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Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture,

Theory
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PUNJABI THEATRE: SPACES, ICONS AND

CULTURE
a
Gunjeet Aurora
a
Address: School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi,
Kashmere Gate, Lothian Road, Delhi 11006, India
Published online: 30 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Gunjeet Aurora (2014) PUNJABI THEATRE: SPACES, ICONS AND CULTURE, Sikh
Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 10:2, 271-283, DOI: 10.1080/17448727.2014.941202

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 Sikh Formations, 2014
Vol. 10, No. 2, 271–283, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2014.941202

Gunjeet Aurora

PUNJABI THEATRE: SPACES, ICONS

AND CULTURE

This paper focuses on the development and growth of Punjabi theatre within the socio-cul-
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tural space of Punjab through a study of its different aspects and the directions it has taken
under different icons and times. Modern Punjabi theatre which grew with the encouragement
of Norah Richards, has not only traversed various genres and styles but also been dominated
and defined by iconic personalities such as I.C. Nanda, Balwant Gargi, Gursharan Singh
and Neelam Mansingh. The themes have been equally varied ranging from folk legends
and stories, the trauma of the partition, the post-independence social reality and the
rustic, rural essence of Punjab. This paper deals with the issue of performance and perform-
ance spaces through the work of some of these dominant personalities of Punjabi theatre in
order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the cohesions and divergences that define and
problematize the entity of Punjabi theatre.

Punjabi theatre is a relatively young entity in the Punjabi cultural landscape. The tra-
dition of theatre is not as strongly rooted in Punjab as it is in some other parts of
India, overshadowed as it is by its more popular music and dance. It is not a cultural
giant in the manner of Marathi theatre or a popular folk art as the yakshagana;
however, over the span of the previous century, it has been able to make a respectable
space for itself in the social, cultural and literary spheres of Punjab. This paper tries to
assess the growth of Punjabi theatre through the impact of the times and the personal-
ities dominant in this field. There are many aspects to the rise of this performance art:
the folk performance traditions of the naqqals, kissa theatre and storytelling; the impact
of western dramatic and theatrical conventions; the dominance of literary and theatrical
giants and finally the slow growth of Punjabi theatre spaces today. Some of these aspects
have been taken up within the scope of this paper in order to further a broad understand-
ing of this genre.
There are various controversies and strains of thought in the Punjabi literary acade-
mia regarding the origins and influences on modern Punjabi drama and theatre. Punjabi
drama neither finds its roots in classical Indian drama, nor does it have a very predomi-
nant folk theatre in the tradition of the tamasha, the yakshagana or the nautanki as a
bedrock for its growth. Other than the naqqals, the bhaands and the swaang, Punjab
appears to have lacked a performance culture in the tradition of theatre which was
quite robust in some other regions of India. This fact can possibly account for the

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 272 SIKH FORMATIONS

gap that is visible in the output of literary texts in Punjabi drama and their performance
counterparts which have been far and few in the initial period. It does, however, exhibit
a marked influence of English drama which was taught in colleges and available to the
reading public in Punjab during British rule. Another important influence was the
highly melodramatic Parsi theatre which was popular amongst the people. These,
along with the experimentation and initiative on the part of writers and theatre
patrons, helped provide the initial impetus necessary for the rise of modern Punjabi
theatre.
To assess the rise and growth of Punjabi theatre, it would be helpful to understand
the larger Indian context of the growth of modern drama:

As it was first institutionalized in the colonial metropolis, modern Indian theatre

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appeared to epitomize the conditions of colonial dominance: it borrowed its organ-

izational structures, textual features, and performance conventions from Europe
(especially England), superseded traditional and popular indigenous performance
genres, and found its core audience among the growing English-educated Indian
middle class. But in practice the new form was absorbed quickly into the material,
social, and ideological structures of a complex and literate culture with longstanding
theatrical traditions in many indigenous languages.
(Dharwadker, 3)

Punjabi theatre cannot be said to be rooted in a purely indigenous tradition. Rather,

