Content area
Full text
Political theatre has often relied upon farce and satire to make a veiled but effective critique of political trends. In contemporary India, however, political theatre is facing a new challenge in trying to find ways to "out-farce" a political arena that already has become inherently farcical There are two special challenges addressed here. The first comes from the state of Kerala in southwestern India, where a self-styled progressive state government in the hands of the Communist Party has come under attack by critical playwrights for ossifying into orthodoxy and complacency. The second challenge centers on the difficulties faced by playwrights who have turned toward so-called indigenous or folk models of theatre to voice their critiques. Since the national government in Delhi has tried to utilize the symbols of an invented indigenous past to establish its legitimacy, critical theatre often finds itself applauded and even co-opted by the very political forces against which it has directed its dissent. This article examines the difficulties of establishing a `pure" space for political theatre in contemporary India and offers as a conclusion a possible path toward resolution.
Darren C. Zook teaches the history and politics of South Asia at the University of California, Berkeley.
In her rich and moving memoir of India from partition in 1947 to the present, Qamar Azad Hashmi, mother of slain theatre-activist Safdar Hashmi, lamented the tendency of revolutionary and politically active artists, particularly those on the left, to allow themselves to be co-opted into the central areas of power against which they once resisted. During the freedom struggle, she notes:
Those who were poets and writers directed all of their anger against foreign [British] rule in their verses and songs; others orchestrated their resistance in the newspapers and articles; scientific and literary societies were founded to bring the common people and the artists together in one place; the suffering of the people was articulated through the theatre and forcefully made known to the people; those who participated in the struggle and those who were their leadersbefore partition they used this entire array of means. [But] several members of the left-wing groups who had participated in the freedom struggle and who had spent time in British jails-after India became free, they accepted copper plaques...