Performance Making and the Archive

This book investigates theories and practices shaped by a performance’s

relationship to the archive. The contributions in the volume examine how
the changing nature of performance practices has made it imperative to
understand how the archive and archival practices could add to the perfor-
mance work. They explore a variety of themes, including artistic engage-
ment with the archive in both conceptual and material terms; physical,
virtual and digital forms; publicly and privately collected; oral, written and
digital ways; or organized and unorganized collections. Finally, the volume
examines how archives are modelled on existing structures and the ways in
which they can be brought into discourses and practices of performance
making, through engagement and contestation.
A novel approach to performance theory, this volume will be of great
interest to scholars and researchers of performance studies, media and cul-
ture studies, studies of technology and art as also literature and literary
criticism.

Ashutosh Potdar is a scholar and creative writer writing in Marathi and

English. He is Associate Professor at FLAME University, Pune, India.

Sharmistha Saha is a theatre practitioner and researcher based in Mumbai.

She is Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay,
Mumbai, India.
Performance Making and the
Archive

Edited by Ashutosh Potdar and

Sharmistha Saha
First published 2023
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Performance making and the Archive (Conference) (2018 : Mumbai,
India) | Saha, Sharmistha, editor. | Potdar, Ashutosh, editor.
Title: Performance making and the archive / edited by Sharmistha Saha and
Ashutosh Potdar.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Conference
proceedings of ‘Performance making and the Archive’, held on March
16-17, 2018 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022025235 (print) | LCCN 2022025236 (ebook) | ISBN
9780367195601 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032340913 (paperback) | ISBN
9780429281921 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Performing arts archives--Congresses.
Classification: LCC PN1575.5 .P54 2023 (print) | LCC PN1575.5 (ebook) |
DDC 026.792--dc23/eng/20220623
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025235
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025236
ISBN: 978-0-367-19560-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-34091-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-28192-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Contents

List of Figures viii

Notes on Contributors xiii
Foreword: Performance, Memory and Absence xxii
SUNDAR SARUKKAI
Introduction xxix
ASHUTOSH POTDAR AND SHARMISTHA SAHA

PART I
Concepts, Histories and Performances 1

1 Archive and Performance; Madness and Revolution:

On Marat, Sade and Theroigne de Mericourt 3
SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY

2 Interpreting Material 11
ASHUTOSH POTDAR

3 Performance, Its Archive and Historicity: Notes on

Intercultural Critique 25
SHARMISTHA SAHA

4 Invisible Histories: Tracing Displacement, Bondage and Resistance

through Adivasi Songs and Performance Practices in Wayanad 46
DEVIKA N. MENON

5 Materializing Site 63
NELA MILIC

6 From Oblivion to Acceptance: Sadir Dancer Muthukannammal’s

Presence as a Challenge to Representations 71
A. P. RAJARAM

7 Archiving for New Emerging Disciplines 83

SAMIK BANDYOPADHYAY
vi Contents
PART II
Dramaturgical Shaping and Re-shaping 93

8 The Dramaturgy of the Archive: An Interview 95

FREDDIE ROKEM

9 Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case 102

ZULEIKHA ALLANA

10 Documentary Theatre and My Performance Practice 127

ANUJA GHOSALKAR

11 Archiving Tamasha and Lavani through Performance 137

SHARVARI SASTRY AND SAVITRI MEDHATUL

12 Narratives of Existence: Witnessing Lived and Imagined Realities 150

HINA SIDDIQUI

PART III
Design and Directorial Methods of Creation 161

13 C’est la CEPT: Archiving the Archive 163

ISHITA JAIN, HARSH BHAVSAR AND GAVIN KEENEY

14 Inside Out 193

ARAM LEE, ANAIS BORIE AND OTTONIE VON ROEDER

15 When I Performed as a Worker as an Artist 207

AMITESH GROVER

16 On Aaydaan 225
SUSHAMA DESHPANDE

17 Conversation with Sunil Shanbag 230

SUNIL SHANBAG

PART IV
Many Methods, Multiple Archives 241

18 Archiving Performing Arts in India: An Overview 243

SHUBHA CHAUDHURI

19 Filming the River: Notes and Thoughts from The Chronic Life
Film Edition 257
CHIARA CRUPI
 Contents vii
20 No Context: Curatorial Writing, Contemporary Dance and the
Archive 273
VICTORIA MOHR-BLAKENEY

