| The last time anyone in the West wrote a history of Bengali theatre was in 1931, when Prabhu Charan Guha-Thakurta published The Origin and Development of Bengali Drama from London. A large part of the book was about the history of the Western-style Bengali theatre that emerged as a hybrid form in nineteenth century Calcutta. Since Guha-Thakurta's pioneering work, little has been produced on the subject in the West, although much has been written about the subject in both Bengali and English in Calcutta. While there is a definite lack of literature about nineteenth century Bengali theatre in the West, what we have in the East is repetitive and mouth mere compendia of facts and figures. There is dire need to take a critical look at the history of the Bengali theatre and connect it to the context of colonialism and the issues surrounding it.;The dissertation narrates in meticulous detail the history of Western-style Bengali theatre--its evolution from imitating the colonial English theatres of Calcutta to form a self-identity--from 1795 through the end of the nineteenth century. It is structured as five informative and analytic essays that imbricate into each other, and reconstitute the act of writing performance history as a strategy for exploring issues that are normatively situated beyond the limits of performance. As a result, we get two performances--one, the immediately recognizable "staging" of the normative, socially cognizant performance (for example, the theatre); and, two, the larger theatre of a colonized society, its culture and history. In this way, we are looking at performance history itself as a "performance" within the even larger performative contingencies of history. So, it becomes not merely a case of reading the social politics of nineteenth century Bengali theatre in British Calcutta, but the theatre of the social politics of the empire itself. The performative paradigm turns into derivative discourse to lend newer, more layered and textured meaning to socio-historical interpretation. Theatre history becomes a metonymic site for socio-political history. |
