But We Will Not Give Up the Categories! (De)valuing the Categories in South Asian Performance Traditions (original) (raw)

Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre

Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre, 2014

Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that defi ne nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and imaginations. International in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces 'Culture' which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and treats 'Performance' as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations.

Theatre Research and Publication in India: An Overview of the Post-independence Period

Theatre Research International, 2010

This article offers an overview of theatre research and publication in India. It comes in two parts. The first examines theatre research post-independence (1947) up until the 1990s – a period of new economic thinking and a liberalization of sociocultural values. The second focuses on theatre research and publications from 2000 onwards, identifying ways in which more recent scholarship has been concerned with the concept of modernity in theory and practice; has begun to address questions of form, style, space and performativity; and has explored urgent social issues. What emerges in this overview is a feel for how complex the field of theatre research is in India given its multiculturalism. In concluding it draws attention to current and future challenges for theatre and theatre scholarship posed by issues such as globalization, communalism, terrorism and religious fundamentalism.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography

2020

The objective to set up archives dedicated to collecting, collating, and researching performance practices in post-independence India, in order to rewrite colonial histories with a vision for the future, was a project initiated by the new state, then subsequently forgotten. However, this is an apt entry point to open up critical debates about how the post-colonial euphoria urged new scholarship and how, at the core of this, theatre and performance practices would be redefi ned. In tracing the history and politics of discourses around performativity and theatricality in the United States and Europe, Janelle Reinelt draws attention to the fact that the applications of the terms theatre and performance resonate with "local struggles" and enable "a challenge to these discourses in light of an increasingly urgent imperative to think and resituate performance theory in relation to our contemporary transnational situation" (2002 , 201). She argues that theatre and performance are not mere linguistic distinctions but are rooted in diff erent conceptual foundations with political implications. In post-colonial contexts, particularly in India, debates have focused on the dichotomy of theatre as a colonial import along with a wide range of heterogeneous local practices referred to as performance. Reviving, recovering, and archiving performances was therefore a much-anticipated and pedagogic post-colonial project of rewriting histories. As has become apparent, this was not merely in the realm of idealism, but ultimately had long-term implications for the discipline of theatre and performance studies in the Indian as well as other post-colonial contexts. Thus, in view of the colonial experience and its aftermath, the binary of theatre and performance collapsed into reductive categories layered with diff erent meanings than the ones prevalent in Western academies. This aff ected the course of the discipline in India and provoked crucial debates around secularism vis-à-vis communitarianism. Signifi cant in this context, I argue, was an intervention in the original binary perspectives, which often extended or changed meanings. The idea behind landmark debates is the hypothesis that while theatre histories can be researched and written, the study of performance practices cannot follow the critical historical method that is widely practised in the discipline. Instead, ethnography was seen as the means to research, archive, and write on performance practices. Meanwhile, theatre, which continued

Performance its archive and historicity notes on intercultural critique

Performance Making and the Archive, 2021

Performance, its archive and historicity: notes on intercultural critique 'Intercultural theatre', which came to be known as a form of performance during the postcolonial period, is one of those rare performance genres that dwells between binaries of partisanship and loathe within theatre scholarship even today. This form, which invariably includes the work of 'western' theatre practitioners, borrows from theatrical, ritualistic or performative traditions that are usually not from their own continent (performances that borrow from traditions within the same continent although different cultures are not usually called 'intercultural theatre'). 1 One of the main criticisms against this form has been its failure to comprehend or rather ignore the cultural and historical context to which the 'source' form belongs. 'Intercultural theatre' has been accused of appropriation or wrongfully taking away that which can also be called 'stealing' 2. Rustom Bharucha one of the critics of this form goes to the extent of saying that it emptied 'source culture'-s like India of its cultural tradition while filling the 'target culture', which in this case to him is the 'west'. This paper tries to understand the dynamics of such 'appropriation' or