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Chasing the Parsi Theatre in Bareilly Pamela Lothspeich Chasing the Parsi Theatre in Bareilly Pamela Lothspeich Staging Heroic Abhimanyu From the Sanægam Theatre to IMA Hall When the play Vır\ Abhimanyu (Heroic Abhimanyu) premiered on 4 February 1916 to a full house at the Sanægam Theatre in New Delhi on the auspicious occasion of Vasant Pañcamı \ (a festival heralding spring), it was just over a year since Gandhi had arrived from South Africa on 9 January 1915.1 Meanwhile, World War I was underway and over one million Indian sol- diers in the British Indian Army were fighting in the Middle East and France (Metcalf and Metcalf 2001:161). Gandhi’s brand of Indian nationalism was as yet nascent, and independence was still a generation away, but a new sociopolitical consciousness initiated in the 19th century was gripping North India. Reformist and revivalist movements in the major religious traditions 1. Playwright Pandit Radheshyam Kathavachak discusses the day Heroic Abhimanyu premiered in his memoirs ([1957] 2004:60–62). Figure 1. Bhim (Arshad Azad, center) comforting a bereft Yudhishthir (Patrick Das, right) as Nakul (Devendrapal Singh, left) looks on at the Mishra production of Heroic Abhimanyu (10 December 2012). (Photo by Sanjeev Gupta, Atul Studio, Bareilly) TDR: The Drama Review 59:2 (T226) Summer 2015. ©2015 Pamela Lothspeich 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00447 by guest on 30 September 2021 and social campaigns to uplift the status of women and those marginalized by caste affiliation were animating the subcontinent (Brown [1985] 1994:159–66; Metcalf and Metcalf 2001:137– 48). Divisive debates raged about the status and relationship of Hindi and Urdu.2 And more momentous developments were yet to come before WWII and independence in 1947 — the Khilafat movement, increasing revolutionary activities, B.R. Ambedkar’s campaign against untouchability, and the rise of the Nehru-Gandhi bloc.3 In England, it was an era that witnessed a slow paradigm shift in public opinion, from an unwavering confidence in the “civilizing mis- sion” and racially tinged hysteria and paranoia ensuing from the 1857 Rebellion against the East India Company to a sobering acceptance, even contriteness, with respect to the evils of empire. The play in question, Heroic Abhimanyu, was written by Pandit Radheshyam Kathavachak (1890–1963), a devout brahmin and poet-singer in the Vaishnava tradition from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. In fact, like many pand∫ its∫ (Hindu scholars) in this line of work even today, he appended the designation “katha\va\cak” (storyteller) to his name, and it has since become as though his surname — his family name was Sharma — and I have treated it as such here. A prolific writer, Kathavachak wrote more than a dozen plays and three major narrative poems, almost all based on stories from the classical Hindu archive. One of the latter, commonly known as the Radhes\ ya; m\ Rama\ yan\ ∫, is a modern iteration of the epic that he composed, revised, and performed throughout much of his life. The company that first stagedHeroic Abhimanyu was the New Alfred Theatrical Company of Bombay, for which Kathavachak wrote a series of “mythologi- cals” — plays based on stories from the Hindu epics and other sacred lore. Kathavachak refers to this genre as dharmik\ (religious) ([1957] 2004). In 1916 the New Alfred was one of the most celebrated theatrical companies in India, and also one of the most conservative, under the direc- tion of Sohrabji Ogra. As one sign of this, the New Alfred resisted utilizing women actors until 1932 (15), even while many other companies had adopted the practice before then.4 The New Alfred operated within a commercial enterprise known as the Parsi or Persian theatre — an outcome of intense intercultural contact during the colonial period. Founded by Zoroastrian businessmen in colonial Bombay — hence the name — this hybrid form flourished in India from the 1870s to the 1930s and was one of the dominant forms of performance enter- tainment in North India before the rise of the Indian cinema, which it greatly influenced.5 In this medium, traveling companies based in Bombay and later other cities, introduced Indian audiences to a new style of cosmopolitan theatre set indoors on a Western-style proscenium stage. With its dependence on music and tendencies towards melodrama and spectacle — conveniently facilitated by new modern technologies — the form quickly grew and spread. It 2. On these debates and the Hindi language movement generally, see King (1994), Orsini (2002), and Rai (2001). 3. For a succinct discussion of the tumultuous period from 1885–1939, see Metcalf and Metcalf (2001:123–99). 4. Kathavachak discusses the use of cross-dressing actors in the Parsi theatre, a convention he supported, in his memoirs ([1957] 2004:39, 166, 174–75). Also see Hansen (1999). 