, an aspect that is crucial for Dutt's project of developing. theatrical model as evinced in DoT. This concerns the name of the journal itself, which presents the idea that preoccupied Brecht throughout much of his thinking on theater—epic theater. In the journal, the notion of the Brechtian epic not only becomes. paradigm to be critically evaluated but also. catalyst for conceiving of. political aesthetic. Particularly for Dutt, Brecht's discourse on the epic lets him ponder. theatrical mise-enscène based on the principles of Marxist dialectics.