21 30 Minutes about Mumbai’s Theatre History 287

RAMU RAMANATHAN

Index 297
Figures

9.1 The ruins of Sikandar Bagh Palace showing the skeletal remains
of rebels in the foreground, Lucknow, India, 1858 102
9.2 Kavya Murthy and Bhagwati Prasad. Seen at Secundrabagh.
Zuleikha Chaudhari in collaboration with Raqs Media
Collective 103
9.3 From the album evidence in the case of Ramendra
Narayan Roy 106
9.4 Installation photograph. Mumbai Art Room 107
9.5 Rehearsing the Witness. Bhibabati Debi (Mallika Taneja),
Kumar Ramendra Narayan Roy, plaintiff (Saif Ali) and
lawyer A. N. Chaudhary (Prayas Abhinav) with Zuleikha
Chaudhari. Mumbai Art Room 108
9.6 Ext LXI. Photograph of the second Kumar in dhuti and coat
taken by P. W. 788 Mr Winterton. [Evidence in the case
of Ramendra Narayan Roy ‘Kumar of Bhawal’] 109
9.7 Auditioning the Plaintiff: The Bhawal Court Case.
Kochi Biennale 2016 114
10.1 An archival black-and-white image from the iconic
Marathi play Kichakvadh 128
10.2 An archival black-and-white image from the play Bhaubandaki 129
10.3 A female performer, wearing black, is standing in front of a
mirror, reading a letter 129
10.4 The female performer is standing with her back to the audience;
she is holding a piece of paper and reading from it 130
10.5 A female performer is standing in front of a projected archival
image of her great grandfather 130
10.6 A female actor is holding a piece of paper in one hand, and the
other is on her hip 131
10.7 A female performer, wearing black is standing, facing the
audience, reading a letter. OR A female performer, wearing
black is standing, facing the audience, reading a letter in a
sharp beam of light that looks a like a corridor 133
10.8 A female performer, wearing black is standing in front of a
projected archival photograph. She is intercepting the beam
of the projector light and part of the projected image is
captured on her hand 134
 Figures ix
13.1 The dance begins… 167
13.2 On 30 January 2017, standard A1 foam-core boards intercept
projected images from the 1960s 167
13.3 A badminton game and the cleaning of the Badminton
Building proceed on parallel planes 168
13.4 A ballet of boards ensues 168
13.5 Students engaged in the badminton game and cleaning
intercept their own images 169
13.6 Ghosts of CEPT’s past emerge from the shadows 169
13.7 The dean of architecture rides through on a broom 170
13.8 Death pays a visit and then departs 170
13.9 The session ends with his departure 171
13.10 Moses intercedes on Doshi’s behalf 171
13.11 On 3 February 2017, a banned image of B. V. Doshi
(“Moses”) is projected 172
13.12 The image sponsors a reading with accompaniment
by classical guitar 172
13.13 The text read concerns ‘gurus and gopis’, adoration and
institutional memory 173
13.14 Institutional memory in this case includes repressions
(the banned image) 173
13.15 The reading is punctuated by two interludes on guitar 174
13.16 Students in the audience have no clue what is taking place 174
13.17 The reading continues with an interpretation as to why
Michelangelo gave Moses horns 175
13.18 The reading closes with comments from a Greek chorus of two 175
13.19 A wordless lecture on classical Indian architecture is staged … 176
13.20 On 4 February 2017, a lecture without words is performed 176
13.21 Music includes Dido, A. R. Rahman, and Sigur Rós 177
13.22 Images of historic Indian architecture serve as the backdrop for
a ritual dance of hands and bodies 177
13.23 Gestures comprise an elaborate secret language of assignation
and affiliation 178
13.24 The images are intercepted with a lace curtain found on the
streets of Ahmedabad 178
13.25 Perspective, parallax and anamorphism hold sway 179
13.26 Relics from the past sponsor a kite-flying contest … 179
13.27 On 5 February 2017, an indoor kite flying contest is staged 180
13.28 Music by Dirty Three, Ocean Songs (1998), echoes within the
Badminton Building 180
13.29 Archival images from the 1960s of faculty and students playing
games of chance form a backdrop 181
13.30 The tournament is judged by King Sachin Soni, his throne an
heirloom wooden stool from the 1960s 181
13.31 The word “SILENCE” is written with yellow
plastic tape on the floor … 182
x Figures
13.32 On 7 February 2017, a rumour that Doshi will stop by
spreads like wildfire 182
13.33 Students arrive at the Badminton Building around 6:30 pm and
await his appearance 183
13.34 And wait 183
13.35 And wait 184
13.36 And wait 184
13.37 And wait 185
13.38 The Badminton Building resembles a temple or a mausoleum 185
13.39 A young lady performs a dance between candles set between the
letters S I L E N C E 186
13.40 The hall and the mood darkens 186
13.41 Boredom and impatience set in 187
13.42 Several students, pacing, decide to leave 187
13.43 Others are hanging on, catnapping, awaiting Doshi’s arrival 188
13.44 It becomes unbearably tedious and pointless 188
13.45 A feeling of expulsion from the Garden of Eden sets in 189
14.1 A map of the Zuiderzee region. On the map, the two dikes,
separating the North Sea from the Ijsselmeer, and
the drained land are highlighted 194
14.2 The outdoor museum of the Zuiderzeemuseum with historic
Dutch buildings creating a village setting situated next to
the water 195
14.3 Two elderly women wearing traditional Dutch clothes. They are
sitting underneath hung laundry stitching or sewing
some textiles with their hands 195
14.4 A historic black-and-white photograph from 1980 in which a
historic wooden cheese warehouse gets transported with a truck
through a contemporary neighbourhood. People are standing
around and watching 196
14.5 An exhibition setting of the Zuiderzeemuseum with a painting
and objects related to the fishing culture in the region 196
14.6 Oil paintings hanging in the depot of the Zuiderzeemuseum.
The theme of the oil paintings is the building of the dikes and
the transformation of the sea into an inland lake 197
14.7 A set of traditional porcelain, ceramic and wooden daily objects
positioned on a shelf in the depot of the Zuiderzeemuseum 198
14.8 One of the artists holding a vehicle which transports one of the
museum’s objects on a pillow inside of a glass box. The artist
and the vehicle are standing in one corridor of the depot of the
Zuiderzeemuseum, left and right surrounded by shelves filled
with preserved historic objects 199
14.9 Two members of the artist group with the vehicle transporting
the museum’s object on a boat 199
14.10 The vehicle with the museum’s object on a promenade with the
scenery of the Ijsselmeer in the background 200
 Figures xi
14.11 A small model of a flag attached to a vehicle. The graphic shows a
calendar page with a photo of the historic flag from the depot of
the Zuiderzeemuseum, a short description text about the object,
an illustration of the flag attached to a vehicle and a date. 200
14.12 A small model of a coin presented on a vehicle. The graphic
shows a calendar page with a photo of the historic coin from
the depot of the Zuiderzeemuseum, a short description text
about the object, an illustration of the coin presented on a
vehicle and a date. 201
14.13 A small model of a book presented in a glass box on a vehicle.
The graphic shows a calendar page with a photo of the historic
coin from the depot of the Zuiderzeemuseum, a short
description text about the object, an illustration of the
presentation of the book and a date 201
14.14 A bar chair made out of bended steel tubes standing in a
3D scanner 203
14.15 A 3D model of a new interpretation of the bar chair which got
modified with different 3D elements 203
14.16 A video capture which shows a person carrying a box out of
the entrance door of the Bröhanmuseum 204
14.17 An art nouveau bowl placed on a commode surrounded by a
lamp, a textile and two small boxes with a copperplate
engraving in the background 205
14.18 One member of the artist group standing behind a vehicle
carrying a yellow plastic object that looks like a sun. The artist
and the vehicle are standing in a corridor of the depot of the
Museum der Dinge surrounded by cabinets filled with preserved
objects 205
14.19 The yellow plastic object from the depot of the Museum der
Dinge outside. In the background, you can see social housing
with many satellite dishes attached to the balconies. The yellow
object and the background both relate to the German-Turkish
culture in Berlin 206
15.1 Artist Amitesh Grover in an IT worker outfit at the company
workplace 210
15.2 Artist Amitesh Grover working at an assigned company desk.
The laptop issued by the company comes installed with worker
surveillance software 210
15.3 Indoor view a multi-storeyed IT Company tower where Grover
developed his project 211
15.4 Top view of the landscaping outside IT company 211
15.5 City of Noida as seen from the company’s terrace 212
15.6 From the actual 15-page-long document outlining the company-
employee contract, with this specific page describing
the company ownership of all digital data produced by
the employee 213
xii Figures
15.7 Scan of a page from the employee contract authored by Grover 214
15.8 Screen grab from Grover’s Data Messiahs (single-channel film)
showing a real-life company employee laden with thousands of
empty employee IDs 216
15.9 Image from Grover’s photoseries Kafka’s Castle showing a
real-life employee holding a placard with the word ‘data’ seen
through the CCTV surveillance network installed inside
the high-security work areas 218
15.10 Image from Grover’s photoseries Kafka’s Castle, showing a
real-life employee holding a placard with the word ‘delete’ seen
through the CCTV surveillance network installed inside the
high-security server room at the IT company (one of 65
low-resolution photography prints on sunboard) 219
15.11 Future is Abolished – A spontaneous Must-Help-Desk
set up by the artist for HCL employees. 220
15.12 Screen grab from Grover’s Data Messiahs (single- channel film)
showing a real-life company employee dancing for the camera 221
15.13 From the Grover’s business card series, where cards carry
cryptic information about the nature of service provided.
In this image, a business card carries the sentence,
“Something is missing here”. 222
17.1 Backdrop of Cotton 56, Polyester 84 232
17.2 Scene from Dakghar 237
19.1 The scenic space of The Chronic Life 266
19.2 One side of the audience 267
19.3 The 180-degree rule in relation to the scenic space of
The Chronic Life 267
19.4 Different shots, crossing the line, of the same scene 268
19.5 A close-up of the same scene (Iben Nagel Rassmussen) 269
19.6 A musical scene (from the left: Roberta Carreri,
Tage Larsen, Sofía Monsalve, Julia Varley) 269
Contributors

