Is There, Or Should There Be, a National Theatre in India?
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Is There, or Should There Be, a National Theatre in India? G. P. Deshpande I have been given a subject which is both tricky and complex, if I may say so. In the last twenty odd years, during my career as a teacher, and in the course of my travels, I have come across some discussion on this subject; and I have always felt - what is this India? Which India are people talking about? There was, for example, in 1989, a seminar in Delhi organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi to mark the Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival, at which Kallol [by Utpal Dutt] was performed. There were three plays from Bengal, three from Maharashtra, three from Karnataka, a couple of plays in Urdu, one in Sanskrit and so on. That variety itself should have made the participants a little more modest in their claims of understanding India. However, at that particular discussion, there was an American theatre critic present, I think from the New York Times. He looked around the hall where we were seated. On the walls of Azad Bhavan were three paintings by Indian artists - one was a Tantric-style painting, the second was a Madhubani style work and the third was in the modem abstract style. He looked at them and asked-'What kind of paintings should Indians do?' He said, 'I can understand Indians doing Tantric painting, Madhubani painting, but what is this modern abstract painting doing here?' His argument applies to theatre. 'Why are Indians doing modern theatre?' was his question. I come from a part of the country which is not renowned for its politeness. So I said, I'm really surprised at what you're saying. Because the first modern play in this country was performed in Calcutta, in English, under a Russian director, in about 1795. This means that the modern, naturalistic, realistic theatre in this country has a history as long as, if not longer than, some of these countries whose citizens, with histories shorter than that of our modem theatre tradition, are telling us that this is not the kind of theatre we should be doing! There was a six-member Pakistani delegation there. During the lunch break, a big Pathan came up to me. He hugged me, actually lifted me off my feet, and said, 'Aapki baat badi meethi lagi or, 'I liked what you said.' When I asked him why, he said, 'Us kafir ko aapne thik kiya' ('You fixed that kafir'). This is very interesting because, in a sense, theatre is a mazhab (or faith) and those who take liberties with mazhab are kafirs. I said, it is good that you introduced this concept of kufr and kafir into a discussion of theatre. It is justified because this maulana from New York has no right to tell me what kind of theatre I should be doing. I cite this story to help us restate the problem of this discussion more precisely. Nobody can have any objection to national theatre per say. I am also aware that we live in times when people are believing less and less in the idea of India, or more and more in the wrong idea of India. Under the circumstances, therefore, one should have very little objection to trying to arrive at a correct idea of what the term 'national'' consists of, especially in Indian theatres. The point is not that the people are wanting a national theatre, but rather that they begin by defining it in advance. This is the real problem. There is an epistemological problem involved. I will quote someone who has been. branded a nihilist-Nietzsche. In his Genealogy of Morals he says that all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated, elude definition. Only that which has no history is definable. The difficulty is precisely that the moment you start defining national theatre, you are, in a sense, throwing history out of the window. Because the manner in which the theatre has grown in Bengal or Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu or any other part of the country is really different. Let me illustrate this point with an example of Kerala. It may appear to be an accident that Bhasa's Natak Chakram was preserved in Kerala and was discovered there. But if it was discovered in Kerala there must be something specific to the Kerala theatre tradition which helped in its preservation. So what looks like an accident was perhaps not an accident. But there are trends which are much more modem and live in Delhi, but I don't belong to Delhi. I try to bring it to everyone's notice that I don't belong to Delhi. I belong to Maharashtra.) Now you must have heard any number of Maharashtrian vocalists. In fact, it is vocal music that has dominated the Maharashtrian music scene, unlike Bengal, where there are far more instrumentalists. But, prior to British rule, there was no significant tradition of classical vocal music in Maharashtra. In other words, it is barely a hundred and forty years or so old. Now if the American critic's logic is to be applied, Maharashtrians should give up singing. What I am trying to drive at is the problem of how one defines national theatre, and if it is at all necessary to define national theatre? My response would be-no. Because most of the people who are trying to 'create' a national theatre or advocate national theatre begin with definitions. They seem to say, this, my dear chap, is what Indian theatre is. Do it. Or if you don't do it, we aren't interested in you. Fortunately the people of this country have been far more sensible-there is an audience which cares. But the pundits of pop national theatre or whatever theatre they have in mind which they call national theatre, have insisted upon defining something which is actually a semiotic concentration of an entire process, to borrow the phraseology of Nietzsche. The second problem is that if we look closely at these definitions, another picture emerges. There is a very famous book by T. J. Clark, on the Painting of Modern Life, which was published in New York in 1984. It deals with Paris in the art of Manet and his followers. In this book Clark says something which is of direct relevance to you, to me and everyone else interested in this subject. Clark says that modernism prefers the unfinished and savours discrepancy, in what it shows and how it shows it, and the highest wisdom consists in knowing that things and pictures don't add up. Simply replace the word 'pictures' with 'plays' and you will get an idea of why national theatre will not be possible. Of course, an arithmetical exercise of determining what is Indian national theatre is always possible. But a bit of Bengal, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, plus folk plus ancient Indian tradition plus Natyashastra all wrapped up into an enormous package tied with saffron ribbon-doesn't work. They don't add up. The beauty of Indian theatre lies in the fact that we are all Indians because we don't add up to being Indian. Let me now turn to our interaction with the West. Mardhekar, a Marathi poet, once made a very valid statement, probably out of disgust with Marathi writers and poets. He said that Marathi literature is so parasitical that it is not parasitical enough. It sums up the modernity problem. I would say this of theatre. If there is an Indian theatre which is national enough, it is so parasitical that it is not parasitical enough. This basically means that our acquaintance with western traditions is superficial, perfunctory, not deep enough even to reject it. A good example of this is our response to Ibsen, Shaw and Brecht. We have played a bit with Ibsen and Brecht but kept a safe distance from Shaw. There have been scattered attempts to do Shaw, but not compared to the way in which Ibsen and Brecht have been done all over the country. My point is that it is interesting that in spite of the long intellectual traditions of this country and specially the modern period, Shavian clarity and drama of ideas has not attracted our theatre people. This brings me to the question of the so-called Renaissance - we use the word wrongly in our history. There was no Renaissance in this country. I think this word is like a boast. Renaissance of what? The problem with this word is that it had a specific connotation in European history, we have borrowed this word. Ernst Bloch, the famous German Marxist, once said of secularism, that the word was accepted by the progressives from the bourgeoise philistines. A word taken from its socio-historical context and planted in another without bothering to bridge the gap, acquires a philistine character. And this is precisely what happened to the word Renaissance. What goes by the name of Renaissance in this country should be described as an Enlightenment project. By this I mean a belief in the primacy of Reason and the rational. In short, we have to go on working out the contours of our modernity. It is important to realize that this Enlightenment project is not over either here or even in Europe. We have to defend the Enlightenment project against the pre-modernists just as in Europe philosophers like Habermas are defending it against post-modernists It was this Enlightenment project, this modernity, that started off our theatre movement. How far back can one go in history? I am not saying the Natyashastra should not be read.