it represents the cultural syncretism of western/eastern, colonial/post-colonial and
urban/rural traditions. It emerged in the late nineteenth century initially with the trans-
lations of some classical Indian and Western plays, followed by the attempts at drama by
some established writers wherein they wrote plays based around folk legends or the
puranic kathas. The first of such plays is generally considered to be Sharab Kaur which,
though not available as a text, is believed to have been performed in 1895 by the
Khalsa Temperance Society (Sagar, 32). Other plays include those such as Raja Lakhdata
by Bhai Vir Singh (1909); Sukanya, Savitri and Kunal by Brij Lal Shastri and those by Bawa
Budh Singh such as Mundri Chhal and Nal Damayanti, which were written around the
beginning of the twentieth century. In keeping with the temper of the times, these
were historical or religious plays aimed more at a literary readership than a performance
audience. These plays were aimed at propagating and inculcating certain religious and
social values among the people of the time. The writers and the readership were
more of an urban, literate middle class. There are some evidences of some performances
being held around these plays, but nothing very conclusive which can hint at the pres-
ence of a rich performance tradition. Most stage performances were staged by the Parsi
theatre companies which were in sharp contrast to the plays being written in Punjab.
Interestingly, there are none or hardly any plays which deal with the nationalist struggle
or with the colonial rule around this time, which points to the purely literary value of
these plays for a niche reading public.
The beginning of Punjabi drama is being dwelt on in this paper more to point to the
gap that existed in terms of drama and theatre rather than providing a chronological or
historical account of the two. My focus will instead be on the generally accepted three
themes or divisions in Punjabi drama, that is the social, the psychological and the pol-
itical (Singh Punjab di Lok-Nat Parampara, 75), to which I add my own division – that of
 PUNJABI THEATRE 273

performance. These will be viewed in terms of five major figures in Punjabi drama and
theatre. The first being I.C. Nanda who pioneered a new style and direction in Punjabi
drama by introducing social realism which had a huge and lasting influence on sub-
sequent Punjabi playwriting. The second figure is that of Balwant Gargi whose psycho-
logical character studies brought to Punjabi drama and stage plays that pulsated with
emotions and feelings hitherto kept under wraps. He is also important for bringing
to the fore the role of theatre and performance in Punjab. The third is Gursharan
Singh whose nukkad and thara (platform) theatre have been undauntingly political and
radical in their views. Social activism in terms of performance and drama take on a pro-
minent place in Punjab through his plays. The last two are Kewal Dhaliwal and Neelam
Mansingh Chowdhry who have played an important role in furthering a performance
culture in contemporary Punjab.
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There is no doubt that the beginning of Punjabi theatre reveals clearly defined
western influences. Norah Richards, the grand dame of Punjabi drama who initiated
its beginnings, was an Irish lady married to a Unitarian minister teaching in Lahore.
She was deeply influenced by the Abbey Theatre and realism. In 1913–1914, she
initiated a play writing competition aimed at promoting Punjabi drama. What followed
is history. I.C. Nanda won the competition with his one act play Dulhan (1913). The play
deals with the issue of child marriage which is brought to the fore through the forcible
marriage of a 10-year-old girl after her elder sister refuses to marry the much older,
widower groom. The play was staged in 1914 and became one of the most popular
plays in Punjabi drama, not on account of its literary merit but because it dealt with
a contemporary social issue and offered something new. Nanda later wrote the play Sub-
hadra (1920) which deals with the issue of widow remarriage at a time when people
were not very comfortable with the practice.
Nanda’s plays engage with the social issues of the time such as corruption, social
inequality and the position of women with the purpose of creating awareness for
social reform. According to Dr. Atamjit ‘The most important contribution of
Nanda’s plays is that, with them, Panjabi drama is freed from religious and mythological
themes’ (269). While there is an obvious influence of Ibsen’s realism and the Abbey
Theatre in Nanda’s plays, they are given a more Punjabi flavour by his use of the folk
element through songs and other means. His plays also show the ‘conflict between
the old and new generation’, the conservative, orthodox forces as opposed to newer
more progressive ideas and thoughts; however, as Sant Singh Sekhon remarks,
‘Nanda does not intend to overstep middle-class sensibilities’ in the resolution of this
conflict (334). Sabinderjit Singh Sagar also sees the rise of the middle classes as being
crucial for the growth in realism in Punjabi drama, which reflects their concerns,
ideas and values (29). Critics such as Dr. J.S. Grewal also state that the theatre emerging
in the twentieth century had to be studied in the context of the changing social circum-
stances (quoted in Sagar, 32). Sekhon also sees the influence of Shakespeare in Nanda’s
use of ‘irrelevant scenes, songs, dances and buffoonery as comic relief to the melo-
drama’. Looked at from the perspective of performance, these would have been necess-
ary for initiating the audience to the seriousness of social drama by providing some sort
of relief and entertainment. According to Sagar, the subsequent plays written after
Dulhan show a concern with the stage also and are not just literary texts. This preference
for realism as opposed to the earlier plays which revolved around history, religion or
 274 SIKH FORMATIONS

