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Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance
Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India
By Nandi Bhatia The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2004 University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-11263-0
Chapter One
Introduction The Theoretical-Historical Context
Postcoloniality and the Question of Genre
[T]here is the special consideration ... directed not at all against any mere publications of whatever sort, but against representations on the stage. Such dramatic acting conveys ideas in a manner quite different from that of any other sort of publication, and among other things has a much more vivid effect. It, therefore, by no means follows that the law regarding publication would suffice for the stage. In short, dramatic representation does require a law peculiar to itself.
These remarks by the lieutenant-governor of Bengal regarding the regulation of drama in India are indicative of at least two trends. First, they reveal that imperial authorities in India perceived theater and drama as potentially threatening modes of anticolonial expression. And second, they indicate that the fears of the authorities were not unfounded; that by 1876, the year of the passage of the Dramatic Performances Censorship Act, and not too long after the mutiny of 1857, the official transfer ofpower from the English East India Company to the Crown in 1858, and the indigo revolt in 1859-60, theater in India had indeed become an expression of political struggle against colonial rule and a space for staging scathing critiques of the oppression and atrocities inflicted upon colonial subjects by rulers on the indigo plantations and tea estates. Based on stories about the lived experiences of laborers in the tea and indigo plantations, eyewitness accounts by playwrights such as Dinabandhu Mitra, and newspaper reports, dramatic representations disseminated stories of colonial excesses to large and varied audiences, in order to raise awareness of existing social evils, forge community bonds, and mobilize collective action.
While the political content of the plays was the reason for the growing panic among the rulers, the performative aspects of such cultural productions further aggravated existing tensions. British authorities feared that drama's interactive relationship with its viewers could generate an immediate response, such as that witnessed in 1875 during a performance (in Lucknow) of Nil Darpan (The Indigo Mirror), a play exposing the oppression of indigo planters. At the moment when an Indian character attacked the actor playing the British planter who assaulted an Indian actress playing the part of the wife of an indigo laborer, some European spectators rose from their seats and moved toward the stage to stop the performance. Thus the play was disrupted, and to prevent a riot, both the audience and the actors had to be escorted out under police protection. While the staged act demanded recognition of colonial abuse, the reaction of the European spectators represented their anxieties regarding the ability of theater to incite audiences. Such anxieties also derived from the knowledge that theater constituted a significant part of public entertainment and religious festivity in its various manifestations including popular and regional folk theaters such as the nautanki, jatra, tamasha, and burrakatha, and religious-mythological drama such as the ramlila. Additionally, the formation of numerous theater companies by 1876 that traveled to various parts of the subcontinent and, through a complex mixture of imagery, stage design, and dialogue, launched attacks on colonial policies and practices, further sharpened concerns about the genre. As such, they established for the authorities that in reproducing and acting out dramas of colonial exploitation and domination, theater had become an invigorating arena for anticolonial cultural resistance.
