CONTEXT AND DIEXIS OF POLITICAL THEATRE IN INDIA
Nirban Manna. Research Scholar. Dept. Of English.
Banaras Hindu University.E-mail: [email protected].
The distinction between theatre and drama is troublesome,
but the complex dynamics of the respective roles lies in the
difference itself. While drama is the fictional script designed for
stage representation, theatre is the phenomenon of the
representation of the dramatic script. Theatre is never a solitary act.
It takes the audience into its conversation. It’s the most powerful
apparatus to influence the mass opinion. It is the most political of
all art forms. The political connotation of drama is linear but in
theatre it’s kaleidoscopic and dynamic. Traditionalists love to keep
politics confined to study of state, government, political
organization but modernists inflate it to the extent of power
mechanism, power sharing, challenging establishment; and
therefore theatre is the easiest tool of empowering common people
with contemporary socio economic knowledge. The political act
of theatre depends as much on the text or performance of the text
as on the socio political structure of society during the
performance. Macbeth in the Elizabethan epoch had specific
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political denotation in relation to English – Scottish political
tension, but the production of Macbeth by Little Theatre Group
(Utpal Dutta’s group) bears an anti fascist signification in the post
independence Congress era. In the country like India with such a
complex social structure and changing political status, theatre
plays a crucial role to reach, to influence and to form political
consciousness of the mass. The origin of Indian dramaturgy is
political in its very core. The intension of making of ‘Natyasastra’
was to protect the hierarchical status quo and revolution from the
marginals. When the celestial theatre performance came under the
attack of demons, Brahma called Bharata to write a Natyaveda to
pacify the rebel of demons. Actually the celestial power made the
fifth Veda to access for both the higher and the lower classes,
while other four Vedas had restrictions for the lower class.
Anticipating jeopardy, the fifth Veda was a kind of ideological
state apparatus to maintain the celestial hegemony. It’s a kind of
toy given to the Sudras which had its remote in the hand of the
higher class. This supremacy of the higher class is evident in the
Sanskrit dramas. Only two plays talk about the issue of making an
alternative government. One is Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshas
(The Minister’s Seal) where Chanakya conspires to overthrow
Nanda dynast. Shudraka’s Mricchakatikam (The Little Clay Cart)
was more political than Mudrarakshas. The main plot revolves
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around the love of Charudatta, a poor Brahmin tradesman with a
rich, beautiful Vasantasena. Vasantasena is a public woman, and
the love affair of a public woman with a poor Brahmin challenged
a social stigma of the class consciousness of the time. The subplot
directly addresses the political reality of the time; it centers on the
political revolution resulting the removal of the tyrant king Palaka
and the coronation of Aryaka as the people’s man. The play also
shows sentiments of party brotherhood. When Aryaka is arrested
and barred, one of his comrades, Sharvilaka comes into the action
in charge of the revolutionary party and arranges his rescue. The
Brahmin Sutradhar frequently shifts to Prakit in the play to
emphasize the compassion of the Sudras.
The most interesting phase in which theatre has served as
political weapon began in the middle of the nineteenth century
when there was a wave of patriotic sentiments and nationalistic
movement against the British imperialism. The first significant
drama about political protest against the oppression and extortion
of the Raj was Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nildarpan (Mirror of the
Indigo Planters), published anonymously in 1861. The play is
drawn from the political incident of 1855 when the Bengali indigo
planters were brutally murdered when they refused to sow the
indigo seed. The main plot concerns about the family tragedy of
Golak Basu and the malevolent British indigo supervisor Mr.
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Wood and Mr. Rouge. The fate of the Basu family is the
microcosmic representation of the exploitation of the British
colonial government in general. Mitra also vandalizes the ‘Dadan’
(paying money in advance) to expose the cunning mechanism of
British business. The play circulated the spirit of revolutionary
activism showing Nabin’s courage and sacrifice. The play had such
a public impact that in one of the production in Kanpur some
Indian farmers in the playhouse assailed some Sahibs. When the
play was published in English by an altruistic missionary, James
Long, it created hullabaloo in the govt. circle and at last Mr. Long
faced imprisonment. After the first production of the play in
Decca, the newly born National Theatre of Calcutta in 1875
inaugurated its production with Nildarpan. Though the production
was set to launch commercial venture of professional theatre, the
choice suggested mare than that. The popularity of Nildarpan and
the subsequent effects compelled the Colonian British Raj to
impose Dramatic Performance Act No. XIX to avoid further
challenges. Mr. Hobbhouse accepted the inflammatory nature of
theatre. He said “Now it has been found in all times and in all
countries that no greater stimulus could supplied to excite the
passion of mankind than that supplied by means of drama”
(Dasgupta: 1938: 225p). The censorship made a little impact on the
political nature of the nationalistic dramas; it veers towards the
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allegorical political plays. Then the playwrights used historical
figures and mythical tale as tool of protest. One of the examples of
the type is Probhakar Khadilkar’s Keechakbadha (The Killing of
Keechaka, 1906). This Marathi play is based on the Virata Parva
of the Mahabharata. This well known story pictures Draupadi
coming under the libidinous desire of Keechaka, the brother in law
of the king, Virata. Perusing his lecherous desire, keechaka steals
into Draupadi’s room in the dead of the night only to find Bhima
who unhesitatingly pulverizes Keechaka, thus Bhima defends the
honour of Draupadi. The audience easily recognizes in Bhima the
reflection of the Marathi patriot, Lokmanya Tilak. And Keechaka
symbolically represents Lord Curzon. Realizing the symbolical
significance too, the British government banned the play.
