Searching for Shakuntala: Sanskrit Drama and Theatrical Modernity in Europe and India, 1789-Present
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SEARCHING FOR SHAKUNTALA: SANSKRIT DRAMA AND THEATRICAL MODERNITY IN EUROPE AND INDIA, 1789-PRESENT AMANDA CULP Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Amanda Culp All rights reserved ABSTRACT Searching for Shakuntala: Sanskrit Drama and Theatrical Modernity in Europe and India, 1789-Present Amanda Culp Since the end of the eighteenth century, the Sanskrit drama known as Shakuntala (Abhijñānaśakuntala) by Kalidasa has held a place of prominence as a classic of world literature. First translated into English by Sir William Jones in 1789, in the intervening centuries Shakuntala has been extolled and memorialized by the likes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Theophile Gautier, and Rabindranath Tagore. Though often included in anthologies of world literature, however, the history of the play in performance during this same period of time has gone both undocumented and unstudied. In an endeavor to fill this significant void in scholarship, “Searching for Shakuntala” is the first comprehensive study of the performance history of Kalidasa’s Abhijñānaśakuntala in Europe and India. It argues that Shakuntala has been a critical interlocutor for the emergence of modern theater practice, having been regularly featured on both European and Indian stages throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, it asserts that to appreciate the contributions that the play has made to modern theater history requires thinking through and against the biases and expectations of cultural authenticity that have burdened the play in both performance and reception. Perceived as a portrait of a particular moment in ancient Indian history, Shakuntala has long been encumbered by the obligation to portray either the authentic Other for an eager and curious foreign audience or the authentic Self for a native Indian audience reclaiming a national heritage. Such expectations, this project contends, overlook the play’s long history in between the diametric poles of East and West, obscuring the far more complicated, and more interesting facets of its lives onstage. As a performance history, “Searching for Shakuntala” endeavors to reconstruct historical productions by assembling reviews, photographs, programs, set drawings, costume materials, video recordings (when available), and other theatrical ephemera. Rather than beginning from the point of view of the text, each chapter is framed around a central production and asks how the cultural, historical, artistic, and political forces of the period in question can be discerned in this particular manifestation of Kalidasa’s play. Chapter 1 begins with William Poel and the Elizabethan Stage Society’s original practice Shakuntala from fin-de-siècle London; Chapter 2 heads across the channel to Paris and the symbolist Théâtre de L’Œuvre of Lugné-Poe and his experimentation with Sanskrit drama; Chapter 3 considers the representation of Shakuntala by a group known as the Brahmana Sabha at India’s First National Drama Festival in 1954; and Chapter 4 begins with an adaptation called Chhaya Shakuntala, or Shades of Shakuntala, as a way into thinking through the play on contemporary Indian stages. Taken together, the productions discussed in this dissertation make clear that the history of Shakuntala in performance is more than just documentation of the occasional production of an obscure work of ancient dramatic literature. It is also a study in the hegemony of intercultural exchange, the interplay between theatrical performance and identity formation, and the interwoven formal theatrical experimentation that took place through the performance of an Indian text during a period of theater history traditionally dominated by the West. CONTENTS List of Illustrations iii Special Thanks and Acknowledgements v Dedication viii Note on Transliteration, Pronunciation, and Translation ix Introduction—Searching for Shakuntala 1 Chapter 1—Shakuntala’s Storytellers 38 Sir William Jones William Poel and the Elizabethan Stage Society The Parsi Victoria Dramatic Company Chapter 2—Six Degrees of Shakuntala 83 The Romantic Network: Shakuntala in Germany 1791-1832 The Network Expands: Shakuntala in Mid-Century Paris The Symbolist Network: Shakuntala in Lugné-Poe –Land Lugné-Poe’s Network: Shakuntala into the Twentieth Century Chapter 3—Reviving Shakuntala 145 The Earliest Productions Shakuntala’s Bones Literary Revivalism Theatrical Eclecticism Institutions of Revival Chapter 4—Shades of Shakuntala 205 State of the Field The Tragedy of Shakuntala The Three Shakuntalas of Ensemble 86 Shakuntala Alone—Rita Ganguly’s Tridhara Igniting Cultural Memory in Kirana Kumar’s Shakuntala Remembered