Postdramatic Theatre and India: Theatre-Making Since the 1990s

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None of the Indian theatre-makers consciously built their works on the Euro-American model of the postdramatic, but many have used the theatre model in innovative, transnational ways. Essentially, they have adapted an originally European theatre paradigm to a different historical context and added new dimensions to it by cross-pollinating it with indigenous cultural forms. The main aim in doing so has been to invigorate the language of Indian urban theatre that had turned stale under the stronghold of realism growing out of colonial stage practice and homogeneous under the decolonizing drive of the theatre of roots movement post-independence. Theatre in India today is rich in cross-media performance, theatre solos and monologues, pure spatial experience, plurimedial work, durational reading, real-time action, and so on. The book balances theory, contextualisation and praxis, building a hitherto non-existing archive of scholarship in Indian theatre within a postdramatic framework, and an argument for its place within contemporary Indian theatre. Interspersed throughout are Indian theatre-makers opinions about their contemporary performance theory and practices vis-a-vis those in Europe and the US.

Author Bio

Ashis Sengupta is Professor of English at the University of North Bengal. A recipient of Fulbright visiting scholarship (2006), he has published widely on South Asian and American theatre. His most recent publications include two edited books: Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and a play anthology, Islam in Performance (Bloomsbury, 2017).