Historical events glorifying India’s past also reinforced the idea of
nationalism and patriotism. Girish Ghosh’s Sirajuddaulla,
Mirkasim and Chattrapati Shivaji are the historical allegories that
were banned under the Dramatic Performance Act. In Assam the
struggle of Ahom Kind with the Burmese invaders was dramatized.
In south India, the historical figures like Eceham Nayaka, Tipu
Sultan, Kittur Channanna provided the subject for the anti
imperialistic resistance. Every region found its own hero to
counter the British Raj. The theme of nationalistic and patriotic
fever continues to dominate the playhouses till our independence.
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In the mean time, diverse political and social philosophies for the
futuristic society began to sprout with inception of the communist
wing in 1922*. Both the congress party and the communist party
began to campaign to make a public impact only to show their
respective potentiality to rule India. The dramatic intelligentsia of
our country turned to ideology to treat social problems. But the
considerable political phenomena like World Wars, great economic
depression, hydra headed fascism and despotism threatened to
break the intellectual and political equilibrium of the whole world.
Cultural associations like Youth Cultural Institute, Progressive
Writers Association, Kranti Shilpi Sangha assembled together to
oppose the growing fascist nature of power. In 1943 the
communist party held its annual session in Bombay and it was
there that Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) took birth
under the aegis of the communist party of India. It’s assumed that
it was the party command that made Anil d’Silva, the secretary of
the Bangalore unit of IPTA, to initiate a mass movement in the
cultural front. Though Ahmed Abbas, the president, had pointed
out IPTA’s non-political standings, its aim and objectives were
clearly Marxist in essence. At the annual conference in 1945, the
themes of the theatre produced had been described thus:
National unity
Food crisis
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Grow more food
Increase production
Red army’s heroism
Anti fascism
Stop sabotage
People’s unity against police repression
A Kishan Sabha worker’s life
Strike. ( Pradhan : 1985: 159p)
These themes clearly indicated the trends of politicizing the theatre
that was inculcated by IPTA. The most significant plays of pre
independence IPTA early attempts that set the political and
ideological stances of the country were Four Comrades (1943),
Roar China (1943) and Nabanna (The New Harvest, 1944).
Written jointly by the IPTA members, Four Comrades dramatized
an incident in the battle of Singapore that described the story of
four labour agitators – two Chineses, one Malay and an Indian who
upon their release from the jail waged war against the Japanese
invaders. The play with the theme of glorification of the
revolutionary activism openly criticized Gandhi’s strategy of non
violence and Quit India movement. In The prologue of the play
Roar China the political outlook was clearly clarified:
But there is a limit to non- violence and peace When the waves of tyranny and justice rise high The oppressed, the hungry, the poor the workers, the peasants ---- all take arms to resist it.(IPTA: 1943:13p)
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On the other level, when Japanese soldier backed Netaji Subhas
Bose up in his fight with the Britishers, the progressive communist
party saw it as launching the Japanese imperialism in India. In one
of the exchanges of Ratan, the Indian labour, with the Japanese
officials clarifies the communists’ anti-imperialistic stance against
Japan.