legend also finds its roots in the socio-cultural changes that had made themselves visible
in Punjabi society in the early part of the twentieth century.
The colonial rule had obvious political and economic repercussions which were
reflected in the emerging Punjabi drama and theatre (Sagar, 48). Nanda’s contribution
to Punjabi theatre is immense in terms of ushering in a new style of writing, giving pri-
ority to social issues and also in writing plays that were staged. There are not too many
sources, however, which can indicate the kind of performance practices that were preva-
lent at the time. Some of Nanda’s later plays such as Subhadra made use of overly thea-
trical devices in the style of Parsi theatre and show the influence that Parsi theatre had on
him (Sagar, 65). Critics also point to the repetition of themes that seems to have crept
into Nanda’s plays over time. Sagar sees the lack of a concrete political ideology as the
reason behind this lack of new themes since Nanda could not place the social issues of his
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plays within the context of the changing political and social circumstances (68).
Nanda’s lead was followed by other playwrights such as Harcharan Singh, Gurdial
Singh Khosla, Roshan Lal Ahuja and Gurdial Singh Phul, who according to Atamjit
wrote ‘popular plays’ based on ‘topical social, historical and mythological themes’
wherein a ‘dramatization of Sikh cultural ethos was also a favorite subject’. It was
easy for such populist plays to win the audiences with their ‘religious sentimentality’
(Singh, 270). Khosla founded the Little Theatre Group in Lahore which he subsequently
revived in Delhi also after the partition (Das, 153). Another playwright, Sant Singh
Sekhon wrote plays which were marked by the influence of ‘progressive writing’ and
have come to be known as ‘intellectual drama’ (Singh, 270). However, because of
their overpowering intellectual emphasis, these plays were rarely staged and are more
confined to the literary world. Punjabi theatre which had started with the concerns
of an educated middle class also started moving beyond urban concerns towards rural
themes which were taken up by subsequent playwrights such as Gargi, Santrain Singh
and Gursharan Singh.
With Balwant Gargi, who started writing during the 1940s, we find a more visible
and radical departure coming into Punjabi drama in terms of style, subject and treat-
ment. As opposed to the simple realism of Nanda unencumbered by complex ideologies
or political viewpoints, Gargi represents not only a realism complicated by the changing
contemporary social, economic and political scenario but also psychological mindscapes
of characters who challenge traditional ways of thinking whether they are rural or
urban. He is also credited with having laid the ‘foundations of a mature, professional
theatre in Punjab’ (Singh, 270). According to Dr. Atamjit, for a time, Punjabi
theatre saw a gap between the literary text and performance, but with the arrival of
Gargi, this gap was diminished as his ‘plays are a happy synthesis between the require-
ments of stage and demands of literature’ (271).
A case in point is Gargi’s famous play Loha Kutt (1944) which apart from making a
radical departure from the prevalent style of writing drama also depicted a marked
concern with the actual staging of the play. The play revolves around the lives and feel-
ings of Kaku Lohar, his wife Santi and daughter Baino in a pre-independence village
setting. The play takes up the theme of a woman’s passions, desires and zest for life
which are suppressed by the forces of patriarchy, society and custom as symbolised
by the blacksmith Kaku. The play derives its power from the stark and intense
manner in which the characters emerge as evocative of the challenges and changes
taking place in society where a new generation and mindset struggle to assert its
 PUNJABI THEATRE 275

freedom in the face of rigid customs and ideas. What makes the play so interesting and
unique is that this struggle takes place at two levels, the more obvious and understand-
able one in the daughter who is in love with Sarvan, the son of a landowner, and elopes
with him in defiance of her parents’ unrelenting decision to marry her to a blacksmith.
This is a classic instance of young love asserting itself in the face of opposition and also
portrays the clash of generations as depicted through the powerful dialogues between
Kaku and Baino, and the more emotional but no less challenging dialogues between
Santi the mother and Baino. The other struggle that takes place is in the heart of
Santi after the honour killing of her daughter.
The play reveals that Santi too had once loved someone in much the same way as
Baino but had to crush that love and accept her marriage to Kaku Lohar. The daughter’s
rebellion starts stirring similar seeds of rebellion in her heart in defiance of her oppres-
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sive marriage which has her in an iron-like stranglehold. Finally, she is unable to curtail
her latent emotions anymore and runs away with her former lover Gajjan after much
emotional trauma and marital discord with Kaku. Santi’s own mother we learn had com-
mitted suicide, yet her death is not able to move Santi into rebellion. Instead, this change
comes about when she sees her own self in the dead Baino. The change which the new
generation tries to bring about is able to affect Santi and frees her from her shackles,
allowing her to love and live life freely. As Gargi himself remarks in an interview, ‘I
reversed the process – instead of like father like son, like mother like daughter – I
reversed the hereditary process, from daughter to mother’ (Singh, Re-presenting
Woman: Tradition Legend and Panjabi Drama, 170). Santi and Baino merge as one figure
by the end of the play and it goes to Gargi’s credit that he has been able to handle
the theme in a sensitive manner through characters who are convincing and credible
in their conflicts and emotions.
It would be easy to believe that Kaku Lohar is a typically oppressive male who sub-
jects his wife and daughter to domestic violence and torture; however, Kaku is also a
character that the audience can understand and empathise with. He is not a bad
person, he is simply the product of his age, the circumstances and the profession that
he is born into. As the playwright himself comments,

