THIS ‘not a seminar paper’ for ‘Not the Drama Seminar’ is a sequence of thoughts, propositions and observations intended to generate discussion about the subject of criticism in general, and the state of contemporary Indian theatre criticism in particular. Both issues have acquired urgency because of the unprecedented scale of cultural production in the post-independence period, and the ever-widening gap between the creative and critical efforts in theatre. Practitioners as well as critics have to arrive at a better understanding of the forms and functions of criticism if we are to make a genuine collective difference to the contemporary theatre culture in which we are all so deeply invested. I will approach my arguments about criticism by way of three general issues.

First, a necessary caveat about language: my comments apply to contemporary discourse about Indian theatre in the medium of English, and the apparent lack of agreement therein about the nature, purpose, and value of criticism. I do not have an intimate knowledge of theatre criticism in the other Indian languages, and want to avoid uninformed speculation about the situation in languages that I do not read myself. I do have enough familiarity with Hindi and Marathi to know that both languages have far more robust traditions of modern theatre criticism, including a great deal of theoretically significant commentary by playwrights, directors, actors, and other theatre professionals.

The same is true of Bengali, and perhaps in a lesser measure of such languages as Kannada, Malayalam, and Gujarati. Yet among urban theatregoers none of these other languages has the currency and accessibility (some would say the cachet) of English, and reflecting on the state of criticism and critique in this language thus has a self-evident relevance.

That English has become, by choice and default, the one link language in which a national conversation is possible among all those involved with theatre raises two intriguing questions. In relation to theatre, why is the ‘national’ link language a weaker critical medium than some so-called ‘regional’ languages? And why has English remained a weak medium for theatre criticism in India when it is the vehicle for extremely sophisticated social science, history, philosophy, political theory, journalism, and literary criticism, not to mention literature itself?

 

Second, it is worthwhile to reflect briefly on the widespread misuse of the term ‘theory’ in presentations and discussions at ‘Not the Drama Seminar’ in late March 2008. Some theatre practitioners asserted that they don’t ‘do theory’ and are not interested in it, while others argued contrapuntally that there is a great need to ‘articulate theory’, and that theory is not incompatible with action and activism. These arguments basically posited a false opposition between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’: theory is the articulation of principles that underlie practice of any kind – artistic, cultural, social, or political.

There is no theory that does not relate to some form of practice, and there is no practice that is not based on either an explicit or implicit theory. The apparent absence of theory is merely the sign of a less self-reflexive practice, just as the apparent absence of ‘politics’ in cultural forms is merely the sign of a less overt politics. So when theatre activists say that they are ‘not interested in theory’, what they mean is that they are not primarily concerned with articulating, reflecting on, or intellectualizing the ideas that underlie their practice. This is in itself a legitimate position because theatre artists have different priorities and different styles. What is problematic is the assumption that theatre practice (including activist theatre) can exist as a self-sufficient field disengaged from all the other dimensions of theatre work.

Third, all forms of cultural performance, including theatre, have multiple modes of existence that unfold simultaneously in time. Practice follows, and is accompanied by, some kind of theory; it creates history in its wake; and it endures because of the attention it receives in criticism. Theory, history, and criticism are thus the necessary correlates of practice, and this is as true of theatre as of literature in general (for a seminal discussion of this interrelation, see Theory of Literature [1942] by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren). In this essay I am concerned specifically with the purposes and varieties of criticism, but my arguments acknowledge theatre’s plural modes of existence, and approach it as a complex, multidimensional art. The following sections respectively consider modern reflections on the function of criticism; question the evasion of critical thinking among contemporary Indian theatre practitioners; examine the idea of performance as a self-sufficient activity; outline the unexplored varieties of criticism and critique; and elaborate on the critical dimension of translation activity in modern Indian drama and theatre.

 

The following is an anonymous selection of comments on the act of criticism, in random chronological order and without cultural identification. In the passages below, replace ‘reader’ with ‘spectator’ and ‘literary’ with ‘theatrical’ or ‘performative’. While some readers may want to act as critical sleuths and identify the authors, that is not vital to my discussion.