The Japanese officer: You are an Indian and we have no quarrel with Indians Ratan: The Japs coming to free India! That would be a good joke. Ha. Ha . Just as you freed Manchuria and Korea and China _____No we Indians are not such fools as to exchange our present bondage for a worse slavery (IPTA: 1943:9-10p)
While the early productions like Roar China and Four Comrades
stated the ideological position of the communist party, Bijan
Bhattacharya’s Nabanna (The New Harvest) dealt with the grim
reality of the post famine Bengali commoners who were denied the
basic necessities of life. Bhattacharya exposed the bourgeoisie
economic vandalism called improvised famine and its heart
rendering consequence of the people who lived hand to mouth. In
Orissa, Kalicharan Pattanyak wrote Bhata (Rice) and Raktamati
(The Red Earth) in the early 40’s. Both the plays deal with political
and social prejudices. Bhata dramatizes the stigma of
untouchability and problem of starvation among the peasants. A
cruel landlord’s only son turns against him and empathizes with
rebellious peasant only to be fatally shot by the father. The peasant
revolution becomes victorious when the grief stricken landlord
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stoops to the peasant’s demands. The rising peasant – landlord
relationship became an issue of the contemporary theatre because
the age old Jamindari system tried to clutch its fading dictatorship
for the last time against the rising political wave of socialism. In
Kerala K. Damodaran’s Pattabakki (The Landlord’s Due) deals
with the corruption and perversion of the landlord who throws his
tenant into jail and compels the tenant’s sister to become his
mistress and ultimately drives her to become a whore. When the
brother is released, she is united with her brother. Obviously the
playwright meant to imply that poverty breeds the social
corruption and an egalitarian society can only be achieved by
longstanding revolution. The independence of Indian, the banning
of the C.P.I. organization in 1948, lack of organizational control
and ideological conflict within the workers resulted split in IPTA.
Though IPTA became paralyzed after its break, still the workers
have been forging with same ideology and vigor that the
organization was founded long ago.
Convinced by the ideas for which the IPTA stood proved
to viable means to reach the common people, in the post
independence era C.P.I continues the exploit the potential of
theatre as a vehicle of propaganda. In 1952, the Kerala People’s
Art Club of Trivandapuram banged with Ningalenne
Communistakki (You Made me a Communist) which was
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performed more than 600 times and is thought to have helped to
make government in 1957. The Congress party also retaliated with
Kesav Dev’s Jnanippo Communist A Vum ( I will not Become a
Communist ) .in the same time D.M.K. party seek to woe its
voters with the production Neethe Tnanon Mayakkam ( The
Seduction of The Just King ) of its own leader Annadurai. In
Maharashtra, the congress party in 1971 election campaign used
Kalapathar (The Back stone) in the traditional Tamasha form.
Taking the inspiration from the successful experimentations
of IPTA , the playwright and directors like Utpal Dutta( The Little
Theatre Group and People’s Little Theatre group) , Manoj Mitra
(Theatre Workshop) ;Ahmed Abbas and Balraj Sahani (IPTA’s
Mumbai Unit) used professional proscenium theatre to preach
people with the socio-political ideologies and knowledge.
Sometimes non-commercial theatre groups like Prithvi Theatre
Group (Prithviraj Kapoor), Shatabdi (Badal Sircar) and Janam
(Sadaf Hashmi and his associates) hit the streets with the
politically conscious plays.
Utpal Dutt, a staunch communist theatre personality, has
devoted his theatre activism on Lenin and Stalin’s ideologies. Most
of his plays are agitprops that follow the hardcore party line. He
believed that theatre could initiate revolution among the mass. He
wrote Angar( The Burning Coal,1959), Kallol ( The Sound of The
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Waves,1965),Ajeya Vietnam (Invincible Vietnam,19) Special train
( 1962 ) and Teer ( Arrow ,1971) and many more for Little theatre
Group ; and for People’s Little Theatre wrote Surja Sikar
( Haunting the Sun, 19 ), Tiner Talowar( Tin Sword , ) Titumir
(1978) Duswapner Nagari ( the City of Nightmare) etc. Angar
shows that the bourgeoisie coal gangsters did not even hesitate to
murder their own labours and to cash out of the murders. Dutt used
slogans, strikes, and party banner on the stage. The Special Train
was another agitprop written on the occasion of the ongoing strike
at Hindustan Automobile Factory in Uttarpara, Calcutta. In the
play Dutt exposed the alliance of the Birla Group with the congress
party. One of the much talked about play Kallol deals with the
conspiracy of the British government in India with the congress
party in Bombay Naval Mutiny in 1946. The play not only exposed
the facts but also questioned the history. The hero Sardul Singh is
the epitome of the colonial and post colonial resistance of the
fascist despotism. Dutt was arrested and imprisoned during the
productions of the play. His Teer was the dramatization of the
uprising of the Naxalbari movement, the armed revolution against
the congress dictatorship during 60’s and 70’s. Teer focused on
the grievous incident in one of the villages in north Bengal where
ten innocent women are ruthlessly killed by police. Later on with
the folk form Jatra, Dutt tries to start a revolution through theatre.