Rustom Bharucha’s Black Shakuntala Panikkar and the Politics of Hunting Reception and Conclusion Conclusion—Continuing the Search 269 Bibliography 283 Appendix A: European Productions of Shakuntala 1789-Present 297 i Appendix B: Indian Productions of Shakuntala 1789-1954 301 Appendix C: Indian Productions of Shakuntala 1954-Present 303 Appendix D: American Productions of Shakuntala 1789-Present 310 ii ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE 1: Sacontala: 10 costume sketches (1858) 113 FIGURE 2: Sacontala: 10 costume sketches (1858) 113 FIGURE 3: “Amany” by Jean-August Barre (1838) 114 FIGURE 4: Scenic Design for the First Act of Theophile 116 Gautier’s Ballet-Pantomime of Shakuntala (1858) FIGURE 5: “Paysage Nabique” by Paul Ranson (1890) 131 FIGURE 6: “Hippogriffe” by Paul Ranson (1891) 132 FIGURE 7: The Brahmana Sabha performs Shakuntala 146 at the First National Drama Festival in New Delhi (1954) FIGURE 8: Advertisement for the Kalidasa Elphinstone 155 Society’s Production of Shakuntala (1867) FIGURE 9: Prithvi Theatres Presents Shakuntala (1944) 191 FIGURE 10: Abhijñānaśakuntalam directed by V. Raghavan 203 for Samskrita Ranga (1961) FIGURE 11: The Three Shakuntalas of Ensemble 86 (1987) 221 FIGURE 12: Shakuntala Meets the King (1987) 227 FIGURE 13: Shakuntala and Sakhis in Tridhara (1995) 232 FIGURE 14: Re-Framing Shakuntala in Tridhara (1995) 233 FIGURE 15: “Listen to Me—Oh Liar King!” (2006) 238 FIGURE 16: “Shakuntala Patralekha” by Raja Ravi Varma 250 FIGURE 17: “Sakuntala Safety Matches” featuring 252 artwork by Raja Ravi Varma FIGURE 18: “Shakuntala Looking for Dushyanta” 253 by Raja Ravi Varma FIGURE 19: Abhijñānaśakuntalam directed by V. Raghavan 253 for Samskrita Ranga (1961) iii FIGURE 20: Shakuntala directed by Rustom Bharucha 254 for Ninasam, 2003 FIGURE 21: Chhaya Shakuntalam Finale (2014) 264 FIGURE 22: Shakuntala and the Bee 277 The Shakuntala Project (2017) FIGURE 23: Dushyanta and the Electric Racket 278 The Shakuntala Project (2017) FIGURE 24: Little India, directed by Emily Gray 281 For Trestle Theatre Company (2007) iv SPECIAL THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Although I have only officially been working on this dissertation for the past three years, it has been a project in development since I began graduate school in 2010. So many people have helped me to reach this incredible milestone, and the task of setting out to thank them all is both daunting and deeply satisfying. I’ll start, as the song goes, at the very beginning, with the faculty who guided this project at its earliest stages when I was a master’s student at the Divinity School at Yale. My endless gratitude to Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara for teaching me how to write and think like a scholar, and to David Brick for teaching me the language of the gods. I would especially like to thank Tamara Sears, whose seminar on art, literature, and courtly culture remains one of the most formative courses I have taken as a graduate student and who taught me how to think about space differently. I was fortunate to spend the summer of 2013 at the American Institute of Indian Studies’ summer Sanskrit program in Pune, India—an experience that I will cherish forever. I am indebted to Meenal Kulkarni and Madhura Godbole for running this program, and for giving me the absolute ananda of reading the Uttararāmacarita amidst Pune’s monsoon rains. I am forever grateful to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for awarding me a Mellon International Travel Award for the 2015-16 academic year, and to the Asian Cultural Counsel for an International Research Fellowship, which allowed me to travel around India and Europe collecting the material I needed to do this project well. So many people and institutions made my work that year possible, so I would like to thank the Asiatic Society of Mumbai; The Maharashra State Archives; Priti Shinde at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum Library; Dr. Shobha Venakatesh Ghosh at the University of Mumbai; everyone in the library and audio visual departments at the Sangeet Natak Akademi, but especially Svatantra Bhogra and Ragesh Pandey; the audio-visual library at the National School of Drama, particularly Anil Srivastava; Professor KD Tripathi for his counsel and wisdom, and for sharing his time with me on my visit to Banaras; Andy Rotman; Kathryn Hansen; Sri Shrikant Bahulkar; Satish Alekar; Dr. Balkrishna Sharma at the Sindhya Oriental Research Institute; Pratibha Dave, assistant director of the Kalidasa Akademi; Prabhat Kumar Bhattacharya; Maya Krishna Rao; Abhilash Pillai; Ram Gopal Bajaj; KS Rajendran; Vanamala Vishvanatha; Sundar Sarukkai; Suresh Anagalli; the staff at Ranga Shankara Theater in Bangalore; Nandini Ramani and Charles Preston; the staff at