1. In the Age of Enlightenment the concept of criticism cannot be separated from the institution of the public sphere. Every judgement is designed to be directed towards a public; communication with the reader is an integral part of the system. Through its relationship with the reading public, critical reflection loses its private character. Criticism opens itself to debate, it attempts to convince, it invites contradiction. It becomes part of the public exchange of opinions. Seen historically, the modern concept of literary criticism is closely tied to the rise of the liberal, bourgeois public sphere in the early eighteenth century.

2. I conclude with what I said at the beginning: to have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity; a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation… Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation.

3. We may comment for a moment upon the use of the terms ‘critical’ and ‘creative’ by one who … overlooks the capital importance of criticism in the work of creation itself. Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism; and that some creative writers are superior to others because their critical faculty is superior… One reason for the value of the practitioner’s criticism [is that] he is dealing with his facts, and he can help us do the same.

4. The function of criticism seems to be essentially a problem of order too. I thought of literature then, as I think of it now, of the literature of the world… of the literature of a single country, not as a collection of the writings of individuals, but as ‘organic wholes’, as systems in relation to which, and only in relation to which, individual works of literary art, and the works of individual artists, have their significance… A common inheritance and a common cause unite artists consciously or unconsciously: it must be admitted that the union is mostly unconscious. Between the true artists of any time there is, I believe, an unconscious community.

5. Critics should recognize that the event of political independence marks the beginning of a highly self-conscious, self-reflexive period in Indian theatre during which most practitioners are engaged in creating a ‘new’ theatre for the new nation, whether they locate the sources of novelty in the pre-colonial past or the postcolonial present… The most striking aspect of this [self-reflexive] commentary is the practitioners’ close involvement with broader contemporaneous developments: in India, the activity of theatre has fostered a powerful sense of community among contemporaries. Self-reflexive authorial comment and the reciprocal dialogue among practitioners have thus emerged as valuable critical resources, and they should become an intrinsic part of the methodology for dealing with Indian theatre as a subject.

6. It is… important to acknowledge that this abundance, this opportunity to examine ourselves publicly and together, is also part of a new critical consciousness that has entered the contemporary arts in general in this country…. As more and more is written about Indian theatre (whether we treat the term as singular or plural), it becomes mandatory that each analytic project have a new angle, a new way of seeing the same, now familiar texts and contexts.

 

Written in different places and at different times, the passages above present a range of arguments about criticism that may be summarized as follows:

(i) Criticism is a key mode of unrestricted debate, discussion, and intellectual exchange in the modern public (as opposed to the private) sphere.

(ii) The creative act is primary and the critical act secondary, but the latter is not second-rate, subservient, or dispensable. Creativity and criticism are also not mutually exclusive qualities or faculties. In fact, for many major writers the critical faculty plays a crucial role in the process of writing itself, and makes their work qualitatively superior to that of more ‘uncritical’ writers.

(iii) At a given moment in culture, the collective output of artists constitutes an interrelated system, and artists benefit if they move from an unconscious to a conscious sense of community. Criticism facilitates this community by connecting, and making sense of, the artistic achievements of a given period.

(iv) The critical effort in Indian theatre lags conspicuously behind the creative effort, and the most significant theory and criticism so far have come from practitioners. Critics need to discover new methods of explanation and analysis in order to bridge this gap.

(v) Post-independence Indian theatre was marked initially by a great deal of self-reflexive criticism and a powerful sense of community. But those energies have begun to dissipate, and restoring them should be a priority for both practitioners and critics.

 

Beside these propositions, I want to summarize some of the responses I had from leading theatre directors between July 2007 and March 2008, as I criss-crossed the country to gather material for an edited collection of modern Indian theatre theory in all the theatrically significant languages (subsequently, these theatre professionals are referred to as D1 through D5).