Zuleikha Allana is a theatre director and lighting designer based out of New
Delhi and Mumbai, India. She is also a Visiting Faculty (scene work) at
the Dramatic Art and Design Academy, New Delhi. She was awarded the
Sangeet Natak Academy, YUVA PURUSKAR in 2007 and Charles
Wallace India Trust Award, 2001/2002. Chaudhari majored in theatre
directing and light design at Bennington College in Vermont, United
States, in 1995.
Samik Bandyopadhyay is a scholar, editor-publisher, translator, lexicogra-
pher, bibliophile and critic of the arts. He has been Rabindranath Tagore
National Fellow at the School for Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, NU, New Delhi (June 2015–May 2017); Visiting Professor,
SAA, JNU, New Delhi (2005–2012, 2014); Visiting Professor: ICCR
Chair at the Department of Theatre Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
(April–July 2014); delivered the Donald Charlton Lecture, Warwick
University, November 2010; Visiting Faculty, Annual Film Appreciation
Course organized by FTII of India and the NFAI, Pune, 1985–2011,
2016; Vice-Chairman, National School of Drama (2006–2010); Member
National School of Drama Society (2005–2014). He lectured extensively
in the United States, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and England; gave a series of
lectures on Indian cinema, Pittsburgh University 1988; gave a seminar on
Indian Culture, Brown University, Providence, 1990. He is Founder-
Member of Natya Shodh Sansthan, a theatre archive, library and resource
centre in Kolkata since its inception in 1981 and founder-trustee of the
Boi-Baibhav Foundation, a registered non-profit trust in Kolkata (estab-
lished 2005) for preserving, cataloguing and facilitating for the specialist
research scholar, rare, personal collections of books and documents, with
special emphasis on social sciences, critical theory, film, theatre, the arts
and performance studies. He has been Regional Editor, Oxford University
Press, Calcutta, 1973–1982; Founder-Editor, Seagull Books, 1982–1988;
and now associated with Thema, a small publisher based in Kolkata
(established 1988) as Founding Editor. He was Producer Emeritus, All
India Radio and Doordarshan, 1989–1992; Research Professor, Asiatic
Society, Calcutta, 1995–1997; Member, General Council, Sangeet Natak
xiv Contributors
Akademi, New Delhi, 1983–1993, and Central Board of Film
Certification, 1970–1980; Member, 14-member Indian Delegation to the
East-West Theatre Seminar organized by the International Theatre
Institute, New Delhi 1966; and Panellist at seminars on Indian Theatre
as part of Festivals of India in USSR (Tashkent 1987) and Germany
(Berlin 1992). He has translated plays and fiction by Badal Sircar and
Mahasweta Devi; contributed introductions to plays by Vijay Tendulkar,
Mahesh Elkunchwar, G. P. Deshpande and Satish Alekar; and recon-
structed for publication film scripts for films made by Shyam Benegal
and Mrina Sen. He contributed several essays in numerous film and the-
atre periodicals in English and Bengali.
He has interviewed Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Mahasweta Devi, Richard
Attenborough, Natalie Sarraute, Salman Rushdie, Derek Malcolm,
Reinhard Hauff, etc., for Film Society periodicals and All India Radio
and Doordarshan, with several of these interviews later included in
books.
Shubha Chaudhuri has a PhD in linguistics. She has been with the Archives
and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology of the American Institute of
Indian Studies since its inception in 1982 and Director since 1985. In the
field of audio-visual archiving, her major interests have been database
applications, research archives and ethnomusicology; issues of intellec-
tual property rights; and community archives. She has presented papers
at many national and international venues in these areas. Her fieldwork
has been in Western Rajasthan in India and more recently in Goa and
Kutch. She has co-authored with Daniel Neuman and Komal Kothari
Bards, Ballads and Boundaries: An Ethnographic Atlas of Music in West
Rajasthan and co-edited with Anthony Seeger “Archives for the Future:
Global Perspectives on Audio-Visual Archiving in the 21st Century” and
Remembered Rhythms: Essays on Diaspora and the Music of India. She
has served as Vice President of the International Association of Sound
and Audio-Visual Archives and the executive board of the International
Council of Traditional Music, as well as Council Member of the Society
of Ethnomusicology. Shubha Chaudhury has been a consultant for the
Ford Foundation in the area of audio-visual archiving for projects in
India, Indonesia and Sudan. She has been active in holding training
workshops for archiving and ethnomusicology. As a trained facilitator of
UNESCO, she has been active in training workshops for the implementa-
tion of the 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention in Nepal,
Bhutan, Cambodia and Lao PDR.
Chiara Crupi is a filmmaker, director and editor with a degree in Modern
Literature, a master’s in film and audio-visual business management edit-
ing and dubbing and PhD in digital technologies for performance
research (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy). Her main current research
is related to digital images and theatre. She has worked for different
companies directing live multimedia events and creating multimedia
 Contributors xv
projects, documentaries, short films, promotional videos, theatre perfor-
mances and workshops. Since 2010, she has worked at Odin Teatret Film
and Odin Teatret Archives as a filmmaker, and she is also responsible for
training projects and live-streaming activities. Since 2016, she has col-
laborated with the Art History and Performing Arts Department of
“Sapienza” University, Rome, Italy. She collaborated in projects of
Education and Training with the professors Ferruccio Marotti
(“Sapienza” University of Rome), Nicola Savarese (Roma Tre University
of Rome), Clelia Falletti (“Sapienza” University of Rome), Mirella Schino
(Roma Tre University of Rome), Luca Ruzza (“Sapienza” University of
Rome) and Valentina Valentini (“Sapienza” University of Rome). She has
also led a workshop for students of Roma Tre University in creating a
documentary entitled “Documenting theatre” (Roma Tre Film Festival
2013). Last project: workshop in editing (“Sapienza” University of
Rome) in Valentina Valentini’s educational courses, January 2017. She
has taken part in several seminars over the years and led internships and
workshops for students (in Italy and abroad) about “theatre and film”,
theatre and digital technologies, cinematic language, shooting and edit-
ing techniques.
Soumyabrata Choudhury is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and
Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has authored Theatre,
Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship of Sovereignty, Power
and Truth and articles on ancient Greek liturgy, the staging of Ibsen,
psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, Schiller and Hegel.
Sushama Deshpande’s passion and her way of communication is through
theatre. Working in theatre for more than 40 years, she loves writing,
directing and acting in plays. Sushama enjoys presenting strong women
personalities on the stage. She has performed Savitribai Phule’s life
through Whay mi Savitribai, the life of folk artists of Maharashtra and
the Tamasha women in the play Tichya Aaeechi Goshta, women saints of
Maharashtra through their poetry in Baya Daar Ughad and plays with
sex workers, My Mother, The Gharwali, Her Maalak, His Wife and Hum
aur tum sab. She also directed a play with the LGBTQ community high-
lighting their issues titled To, Ti, Te (He, She, It). Aaydaan is based on
Dalit writer Urmila Pawar’s autobiography. Sushama works with theatre
artists and enjoys doing plays with the community. Sushama learned
techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) with the late Augusto
Boal. She loves working with rural women through TO techniques.
Anuja Ghosalkar is a Bangalore-based artist. Drama Queen, her documen-
tary theatre company, a first of its kind in India, focuses on personal
histories and archives to extend the idea of theatre to create audacious
work. Drama Queen’s debut show, Lady Anandi, was written while she
was an artist-in-residence at Art Lab Gnesta, Sweden. In the past, Anuja