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As Utpal Dutta followed the hard line party – cadetship -
doctrine in his plays within the limits of the commercialism, the
group Janam (Jana Natya Mancha) performed their street plays
under the banner of C.P.I. (M). Their plays are used for election
campaigns and most of the plays make direct political statement on
price rise, elections, communalism, economic policy,
unemployment, trade union rights, globalization, women's rights,
education system, and the political leaders, etc. The group
became matured under Sadaf Hashmi. Janam’s first election play
Aye Chunaw (Here comes Election) was produced for the 1980
Parliamentary Election, held in the backdrop of the first non
congress government. In 1989‘s general election Janam
Campaigned for the C.P.I (M) candidate from Kanpur with Hai Lal
Hamara Parcham (Our Flag is Red). And for the first time in the
history of Indian political theatre, Janam made voters as characters.
*In the 2004 general election with Lo Utha Raha Phir Hai Jhanda
Lal (Here Red Flag rises again). In the play the B.J.P led N.D.A.
was severely criticized with the portrayal of the High-Tech Sadhu.
The theatre in the hand of Janam becomes more a mudslinging
machine than people’s weapon. Janam has handed over theatre
from common people to the selected political leaders. Though it
followed the hard core party line, the productions of Dutta
maintained the essence of theatre as a whole. Apart from Janam,
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no theatre group in India has dared to go beyond the limit of the art
of theatre. The theatre units like Shatabdi, Chetana, Bahurupee are
political, but from a certain distance.
The tradition of political theatre in Bengal was carried on
by several group theatre activists. The plays like Rajrakta (the
Royal Blood) of Mohit Chatterjee and Chak-bhanga Madhu (Fresh
Honey from Hive,) of manoj Mitra of the Theatre Workshop were
the examples of urban political theatre. In Rajrakta, Mohit
Chaterjee brilliantly draws the nature of autocratic power , when
we saw Rajababu assumed various authoritative roles to allure his
people and thus tightening his hegemonic and panoptic grip over
the commoners. Apart from theatre workshop, we find many
professional group of commercial theatre propagating the ideology
of Marxism in particular and humanism in general. The groups like
Gandharva and Chetana openly declare their objectives to produce
‘right drama’ from the Marxist point of view.
The contribution of the theatre activist Badal Sircar in the field
of the raising political and humanistic consciousness among the
urban people was as important as the propagation of the
revolutionary theatre by Utpal Dutta among the rural people. These
two held two faces of political theatre in India. One is
commercially ‘rich professional theatre’ and other ‘poor theatre’.
His practice of the third theatre is the essence of the Marxist
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political theorem. Denying the ‘rich proscenium theatre’, he moved
to the streets, parks and pavements of Calcutta with his plays like
Bhoma (1975), Michil (Procession, 1974) and Basi Khabar (Stale
News, 1978). The plays empower the common people rather than
empowering any party ideology. Sircar’s plays do not comment on
the ideology but they comment on the existence of humankind in
the age of political exploitation. The essence of these plays is not
in the theme, but in the content and message that the plays carry.
Though Michil is a random juxtaposition of the slices a modern
life, it cleverly infixes the theme of drudgery, political and
intellectual purposelessness of the modern people to combat
hegemony. The theme of searching for path leading to our spiritual
freedom from the narrow cognizance fits to the Marxist –
Humanistic matrix. The Plays like Bhoma, Sukhpathya Bharater
Itihas (Indian History Made Easy, 1976) and Basi Khabar made
people aware of the nature of economic and social exploitation of
the rural people in the hand of the bourgeoisie.
From the age of Sanskrit plays to the 21st century, as the
mode of exploitation has changed but the content remained the
same, so also theatre prowess has changed in accordance with the
political and public tastes. Not only the political theatre
harmonizes the political and public sense but also it sets a new
trend of criticism and creation. But in now a days the rampaging of
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the television, satellite, multiplex cinema culture creep so much
into the modern life that theatre are losing its critical value ; and
theatre should act politically and potentially to resist this dreadful
mechanistic future.
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WORKS CITED: ____________________________________________
Banerjee, Biswanath (1999) Makers of Indian Literature: Sudraka (New
Delhi: Sahitya Akademy).
Bhatia, N (2004) Acts of Authority/ Acts of Resistance: Theatre and
Politics in the Colonial and Postcolonial India (New Delhi: OUP).
Bharucha, Rustam (1983) Rehearsal of Revolution :The Political Theatre of
Bengal (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press).
Dasgupta, H N (1938) The Indian Stage, vol- 2 ( Calcutta : Metropolitan
Printing and Publishing House) .
Deshpandey , S. ed (2007) Theatre of the Street : The Jana Natya
Mancha Experience (New Delhi: Janam).
Dharwardker, A B (2006) Theatre of Independence: Drama Theory and
Performance in India since 1947 (New Delhi: OUP).
IPTA (1943) Roar China and Four Comrades (Bombay: National
Dramatics for Defence ).
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Mukhopadhyay, K ( 1999 ) Theatre and Politic : A Study Of
Group Theatre movement of Bengal ( 1948 – 1987 ) (
Calcutta : Bibhasa ).
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