One director was outraged that I had written about his work of the 1960s and 1970s without actually watching the performances in question (the fact that I was a child not living in Delhi during that period was irrelevant). Another felt that a director’s work cannot be understood at all through conversation, discussion, reading, and archival audio-visual material but only through repeated personal contact over long periods of time. My interest in his theoretical stance as a director was therefore ‘methodologically’ questionable, and my intention to anthologize the major theoretical positions of the past fifty years was only going to perpetuate the polemic that had already been so harmful to theatre.

 

A third director professed a lack of interest in how ‘history’ would represent him, because his own interests had shifted away from the kind of theatre that had made him a national figure. He also felt that my theatre scholarship was too ‘Delhi-centred’, and I needed to refocus my attention because ‘nothing of importance happens in Delhi.’ The fourth director claimed that he never published his views or wrote anything down, just spoke from notes when he needed to. To generate a written record of his ideas, I would have to transcribe the notes from our meeting; he would then dictate an oral response which would be transcribed by his secretary and sent to me. The fifth director did not wish to meet with me personally but mentioned the extensive archival documentation of her work and sent me a career synopsis in the mail. Numerous others explained apologetically that although they have done theatre for thirty or forty years, they have no written documents to offer, not even the odd Director’s Note – mainly because they are ‘doers, not thinkers’.

 

That all these comments came from directors rather than playwrights or other theatre professionals was an interesting circumstance in itself. It underscores the extent to which (male) directors have come to occupy the centre of contemporary performance culture and become its primary spokesmen, even as the directing function has fostered a kind of intellectual complacency and squeamishness that produces a spate of unexamined assumptions and superficial generalizations. Arguably, many of the problems that have sapped contemporary theatre practice of energy are implicit in these comments.

D1 asserts that the actual experience of a live performance is the only source of genuine ‘knowledge’ about plays and directors. This dismisses at one stroke the entire discipline of theatre history, which is precisely about retrieving and representing the performances of the past. D2 cannot accept the idea that in a collection of modern theories of theatre, the editor’s role is not to censor or suppress the positions she dislikes, but to represent the field objectively, so that the full range of theoretical positions may come into view. One assumption here is that criticism should only serve the cause of the kinds of theatre we would like to promote. Another is that critical assessments should be exclusive, not inclusive: true knowledge is possible only when one immerses oneself in a particular kind of theatre, and consciously evades all the other kinds being practiced at any given moment.

D3 forgets that he may not care about history, but history is compelled to care about him. (And if he actually looked through my book, Theatres of Independence, published in 2005, he would discover that this so-called ‘Delhi-centred’ work deals with theatre in eight languages, and documents performances in fourteen different cities). D4 has elevated his antipathy towards the written word to the status of a virtue. D5 considers even a short face-to-face conversation with a visiting scholar pointless. The rest of the doers are fully aware that a little more of their work is lost every day, but their response to that crisis rarely goes beyond a few verbal gestures of regret.

Creativity does not flourish in a vacuum: it dies without a commensurate critical effort. The indifference of most current theatre practitioners to the afterlife of their work is problematic enough, but to dismiss all concern with that afterlife as superfluous is not only an anti-intellectual but a thoroughly self-defeating move.

 

There is a growing tendency in India to regard live performance as a self-sufficient event and an end in itself. But to last beyond the moment, performance needs a parallel discourse that reflects on what is being performed, why, and for whom. The following descriptions point to the difference such questions can make to the ultimate value of performance.

1. The 10th Bharat Rang Mahotsava organized to celebrate the golden jubilee of the National School of Drama took place in Delhi from 3-20 January 2008. After an inaugural ceremony culminating in a performance of Ratan Thiyam’s Prologue, audiences were offered an average of 4-5 performances per day for seventeen days in six different locations. The gap between performances in different venues was often 15-30 minutes, so that audiences were literally running from one play to another. The principle of selection for the Indian entries was that they should be directed by NSD alumni, or have alumni in leading roles. There were, in addition, invited productions from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Iran, Afghanistan, and Mauritius, in addition to the South Asian conclave of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

At every venue, there were impressive displays of larger-than-life colour photographs and posters, marigold garlands, bouquets, and flower-petal arrangements on the floor. On the NSD campus there was also an exhibit relating to the school’s history, and a live installation called the Glass House Project which involved a student living in a transparent structure for the duration of the festival.