has worked at India Foundation for the Arts, Experimenta, in curating
xvi Contributors
and teaching cinema and as an independent researcher with University of
Westminster. As a Sarai fellow, she documented the oral narratives of her
grandfather, the oldest living make-up artist in India. Her newest perfor-
mance, The Reading Room, blurs the boundary between audience and
performer, where ten strangers read personal letters alongside public
ones. As artist-in-residence at Srishti Institute of Art Design and
Technology (December 2017), she conceived a site-specific performance
project called Dream Walkers. She is an Art Think South Asia Fellow
(2017–2018).
Amitesh Grover is a performance-based artist in New Delhi, India. He cre-
ates work across art disciplines to produce performances, texts, objects,
images, installations and films. His recent works include Back to Work
series (2017), Mourning series (2016), Sleep series (2014). Some of these
works are on display as part of the exhibition “Hangar for the Passerby”
curated by Akansha Rastogi at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India (till
March 2018). His projects are often commissions, which investigate the
work of art and the art of work. To build his projects, he deploys several
roles, that of an actor, visitor, observer, director, interviewer, coder,
employee, writer and artist. His practice investigates performance – in
productivity, in technology, in art. He has received acclaim both in per-
formance and visual art. He was nominated for the Forecast Award at
Hauz Der Kulteren Der Welt (Germany, 2015) and is the recipient of
numerous awards and residencies including Arte Laguna Prize (Italy,
2013), Tokyo Culture Creation Project (Japan, 2013), KMAT Residency
(Australia, 2011), Ustaad Bismillah Khan Award (India, 2009) and
Prohelvetia Residency (Switzerland, 2008). His works have been shown
in performance festivals and exhibitions in Germany, Australia, Italy,
Switzerland, England, Mexico, China, Philippines and the United States.
He has also presented talks at IMPACT ’17, International Transdisciplinary
Symposium at PACT, Essen (Germany, 2017), “How To Produce
Worklessness” at Kiran Nadar Museum (Delhi 2017), “Performing
Excess” at Performance Studies International (Hamburg 2017) and
“Performapedia – On Audience, Experience, Desire” at University Of
Exeter (United Kingdom 2016). His work, thoughts and press reviews
are available online at www.amiteshgrover.com.
Ishita Jain uses the medium of performative formalism as an immersive
practice and a medium to think about habitats, behaviours and environ-
ments. The body of research emerging from her role as an architectural
academician explores historiography and its generative modalities and
the role of the individual in artistic production. This interdisciplinary
approach is informed by her undergraduate degrees in architecture,
English literature and Kathak dance. She taught architectural design, his-
tory and theory for two years at Indus University, Ahmedabad, before
moving to London in 2017 to pursue a postgraduate course in
 Contributors xvii
architectural history at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University
College London.
Harsh Bhavsar is one of the many architects in this observable universe.
During his postgraduate work at CEPT University, India, he has forged
an extensive approach to design thinking and seeing by involving in the
development of his work - his own ‘body’ language. His research is aimed
at building a carefully constructed narrative record of works developed
across an exploration of forms, phenomena, orders and pedagogical
models combined with artistic, architectural and curatorial practice.
Along with being the curator of Kaash Foundation, a cultural initiative
bringing together Indian culture, craft and design, he is the co-founding
member of Out of India Artist Collective, where his visual narratives of
time and place baffle the eye as well as evoke the urge to interpret and
interweave a complex labyrinth of allusions. Currently, he teaches at
CEPT University, India and practices as the principal photographer, exhi-
bition designer and curator of transmedia acts carried out as perfor-
mance-based cinematic explorations grounded in ambient architectural
and scenographic utilities across India.
Gavin Keeney completed a research doctorate in architecture at Deakin
University, Geelong, Australia, in 2014. His thesis project, “Visual
Agency in Art and Architecture”, resulted in two multimedia exhibitions,
“‘Shadow-Lands’: The Suffering Image” (2012) and “‘Shadow-Lands’ II:
Not-I/Thou” (2014), and two monographs, Dossier Chris Marker: The
Suffering Image (2012) and Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and
Architecture (2014). Postdoctoral projects include a Fulbright Specialist
Program seminar, “Knowledge, Spirit, Law: A Phenomenology of
Scholarship”, Ljubljana, Slovenia; the 2015–2017 two-volume collection
of essays, Knowledge, Spirit, Law (Book 1, Radical Scholarship and
Book 2, The Anti-Capitalist Sublime); a 2016–2017 teaching fellowship
at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India; a 2017 research residency, “The
Moral Rights of Authors in the Venetian Renaissance”, at the Giorgio
Cini Foundation, Venice, Italy; and a research fellowship, “The Moral
Rights of Authors in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism”, at Birkbeck
Institute for the Humanities, University of London, London, England.
Savitri Medhatul is a Mumbai-based documentary film director and theatre
actor-director. She has directed and produced a documentary film on
Lavani dancers (women folk dancers from Maharashtra, India) called
Natale Tumchyasathi. Behind the Adorned Veil. She has also collabo-
rated on various national and international projects. Her work touches
upon varied topics such as farmer suicides, Water distribution in city of
Mumbai, Bene Israeli (Jewish community from Maharashtra), Rickshaw
drivers in Mumbai and more. In 2014, she started Kali Billi Production
with Bhushan Korgaonkar. In 2015, Kali Billi Productions produced
Sangeet Bari. This show reflects on the tradition of Sangeet Bari, Lavani
xviii Contributors
and the lives of Lavani women. It also includes live performances of
some of the unknown Lavani songs by veteran Lavani artists.
Devika N. Menon is currently pursuing her PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru
University. She completed her MPhil with her dissertation titled “Labour,
Play and Ritual Services: A Study of the Performance Practices of Paniyas
and Adiyas in Wayanad” for the Department of Theatre and Performance
Studies. Her present research engages with adivasi cultural practices to
understand the interstices between performance and history. It addresses
the notion of performance and labour in the context of bondage. It fur-
ther explores the significance of performance to understand the history
of adivasi communities recorded and embodied in the body and its mem-
ory. Further, she also explores cultural and political adivasi movements
of resistance and subversion from the paradigm of performance and cul-
tural practices. Her work also includes a rigorous documentation of adi-
vasi oral histories and songs from Wayanad which are gradually being
erased from public memory.
Nela Milic is an artist and an academic working in media and arts and is a
Senior Lecturer for Contextual and Theoretica Studies in the Design
School at London College of Communication. Throughout her career,
Nela has delivered creative projects for organizations including the Royal
Opera House, Barbican, Arts Council England, John Lewis, Al Jazeera,
Campbell Works, Oxo Tower, LIFT festival and London Film Festival.
Victoria Mohr-Blakeney is a curator and scholar with a focus on curating
contemporary performance, based out of Peterborough, Canada. She has
curated/co-curated performance and visual art exhibitions in gallery-,
theatre- and site-specific settings, including Harbourfront Centre, CB
Gallery, Edward Day Gallery, Artspace, The Citadel, George Brown
School of Design, Scotiabank Studio Theatre, Artsweek Peterborough,
Xpace Cultural Centre and Nuit Blanche. Victoria is currently
Performance Curator at Public Energy in Peterborough, Ontario. She has
published work in Kapsula Magazine, The Dance Current, Toronto
Standard, Peterborough This Week, Kawartha Now and the Literary