We do not feel angry with Kaku, rather we can sympathise with him. He is not a bad
person … he is not a villain. He is also the victim of an unrelenting society which
forces him to toil day and night for his bread.
(Sagar, 113, translation mine)

Kaku’s past reveals how his parents died when he was quite young, leaving him to
take on the mantle of running his father’s business. He becomes the most famous black-
smith of the village and as he beats and forges iron he too becomes rigid and hard like
iron. He loves his wife Santi and yet, despite his love, he is unable to desist from his
drinking or his affair with Banso. His life is governed by the unrelenting labour and ded-
ication to his forge, which, he says, has filled him with so much iron that he needs to
drink every night to quell its taste. In his single-minded devotion to his work, he
loses sight of the desires that his wife and his daughter have in their lives. While he
kills his daughter in the name of honour, he is unable to stop his wife when she runs
away realising too late that his hardened soul had driven his faithful wife away and
cost him his daughter’s life. He rejects Banso also and reconciles himself to his forge
 276 SIKH FORMATIONS

into which he inducts his son Deepa. Gargi, thus, presents the delicate and intimate
man–woman as also mother–daughter relation in a rural setting through dialogues
that reveal the emotional conflicts inside the characters.
There is a force of action, a visual language and symbolism that accompany the dia-
logues which stand in sharp contrast to Nanda’s plays. Gargi also uses a lot of folk
musical elements which add to the atmosphere of the play and provide echoes and
foils to the emotions of the characters. From the perspective of performance, the
play provides a lot of emotive possibilities and challenges for the actors who have to con-
vince the audience of their radical viewpoints and feelings. The play is replete with
symbols which subtly point to the characters and their conflicts, the most prominent
being the forge which symbolises the rigidity of custom and orthodoxy, or the sounds
of giddha which are evocative of Baino’s desire to live and enjoy her youth. Most of
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the scenes are powerful and evoke the marital discord purely through the power of
the visual, such as those when Santi, after having fasted for Kaku, is about to break
her fast upon seeing him but despite her remonstrations he keeps drinking after
already having come home drunk. Gargi questions the institution of marriage and the
position of women in the grips of tradition and custom which do not allow them to
love and live on their own terms. According to Atamjit, ‘At a symbolic level, the
play deals with the elemental and primordial in human nature’ (271).
Apart from these themes, Gargi also brings in a political perspective by addressing
the contemporary concerns related to the Second World War and the British hold over
India. According to Sagar, Gargi parallels the characters’ beliefs about the impossibility
of a wife’s disloyalty towards her husband with the equally impossible event of the colo-
niser’s letting go of Punjab (115). However, both these seemingly impossible events do
happen pointing to the sea-changes taking place at both the micro, personal level of a
village blacksmith’s family and the other macro-level political changes sweeping the
nation. Other than the theme of complex relations and a woman’s desires which is
echoed in his one-act play Pattan di Beri, Gargi also shows Marxist and existentialist
themes in his other plays such as Kanak di Balli (1976) and Dhuni di Agg (1976).
Gargi is one of the earliest Punjabi playwrights whose plays were performed and
appreciated at the national and international level. His own involvement with theatre
went beyond writing and ventured into directing, teaching and critical writing. He
also helped in setting up the Indian Drama and Asian Theatre Department at Panjab Uni-
versity. This clearly gave a great fillip to theatre in Punjabi by narrowing the gap between
drama as a literary genre and the theatre, thereby adding to the growth of a performance
culture.
During this time, independence and the accompanying political and social changes
were also reflected in the literature of the time as was the trauma of partition. According
to Atamjit, the partition played a detrimental role in the growth of Punjabi theatre, since
post-partition it was reduced to a ‘localised affair with no distinctive character of its
own’ (276). Post-independence saw a number of changes taking place at the pan-
Indian level as Dharwadker comments:

