Beyond the Hindu Nationalist Frames: Investigating the Inception of a New Language of Theatre in Rabindranath Tagore’s play Sarodtsav

Speaker: Rajdeep Konar

Research Scholar, School of Arts and Aesthetics

Venue:  Committee Room, Central Library, JNU

Date and Time: 6^th February 2016 (Saturday), 4:00 pm

Abstract

As theatre and performance studies scholar Sudipto Chatterjee would rightly argue in his work The Colonial Staged: Theatre in Colonial Calcutta, the Hindu past both in its historical and mythological dimensions, had become a customary presence in the Bengali theatre of late 19 th and early 20 th Century. Both, the commercial theatre as well as the parallel theatre that existed at elite houses like Jorashanko Thakurbari were drawing on the Hindu past, be it via its historical figures or mythological narratives. This practice was feeding into the conservative Hindu Spiritual­Nationalist project of the period as elaborated by Partha Chatterjee in his The Nation and Its Fragments. In his earlier plays written and performed at Jorashanko, Rabindranath Tagore too, was often found to draw from the reservoir of cultural icons of the Hindu past, un­problematically. However, a distinct change in the nature of his treatment of the past can be perceived in the second set of his plays written after he arrived at Santiniketan. The two phases are separated by a time of ten years (1897­1908) ­ the last play of the first set being Baikunther Khata (1897) and the first play of the second set being Sarodotsav (1908). Sarodotsav written and designed to be performed in form of an Utsav or festive­play is based on a loose quasi­mythical structure. Tagore however chooses to destabilise these mythological signifiers both in the play text and the performances. He puts the mythical past constantly into play in an almost Bakhtinian spirit of revelry and thereby breaking it and rewriting it to give shape to a new language of theatre. In this short essay I would like to analyse the play Sarodotsav in its text as well performance to revisit this point of inception and delineate its modalities.

In Search of the Real: Writing the Past in Colonial India

Abstract

During the colonial period, writing the past became central to the self-hood of colonial subjects. The past came to be written in different genres and its ethics and protocols were widely debated in the public domain. My paper deals with one aspect of this debate – the meaning of historical reality. I shall explore this with reference to the work of the Hindi novelist Vrindavanlal Verma (1889-1969) and a few other Hindi littérateurs of the late colonial period. Their work on historical subjects – poetry, play, novels – betrays an underlying tension between the positivist certitude about empirical facts and the romantic desire for a past that might not be accessed by positivist methods. I shall investigate this tension by examining their choice of form for narratives of the past and their use of oral and written sources for reconstructing the past. Falling outside the domain of professional history-writing, their works are indicative of the wider cultural tensions central to many post-colonial societies. Belying any totalizing narrative of modernity or colonial difference, they draw our attention to multiple oppositional discourses and practices within the West and the non-West and the complex web of interconnections between them.

Speaker:

Akash Bhattacharya

Research Scholar, CHS, SSS, JNU

Venue:  Committee Room, Central Library, JNU

Date and Time: 9^th August 2014 (Saturday), 4:00 pm