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Grounds-For-Play-Nautanki.Pdf Preferred Citation: Hansen, Kathryn. Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft9v19p2qq/ Grounds for Play The Nautanki Theatre of North India Kathryn Hansen UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1991 The Regents of the University of California To Carla and my parents Preferred Citation: Hansen, Kathryn. Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft9v19p2qq/ To Carla and my parents Acknowledgments The research undertaken for this book received generous financial support from several sources. A fellowship from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute enabled me to carry out the first round of fieldwork in India in 1982. A two-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded subsequent trips to India in 1984 and 1985 and provided for research assistance and expenses. The Social Science Research Council (New York) through its postdoctoral fellowship program offered me a maintenance stipend during 1984-85. Additional help came from the University of British Columbia in the form of faculty research grants (1981-84). I wish to express my gratitude to these agencies for their timely assistance. Institutional support played an important role throughout the development of this project. My first debt is to my home institution, the University of British Columbia, for accommodating my requests to be released from teaching responsibilities in academic years 1983-85 and the second term of 1987-88. During 1983-85 I was associated with the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Bruce Pray kindly made available to me the administrative facilities of the Institute for International Studies and the Sponsored Projects Office; I am grateful to Bruce along with Karen Beros and Jeri Foushee for their patience and cooperation. In 1988 the Southern Asian Institute of Columbia University was my gracious host; Ainslie Embree and his staff offered me physical space, most precious ― xiv ― of commodities in Manhattan, and in that stimulating environment I completed the first half of the manuscript. Here I must also thank Maureen Patterson and the personnel of the South Asia library at the University of Chicago for their assistance during research visits in 1982. Other libraries that contributed substantially to this project were the India Office Library and the British Library (formerly the British Museum) in London. I am indebted to them not only for access to their unrivaled collections but for their permission to reproduce many of the illustrations that appear in this book. In India my activities were coordinated through the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute in Delhi. I especially appreciate the efforts of P. N. Malik, who expedited everything from government clearances to travel arrangements and accommodation. Thanks to the India International Centre, I enjoyed a high standard of comfort and security, even during the Delhi riots of 1984. The officers of the national Sangeet Natak Akademi, in particular Jiwan Pani, suggested avenues for research and assisted in the acquisition of tape recordings and photographs. I am grateful to R. S. Malhotra for opening the academy's archives to me. I further extend thanks to the Uttar Pradesh Sangeet Natak Akademi in Lucknow and the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology of the American Institute of Indian Studies in Delhi for their help in my research. My deepest sense of obligation is reserved for the many individuals who accepted the legitimacy of my inquiry and attempted to quell my curiosity, giving of their time, hospitality, experience, and knowledge. Why they should have done this so unquestioningly still puzzles me, but there is little doubt that without their willingness I would never have written this book. Ron Hess inspired me at the outset with his vivid documentation of Nautanki in Banaras, while Alan Entwistle's gift of Nautanki recordings from All-India Radio was an unexpected windfall. Similarly, a world was revealed when Shrivatsa Goswami invited me to Vrindavan for the Ras Lila season. Nemichandra Jain, Amritlal Nagar, Mudrarakshas, Habib Tanvir, Ashok Chakradhar, Urmil Thapaliyal, Raj Bisariya, Jugal Kishor, and others shared their expertise. From the community of Nautanki artists, I am indebted to Giriraj Prasad, Ram Dayal Sharma, Pandit Kakkuji, Phakkar, and Malika Begam, who responded to my probing with trust and candor. During the painstaking process of transcription and computer editing, I received able assistance from Ann Cherian and Arpita Mishra. Dave Fern played many roles from ace receptionist to stalwart Macin- ― xv ― tosh operator. Tara Sinha enlivened the collating of texts with her charming synopses and sympathetic manner. In the musical analysis, I benefited by repeated consultation with Kay Norton, who was diligent beyond the call of duty. It would be difficult to mention the numerous colleagues and friends who commented and advised as this book evolved. More than they may be aware, their affection and