Since independence, theatre practitioners in India have both embraced and rejected
the colonial inheritance in terms of form, language, ideology, and conventions of
representation. Despite the emphasis on anticolonial critique, their work remains
deeply connected to modern and postmodern Western practices, especially to
 PUNJABI THEATRE 277

specific forms of social-realist, existentialist, absurdist, and Brechtian political

theatre. Through translation, adaptation, and intercultural appropriation, contem-
porary Indian theatre also maintains an extensive intertextuality with classical and
modern European and Anglo-American drama. This multifaceted engagement
with the West coexists with a complicated relation to the classical, postclassical,
and colonial Indian past, both as a cultural possession and an object of knowledge.
(11)

Punjabi drama also shows this experimentation with themes and styles which was
taken further by playwrights such as Atamjit, Ajmer Aulakh, Surjit Singh Sethi and
Kapoor Singh Ghuman. The latter show the influence of Artaud and the Absurd in
their plays and are quite experimental as opposed to the general trend of social
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realism. Other than these, the Indian People’s Theatre Association had a huge influence
on Punjabi drama and theatre as well which not only helped it become a part of the
larger theatre movement in India but also freed it from the ‘inhibitions of academicism
and middle-class prudery’ (Singh, 272). At the level of performance and theatre, people
increasingly started venturing beyond Punjab during the 60s and 70s and gravitated
towards National School of Drama (NSD) which was the hub of theatre activity and aca-
demia. This gave a further fillip to theatre in Punjab which could now turn to the skill of
professional artists such as Harpal and Neena Tiwana, Bansi Kaul and later Gurcharan
Singh Channi, Kewal Dhaliwal and Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, to name a few (Singh,
276).
A name that stands out when referring to the 60s is that of Gursharan Singh or Bhaji
as he was known, whose radical plays were staged all over Punjab and were instrumental
in taking theatre away from the confines of the literary world by making it a part of the
everyday lives of people. His contribution has been immense with over 53 plays as a
director and 9000 shows (Singh). He undauntingly and openly criticised social, historical
and political problems of the times (Dhaliwal Lakeer, 58). His career spanned five long
decades and he was active till the very end of his life when he passed away in 2011. An
engineer by profession, he soon turned to theatre as a medium for bringing about social
change and set up his Amritsar School of Drama in 1964 which was later turned into the
Chandigarh School of Drama. He is also credited with the development of the thara
(platform) theatre and in taking theatre towards rural Punjabi as also promoting
social activism through theatre. As a director, he has directed the plays of almost all
the leading Punjabi dramatists. Gursharan Singh not only took up contemporary con-
cerns and issues but also used Punjabi legends, folk songs, poetry and vaars as themes
and devices in his plays such as Dhamak Nagare Di (1978) which is based around the
legend of Dulla Bhatti and is one of the plays that I will be discussing along with the
one-act play Begmo di Dhee (Begmo’s Daughter). Singh also makes use of stock characters
of Punjabi culture such as Taya (uncle), Shah, Baba, Shahni, Nat, Natni and Amli (addict)
in his plays to bring them closer to the people (Dhaliwal Lakeer, 59).
Gursharan Singh’s plays reveal his leftist inclinations and do not shy away from
addressing sensitive political issues such as Naxalism, terrorism and the Emergency.
His plays are openly anti-establishment as they attack governments for their inefficiency
and malaise. The plays Kiv Kurrey Tutte Pal and Bund Kumre were performed during the
1970s in response to the Emergency, which also led to his imprisonment during the time
as the state was intolerant of dissent or anti-Emergency views. He also wrote and staged
 278 SIKH FORMATIONS

