The Colonial Staged: Theatre in Colonial Calcutta

Shayoni Mitra

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 28,
Number 3, 2008, pp. 562-565 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v028/28.3.mitra.html

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 562 discovered, translated, and marshaled by Virani.
The book is refreshingly accessible to lay readers,
as it employs mainly English translations of for-
eign titles and terms, with simplified translitera-
tions where necessary, and it contains an accessible
glossary of technical terms and easily read figures,
tables, and maps. The last third of the book will be
of keen interest to specialists, as it includes com-
e prehensive notes with complete academic translit-
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Co Arabic sources, a transcribed index, and a full bib-
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     Harvard University
doi 10.1215/1089201x-2008-032
The Colonial Staged:
Theatre in Colonial Calcutta
Sudipto Chatterjee
London: Seagull Books, 2007
160 pp., $84.95 (cloth), $29.95 (paper)
Analytical dramatic histories in English are still
relevantly uncommon in the Indian subcontinent.
Most often it is playscripts that are regularly circu-
lated as literature. Their nonfiction counterparts,
biographies and autobiographies of famous actors
and directors, fall into the iconic, emulative modal-
ities of memoir readership. With a more sinister
bureaucratic purpose, chronicles of “Indian” per-
formances, plays, and groups survey the field as pur-
veyors of (high) culture. What are repeatedly elided
in all these renditions are the performative lives of
plays on the stage and the socioeconomic enablers
of theater making. It is not that critical thought has
not been applied to performance traditions in the
subcontinent. It is that, until recently, even until
the last decades of the twentieth century, analysis
of Indian theater happened regionally in the ver-
nacular. This is especially remarkable in a region
like Bengal, where not only many of the debates
and discussions surrounding the theater but also
on occasion the plays themselves were in English,
from the twentieth century on. Sudipto Chatterjee’s
The Colonial Staged intervenes to fill precisely this
lacuna. As a much-needed, insightful, chronological
look at the formations of modern Bengali theater at
the height of British influence in colonial Calcutta,
it is therefore indispensable to any theater scholar
interested in the region.
As the title suggests, tracing the history of the
Bengali stage in the colonial era is not so much about
how the physical performance stage evolved and was
configured under colonial influence. Although ven-
ues did change drastically, from the erstwhile impro-
vised outdoor, courtyard, or living room theaters to
professional auditoriums, they were in fact symp-
tomatic of a larger shift—the identity of the theater
maker himself (for the ones defining and negoti-
ating the parameters of colonial self-identity were
always male). Chatterjee expertly unravels in each
instance of dramatic utterance the politico-social
underpinning of the playwright, director, and actor
drawn together in their collaborative enterprise.
Theater, and in particular under British occupation
theater in one’s mother tongue of Bengali, becomes
a particularly potent medium of expressing, chal-
lenging, and changing collective identity.
Colonial theater, as even this briefest of intro-
ductions indicates, was then by its very nature a
hybrid performance. Chatterjee deploys Michael
Taussig’s theorization of mimesis and alterity as
the containing and illuminating framework for
his book, where the colonial subject, through his
attempts at mimicking the civilizational/civiliz-
ing cultural genres of the colonizer, succeeds most
strongly in highlighting his own difference from his
colonial master. The case of performance becomes
most poignant in this overall ambition since racial-
ized bodies onstage are the surest marker of the
futility of camouflaging otherness. In an early pro-
duction, when a “native” did appear in an expatriate
British performance of Othello in Calcutta in 1848,
as “the real unpainted nigger” with his racial speci-
ficity erased save for his dark skin (59), the burden
of this taxonomic symbology was too much even for
this admittedly talented actor. While reviewers alike
remarked favorably on Bustomchurn Addy’s acting
skills, the audacity of the enterprise did not cease to
gall. Even the most benign English reviewer could
not rid himself of condescension while ultimately
suggesting that theater, in its superior Western
garb, was simply beyond the ken of the native. The
Bengalis then, summarily excluded from the Brit-
ish theater of Calcutta, had no choice but to devise
their own theater.
This process was not always as progressive
or redemptive as the exercise suggests. Chatterjee
deftly points out that the players at the vanguard of
this self-fashioning were the babus—the elite, edu-
cated, wealthy class of feudal Bengal whose patterns
of dependence on, admiration for, and/or opposi-
tion to their colonial masters were very complicated.