 

There were, however, no occasions for playwrights, directors, and performers to talk with each other or with the audience. An ad hoc noon-time discussion forum began a few days into the festival and continued erratically for a fortnight, but without the visible publicity that would bring in the viewing public. There was no discussion of the nations, cultures, languages, and regions represented at the festival, or of the range of texts, forms, and presentation styles. At the National School of Drama, there was no assimilation of a two-week event to any pedagogic goals or special activities relevant to students. At the end of seventeen days, the individual viewer was left with a small pile of programmes, brochures, and ticket stubs, free to reconstruct the event in whole or in part as he/she pleased.

2. The 3rd Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards Festival took place in New Delhi from 29 February to 5 March 2008. Ten plays, selected by a four-member committee from a total of ninety-five submissions, were performed over six days at the Shri Ram Centre and Kamani auditoriums. A distinguished five-member jury evaluated the plays in a total of twelve categories, and the awards were presented on 6 March at a lavish five-hour ceremony at the Taj Mansingh hotel. In comparison with the NSD festival, the Mahindra programme was both more modest and more rigorous, since a smaller number of plays competed for awards in closely contested categories, and the jury deliberated over each entry. Within three years, this annual event has also established itself as a coveted and important showcase for ‘the best in contemporary theatre’ – the comprehensive support it extends to the ten finalists is invaluable in a marketplace of very scant resources.

 

But on the whole the Mahindra festival remained, like its NSD counterpart, an unreflective succession of performances. Neither the selection committee nor the jury – all of them major practitioners or scholars – commented publicly on their choices and decisions. There was again no contact between the producers and consumers of theatre, no opportunity for comment, debate or discussion. All of the extra-performative energy was focused on the five-star awards ceremony, where a Mumbai-based compere unconnected with theatre ‘kept things light’, the names of plays and performers were routinely mispronounced, and the lack of coordination between written lists and video clips turned the announcement of nominees within each category into a circus. The festival organizers have already garnered such extravagant praise for the event, however, that its format is unlikely to change in the near future.

The NSD and Mahindra festivals are examples of unmediated performance, with little to thicken or deepen the spectator’s experience. The main ethical issues they raise have to do with the vagaries of sponsorship and patronage in a largely non-commercial theatre system in which the vast majority of serious practitioners are struggling for their very survival. What is the public or private expenditure on these events? For how many years will the smorgasbord of performances continue, and what will be its cumulative value? What, ultimately, will be the point? The initiative for change in these formats has to come from the community of theatre artists and audiences. Public institutions are accountable to the public, and the public needs to make itself heard through all available forums.

3. From 29 February to 15 March 2008, the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) produced Lydia Diamond’s stage version of Nobel laureate Toni Morrisson’s novel, The Bluest Eye. This is the fourth play the department has produced under the auspices of the Lorraine Hansberry Chair, which commemorates Hansberry every alternate year with the production of a play by an African-American woman playwright.

After the performance on 1 March, University Theatre (the department’s production wing) organized a talk with the playwright and the director, Derrick Sanders. Following the performance of 6 March there was a talkback with the audience moderated by Sandra Adell, Professor of African-American Studies. On 7 and 9 March, Mike Sell, a specialist in avant-garde theatre, delivered lectures on the Black Arts Movement and the legacies of Black American Theatre. Also on 9 March, there was a post-show discussion with a professional dramaturge and three graduate students from the Department of Theatre and Drama.

 

The difference between the University of Wisconsin events and either the NSD or Mahindra festival is not a matter of material support – if anything, the resources of a theatre department at a large American state university are considerably more straitened than those afforded by government or corporate patronage in India. It is also not the difference between a professionalized academy abroad and the domain of popular culture at home – serious theatre is not a ‘popular’ institution in either India or the US, and any institution of theatre training can be as ‘academic’ as it chooses. Rather, it is a difference of approach and attitude that creates a different overall cultural position for theatre by valuing all its modes of existence, textual and performative.