his plays during the 1980s which witnessed terrorism in Punjab and challenged not only
militancy but also the state through his plays such as Hit List. The one-act play Begmo di
Dhee for instance takes up the theme of forcible abduction of women and their being sold
off in other parts of the country during partition and after. He brings in the theme of
terrorism as shown through the AK 47 wielding characters who are present in the back-
ground and petty thugs like Pala Singh who make use of the situation to dominate
women such as the Schoolteacher for their pleasure. The teacher turns out to be the
daughter of one such woman Begmo who was forcibly abducted and sold off by Pala
Singh’s father. The motive is revenge and in a land which is unfortunately infamous
for female foeticide and where girls are considered a burden due to dowry, Gursharan
Singh gives his female protagonist not only a strength of character, but also a fearlessness
which is fuelled by her desire to avenge her mother’s misery. She does not have a name
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but symbolises the educated, working woman of Punjab who is no longer willing to
accept her fate silently but is instead willing to fight for her rights and those of the
oppressed. The play’s climax shows the teacher killing Pala Singh when he tries to
take advantage of her and closes with her speech wherein she compares his death to
the death of all those who try to take advantage of the weak. The play also comments
openly on the terrorist activities of the time and denounces the role of both the govern-
ment and the terrorists. As the teacher comments,
For the common man the division or integrity of a country is not an issue, it may be
so for leaders, but the common man’s fight is for his right to live, for his children’s edu-
cation, the protection of the honour of sisters and daughters studying in schools, that
there be no fear, no terror, no bullets flying, no bombs blowing up … (Singh
Begamo di Dhee, 17, translation mine)
This voice against oppression and tyranny is also taken up in the play Dhamak Nagare
Di, one of his most popular plays which uses the legend of Dulla Bhatti to show the
people’s resistance against forces of oppression as symbolised by the Emperor. The
play transcends its historical and legendary context and emerges as socially relevant
in the contemporary scenario as well. It makes use of folk devices and songs which
are sung by a chorus at repeated intervals and is thus more stylised and formal than
his one-act plays. The language is also more literary and the play displays a wider
range of characters. Unlike Gargi, Gursharan Singh does not complicate his characters
too much, so there is no inner or psychological conflict or insight that we gain in his
plays; however, there is a lot of dramatic action which is carried forward by the char-
acters who are moving towards a definite aim and purpose. The death of Dulla Bhatti is
not seen as a defeat but heralds the rise of many more such young men willing to fight
against oppression. Again the women in the play are not passive characters but equally
active in this struggle, which points to his progressive ideas regarding the status of
women in Punjab. The play was directed by Bansi Kaul in 1978 as part of the Amritsar
School of Drama workshop.
These plays with themes and ideas close to the hearts of the people were performed
in their midst rather than being confined to the city auditoriums; therefore, they
instantly struck a chord with the masses. As a result, Punjabi theatre went beyond
the middle class urban theatre and became a part of Punjab’s rural sensibilities also.
Bhaji’s plays are also marked by a style which, though not very sophisticated, is powerful
and dramatic in its use of the emotive value of everyday speech and expressions. His
plays and style encouraged many other playwrights and directors such as Kewal Dhaliwal
 PUNJABI THEATRE 279

who states that ‘Anyone desirous of understanding the history of Punjab’s economic,
political, social and cultural changes over the past fifty years, should simply read Gursh-
ran Singh’s plays’. (Foreword Begmo di Dhee, 7, translation mine)
Gursharan Singh influenced many younger directors and playwrights, the most pro-
minent being his disciple, Kewal Dhaliwal, a director in his own right. He along with the
popularly acclaimed ‘czarina’ of Punjabi theatre Neelam Mansingh have ushered in a
new performance culture in Punjab by adding to its richness. Both were trained at
NSD and have been instrumental in showcasing Punjabi theatre to national and inter-
national audiences. Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry’s plays are mostly Punjabi translations
of Western and Indian classics such as Phaedra/Fida (1997), Yerma (1991), Kitchen Katha
(1999) or Nagmandala (1989) and Stree Patro (2010). She is known for the synthesis of
Western and Eastern sensibilities that she achieves by recreating the text in Punjabi,
employing the folk element of Punjabi performance culture – the Naqqals (female imper-
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sonators), and by devising a visual language which is rooted in the context of the
regional. Despite these radical changes, the plays do not suffer from a forced contextua-
lisation primarily because the themes remain universal and the expression comes closer
to the cultural reality of the audience. As a director, Chowdhry creates a language of
theatre through which she communicates on her own terms, rather than following
the established pattern of Punjabi theatre. ‘In Chowdhry’s “fusion theatre,” urban
and rural, classic and folk, Indian and foreign and straight and queer elements thus
meet on the robust common ground of the Punjabi language in a frenzy of music and
dance’ (Dharwadker, 118). In the case of Lorca’s Yerma for instance she states that
they hoped a “classic” of world literature would create an organic synthesis between
the text – that is eternal – and allow the content to interact at a deeper level with tra-
ditional forces, creating a vital link with those realities that are beyond geographical cul-
tural barriers (Chowdhry, http://thecompanychandigarh.wordpress.com/yerma/).
She is hopeful that ‘this osmosis will … lead to nationalizing the regional and regio-
nalizing the national’ (Chowdhry). Her theatre group called ‘The Company’ consists of
trained actors and the naqqals and she has been assisted in her productions by the trans-
lations of poet Surjit Patar and B.V. Karanth’s music.
Chowdhury’s plays have also been performed at many prestigious theatre festivals
all over the world. A salient point of her creative genius is that rather than using
Punjabi drama, she uses the Punjabi idiom and the flavours of Punjab as her visual
language. Her plays can be seen more in terms of the experimentation and growth
that have taken place in the sphere of Punjabi performance and are marked by the pres-
ence of strong female characters and a feminine sensibility in a genre and art dominated
by men in Punjab. As Dharwadker remarks,