A straightforward repudiation of British influence
in the cultural realm, often rather obdurately disas-
sociated from the political and economic realm, was
neither possible nor desirable. Even when the the-
ater passed on from the exclusive purview of babu-
dom to a more egalitarian, “secular” (119) domain of
professional theater without patronage, it retained
many of its upper-middle-class reservations. Ben-
gali theater could never quite rid itself of its literary
aspirations. For instance, even though the greatest
outpouring of dramatic writing happened in the
pulp form as short playlets, characterized here as
the “Battala” plays after the book market they were
most readily available in, these popular, kitschy plays
were never produced on the stage (148). A more
compelling example of the omniscience of the writ-
ten word, especially in the colonizers’ language, is
the illustrative case of the play Neeldarpan (1860) by
Dinabandhu Mitra. The play was ruled seditious to
British rule, but it was the English translator, James
Long, who was incarcerated for it and not the origi-
nal Bengali playwright or any of the actors involved
in its first production in 1873 (222–26).
Yet it would be incorrect to surmise that the
nascent modern Bengali theater was propelled by
the word alone. While Shakespeare and Kalidasa
have been the two abiding touchstones for dramatic
greatness (126) in Indian theater,1 Chatterjee shows
that it was at the structural level—the well-made
five-act play—that Bengali drama borrowed the
most from its counterparts. Even the Sanskritic tra-
dition invoked by the increasingly strident nation-
alists as part of their glorious past to refute claims
of native indolence and ignorance was not unprob-
lematic. The newly excavated and interpreted texts
came to the Bengali babus precisely through colo-
nial intervention—through the work of orientalist
scholars. Even the Natyashastra, the authoritative
treatise on Indian aesthetics, was not commonly dis-
seminated until the twentieth century. Any claims by
the Bengalis of an unbroken cultural heritage from
the time of Kalidasa were patently constructed. To
complicate this question of theatrical influences was
the ever-present Bengali folk form the jatra. A melo-
dramatic, hyperbolic, musical, and widely popular
genre of narrative drama, the jatra was deemed
unfit for the modernist task the babus were under-
taking. Originating in the lower classes, it was too
crass for the babus’ newly constrained realist tastes.
Yet it was to the jatra that Bengali playwrights often
unconsciously turned for their style of prose. It was
inspiration for their desire to incorporate music
into their plays, for their abiding penchant for
melodrama, and often for models of characteriza-
1.  See Vasudha Dalmia, Poetics, Plays, and Performances: The Poli-
tics of Modern Indian Theatre (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2006), 28.
tion such as the sutradhar, or storyteller, who is both
commentator and actor. Put simply, the precepts of
563
Western realist theater, notions of Sanskrit drama,
and techniques of rural jatra are all equally respon-
sible for the hybridity of modern Bengali theater.
Chatterjee starts and ends The Colonial Staged
by grounding his work in present-day, postindepen-
dence Calcutta. His introduction is an evocative
thick description of the Minerva theater, the site
Book Reviews
of the first National Theatre of 1873, in its present
state of utter decrepitude. The neglect surround-
ing the decaying and abandoned facade that Chat-
terjee finds at the start of his fieldwork becomes a
metaphor for the steep archeological task he faces
as researcher/analyzer of the Bengali theater. The
“Foregone ‘Conclusion’” returns again to the pres-
ent moment to ask what performance can do in the
changing scenario under the unrelenting onslaught
of globalization. Making a number of connections
to contemporary political situations ranging from
farmer suicides to the controversy over government
land acquisition in Nandigram, West Bengal, Chat-
terjee shows the relevance of his brand of theater
scholarship, one that interrogates social and eco-
nomic factors in cultural formation, to a Bengali,
and by extension Indian, identity. After all, perfor-
mance has always been a means of moving people,
and we can only learn from past instances to suc-
cessfully negotiate the current climate.
Chapter 1, “The Staging of the Nation: The
Russian, the Babu, and the Moor,” faithfully docu-
ments the first spate of Western-style theater in
Calcutta from the late eighteenth century. These
were English drama meant exclusively as a tool and
product of nostalgia for the expatriate British who
had recently come to this newly declared colony.
By the turn of the century, however, the colonials
developed more than a f leeting interest in dra-
matic performances and even as amateurs began
to seriously immerse themselves in the art of the-
ater making. For instance the approval and (long-
distance) collaboration of the famed British actor
David Garrick were the much-publicized facts of a
badly needed validation from the motherland. The
performances themselves moved away from farces
to more serious drama, with Russian orientalist
Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedev attempting the first
“Indian” drama—an adaptation and interpretation
of his recent translations from Sanskrit. At this stage
natives were only permitted to watch some of these
productions, contingent of course on their wealth
and status. The chapter deftly recreates the early
fascination, debates, and discussions surrounding
 564 the British-style theater through a rich tapestry of
theater reviews from newspapers. Chatterjee is able
to extrapolate from these often-prescriptive pieces
the essential racial anxieties surrounding perfor-
mance in the colony.
