Dr Prateek

This article investigates the crucial role of Brechtian aesthetics in
representing the voice of Aboriginal Australians. It examines the
theatre of Wesley Enoch, an Aboriginal Australian director and
playwright, and argues that Enoch’s 2013 adaptation of Bertolt
Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, performed at the
Queensland Theatre Company, Brisbane, formed an instance of
resistance against epistemic hegemony. The first part of the article
examines the device of the heckler, central to the writings of
Australian Aboriginals, by focusing on Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry
Pickers (1988) and shows how the device functions to articulate the
peripheral voices of the Aboriginal Australians. The second part
demonstrates how Enoch employed the heckler trope through his
dramaturgy to protest against the Australian nation state. Broadly,
it illustrates how Enoch’s production used Aboriginal aesthetics to
voice Aborigines’ challenge to established norms, an act that
remained independent of Brechtian theatre’s previous uses in the
Australian context.

This article demonstrates how Covid-19 transformed the performance aesthetics of ancient theatre traditions in India. I draw primarily on the October 17, 2020 performance of the Ramlila, the folk staging of Ramayana, produced by the Shri Ram Dharmik Leela Committee, Tri Nagar, one of the most popular theatre troupes in North Delhi. In the first part of the article, I explore the metatheatricality of the production by analyzing its camera-centric aesthetic while demonstrating how the performance divested gods of their power. In the second part, I investigate how the performance’s paratextual thematic bestowed power on humans. Broadly, I show that the Covid-era performance of Ramlila marks a break from some of the traditional conventions of performance aesthetics in India.

This article explores an unusual connection between the poetics of ancient Sanskrit drama and Hindi comics. This interconnection highlights how satire was used in Hindi comics after India’s twenty- one-month Emergency was declared from 1975 to 1977. I argue that Hawaldar Bahadur comics negotiate with the ancient Vidushaka tradition of Sanskrit drama to overcome the angst of the post-Emergency world. In the first part of the article, I analyse the function of Vidushaka, a humorous character considered to be the personification of laughter, by first looking into its earliest example, the Sanskrit satire play, Bhagavadajjukiyam (The Ascetic and the Courtesan). I then study the modern rendering of the Vidushaka tradition through an analysis of Habib Tanvir’s 1975 production of Charandas Chor (Charandas the Thief). In the second part of the article, I demonstrate how Hawaldar Bahadur of Manoj comics deploys the idiom of Vidushaka to create a new model of resistance, which in turn critiques the mainstream discourse of resistance – that is, of the ‘angry young man’ popularised by Bahadur of Indrajal comics. Overall, I examine satire in Hindi comics to understand how humorous characters have contested the dis-course of an autocratic nation-state.

This article explores the poetics and politics of the Indian aunty. I argue that the aunty in the movie The Lunchbox (2013) negotiates with the ancient Sanskrit tradition of akashvani (celestial voice). In the first part of the article, I track the aunty’s trajectory from a loan word in Hindi to a political statement. I then study the aunty through an analysis of Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox to demonstrate how the aunty figure rewrites Bollywood’s eroticizing gaze and challenges unpaid female domestic labor. Overall, I examine how the Indian aunty offers another idiom of resistance against the discourse of patriarchy.

This article analyses Deepan Sivaraman's 2012 production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1876) and argues that the production's scenography evoked scepticism toward the Indian nation-state. This scepticism came as a direct consequence of the scenography's ability to alienate the audience through the formation of dark ecological environments, with the help of three characters: the elf princess, the son of the elf princess, and a hell hound, a concept invented by Sivaraman while adapting the verse play of the Norwegian playwright into Malayalam and English. The dark ecological aesthetics of the production functioned like Bertolt Brecht's Gestus and Verfremdungseffekt, offering a dialectical point to the audience to reterritorialize their understanding of the Indian nation-state and its ecology. In the first part of the article, I analyse the Indian dramatic form of bhana used by Sivaraman to articulate the discourse of what Timothy Morton calls ‘dark ecology,' and argue that the bhana's satirical narrative remained central to writings of Otherness. In the second part of the article, I demonstrate how the production mounted imbricated narratives of ecological awareness on the stage through the figures of the elf princess, her son, and a hell hound that relentlessly witnessed the capitalist journey of Peer. By offering an active agency to these figures through the scenography, Sivaraman's production interrogated the Indian nation-state's definition of ecology. Significantly, in its choice of a non-human witness, the production destabilized the human centre and pointed towards a post-human ecological turn. Although Ibsen's aesthetics have been used countless times in India to stage the anxieties of the female gender and minority communities, this was the first time they were employed in India to stage dark ecology; Sivaraman's production began where Ibsen's play ends. In the first scene itself, the audience members found themselves face to face with Peer's spirit - rather than the flesh and blood Peer of Ibsen’s play - begging God for another chance at life so that he could become a better man. When Peer is offered a second chance, he uncannily uses it to become a non-resident businessman involved in mining. The performance showed how scenography could be used to articulate a dark and depressing ecological awareness.