 

All the way from community and university theatres to regional repertory theatres and Broadway, American performance is surrounded by a discursive text that consists of print materials, discussion, commentary, and audience outreach (programmes, brochures, study guides for students, director’s and dramaturge’s notes, panels, symposia, talkbacks, etc.). I have cited a specific example of this approach not to demonstrate the ‘superiority’ of American methods, but because as a member of the theatre department at Wisconsin I know first hand the gruelling collective effort it takes to put on our annual season of nine productions. There is nothing glamorous about this effort, and it involves no patronage beyond the fact that we are all paid employees of the university. The events accompanying The Bluest Eye, in short, graphically represent the critical prising open of performance – a process that Indian theatre-in-performance has to begin following in greater measure if it is not to dwindle into an empty spectacle.

Question: How many critics does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Answer: All of them, because some will object to the shape of the bulb, others will complain about the quality of the light, and the rest will claim that they could have done it better themselves.

This (or something to this effect) was one of the many ‘light bulb’ jokes at the Mahindra awards ceremony, which I attended mainly out of curiosity about the emerging corporate face of Indian theatre. The cliche it recirculates has been around at least since the seventeenth century in English – that a critic is an ignorant egotist whose only goal is to launch a mean-spirited and pointless attack on a worthy object. In India this popular image has also become largely performance-oriented and journalistic, with the ‘theatre critic’s’ job consisting mainly of performance reviews and interviews with practitioners that appear in periodicals of various kinds. The other frequent site of criticism is a Preface or Introduction to a collection of plays, especially plays in translation.

 

With these more or less occasional forms of criticism occupying a dominant position, contemporary Indian theatre seems to be a field full of unexplored critical modes and occasions. Only a handful of major playwrights have written prefaces, forewords, or introductions to their own work, or produced manifestoes, memoirs, and polemical essays. Only a few actors have produced autobiographies, memoirs, or acting manuals. Only a few directors have theorized a full-fledged aesthetic of performance. Very few set designers, lighting and sound designers, costume designers, and stage managers have been heard from. (One cannot compel this kind of work from theatre artists, but it is immeasurably enriching when it does appear). Similarly, only a few theatre critics have produced anything beyond performance reviews, book reviews, introductions, and random essays.

In Indian theatre, authors do not appear to speak regularly to their audiences and readers, and critics do not display any common understanding of what constitutes a responsible act of criticism. The reductive notion of ‘criticism’ as merely the rhetoric of praise and blame also obscures the other functions of criticism: explication, interpretation, analysis, comparison, retrieval, and documentation, to name some. Indian theatre criticism would take on a different complexion if even theatre history and interpretive criticism were to be pursued more seriously than they have been.

 

One particular mode of criticism – namely, critique – has become even more important in the current climate. Critique is a focused way of debating ideas of cultural significance: a pointed exercise that considers the positive and negative effects of specific aesthetic beliefs and cultural practices. Historically, this mode has been significant at every stage in modern Indian theatre. Urban commercial theatre established itself in the late nineteenth century by critiquing the ‘vulgarity’ of forms such as the jatra and tamasha; the IPTA critiqued colonial theatre in the 1940s; and the proponents of theatre in the 1950s critiqued the IPTA. In more recent decades, the ‘theatre of roots’ movement has critiqued urban realist theatre as a remnant of colonialism, while the adherents of urban realism have critiqued the theatre of roots movement as a form of revivalism. There are at present at least three issues in contemporary theatre that would benefit from systematic scrutiny:

(i) The so-called ‘abolition of the playwright’ because a growing number of directors prefer to develop their own scripts for performance, often in collaboration with their actors. During the NSD and Mahindra festivals, the publicity materials prominently mentioned the directors of plays, but not the playwrights. Of the ten plays at the Mahindra festival, only two had authors who were not also the plays’ directors. Delhi has already acquired the dubious reputation of being a metropolis inhospitable to playwrights. Theatre forums of various kinds need to begin discussing this trend critically if major forms of theatre are not simply to disappear by attrition.