Chapter 2, “Mise-en-(Colonial)Scène: The-
atre of the Bengal Renaissance,” looks at the defini-
tive moments of Bengali identity formation flowing
e from what has been called the Bengali Renaissance.
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religion. Propelled by the emerging egalitarianism
     of Europe, a humanitarian ethos underpins the
first Bengali scripts in the Western mold. Dutta’s
most acclaimed work, Sarmistha, is loosely inspired
by (perceived) notions of Sanskritic mythology but
is ultimately a paragon of the colonial encounter.
Chatterjee in this chapter situates the generative
tension of the Bengali Renaissance, especially as
characterized by the theater, in the contradictions of
the Benagli babus’ position over the Great Rebellion
or the First War of Independence (1857, designated
as the Sepoy Mutiny by the British). The ignominy
of colonial subjecthood clashed with the dearly held
belief by the Bengali’s in the benevolent mission of
the British, and Bengali theater as a result became
a hybrid that articulated native identity but through
the lexicon of a colonial cultural language.
These contradictions become clearer with
time as the varnish of colonial admiration begins
to wear thin. Chapter 3, “Twixt the Twain: From
Colonial Jatra to Native Theatre,” recounts the pro-
cess of the secularization of performance with its
subsequent commercialization. As professional Ben-
gali theater takes hold in the guise of native theater
groups writing for, constructing, and operating their
own theater, the secluded world of babudom with its
British inculcations is traded for a panoply of influ-
ences, which begins to include the commonplace
jatra. Girish Chandra Ghosh embodies this amal-
gam of genres, as he was influenced in equal part by
the workings of Western touring drama companies
and the spirit and idiom of the local bazaars. He
was a prolific playwright as well as a talented actor
and director, credited with the increasing empha-
sis on performance training. Ghosh authored more
than forty full-length productions, which run the
gamut of generic possibilities from mythic drama
to social reality plays. Chatterjee captures well the
larger imperatives of Bengali drama in the late
nineteenth century by bringing the religious and
reform movements into the fray of the discussion.
Ghosh was hugely influenced in later life by the
charismatic priest Ramakrishna, a devotee of the
Goddess Kali, and his particular brand of religios-
ity through bhakti to the divine couple Krishna and
Radha. Chatterjee shows dramatic denouement to
be not only a technique of storytelling inherited
from the West but also an indigenous mode of
reconciling questions of spirituality and mortality.
Modern Bengali drama, even in its secular garb, is
infused in many complex, intricate, and sometimes
troubling ways by the Hindu pantheon.
While religious reform was a fiery debate in
Bengal in the late nineteenth century, another cause
gaining currency was widow remarriage. Chatterjee
charts the dense and convoluted terrain of women’s
rights in colonial Bengal in chapter 4, “Mother(s) of
Invention: Prostitute-Actresses and Late-­Nineteenth-
Century Bengali Theatre.” He anchors his exposure
of the contradictions of women’s uplift in the intro-
ductory moments of women on the Bengali stage.
While the innovation was not without its detractors,
the debate was finally won (for women did become
an abiding feature of Bengali professional theater)
by touting a version of the argument for women’s
emancipation in other realms. Women not only
added significantly to the dramatic realism of the
stage, a generally accepted aim of Western drama
then, but as recruits from prostitution they also fit-
ted into an ideology of social betterment. This argu-
ment is but lip service to the women, like Binodini
Dasi, who actually appeared on stage, devoting their
lives to performance. Chatterjee intertwines the per-
sonal saga of this famed actor in being denied her
own theater with the larger problematics of rights
discourse and the patriarchal stewardship of iden-
tity formation in Bengal. Women, in this reckoning
as actors, are the objects and never the subjects with
agency in the colonial theater.
Chapter 5, “The Nation Staged: Politics and
the Nation in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengali
Bourgeois Theatre,” charts the rise of social drama
in the late nineteenth century among the middle-
class playwrights and theatergoers. Plays like Neel-
darpan that adopted a rigorous ethic of mirroring
societal evil effectively highlighted the injustices of
particular classes of people, like indigo plantation
workers, indentured laborers, and mineworkers. But
as Chatterjee shows, theirs was often empty rhetoric
since they were unaccompanied by a call for radical
exchange. They were, in other words, pure descrip-
tions of social reality without any analysis of the
mechanisms of social injustices—a classic ploy of
assuaging bourgeois guilt. And they invariably never
reached the audiences they wrote about but, rather,
stayed moribund in the middle-class audiences who
were complicit in the systemic inequities. Yet these
plays could not escape colonial censure. The “mir-
ror” plays eventually brought about the infamous
Dramatic Performances Censorship Act of 1876.