Review of Canada. Victoria is the recipient of the 2015 President’s Medal
in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University. She has pre-
sented her research on curatorial writing and contemporary performance
in North America and New Zealand.
Ashutosh Potdar has been teaching English and Indian literature, drama
and theatre studies, as well as creative writing at the graduate and post-
graduate levels for almost 20 years. He is among the most prominent,
award-winning playwrights, poets and short story writers writing in
Marathi. His plays have been performed at several national and interna-
tional festivals. He is also a translator, editor and researcher. He has
published his research on drama and literature in English and Marathi in
various journals and presented papers at national and international
 Contributors xix
conferences in India as well as abroad. Ashutosh is currently an Associate
Professor of Literature and Drama at FLAME University, Pune.
A. P. Rajaram is currently teaching as an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Performing Arts, Presidency University, Kolkata, India.
He has completed his PhD in theatre and performance studies at the
School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
His research focus are Ritual dances and movement analysis. He has
worked in the rituals of Thai Pusam and Panguni Pongal festivals of
Tamil Nadu. His research is on analyzing and understanding these rituals
and their trance. He has also worked with a living Devadasi in Viralimalai,
researching her memories of the Sadir dance and its legalities associated
along with the performance. He has also been involved in understanding
the trance movements in the Bhagavatamela Natakam, a community
performance from Tanjavur, Tamil Nadu.
Ramu Ramanathan is the editor of PrintWeek India – which he helped
launch in May 2008. He has been a driving force in re-shaping coverage
of the Indian print market through Industry Specials, Awards and Survey
Reports. Under his leadership, PrintWeek has grown into one of the larg-
est teams covering print in India. He is also a playwright and director.
The book 3, Sakina Manzil and Other Plays (Orient Blackswan and
EFLU) is a collection of eight of his plays in English. He has written
columns on theatre for national dailies.
Freddie Rokem is Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Theatre at Tel
Aviv University, where he was the Dean of the Faculty of the Arts (2002–
2006) and held the Emanuel Herzikowitz Chair for 19th and 20th
Century Art (2006–2016). He is currently the Wiegeland Visiting
Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at the University of
Chicago. His recent books are Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking
Performance (2010), Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre
(2010, co-edited with Jeanette Malkin), Strindberg’s Secret Codes (2004)
and the prize-winning Performing History: Theatrical Representations of
the Past in Contemporary Theatre (2000). He was the editor of Theatre
Research International from 2006 to 2009 and a founding editor of the
Palgrave/Macmillan book series ‘Performance Philosophy’. He has been
a visiting professor at many universities in the United States, Germany,
Finland and Sweden and is also a practicing dramaturg.
Sharmistha Saha is assistant professor of Performance Studies at the
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of
Technology Bombay, Mumbai. She completed her PhD from the
Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the Freie Universität,
Berlin, Germany. Erasmus Mundus followed by the German Research
Foundation (DFG) funded her doctoral study. Later, she was a DFG post-
doctoral fellow at Dahlem Research School, Berlin, Germany. She has
been a UGC Junior Research Fellow at the School of Arts and Aesthetics,
xx Contributors
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In the past, she has been a
Becas MAEC-AECID fellow at the Universidad de Granada, Spain. Her
research interests include theatre historiography, performance philoso-
phy, colonial theatre, theories of acting, aesthetics and politics, archive
and the arts and critical theory. She is the author of Theatre and National
Identity in Colonial India: Formation of a community through cultural
practice (Springer/Aakar, 2017). Sharmistha is also a theatre practitioner
and some of her directorial work includes “Playing to Bombay” co-cre-
ated with Sunil Shanbag, “Her Letters” commissioned by the Tagore
Centre in Berlin and “Romeo Ravidas aur Juliet Devi”, amongst others.
She most recently was part of the international inter-medial project
“Elephants in Rooms” facilitated by the German-UK based Gobs Squad
Arts Collective. She has closely worked with the theatre stalwart Eugenio
Barba and his company Odin Teatret in Denmark. She is the recipient of
Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship for
the year 2022-2023 to be a visiting fellow at TISCH School of the Arts
at New York University.
Sharvari Sastry is a PhD student at the University of Chicago where her
research interests revolve around the theory and praxis of archiving the-
atre performance in modern and contemporary India. Prior to graduate
school, she worked in Mumbai with Theatre Professionals Pvt. Ltd.,
Prithvi Theatre and the India Theatre Forum.
Sunil Shanbag is a theatre director, screenwriter and documentary film-
maker. A graduate of Mumbai University, he worked extensively with
the theatre director Satyadev Dubey, before founding his own theatre
company Aparna in 1985. In 2006, he directed the much-acclaimed play
Cotton 56, Polyester 84, which won three META awards at the
Mahindra Theatre Festival, including Best Original Script for its writer,
Ramu Ramanathan. Among other things, in 2010, he directed S*x
M*rality & Cens*rship, which revolves around the issue of the censor-
ship of Vijay Tendulkar’s 1974 play, Sakharam Binder. The play was
funded by a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts and under-
went research and rehearsals for almost a year. Ultimately, it was nomi-
nated for nine awards at the META Awards. with supporting actress
Geetanjali Kulkarni finally winning for her performance. In 2012, he
was invited to do a Gujrati adaptation of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That
Ends Well as part of the Globe to Globe festival in London, in which all
37 of Shakespeare’s plays were performed in 37 different languages at
Shakespeare’s Globe.
Hina Siddiqui is a teacher, trainer, theatre maker, arts manager and creative
entrepreneur based in Pune. She holds a professional certificate in perfor-
mance and training from LAMDA and was an ATSA Fellow 2016–2017
where she completed a secondment at the Spill International Festival,
United Kingdom. She is also an AWID Seed Grant Awardee 2017 and a
 Contributors xxi
member of South Asia’s first ATSA Trainers’ cohort. Currently, she is
working on various community theatre projects focusing on mental
health and women’s rights. She has represented India at the Women
Playwrights International Conference, the Contact International Forum
(Manchester) and was featured in Key City Theatre’s International
Playwrights line-up in Washington. She is the artist leader at Orchestrated
Q’Works, a performance art and community theatre collective she started
ten years ago. Hina is currently pursuing her master’s in anthropology,
challenging the patriarchy and learning how to make a seven-course
meal with just three eggs.
Ottonie von Roeder, Anais Borie and Aram Lee are a designer group for
artistic research and experiments (Office1) based in the Netherlands and
Germany with a professional background in art and design. They con-
sider their artistic practice in museums as a way of engaging with the
world around them. The aim of their work is to reconcile the encyclopae-
dic archive in the museum with its changing context by rearranging
them. Their activities encompass not only exhibitions but also research,
production, debates, publishing and performances. Instead of alienation,
accumulation, isolation and conservation in museums, their principle
with the mass of the museum archive is breaking, distributing, disturb-
ing, speculating, reactivating, sharing and working together. By applying
their principles to the museum archive they attempt to stimulate the tra-
jectory in the museum.
Foreword
Performance, Memory and Absence
Sundar Sarukkai