The success of female directors in creating new modes of performance and appeal-
ing to new communities spectators has diversified a hitherto male-dominated field,
and the resulting focus on female experience by women practitioners modifies the
almost monopolistic control that male playwrights and directors have exercised over
the representation of women on the Indian stage.
(119)

While the locus of Chowdhry’s work has been predominantly Chandigarh, another
city in Punjab has also displayed an equal, if not richer, theatre environment. Amritsar is
 280 SIKH FORMATIONS

a city which has had a close relation with art and culture. The famous ‘Preet Nagar’,
which was envisioned as a utopian community of artists, was set up here by Gurbax
Singh Preetlari. It is no wonder that rather than Chandigarh, Amritsar seems to be a
more thriving place for theatre groups and theatre as is evident from the existence of
theatres such as the ‘Punjab Naatshala’ which has been designed with state-of-the-art
technology and a seating capacity of 225 people. Gursharan Singh’s Amritsar School
of Drama also came up here initially; Kewal Dhaliwal’s Manch Rangmanch is an Amrit-
sar-based theatre group which also has its own Rangamanch Bhawan for staging plays.
Other than these, there are Lok Rangmanch Amritsar, Neeta Mohindra’s Nat Toli, The
Theatre Persons and many more, which seem to be working at their individual level
towards the growth of theatre. The city also has Virsa Vihar and Guru Nanak
Bhawan Auditorium, City Centre, which cater to theatre (Jas, 88).
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Kewal Dhaliwal’s Manch Rangamanch is one of the most successful groups in Punjab
today as it is not only actively staging plays at home and abroad but also hosting inter-
national and national theatre festivals in Amritsar. Founded in 1991, the organisation is
committed to ‘uproot(ing) social evils in order to bring social awareness’ and states that
it aims ‘To promote quality theatre in Punjab by blending traditional theatre forms with
modern techniques and provide entertainment which has a social relevance’ (Home-
page). Dhaliwal has also worked with Bhaji and counts him as an important influence
on his work. It is in the spirit of making drama and theatre a part of social reality
that the activities of Manch Rangmanch also claim to focus upon. The organisation
has so far staged 150 plays and performed 1800 shows both in India and abroad. It
has also held some very successful workshops which have involved theatre artists
from different parts of India and Pakistan (Walia 2008). The national theatre festival
held by the organisation has seen many prominent directors stage their plays in Amritsar.
In January 2012, it hosted the NSD international theatre festival Bharat Rang Mahotsav
which saw many international productions being staged in the city. Some of the plays
which have been staged here are Maavan, Kanak Di Balli, Loona, Blood Wedding, Desire
Under the Elms, Agnikund, Ghasiram Kotwal, Asadh Ka Ek Din, Pinjar and Eh Hamara
Jiwana. These are not only plays in Punjabi but also adaptations, translations and recrea-
tions, thereby representing a wide range of theatrical practices.
Apart from Amritsar, other cities have also seen a growth in theatre activity with the
rise of theatre groups and spaces such as Shiela Bhatia’s Delhi Art Theatre, Balraj Pandit’s
Natakwala, Atamjit’s Kala Mandir, Input Naat Bhawan Beas and the more recent Harpal
Tiwana Centre for Performing Arts. The presence of folk festivals and melas such as those
of Gadri Babas has also helped in the growth of Punjabi theatre. This clearly points to the
long way that theatre in Punjab has come from its nascent beginnings from translations and
simple realism in the early part of the twentieth century to its present status of being a
thriving entity confidently expanding its literary and performance possibilities.
Notwithstanding the success of some playwrights and directors, there is still a lot
that needs to be improved and introduced in Punjabi theatre. Most of the writers,
artists and critics in Punjab bemoan the lack of adequate state support and it is a fact
that governments in Punjab have been more concerned with furthering giddha,
bhangra and music, which are by now so popular that they stand as the visible and,
for some, the only icons of Punjabi art and culture. This popularity, while welcome,
has also sidelined the other arts of Punjab, the most prominent amongst these being
Punjabi theatre which has thrived on its own steam and the hard work and dedication
 PUNJABI THEATRE 281