5. Kathryn Hansen dates the Parsi theatre as 1853–1931, from the founding of the first Parsi theatre clubs, to the release of the first Indian film with sound (Hansen 2011:4). Anuradha Kapur likewise suggests roughly the 1850s to the 1930s (Kapur 2006:211). My discussion of the Parsi theatre here is informed by Gupt (2005), Hansen (1999, 2011, 2003), and Kapur (2006). Pamela Lothspeich is Associate Professor of Hindi-Urdu and South Asian literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her PhD in South Asian Studies and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2003. Her research interests include the Hindu epics in modern literature and theatre, especially the Ramlī\ la \ tradition. Her first book is Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahabharata in the Age of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her current book project is on the Radheśya\ m\ Rama\ yan\ ≥ and the neighborhood Ramlı\ la\ ,\ particularly in and around Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. [email protected] Pamela Lothspeich 10 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00447 by guest on 30 September 2021 also helped that companies offered plays in languages suited to their audiences, which allowed it to grow beyond a regional or vernacular theatre. It was a polyglot medium, one that was able to reach many audiences throughout colonial South Asia and even Southeast Asia, its lin- guistic repertoire spanning English, Gujarati, Urdu and finally, Hindi.6 Early plays drew inspi- ration from English examples, especially plays by Shakespeare, but over time increasingly favored indigenous themes drawn from Indo-Persian romances and legends, Indic folklore, and Hindu mythology. The play Heroic Abhimanyu appeared just when the Hindi mythological became fashion- able in the Parsi theatre. The play itself is based on several episodes from the Maha\bha\rata: the Kauravs’s heinous killing of Arjun’s son Abhimanyu, his funeral rites, and Arjun’s dramatic kill- ing of Jayadrath, the chief perpetrator of his son’s death. It is not surprising that Kathavachak turned to the great epic for inspiration, as it was during the late colonial period that the Maha\bha\rata apotheosized from itihas\ (legendary history) to national history. Themes from the Maha\bha\rata were commonplace in the literature and visual art of the period. Although Heroic Abhimanyu is an important play in the history of Parsi theatre, it may also be situated within the larger history of modern Indian theatre, which generally witnessed a flow- ering of mythological plays in the latter half of British rule, some of which contained veiled anticolonial messages and allegories. To present two notable examples from different regional theatres, Dinabandhu Mitra’s Bangla (Bengali) play Nıl\ Darpan∫ (The Blue Mirror, 1860) about horrific conditions on indigo plantations, is set in the historical present but contains many epic allusions, while Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar’s Marathi play Kıcak-vadh\ (The Slaying of Kichak, 1907), about an attempted molestation of Draupadi in the Maha\bha\rata, clearly relates to the imperialist rape of “Mother India.” This turn toward the classical Hindu archive in part stemmed from Orientalist and imperialistic interventions in the subcontinent. Yet, ironically, Indian writers strategically refashioned the classical themes and ideas into powerful discourses of anticolonial nationalism, however alienating it was for non-Hindus, a topic I have explored more extensively elsewhere (see Lothspeich 2007 and 2009). We can understand the need for mimesis, transference, and subterfuge when we consider that British authorities were well aware of the subversive potential of India’s modern theatre, most active in the colonial cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. Their distaste for Mitra’s damning play The Blue Mirror in the Bengal Presidency region, the seat of British colonial power in India, surely figured into the passage of the Dramatic Performances Control Act XIX in 1876, which was to “prohibit public dramatic performances which are scandalous, defama- tory, seditious, or obscene” (Solomon 1994:325). From that time, surveillance, regulation, and censorship of the Indian theatre became routine. Meanwhile in the Bombay Presidency, Khadilkar was no doubt drawn to the ideology of his friend and employer Bal Gangadhar Tilak, with his uncompromising stance against the British and gestures toward Hindu nationalism. Khadilkar worked as an editor at Tilak’s nationalist newspaper Kesarı \ (Lion) (Solomon 1994:346). In a survey of ten Marathi plays, including The Slaying of Kichak, which were proscribed under the Dramatic Performance Act, between 1898 and 1910, Rakesh H. Solomon notes that nine of the ten plays employed allegory, some more obviously than others, and seven drew on classic themes from Indian folklore, history, and epic literature (326–27). Heroic Abhimanyu itself wasn’t censored, but the narrative is covertly critical of the British, and in its prologue there is a strong expression of anticolonial nationalism, which I d iscuss below. However, another of Kathavachak’s plays, Parambhakt Prahlad\ (Supreme Devotee, Prahlad), was subject to imperialist scrutiny — the Secret Police came twice to see it — but avoided censorship because the allegory was too opaque ([1957] 2004:84–85).
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