(ii) The adaptation of novels, short stories, and other prose narratives for the stage, especially by Delhi-based directors. In Delhi this practice has been theorized most extensively as ‘kahani ka rangmanch’– not an ‘adaptation’ or ‘theatricalization’ of a narrative but a literal ‘staging’ which retains the text, structure, and atmosphere of the original. Whatever the name and particular technique, novels and stories are appearing in increasing numbers on the stage in every major Indian language. We need to consider the artistic, rhetorical, and economic implications of this trend, and ask if the colonization of the stage by prose fiction is an appropriate or effective direction for theatre.

(iii) The continuing over-dependence in the urban repertory on translations and adaptations of foreign plays. As the next section will show, this practice has a historical and ongoing significance in modern Indian theatre. But in the early twenty-first century, the continued preoccupation with Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, Brecht, Miller, Dario Fo et al. is beginning to look like a compulsive derivativeness.

 

Again, a critique of these practices does not necessarily imply attack or rejection. But they are altering the face of contemporary theatre in profound ways, and we need to initiate a serious conversation about them so that theatre does not change merely by default.

 

Translation enters this discussion about criticism in part at the request of the organizers of ‘Not the Drama Seminar,’ but also because it is a critical act in several respects, and has functioned as such in modern Indian theatre for a hundred and fifty years. The selection of a text or performance for translation recognizes its importance in the original language of composition, and even more, the important work it can do for readers and viewers in the target language. A successful translation requires equal facility in both languages, and involves consistent critical choices relating to meaning, form, tone and texture. Furthermore, translation creates an open-ended life for a text or performance well beyond its original location in time and space.

Because of the diversity of languages on the subcontinent, India has been a ‘culture of translation’ since the post-classical period. But the activity of translation has undergirded the very formation of a print and performance culture in the modern period, since the decisive nineteenth-century cultural encounter between India and the West depended heavily on the ‘carrying across’ of works from one language to another: from European languages (especially English) to the modern Indian languages; from Indian languages (especially Sanskrit) to the European languages; from Sanskrit to the modern Indian languages; and from one modern Indian language to another (across a spectrum of about twenty important languages).

Where drama was concerned, this multidirectional traffic highlighted the twin canonical figures of Shakespeare and Kalidasa, and placed the innumerable modern versions of their works at the core of a ‘national theatre’ in the colonized nation. By the late nineteenth century, the texts for performance in urban Indian theatre included plays in English, European plays in English translation, English and European plays in Indian language translation, adapted and indigenized versions of western plays, translations of Sanskrit plays into the modern Indian languages, and new Indian language plays, performed both in the original language of composition and in translation.

 

In the post-independence period, the translation of older Indian plays and of foreign plays from all languages, cultures, and periods has not only continued but grown immeasurably; but the translation of new Indian plays into multiple Indian languages has acquired unprecedented momentum and significance. The last five decades have demonstrated that in Indian theatre the prompt recognition of new plays as contemporary classics does not depend so much on publication or performance in the original language of composition, as on the rapidity with which the plays are performed and (secondarily) published in other languages.

The process of selection has a vital critical element because it establishes the value of a given play, and keeps it in constant circulation among readers and viewers, creating the layers of textual meaning and stage interpretation that become the measure of its significance. This method of dissemination also generates – and has already generated – a body of nationally circulating texts and performance vehicles that offers more convincing evidence of the existence of a ‘national theatre’ than any other institutional, linguistic, or bureaucratic conception.

In their formal recommendations to the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the participants at the 1956 Drama Seminar had suggested that ‘there should be a special programme of translations of well-known and stage-able plays of the different languages of India into the regional languages enumerated in the Constitution,’ and that ‘these plays should be made available at moderate prices.’ This programme of translations did not materialize, perhaps because it involved sixteen or more languages. But the nationwide theatre movement of the 1960s, which began the first major transregional initiatives, gave high priority to the translation of important new plays, and succeeded in forging strong connections between the Indian languages within a few years of the event orchestrated by the Akademi.