This book, a reflection on the relationship between performance and

archives, is a welcome addition to critical thinking about the nature of per-
formance. These are two apt categories that allow us to examine the nature
of art and its function at a broader level. These categories create a series of
well-known oppositions, such as between presence and absence, immaterial
and material, present and past. In this foreword, I want to reflect on two
important philosophical notions that offer a creative way of understanding
this relationship between performance and the archive. These are the
notions of memory and absence-as-real. An archive is first of all a process
of social and institutional memory-making in a material form. However, a
performance actively draws on individual memories, those that are seen as
psychological elements within an individual. These individual memories,
residing as it were, ‘within’ us, function as an archive but are not material-
ized as an archive. Performance draws upon these memorial archives within
us in various ways, ranging from the practice of method acting to perfor-
mances based on conscious acts of forgetting. Is there really a conceptual
difference between the archives of the ‘mind’ and the material archives? Is
the difference only a matter of materiality? Or are they different ‘kinds’ of
memories?
It is commonly believed that performance is alive. Performance captures
the elusive idea of a presence. While much has been made of this notion of
‘presence’, there remains a basic question about it. What exactly is being
‘presented’? One might argue that what is being presented is not the event
of performance but the individual who is performing. Thus, in a sense, it is
the body of the performer that is being first presented. The performance by
the body need not be present in the sense that it is already present as an
archive, either within the body or outside in the cultural world. The notion
of absence is often contrasted with that of presence associated with perfor-
mance. More importantly, it is the loss of the body that creates the first sense
of absence. Archives are an attempt to regain this lost body and thus are
about that which is lost and regained. Their materiality is about the social;
it is about the presentation of loss and death. All societies create socialities
around loss and death – witness the performance of many death rituals
endemic to societies. In what sense then can these two opposites – one
 Foreword xxiii
expressing living and presenting the individual and the other of death and
the social attempts to hold on to that which is gone – relate to each other?
Performance needs archives, whether they are of texts, taught practices,
skills or just memories. The relation between archives and performance is
often seen as that between the past and the present. However, the perfor-
mance can also be related to the future. There is no archive of the future,
and I would argue that a performance is a necessary step in the creation of
the archive of the future. In this sense, performance is a constant attempt to
subsume the idea of an archive while at the same time the archive is an
attempt to create the future and to come alive through performance.
If every performance is a potential archive of the future, then it is true
that performance and archives are intrinsically linked to each other. But
what we need to make sense of this claim is to have a different approach to
the meaning of memory. Archives are often understood to be a repository of
memory, of traces of things past. I believe that there are two interesting
formulations that can help us understand the relation between performance
and memory. One is an extrapolation of Bergon’s idea of memory, and the
other is the reality of absence as formulated by the Indian philosophical
tradition of Nyāya.
Archives are characterized by absence in that they are a collection of a
materiality of absence, that which has gone past. But in this role, archives
are also a form of constant reconstruction of the lost past. But what is really
this nature of the absence of the past? The idea that performance marks
presence while the archives mark absence is based on a particular view of
absence, one that is always negative and seen as lost in some sense. However,
can this relationship between performance and archives be understood dif-
ferently if we start with a different theory of absence, one in which absence
is always present? Memory is one such absence that is always present. What
may not be present is the content of what the memory stands for, but if we
have a different approach to the question of memory, then we can reformu-
late this relation between performance and the archives. Thus, there are two
possible resolutions to the problem of the relation between performance
and the past: municipalities of memory and the reality of absence. To
expand on the former, we can look to Bergson, and for the latter, we can
enter into the world of the Naiyāyika philosophers belonging to the Nyāya
tradition in Indian philosophy.
The Nyāya argument that absence is ‘real’ can be understood in the fol-
lowing sense. When something is created, there is a moment before creation
when it is absent, really absent. After the thing is destroyed, it is again
absent but absent in a different manner. There is also a constant absence of
properties that are contrary to each other, as well as absence of essential
properties of one in another. Why is it important to claim that these absences
are real? One marker of presence is perceptibility, an ability to perceive
something that is present before us. Our commonsensical ideas of presence
are based on such perception. We can understand the reality of absence
through the claim that absence is also perceptible. When we see something,
xxiv Foreword
it is equally true that we also see the absence of certain other things. When
I see a chair in front of me, can we say that I also see the absence of an
elephant sitting on that chair? If such a description is possible, then it is
meaningful to say that we perceive an absence as much as we perceive a
positive presence. But what exactly is absent? I can say that I do not see an
elephant sitting on the chair and thus perceive the absence of the elephant
on the chair but do I also see the absence of an apple on the chair or any
other object? The Nyāya discourse on absence is to answer these and related
questions. I am invoking the idea of absence here to point to an interesting
relation between performance and archive that is mediated by the reality of
absence. What kind of absence does an archive really capture? Firstly, the
archive in itself is not a performance (unless we stretch the meaning of
performance to accommodate acts of curating and collecting as perfor-
mance). The archive becomes an archive only due to the absence of the
performance. As we saw earlier, the problem with absence as a category is
that there seem to be countless terms that are absent. So just as performance
is absent in the notion of the archive, so could other things be absent. One
could well say that an elephant is absent in the archive. However, one could
argue that the archive is characterized by a particular absence – that is, the
absence of performance. It is the absence of performance as a category that
defines the archive as an archive. The absence of an elephant is not enough
to do that. The essential character of the archive arises through the reality
of the absence of performance. One could well say that the performance is
present in the archive as an absence since it is the anticipation of what the
archive can complete that makes an archive what it is.
Another conceptual schema to look at this can be through the notions of
doing/acting and remembering. What these terms capture is the more inter-
esting binary of active and passive rather than present and the past.
Performance is an action, and its relationship with the present comes when
it is seen as action. If we can imagine performance without action, it would
be possible to remove the baggage of the present from performance. Not all
actions are performances and not all performances are actions. How do we
recover the space of inaction within a performance? The body alone is not
enough to capture the possibility of action. Imagine a person sitting silently
with eyes closed. Is there any action associated with this person? From out-
side, watching this person, one might say that there is no action if action is
seen as embodied movement. But the person sitting quietly might say that
her mind is filled with thoughts; she is aware of her breathing and aware of
her body parts as she sits silently. The question of action thus depends on
the context of an act. If the person is sitting silently on stage with an audi-
ence watching her, then it might seem outwardly that there is no action on
the stage, but for the performer, her sitting there is filled with action. There
is a useful lesson that we can draw from this example, which is that action
is never completely defined by and within a performer. Action related to a
particular performance is completed by the performer, as well as by the
audience. The moment the audience recognizes a notion of action within an
 Foreword xxv
act, then that act becomes a performance. Action is being performed in the
audience, as well as on the stage. We can see this very clearly when a viewer
gets totally engrossed in a performance. The body of the viewer reacts to the
performer, sentences uttered by a performer can get completed and felt
within the viewer and in the case of dance, if viewers are not imprisoned to
their seats as in many performances today, the body of the viewer moves in
response to the movement on the stage. The viewer/listener completes the
action that is present on stage. The viewer in that moment of response is
actually responding to the archives of her memory and her bodily practice.
In this sense, engrossed viewing of a performance is already an illustration
of the relation between an archive and a performance. But the audience is
always absent in an archive which is related to a performance. The action
related to performance brings together the absent audience, the absent act
of performing along with the archive.