This article investigates the crucial role of operatic theatre tradition in representing the mountain culture of Uttarakhand, a region that became the twenty-seventh state of the Republic of India in 2000. Uttarakhand culture is extremely diverse, so in this article I solely examine the performance practices of the Kumaoni community and, in particular, a Kumaoni opera called Rajula Malushahi, which is based on a folk mountain legend. This article problematizes and expands the range of influence of mountain cultures by drawing on a version of this story by Indian director Amit Saxena, performed on 17 January 2017, at the Sri Ram Centre for Performing Arts, Delhi. The first part of the article traces the emergence of the Kumaoni opera tradition and its ability to articulate the voice of these mountain people. In the second and third parts, I examine the dramaturgical practices of Rajula Malushahi and demonstrate how it diverged from mainstream Indian dramaturgies, and how this voiced the anxieties and dilemmas of peripheral mountain cultures. These strategic diversions reimagined the idea of mountains and the female gender. I argue that Kumaoni operatic theatre tradition, which is based on folk narratives, continually connects mountains, human bodies and modern environmental discourses, and thus offers a critique of entrenched modern divisions between humans and non-humans.

This paper probes the crucial role of Brechtian aesthetics between the late 1960s and early 1970s in creating a new strain of political theater in India. I argue that the formation of this new variant was the result of the creation of a “theatrical idiom” of Gestic Realism through the recycling of Brechtian aesthetics. I examine one such instance of Brechtian aesthetics—that is, of Gestus, a Brechtian device that establishes a nexus between body, history, and society. Besides underscoring the role played by Gestic Realism, I further propose that the device of Gestus is dependent on the social and political contexts of the target audience, which means that the Indian version of Brechtian theater will continue to swerve into something new and different from its European counterpart. Drawing upon the performance of Teen Take Ka Swang (The Threepenny Opera, 1970) by the East German director, Fritz Bennewitz, the paper problematizes and expands the purview of Brechtian scholarship in India. Broadly, the paper examines the capacity of recycling to articulate the discourse of the periphery.

This article traces the cultural history of the hookah in Indian culture from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, focusing on its imbrication in cultural practices and cultural narratives. In proximity with thing theory's idea of the agency of "chance interruption" to disclose the "physicality of things" (Brown 4), I argue that chance interruptions of monetisation turned hookahs as "objects" into hookahs as "things." In the first part of the article, I trace the origin of the hookah culture and then examine one such interruption of monetisation-the patronage system of the Nawabs-that made the hookahs's thing status evident and recognisable. Moreover, in the first section, I further elaborate Bill Brown's use of the term "chance interruption" and how it links to the "physicality" of the hookah in the wake of the Nawabi system. Interacting with the posthuman idea of how the material environment forms and transforms human beings, I explore the thingness of the hookah in the context of a "bazaar of thingness" (Appadurai 18) present in India. To underline this metamorphosis, in the first part of the paper, I demonstrate two things: a) an object becomes a thing through "a sequence of encapsulations" (Connor 18); that is, the production of a "thing" is directly associated with the production of a chain of significations connected to the thing itself, and b) thingness is not inherent in things but it is the effect "of recognitions and uses performed within frames of understanding (which may be markets or ad hoc negotiations of action or desire or bodily skills as much as they may be intellectual formatting or sedimented codes)" (Frow 285). To put it differently, an object evolves into a thing if it is humanly recognised. Broadly, I argue in the first section that transcultural encounters are responsible for "thingifying" hookahs. In the second part of the paper, I analyse the second interruption of monetisation, the mercantile system of the British. Furthermore, I contend that by employing the thing status of the hookah in his play, The Play of the Hookah Smoker: A Farce in Four Acts, Thakur Jagmohan Singh (1857-1899), an Indian playwright writing on the cusp of modernity, has created one of the first myths of Hindi nationalism. This myth feminises and demonises Bengalis, speakers of the Bengali language, so that Hindi can be extolled as the national language of the country.

This article examines the theatre of Habib Tanvir, a playwright, actor and director from India, and through this analysis demonstrates the emergence of the new definition of 'passion as resistence' in the 1970s in India. Although the idea of 'passion as resistance' arose during the colonial period as Indian writers assimilate this meaning. In his postcolonial theatre, Tanvir presented the viewpoint of the people against the established urban definition of acting that privileged the 'voice of the Artist' over the 'voice of the people' (to borrow the terminology from Rustom Bharucha), as well as the 'vachik abhinaya' (acting through speech) over the angik abhinaya (acting through bodily movements).

If the “unconstitutional” inclusion of Manipur in the Indian union in 1949 left the Manipuris in shock, then the implementation of the 1958 Indian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act left them speechless and traumatized. In response a new type of Manipuri theatre emerged, which we call “neues theatre.” We examine the reasons for the rise of “neues theatre.” We locate the narrative of a recent Manipuri play Mythical Surrender (2011) in a social and cultural context, explain the ontogeny of Manipuri theatre, and present a gendered analysis to support our views on the impossibility of the unification of North India and the North East.