Book Smart

A period of reassessment followed India’s independence from Britain in 1947. Increasingly, the new nation turned to its artistic communities to help foster and nourish its emerging sense of itself as a complex, diverse and multilingual culture. Dharwadker’s book discusses the emergence of modern urban theater in India as an important cultural form transformed by new conditions of writing and performance in the post-independence period.

“The theater of the colonial period was mainly a commercial venture grounded in music and spectacle,” Dharwadker says. “The arrival of talking films in the 1930s quickly made it obsolete. The Indian People’s Theatre Association, a nationwide, left-wing theater movement, dominated performance in the 1940s. Then, during the 1950s, a new generation of playwrights and directors influenced by the modern Western theater of Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw and Brecht, as well as by traditional Indian forms, redefined theater as a serious but noncommercial art. That conception has persisted for more than five decades now.”

Dharwadker notes that contemporary Indian theater hasn’t been the subject of much scholarly inquiry — yet. “I quickly discovered after beginning the project that there were no real models to follow, and very little material available in conventional venues such as libraries or archives. I realized that I would have to invent my own research methods.”

Those methods included first-person interviews with playwrights, director, actors and other theatrical practitioners.

“That contact has led to long-term friendships with a number of them, and that makes teaching and writing about their work even more fascinating,” she says.

Indeed, three leading Indian playwrights — Vijay Tendulkar, Rahul Varma and Mahesh Elkunchwar — have held short-term residences at UW–Madison within the last few years.

She adds that Western students often find the contrast between Indian and American approaches to theater and art striking, and consequently, challenging.

“Since Indian drama is written in languages other than English, it is deeply immersed in the cultural worlds of those languages. On the other hand, the subject matters of home, family, gender, society and nation have strong commonalities across cultures, especially in a performative art like theater,” she says. “I find it remarkable that my students have embraced both the similarities and the difference between who they are and what they read. Perhaps the strongest lesson of Indian theater for a capitalist culture is that art manages to survive and even flourish under impossible economic conditions because of artists’ talent and determination,” she says.

This semester Dharwadker is teaching a combined graduate/undergraduate course in postcolonial theater.