Bergson and Memory

There is another interesting concept that gives us another dimension of the
relation between performance and archive – namely, Bergson’s influential
work on memory. Bergson’s book Matter and Memory speaks naturally to
the theme of performance and the archive, although he is not discussing
either of these terms. Bergson begins by questioning the distinction between
pure perception and pure memory. He also questions the secondary nature
that is often ascribed to memory as being secondary to perception. As he
notes, there is no perception that is not always full of memories and argues
that perception and memory are a difference in kind (this will also allow the
avoidance of the fallacy of understanding memory as ‘secondary percep-
tion’). He also suggests that there are different kinds of memory. We have
memories related to bodily habits, which without being articulated allows a
body to move and act. We do not think every moment how to breathe or
how to walk. But we also have the capacity for representational memory
(related for example to recollection). Bergson suggests a classification into
types of memory consisting of habitual, representational and pure memory.
Memory is made of memory images (like an archive is made up of material
elements). Another important point he makes is that the brain is not the
repository of memories and this has deep implications for understanding
the very notion of an archive. If we look at an archive as a space, a con-
tainer where ‘memories’ are stored in material form (akin to the reduction-
ist view that memories are stored in chemical forms), then we tend to look
at the archive as similar to a brain. Bergson’s argument that memories are
not ‘in’ the brain suggests a way to understand archives in relation to per-
formance in a larger sense and not restrict us to material artefacts stored
within an archive. Perri (2014) classifies these different types of memory as
follows: episodic, semantic and procedural.
The most interesting aspect of Bergson’s approach to memory is the clas-
sification into many types of memories. We tend to talk about memory as if
xxvi Foreword
it is only about recollection, something to do with the past. Bergson’s inno-
vative classification of types of memories is interesting because it suggests
that we should conceive of different types of archives dealing with these
different kinds of memories. Such a classification is particularly important
for analyzing the relation between performance and archive since archive in
its most basic sense is about memory and has the structure and functions of
memory.
Bergson uses memory in different ways: starting with recollection as a
way to represent the past, as well as a reference to the past itself (Bergson
1991; Perri 2014, p. 837). The materiality of archives is also caught up in a
similar bind as to whether the archive should be seen as representing the
past or as placing before us the fragments of the past. In the first chapter of
Matter and Memory, Bergson identifies two ‘forms of memory’: contraction
and perception memory. The contraction memory “gathers together a plu-
rality of independent moments to constitute our enduring lived present”
(Perri 2014, p. 838). The perception memory provides the content for every
perception in a manner that makes Bergson say, “[T]here is no perception
that is not impregnated with memories” (Bergson 1001, p. 33). In the sec-
ond chapter of the book, Bergson makes another distinction between habit
memory and recollection memory: “[H]abit memory is an implicit, non-
representational ‘motor memory’” (‘motor memory’ being Bergson’s term)
intrinsic to the body and which “manifests itself as a disposition to react in
a more or less fixed way to one’s surroundings, recollection memory is the
explicit representation of some event or episode from one’s past life” (Perri
2014, p. 838). Bergson also emphasizes a form of memory that he calls
‘pure memory’, which is the “totality of one’s past experience”. This is not
a concrete memory in that it is a virtual memory which gets actualized as
memory images when we recollect or when we perceive. The crucial distinc-
tion that Bergson emphasizes is that the memory image cannot be seen to be
the same as pure memory, as “memory that has been actualized in an image
differs profoundly from pure memory” (Bergson 1991, p. 140). Moreover,
in later works, Bergson suggests other types of memory such as a memory
of the will as well as a memory of the present. However, as Perri notes, this
does not mean that our memory is always a combination of all these types
of memories and “memory is more or less distinguished into several memo-
ries that can be considered independently depending on one’s circum-
stances” (Perri 2014, p. 844).
I am offering these fragments of Bergson’s complex philosophical argu-
ment only to suggest that the question of memory with respect to perfor-
mance and the archive has not been thematized enough. The material in this
book gives enough material to be able to build on these and other types of
philosophical conceptualizations on this theme. One way to directly relate
Bergson’s views to the relation between performance and archive is by con-
sidering the role of memory in performance. There is, of course, a body
memory in action during a performance, and what is unique about this
form of memory is that it is often not articulated or even a mode of
 Foreword xxvii
awareness. The performer performs and this action is filled with elements of
unarticulated embodied memory. Thus, the body is already the first ‘archive’
for performance. Some of the habits may be known but many may not. The
body as an archive is a different form of archive for performance compared
to other material archives. For example, in the archives, there could be a
preponderance of propositional, semantic memory in operation through
various bits of meaning-making.
However, I believe that the most important element of performance is
that it has an independent type of memory associated with it. We could call
it ‘performance memory’ like the other memory types we saw earlier. I do
not believe that this performance memory can be reduced to other types of
memory like habit memory, body memory, recollection and so on.
Performance is a special kind of action, one that is embodied but more than
the body. The types of memories related to performance are more than what
a typical archive might materialize. Performance memory is also different
from body memory. The difference can be well illustrated in aspects of
everyday performances. Consider people who are perennial jokers, ones
who perform all the time as part of their daily lives. Such individuals do not
relate ordinarily to other people; instead, every situation leads them to per-
form mostly in order to entertain others. Describing such acts are quite
difficult since the spontaneity of performance is quite astounding. Their
actions are not based on memories but on spontaneous wit, driven by the
spirit of performing. Performance in this sense is essentially rooted in the
capacity to create, to discover an original moment even in the performance
of repetitions.
Thus, there is an internal and intrinsic tension between performance and
the archive, in that the archive is fixed and performance is changing and
future-looking. One difference between them is captured well in the distinc-
tion between pure perception and pure memory, as performance is in the
domain of perception and the archive is in the domain of memory. However,
there is a larger issue with performance since every performance has an
archive of its own, but at the same time, it also has to deal with the archives
of an audience. If we accept that performance is not performance without
the presence (or imagination) of an audience, then we could argue that the
archives related to performance have to be more than mere materialities
associated with the performance. It also has to perforce include the archives
related to the audience.
Hyppolite, in a well-known piece on Bergson published in 1948, points
out that memory for Bergson is not just a mere reproduction. It is not only
about the past, nor is it about attempts to recover the lost past through
fragments of the archive. In contrast, memory is actually about the future
and about creation. As she notes,
Memory here is not a particular faculty that is concerned with repeating
or reproducing the past in the present; it is consciousness itself insofar as
this consciousness is creative duration. One will note already this truly new
meaning of the word “memory”. Ordinarily, memory is only conceived of
xxviii Foreword
as a faculty of repetition or of reproduction, and is thereby opposed to
invention and creation. But Bergson reunites the impetus towards the future
with the thrust of the past in a unique intuition he calls memory. (Hyppolite
2003, p. 112).
It is this future-looking aspect of memory that is captured so well in
performance. In this sense, performance is not really something that is so
different from memory or from the archives. Performance is memory-mak-
ing and is always a projection of the future. A performance will draw upon
memories but it is always more than the memories it draws upon since its
essence as a performance, I would argue, is to always go beyond the given
memories and construct new ones. Performance thus is not as much about
the present, about the evanescent, as it is about the creation of new memo-
ries, creation of new types of memories as we discussed earlier. Even if a
performance is replicated in exact detail, if it is a performance, then it has
something new and creative in it. I believe that it is entirely because of this
notion of performance that an audience is necessary and yet not necessary
because the creativity of performance is through the performer, but in cases
where a performance is absolutely repetitive, just a recollection, then it is
the audience’s memories that make possible the new creative element of that
performance. This view of performance in terms of its creativity and not in
terms of time and presence actually brings the themes of performance and
archives closer together. Thus, extending the spirit of Bergsonian memory
unites performance and archive in a unique manner, and this has important
consequences for how we construct and create new archives in relation to
performance.