concern sustained me and proved invaluable to my forward progress. On the long home stretch, Carla Petievich, Yvonne Hansen, and Linda Robbins in their own ways gave me the necessary strength of heart to finish. I also owe many thanks to my editor, Lynne Withey, for her gentle persistence and clarity. The last credit goes to Bitiya and Mehndi, who simply witnessed and believed. ― xvii ― Note on Transliteration This book contains words from Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and other Indic languages. In general, foreign terms are transliterated following the scholarly conventions in practice for those languages. The differences between the Hindi and Sanskrit romanization systems are few. In most Hindi words, the final "a" is dropped, e.g., sutradhara (Skt.), sutradhar (Hin.). To facilitate pronunciation, I have rendered the five sounds , , , , and as ch, chh, sh, sh, and ri for Hindi, while preserving the standard c, ch, s, s, and r for Sanskrit. In the case of dramaturgical terms common to Hindi and Sanskrit, context determines the chosen spelling. The invocation of a Sanskrit drama is mangalacarana , of a Hindi drama mangalacharan . Urdu words are romanized following their most frequent spellings in Devanagari script. The izafat construction is represented by -e- , e.g., badr-e- munir, bahr-e-tavil . Variant spellings are often found in the Hindi texts of this period. I have reproduced the inconsistencies of my sources, transliterating titles as printed. However, when referring to a class of stories, I have adopted the most common spelling, e.g., Ramlal's Puranmal , but in most versions spelled Puranmal . Anglicized spellings indicate words that have become common in English, e.g., Koran, guru, Shudras, Awadh. Personal names appear without diacritics, with the exception of authors' names transliterated in the appendixes. The popular surname simh is spelled as Singh except in textual references, e.g., Amar Singh Rathor (hero's name), Amar simh rathor (title of drama). Following Hindi usage, I have chosen to speak of Ram instead of Rama but have used Ramayana and Mahabharata even when referring to Hindi versions of the epics. ― 1 ― Introduction The Indian subcontinent possesses a rich theatrical history spanning many centuries. As in other parts of Asia, theatre here brings together storytelling, mime, poetry, song, and dance in a multifaceted spectacle. Many of the premodern forms of Indian theatre have religious roots, and earlier scholarship has focused on these genres, stressing the function of theatre as sacred ritual or doctrinal instruction. Less known are the secular stages such as Nautanki, although their folkloric interest and musical complexity arguably surpass those of sectarian theatre. Previous oversight of these forms may owe something to the prejudice against profane amusements held in certain sectors of precolonial Hindu and Muslim society, as well as among British officials and Indian elites schooled in Victorian taste. Political authorities, orthodox believers, and aspirants to respectability have tried to suppress popular cultural practices in many places and times. Nonetheless, secular theatre has enjoyed great renown in India, particularly during the last two hundred years, and forms like Nautanki have played a significant role in the cultural and social processes of the period. Although clowning, melodrama, and ribaldry are certainly not absent from the staging of devotional dramas in India, Nautanki and other secular theatres are unabashedly concerned with entertainment. Performances of Nautanki provide pretexts for fun, grounds for play in the workaday lives of ordinary people. Play, or "ludic behavior" in the eyes of anthropologists, is a deeply creative activity. Just as it gives the grow- ― 2 ― ing child an opportunity to experiment and learn new ways of being, play at the societal level allows the exploration of new models and symbols. Cultural forms of play possess the potential to regenerate and change society. As Victor Turner has proposed, they may reveal structures, "social dramas," that are universal to human experience. [1] But even if the cross- cultural study of play had not established its "human seriousness," we would still wish to know more about the traditional modes of recreation among Indians, if only to counterbalance the still-prevalent image of the subcontinent as pious and otherworldly. Even as they entertain, the traditional Indian theatres such as Nautanki supply "pictures of the world, "selections of things worth attending to," just as newspapers, cinema, and television do. [2] Theatrical shows, together with epic recitations, ballads, songs, folktales, and so on, comprise the principal media of communication in societies characterized by limited literacy and technology. In premodern India, these traditional media were at the core of communication. [3] In the broadest sense then, this book is an inquiry into communication, specifically into a medium of communication that has today been displaced by the more powerful mass media.
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