Read another way, the chapters of The Colonial Staged
are an account of the buildup to this one drastic act
of colonial intervention in the process of native cul-
tural formation. The act betrays through its resort
to legislative action the dangers of letting colonial
subjects articulate their own identity. As Chatterjee
amply substantiates, the history of modern Bengali
theater is a slow panorama of the native using the
tools of the master in a fitful fight against him.
Colonial Bengali theater then is a hybrid form
that challenges by its very existence the fundaments
of colony. While The Colonial Staged is successful in
its analysis of the genesis of modern Bengali drama
against a backdrop of social, cultural, and political
changes under the British yoke, the book can be cri-
tiqued for its insular narration of the development
of theatrical technique in India as a whole. The
reader cannot help but often wonder what was hap-
pening in the rest of the country at the same time.
While Calcutta’s position as the British capital in
India in the nineteenth century amply justifies Chat-
terjee’s choice of focus, he gives the city an almost
hermetic air. Colonial Calcutta was interfacing not
only with its own immediate hinterland but also, by
virtue of its being a crucial port, a confluence of
many other regional and international influences.
In the dramatic sphere a contemporary can be most
easily found in the Parsi theater, centered in Bom-
bay but drawing the entire country into its force
field through its extensive tours. From these differ-
ent performative genres, what if any were the cross-
overs into Bengali theater? Also, although Chatter-
jee’s extensive research into his subject is evident,
he should be alerted to the pitfalls of the cult of per-
sonality that often holds Indian theater scholarship
in its sway. His chapters can sometimes be read as a
consecration of the trio of Dutta, Ghosh, and Dasi;
it is important to reserve this canonizing impulse
for a more critical approach to their contributions.
Yet Chatterjee’s mastery in drawing a vivid
picture of nineteenth-century Bengali theater is
undisputable. Such an account was unavailable to
readers in English until the 1997 translation of Shei
Shomoy (Those Days) by the famed Bengali novelist
Sunil Gangopadhyay, in which he provides a rich fic-
tive account of the same period Chatterjee studies
in his work. Binodini Dasi’s memoir, translated by
2.  Sunil Gangopadhyay, Those Days, trans. Aruna Chakravarty (New
Delhi and New York: Penguin, 1997); Binodini Dasi, My Story and
My Life as an Actress, trans. Rimli Bhattacharya (New Delhi: Kali
for Women, 1998).
Rimli Bhattacharya, has been available only since
1998.2 The Colonial Staged is therefore invaluable to
565
historians of Bengali drama for its gold mine of fac-
tual information drawing on meticulous research.
The author’s analysis of the sociopolitical field in
which performance is imbedded makes the book
a useful addition to the library of any South Asian
scholar interested in the modalities of cultural for-
mation in the Indian subcontinent. And perhaps
Book Reviews
most important, because of Chatterjee’s convincing
and unrelenting theorization of Bengali theater as
a hybrid entity, The Colonial Staged in its refusal to
succumb to the polarization of master and native
narratives serves as an important interjection in the
field of postcolonial studies. Modern Bengali drama,
because of its inception in colonial times, refuses, as
Chatterjee shows us, any easy categorization.
Shayoni Mitra
New York University
doi 10.1215/1089201x-2008-033
The Scandal of Empire:
India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
Nicholas B. Dirks
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006
xviii + 389 pp., $27.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper)
Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The School for Scan-
dal details the fabulous deceptions and witticisms
of English high society in the late eighteenth cen-
tury, a time of unprecedented scandal during the
growth of capitalism. Sheridan was a close friend of
Nathaniel Halhed, orientalist par excellence, and
a contemporary of Warren Hastings and Edmund
Burke, the main actors in Nicholas B. Dirks’s The
Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial
Britain. Dirks frames his book in dramaturgical
terms befitting the time period, such as the epic
roles of Burke and Hastings and the twists and turns
in the performances of those justifying empire. At
times, he mentions Sheridan, the dandy of late-eigh-
teenth-century British theater, as a part of his vast
drama of Scandal. Sheridan’s play, written and first
produced in the late 1770s, illustrates Dirks’s con-
tention that scandal thematically encapsulated the
time period. Sheridan’s characters show an England
full of unscrupulous businessmen, suitors, playboys,
moneylenders, and questionable women reflecting