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Theatre and the Publics of Democracy: Between Melodrama and Rational Realism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2016

PARTHA CHATTERJEE
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Abstract

The theatre that developed in late nineteenth-century India, especially in the Bengal and Maharashtra regions, catered to an audience that was much wider than the new educated middle-class males who introduced the European stage form in Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. Driven by private capital, the new Indian theatre adopted the melodrama as its main dramatic form. When performance capital shifted to the more lucrative field of cinema in the middle of the twentieth century, the melodramatic form again became the chief narrative mode. Such is its power that it has become the principal rhetorical form of popular democracy in India. In the decades after independence, theatre was rescued from imminent death by the support provided by state agencies which sponsored the production of a national theatre canon and style, as opposed to the prevailing regional ones. However, with bureaucratization and political interference, theatre in India today must revert to its one inherent superiority over the cinema – the immediacy of its encounter with small audiences.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , October 2016 , pp. 202 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2016 

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Footnotes

1

Keynote address at the conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research held in Hyderabad in July 2015. I am grateful to Trina Banerjee, Rustom Bharucha, Rimli Bhattacharya, Sudipto Chatterjee, Shayoni Mitra, Debashree Mukherjee, Suman Mukhopahyay, Janelle Reinelt and other conference participants for their comments.

References

NOTES

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4 I argue this point at greater length in my forthcoming book Critique of the Nation Form.

5 Kosambi, Gender, Culture, and Performance, pp. 170, 15.

6 The famous patriotic song ‘Vande mataram’ which first appeared in the novel in 1882 refers to seven crore (seventy million) children of the mother nation. That was the population of Bengal in the 1881 census.

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19 For a critical survey see Dalmia, Poetics, Plays, and Performances, pp. 153–277.

20 Interview with Nissim Ezekiel, 17 January 1971, cited in Dalmia, Poetics, Plays, and Performances, p. 221 n. 41.

21 Cited in Dalmia, Poetics, Plays, and Performances, p. 255.

22 Ibid., p. 191.

23 Cited in ibid., p. 177.

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26 Ibid., p. 120.