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Farley Richmond is the pioneering figure in Indian theatre scholarship in the United States. He has taught and headed departments at University of Michigan and SUNY Stony Brook and is presently teaching at the University of Georgia. He is trained in Kutiyattam, one of India's oldest classical theatre forms, and is a key figure in bringing it to world attention.
Arnab Banerji is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia. He is currently in India conducting field research for his doctoral dissertation on contemporary Bengali group theatre. He has published book reviews and articles in Asian Theatre Journal and Southeast Review of Asian Studies (SERAS).
Following Sir William Jones's 1789 translation of Kalidasa's Sakuntala, the West came to regard Sanskrit theatre as the highest achievement in Indian drama-now long lost and beyond retrieval. Sylvan Levi in his Le Theatre Indien explicitly states that for him Indian theatre meant Sanskrit drama. He dismissed all other forms of performance in India as "'unsophisticated,' 'indifferent to literary qualities,' and offering 'very little originality'" (Levi [1890] 1978: 4-5). Indian theatre historians adopted the same bias as Wilson, Levi, and another early historian of Indian theatre, Ernest Philip Horrwitz. For example, R. K. Yajnik, in his book The Indian Theatre: Its Origins and Its Later Developments under European Influence, was primarily interested in theatre as literature and judged theatre solely on its literary merit: "Gradually, the dignity of drama as literature and as a fine art is being generally recognized" (Yajnik [1934] 1970: 238). Such a bias was largely prevalent in the West up until the 1960s. This created a huge lacuna in not only theatre studies but also in the assessment of Asian cultures. The inauguration of area studies and the availability of funds for research in India and Asia were instrumental in changing this scenario. The pioneers of Asian theatre studies laid the initial groundwork and inspired generations of scholars to rigorously study Asian theatre. Inspired by one such pioneer, James R. Brandon (see Jortner and Foley 2011), Farley Richmond became a founding figure for Indian theatre scholarship in the United States. Although his initial foray into Indian theatre began with classical Sanskrit drama, his interest soon expanded...