of some individual writers and artists. It is a victim of red-tapism and bureaucracy and
lacks funds and grants necessary for the growth and sustenance of theatre and artists.
Punjabi theatre lags behind in terms of infrastructure also, as theatre groups need
more space for rehearsals and more technical equipment so as to match the changes
taking place in other theatres of India. Kewal Dhaliwal points to the need for more
theatre spaces and auditoriums, open air theatres in the villages which are necessary
for taking it to the people (76). Even a theatre like the iconic Tagore Theatre is seen
as technically and structurally ill-equipped for the standards of modern productions
(Ahuja 2006). According to Dhaliwal, rural theatre needs to be promoted rather
than propagating the stereotype that the rural is backward and therefore offer them
the same dross (78). He also states that there is lack of good scripts in Punjabi today,
a dearth of plays which explore the different aspects of life and are theatrical. This is
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at present being compensated by adaptations from poetry and novels (89). Even univer-
sity departments such as those of Patiala and Chandigarh have not been able to live up to
the vision that they were set up with. There is a lack of a substantial body of constructive
criticism also in the field of Punjabi theatre and drama. These structural and literary
problems coupled with the fact that it is difficult to define the entity ‘Punjabi Drama
and Theatre’ are factors that can account for the relative lack of popularity and visibility
of Punjabi theatre and drama at a pan-Indian level.
A study of Punjab drama reveals that there is little that holds together the various
plays that have been written as characteristic of Punjabi drama apart from the fact that
they are written in Punjabi. It is difficult to draw any such specific or defining features as
in the case of Marathi theatre, simply because there is no proper or rooted performance
or theatre base that can form the bedrock for these plays. Punjabi drama emerged and
grew around individual writers, who gained iconic status and were emulated till another
such icon appeared on the scene. While Punjabi poetry and prose have been translated,
lauded and included in various anthologies, the same is not the case with Punjabi drama
which rarely or hardly ever finds mention as a powerful literary and performance form
capable of influencing and impacting other theatre practices. The lament that Punjabi
drama and theatre have not been given their due in terms of recognition also arises
on account of the fact that only those individuals have carved their identities as play-
wrights or directors who write or direct Punjabi plays. According to director Neelam
Mansingh, ‘There is no such thing as Punjabi theatre. At best, we are individuals
working in Punjabi language. Beyond this there is no similarity in context or content.
We all work from our own points of view’ (Singh 2012, 23). This view may probably
stem firstly from the absence of a traditional folk base of theatre which could have pro-
vided a sense of collective cultural consciousness to Punjabi theatre and secondly from
the prevalence of varied external influences which different individuals brought to their
own versions of Punjabi theatre, thereby leading to a variety of performance styles under
the bracket of Punjabi theatre.
This paper therefore has focused on individual writers who have given new directions
to Punjabi theatre. These new directions, however, spring more from influences outside of
Punjab which were co-opted and assimilated culturally and moulded around themes emer-
ging from within Punjab. This is not to decry the importance of external influences since
they are crucial for the art and culture of any place to stay alive and vibrant. However, in
the case of Punjabi theatre, these seem to have been more dominant than any indigenous
new direction in Punjabi theatre in terms of writing and performance. There has of course
 282 SIKH FORMATIONS

been experimental writing in Punjabi drama as seen in the works of Surjit Singh Sethi,
Kapoor Singh Ghuman, Ravinder Ravi and Ajaib Kamal, but these are again individual
names which do not point to any concrete or lasting influences.
It remains to be seen what new directions Punjabi theatre and drama will take
further in the process of its growth. It needs to expand its boundaries and scope even
more, and for this it requires state support and a receptive audience both within
Punjab and outside. Nonetheless it is creditable that in such a brief history, Punjabi
drama has been able to keep itself going and carve a niche for itself which is slowly
becoming wider and more popular.

References
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Ahuja, Chaman. 7 May 2006. “How Good is Tagore Theatre?” The Tribune, August 26,
2012. http://www.tribuneindia.com/2006/20060507/society.htm#1
Chowdhry, Neelam Mansingh. “Yerma.” The Company Chandigarh, August 27, 2012.
http://thecompanychandigarh.wordpress.com/yerma/
Homepage. Manch Rangmanch, August 28, 2012. http://manchrangmanch.in/index.html
Singh, Nonika. 23 Jan 2012. “In Need of a Push.” The Tribune, August 28, 2012. http://
www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100123/saturday/main1.htm
Singh, Nonika. 6 Oct 2009. “Agent of Change.” Sikhchic.com, August 28, 2012. http://
www.sikhchic.com/article-detail.php?id=1048&cat=2
Walia, Varinder. 1 July 2008. “Manch Rangmanch: Creating History in Indo-Pak Theatre.”
The Tribune: Amritsar Plus, July 2, 2012. http://www.tribuneindia.com/2008/
20080702/aplus1.htm#7

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Gunjeet Aurora. Address: School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi,

Kashmere Gate, Lothian Road, Delhi 11006, India. [email: gunjeetaurora@gmail.com]
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