Modern Indian Drama: Issues and Interventions is a collection of diverse and critically incisive essays on key issues emerging from the post-Independence era to the present times. The concept of modernity is interrogated in the plays of mainstream dramatists like Vijay Tendulkar, Mohan Rakesh, Girish Karnad, and Mahesh Dattani. The debate regarding the relationship between tradition and modernity is viewed through the lens of theatre practitioners engaged in a dynamic and flexible dialogue. between the past and the present. Post-colonialism, interculturalism, pluralism and marginalism are the centre. of debate in several essays. However, the collection moves beyond the widely accepted canon of mainstream Indian drama and highlights the work of dramatists / practitioners/actors who re-examine modernity in their own individualistic style.
Lakshmi Subramanyam teaches English at Jesus and Mary College, Delhi University. She has been teaching drama courses for graduate and postgraduate students and has participated extensively in seminars and workshops on theatre. She has co-authored an English translation of Kannada short stories by women writers, Third Eye, Srishti (2000), and edited a collection of essays on Indian Theatre, Muffled Voices: Women in Modern Theatre.
Robert Leach in his book Makers of Modern Theatre provides a crucial and useful definition of the term "modern" in the context of Western drama:
The modern theatre is the theatre of today. 'Modernist' theatre refers to the theatre of the first fifty years or so, years of the last century when Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Brecht and Artaud flourished. Their Modernism however infiltrates and influences all aspects of modern theatre. They bestride the gap between Modernism and modern.
The word "Modern" in the title of this volume has been used in similar sense to examine the concept of modernity in post-Independence Indian theatre and drama. Sixty years of Independence provide a crucial marker to renegotiate and reinterpret the past decades. The terms "drama" and "theatre" are often defined as written and performance texts respectively. Ric Knowles, however, interprets drama as a more "serious literary mode" and defines theatre as the "translation of the text into different (and usually unstable) codes of semiosis of enunciation, gesture, embodiment, design and so on". For the purposes of this book, the two terms have been used in a more flexible manner as the intertexuality between drama and theatre is a fluid and dynamic one. Though the title limits itself to "drama" for the sake of convenience and brevity, performance texts are also the focus of several essays featured in this volume.
In post-Independence India, modernist trends began to emerge i in the works of playwrights like Vijay Tendulkar, Badal Sircar, Mohan Rakesh and Girish Karnad. Naturalism, realism and existentialism dominated the drama of this period. Samik Bandhyopadhyay contends that "Every single director who dominated the 50s and 60s starts with Ibsen." In Bengal, Utpal Dutt's first production in the 1950s was Ibsen's Ghosts followed by A Doll's House (1957). Modernism in Indian drama was also deeply influenced by European drama in its questioning of traditional values in religion and culture, a self-conscious reflection on the fragmented nature of the urban experience, avant-garde movements and an emphasis on experimentation in form and theme. Family, with its frictions and fissures, was an important subject in this period. There was a "stress on the exploration of the individual in society and the society's responsibility to the individual". While proscenium theatre dominated mainstream drama, a counter discourse was visible in experiments that were deeply influenced by Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre and alienation techniques. Further, street theatre proved to be a useful forum for theatre practitioners deeply involved in political and social issues. In recent years the aesthetics of performance and its processes have engaged several theatre directors. Focusing on multiple devising techniques, non-linear composition, multi-media and emphasizing the material presence of the body are but a few of the techniques used to destabilize the concepts of realism and naturalism that marked the early phase of modern drama and theatre.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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