Such theatrical campaigns make the question of drama's role in liberation struggles in colonial societies generally, and in India in particular, especially distinctive. For as part of the cultural institutions that play a significant role in mobilizing the populace toward political activism, theater in colonial and postcolonial India has consistently participated in providing possibilities for resistance to and reassessment of ruling ideologies through multiple methods of engagement ranging from mythology, folk forms, reenactment of oppressed histories, revival of historical stories, and hybrid Anglo-European productions. Historiographers of South Asian history and culture have pointed out the need to acknowledge the role of the subaltern in anticolonial resistance movements. As early as 1981, Sumit Sarkar proposed that "[w]ritten literature in a largely illiterate country ... can be a guide to the ideas and values only of a minority." Despite Sarkar's urgings to examine oral cultural forms for the purpose of recovering a "history from below," there have been few systematic attempts to examine the role of theater in order to identify what Ranajit Guha calls "the element of subaltern protest ... [and] challenge the condescending assumption about the passivity of the masses." While the representational project of theater, through its fictional dramatization of events, is not identical to the historiographical project of these historians, who reinscribe into history "authentic" accounts by subalterns themselves, scholars and literary critics have repeatedly underscored the "interpenetration" of historical and fictional writing and argued for the centrality of cultural texts in intervening in discourses of history. As such, their critical insights have also provided careful directions regarding what Gayatri Spivak calls the literary critics' responsibility to "wrench" the subaltern narratives out of their "proper contexts." The project of recuperating alternative histories through cultural texts also necessitates discussion of modes of representation of those histories as well as the ideological function of form, a context in which the representational apparatus of theater acquires special relevance. Theater's visual focus, emphasis on collective participation and representation of shared histories, mobility, potential for public disruption, and spatial maneuverability impart yet another layer to the cultural investments of colonial and postcolonial texts in framing, organizing, and presenting alternative stories. It is precisely the attempt to reach the subaltern populace and solicit its involvement through the efficacy and force of theater that led Ngugi Wa Thiong'o to organize a "people's theatre" in Gikuyu. The power of performance to capture the public imagination and sway public opinion, thus, cannot be minimized. After all, even Plato's Republic works against the power of performance to shape opinion, as opposed to the written word. And the now burgeoning attention to theater movements in colonized societies further attests to the key role of theater as a powerful tool of political engagement. To ignore theater, therefore, is to ignore a large piece of subaltern history. In locating and retrieving experiences and voices of those visibly engaged in dismantling the exercise of power at national, regional, and local levels, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance uncovers forgotten stories of powerful theatrical resistance.
While engaged with Indian materials, this study also addresses important theoretical questions regarding the method of recovering contentious voices from the margins of colonial societies, a concern that necessitates discussions of postcoloniality and the question of genre. On one level, the characteristic features of theater prompt this question. Unlike literature that finds its ultimate expression in print, theater's incompatibility with infinite mechanical reproducibility, its ephemeral and live aspects, cultural and theatrical conventions-such as the folk performances of the jatras, which could last from several hours to several days-pose the problem of documentation and recovery. Yet on another level, concern regarding theater also arises from the dominant trend in colonial and cultural studies to repeatedly turn to print commodities and genres such as the novel for a recovery of dissenting voices. Scholarship exploring the relationship among nationalism, colonialism, and literature has pointed out an array of cultural sites ranging from narrative fiction by the colonized to prison memoirs, songs and poetry, and autobiographies, where marginalized groups produced challenges to colonial domination. Despite such emphases, for the most part, critical assessments of literature as representative source material for retrieving alternative narratives characteristically privilege the authority of genres such as the novel. This reliance on novels as objects of study for the retrieval of anticolonial voices is the result of a number of issues related to literary studies, including the institutional location of postcolonial studies and the publishing industry. Because the novel, as critics have pointed out, became the most important aesthetic form in Europe to emerge in the late nineteenth century, it is (inappropriately) seen as the appropriate form and object of study for an analysis of postcolonial literatures. It was the novel, argues Benedict Anderson, that offered "spectacular possibilities for the representation of simultaneous actions in homogenous empty time." Yet its dominance in Europe does not automatically make it the relevant form of resistance in colonized societies. The rupture that technological innovation created in Europe through mechanical reproduction and print culture cannot be assumed to be the same in all societies.
In most colonized constituencies, the exigencies of the material realities of literacy, the heterogeneous contexts of language, and the vitality of cultural life brought forth an outpouring of energy through popular forms and oral and performative genres. Of these, theater, which constituted a significant part of the cultural life of the "people," functioned as a compelling form of anticolonial expression when it came into conflict with authoritarian structures. However, as Elleke Boehmer argues, because of its "recognizability in the west-a recognizability which has been reinforced by marketing strategies-it is the polyphonous novel above all other postcolonial genres which has enjoyed success in European and American academies. In contrast, poetic genres, [and theater] usually more closely tied to indigenous cultural traditions, are believed not to translate so well." An index of such oversight of "postcolonial literary texts that remain outside the canons already in formation" is the focus of the vast majority of postcolonial courses on the novel, with theater studies comprising only a fraction. Additionally, critical work in colonial cultures reveals this lacuna. To date, in the expanding corpus of critical work on postcolonial literatures, there are only a handful of studies on drama.