 

The movement brought leading playwrights and directors from different languages together through workshops, fellowships, roundtable discussions, and collaborative productions, and one of its important effects was to lead playwrights to translate their own and each other’s work, so that major new plays could reach a larger audience of spectators and readers. Girish Karnad translated Badal Sircar’s classic Evam Indrajit into English, and Vijay Tendulkar translated Karnad’s Tughlaq and Sircar’s Evam Indrajit into Marathi. Since 1972, Karnad has also translated all his own major Kannada plays for publication in English, diversifying his objectives as a translator, and demonstrating the importance of making drama-as-text potentially available to national and international audiences.

The total translation activity of the last five decades now makes up a daunting field, even if we consider only Hindi as the target language. The following two Tables offer selective information about the translation of foreign and Indian plays into Hindi, highlighting the significant authors as well as translators.

 

Table I is impressive because of the concentration of literary talent: aside from the original authors, the list of translators reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of the Hindi literary world in the post-independence period. Furthermore, although the translation of both foreign and Indian plays has a close link to performance, the published versions display a degree of critical engagement with author and work that is unmatched by plays published in the original Indian languages. Most translations carry a foreword or introduction that contains biographical information about the original author, reflects on the translation process in general and specific terms, and underscore the artistic and critical importance of bringing the play to Indian audiences. Many translations carry notes and annotations. This critical material offers insights into the theory and practice of translation on such a scale that, ironically, the act of translation rather than original composition emerges as the more significant critical occasion in contemporary theatre.

A comment by Satyadev Dubey about his ‘obsession with original plays’ best sums up this process: ‘Besides finding in them a lot of things [I have] wanted to say without having to take the trouble of writing them, [I have] had a sense of continuous contemporariness which makes me feel that I am not alienated from society, at least the society which believes in theatre’ (Contemporary Indian Theatre, Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, 1989, pp. 100-101).

 

Beyond the specifics of translation, multilingualism and circulation in their post-independence forms have had a profound effect on dramatic authorship, theatre theory, and the textual life of drama. Playwrights who conceive of themselves as literary authors write with the anticipation that the original text of a play will soon enter the multilingual economy of translation, performance, and publication. Vijay Tendulkar, G. P. Deshpande, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Satish Alekar, Chandrashekhar Kambar, and Mohit Chattopadhyay are among the authors who have collaborated actively with translators to make their plays available in other languages (especially Hindi and English), for performance as well as publication (again, especially in Hindi and English).

As translators of the work of other contemporary playwrights, Tendulkar and Karnad stand apart in their understanding of the importance of transregional routes in theatre, and by rendering his major plays into English, Karnad has applied that understanding to his own work. All these playwrights construct authorship and authority as activities that must extend across languages in order to sustain a national theatre movement in a multilingual society.

 

Similarly, playwrights who function actively as theorists and critics of Indian drama do not limit themselves to their ‘native’ linguistic-dramatic traditions, but aim explicitly at creating a ‘nationally’ viable body of theory and critical thought. They construct a framework for contemporary Indian drama and theatre in which regional theatrical traditions interact with each other, and are available for use beyond the borders of their languages and provinces. Significantly, although playwrights such as Tendulkar, Elkunchwar, Kambar, Deshpande, and (with some qualifications) Karnad write their plays exclusively in their respective regional languages, much of their criticism appears directly in English.

For both authors and audiences, the total effect of active multilingualism and circulation has thus been to create at least four distinct levels for the dissemination and reception of contemporary Indian plays – the local, the regional, the national, and the international. But multilingualism is a collective activity, another possible casualty of the strategies of insularity and incommunication that are fostered by the avoidance of ‘criticism’.

 

* This essay is a slightly revised version of a plenary paper delivered at ‘Not the Drama Seminar,’ Ninasam, Heggodu, Karnataka, 26 March 2008.