LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 14:4 April 2014
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Decolonizing the Indian Theatre

Bishun Kumar, Ph.D.

Abstract

Decolonization, as a post-colonial movement, attempts to dismantle colonial effects and imperialization of weaker countries. It is a process of uprooting colonial facade coated on the valuable Indian cultural legacy with the purpose to make it invaluable. Theatre is one of the glorious legacies of India. During the freedom struggle, the seeds of decolonization were already planted by the freedom fighters such as Mahatma Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose, Chandrashekar Azad, etc. Gandhi’s battle cry for ‘Swadeshi’, ‘Hind Swaraj’ and ‘Quit India.

Movement’ strengthened the concept of decolonizing the Indian mind. Literary writers such as Tagore, Tendulkar, Karnad, Anand and Raja Rao realized the need to decolonize, re-discover and re-establish the glory of Indian culture, myths, language, religious ethos, democracy and Indian governance, etc., and prepared an international stage for the textuality of Indian theatre. The plays of Badal Sarkar, Vijay Tendulkar, Tagore, and Karnad have dominated the world of theatre and encouraged defiance against the effects of colonialism. Re-inventing Bharata’s Natyashastra raises India to compete with the Aristotelian theatre. Kalidas’s plays have sufficient theatrical flavour to dominate Shakespeare’s plays. ‘Action’ is the very feature of the Western theatre while the very feature of the Indian classical theatre is ‘action with sentiments’ and is an improvement upon the western theatre. In post-modern period, the plays like Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghasiram Kotwal and Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana have evidenced the incomparability of Indian theatre. The present paper aims at finding the effects of decolonization in the Indian Theatre.

Key Words: Decolonization, post-colonialism, assimilation, Natyasastra, poststructuralism, classical theatre.

Decolonization

Decolonization is a paradigm shift from colonial dominance to the freedom of natives, from subordination to co-ordination, from suppression to expression, from imposition of language and culture to one’s own choice, from surrogate Englishman to indigenous man, from forced civilization to ethnic culture, from autocracy and dictatorship to democracy, from domineering politics to the politics of human welfare, from the exercise of the castration of psyche to re-gaining of manhood and many other things. Postcolonialism has studied the threefold exercise of colonial powers. The first is to rule the colonized interpreting them to be savage, uncultured and immature other and yet promised them of better governance and upliftment of the natives. The second is implementation of ‘Macaulay’s Minute’—‘the mission to colonize the mind’ literally to educate the colonized and to civilize them but politically to turn them spiritually handicapped and place them on the position of ambivalence; and the third is to teach them English literature, a model of advanced civilization literally to enlighten the colonized but potentially to castrate them from their spirituality and ethnicity.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Bishun Kumar, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Babu Banarasi Das National Institute of Technology and Management, Lucknow
A constituent College of Babu Banarasi Das University
Faizabad Road
Lucknow 227105
Uttar Pradesh
India
gbishunkumar@yahoo.co.in
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