This is not to argue against the relevance and importance of the vast body of novelistic writing that attests to the importance of the genre for resistance writing and practice. Yet the flip side of this predominant focus on the novel is that it fosters simplistic claims such as the one made by Kyong-won Lee in a recent article in Cultural Critique. In this otherwise informative article, Lee contends that "[w]riting was for the British a means of containment, of legitimating and naturalizing colonial rule; but simultaneously, writing was for natives a subversive act, namely, a practice of resistance and emancipation. And unlettered natives, by contrast, remained silent throughout." There is no disagreement with the first part of the author's statement. The issue of writing as a subversive activity and a practice of resistance has received considerable attention in postcolonial studies. However, it is the latter part of the statement that becomes questionable, as it presents a crisis of representation in unhistoricized systems of reading, writing, and practice that continue to focus on "written" (equated with "literate") forms to the exclusion of more popular cultural practices. Feeding on this trend construes the unavailability of certain modes of resistance in print as "silence," and forces into obscurity those who did not express themselves through literate forms, did not possess the means to do so, or preferred oral discourses for reasons of social and cultural contingency.
Since theater constituted an important part of cultural life in India from precolonial times-whether performed in enclosed theater houses or on the street, in the form of puppet theater, folk drama, or mythological drama-examining theater as a locus of sociopolitical struggles takes on special significance. While the primacy of theater as a powerful cultural force creates the need to be attentive to the genre, the material conditions of literacy make an examination of theater even more relevant. Even as late as 1911, literacy figures in India were reported as only 1 percent for English and 6 percent for the vernaculars. Hence, in the context of India, the argument regarding the formation of "imagined communities" as a result of print culture remains limited. For it presupposes both a mass reading public as well as mass circulation of the printed text, and in so doing fails to consider that in largely nonliterate cultures (depending upon the language and translatability of texts) printed materials would only reach a small percentage of the educated elite. This is not to minimize the impact of printing in generating new ideas and nationalist consciousness. For even in India, printing by the late nineteenth century had created a new readership and had become an irritant for the colonial government. Yet literacy also restricted the printed text to those who had access to the languages-for as Aijaz Ahmad points out, in India, linguistic fragmentation prevents monopoly of any one language over another. Because English was (and continues to be) the language of the elite, the materials printed in English would remain in the hands of the privileged few. With its wide oral base that offered possibilities for the production, circulation, and consumption of ideas among a large body of people, theater formulated and sustained communities, both literate and nonliterate.
While the distinctive features of drama as a tool of resistance inform this study, the colonial government's attention to theater and its eventual regulation, especially after passage of the Dramatic Performances Censorship Act of 1876, invite further emphasis on the genre. In the presence of theater as a powerful cultural force, colonial authorities resorted to keeping regular checks on drama through the Anglo-Indian press and agents of the state. This becomes evident as early as 1837 in a report about native drama in the Asiatic Journal-an organ of the Royal Asiatic Society:
The puns in the [performances] are numerous, the Hindostaanee language being particularly adapted for indigenous plays upon words, double meaning, and droll associations, and to those who have made any progress in their study of the native dialects, the dramas afford instruction which it would be difficult to obtain by any other means.
The article posits that "the natives take great delight in the dramatic entertainments ... shewing, though in a covert manner, when Europeans are present, the enjoyment produced when these Christian strangers are made the subject of ridicule." Therefore, concludes the article, "The songs, tales, histories, in fact everything connected with Asiatic amusements and literature, are, with few exceptions, more or less licentious." And such a discourse extends to all ranges and varieties of performances. For example, the same article presents the following about the festival of Kali:
In Calcutta ... although very large sums are expended upon the festival in honour of the goddess Kali ... performers of every denomination are admitted, Mussalmanee women, as well as the real worshippers of the goddess; these people, it may be supposed, must be of a very low class and very loose morality, since they can thus lend themselves to the assistance of idolatrous worship, and they are so considered by the whole population.
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