Bibliography
Perri, Trevor. Bergson’s Philosophy of Memory. Philosophy Compass 9/12, 2014.
Bergson, Henri. Matière et mémoire. English translation by N.M. Paul and W.S.
Palmer as Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Hyppolite, Jean. Various Aspects of Memory in Bergson. Translated by Athena V.
Colman. In The Challenge of Bergsonism. Leonard Lawler. London: Continuum,
2003.
Introduction
Ashutosh Potdar and Sharmistha Saha

Performance takes place in different forms and can be presented in diverse

ways, challenging the contexts they are part of. The process of writing a
play is not only about scripting by an author, but it can also be devising a
narrative through rehearsals and ongoing processes. Similarly, acting can be
extended to playing with visual images, abstract movements and sound-
scapes. Breaking boundaries between performances and audiences, an event
of performance may witness varied forms of spatial and socio-political
experiences. In response to all such diverse and changing practices of creat-
ing, presenting and disseminating a performance, the artists and groups
revitalized by research and practice-oriented work are enabled by newer
demands and opportunities. In this way, a performance in any form also
communicates with the public before and after an act of performance.
This edited volume is interested in exploring the leftovers of a perfor-
mance in the form of documented performance and process, as well as the
archival material that records the before and after of a performance. The
volume aims at investigating theories and practices shaped by performance’s
relationship to different forms of the archive. We have attempted to look
into artistic engagement with the archive in both conceptual and material
terms; physical, virtual and digital forms; publicly and privately collected;
oral, written and digital ways; or organized and unorganized collections.
The archive as a concept, a resource for getting information, space to
reflect on the past, location of cultural and power relations within the per-
forming arts is the centre of investigation in this book. Looking at how archi-
val practices transform performing arts practices, this edited volume reflects
upon how the archive becomes a fruitful platform of stimuli or a provoca-
tion for artistic work (especially performance art and theatre) and theoreti-
cal discourse around the practice of performance. Addressing the intersection
of pre-production research work, engagement with the team of artists, dra-
maturgical mediations and directorial perspectives and reception of per-
forming arts, the book highlights the existing dialogue between archive,
research and creation in the contemporary context in India and outside.
Theoretically, performance has been understood as ephemeral, located in
the present, bearing affective excess, having transformative powers, identi-
fied as disappearance, etc. Its “material” absence has been at the heart of
xxx Introduction
these theoretical formulations. We see Sundar Sarukkai talk about absence
in this context at length in the foreword. At the same time, it has also been
understood as ‘circulation of representations of representations’ and its
live-ness has been argued over.
Thus, some of the key concerns addressed in the book are as follows: how
do we begin to look at performance, especially that works with the archive
and historical consciousness as its material – performance that is interested
in the document? In which ways can we articulate such practices of perfor-
mances that are a confluence of the past and the present? Against this back-
ground, a conference was organized titled “Performance Making and the
Archive” at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2018, which
became a platform for dialogue between artists, archivists and researchers.
This book includes the papers presented at the conference.
The study of interconnections of performance making and the archive is
largely an undermined area in performance studies. Although the works of
Diana Taylor, Baz Kershaw, Helen Nicholson, Maggie B. Gale, Ann
Featherstone and others have addressed theoretical nuances of practicing
with the archive, the in-depth analysis of different dimensions of the rela-
tions between performance and the archive within the specific contexts of
performance practices and their emerging nature need further in-depth
attention. The concerns about the ways in which the strategic process of
archiving could have taken place so as to document the life of artistic prac-
tices (performances, productions, presentations, etc.) and make it available
in the vast domain of performance practices haven’t been considered criti-
cally. The changing nature of performance practices has made it imperative
to understand how the archive and archival practices could add to the per-
formance work. In addition, we need to address the ground reality of mere
absence of archive of performance practices, issues of funding, strategic
programming of existing performance archives, wastage and so on.
This edited volume divided into four sections has been planned and
designed in order to address some of the aforementioned concerns. Needless
to mention, it has emerged out of the intense interactions among the partici-
pants and audience members at the conference.
Our entry point in the book is the discussion of a broader theoretical and
practice-oriented understanding in the first section, “Concepts, Histories
and Performances”. The first chapter in this section is Soumyabrata
Choudhury’s study of the archive and its relation to political events.
According to him, this relation indicates two kinds of performances: both
the theatrical and the historical ones. He takes a look at some traditions of
documentary theatre, particularly the work of Peter Weiss and how his play
Marat/Sade has been performed both as a recreation of a revolutionary
event and as contemporary theatre based on the documents of history. In
addition, he takes a look at the limits of public memory when it comes to
the archival storing of something which challenges all discourse of culture
and society including politics – that is, the challenge of what he suggests is
called madness. In the same section, Ashutosh Potdar’s chapter investigates
 Introduction xxxi
the archival material that informs the making and the presentation of per-
formance in nineteenth-century India. The basic task undertaken in this
chapter is of studying the emergence of drama in the early performance
practices in India, with a special focus on Maharashtra. Calling it ‘the mak-
ing of theatre phase’ as newer expressions in the practices of performances
had begun evolving, the chapter analyzes the relationship between archival
material and contextual factors. These factors according to Potdar simulta-
neously influence how signs are deciphered in the making of theatre.
Sharmistha Saha’s chapter looks at the practices of the ‘intercultural the-
atre’ which have been problematized by postcolonial scholars of theatre
and performance especially started by the debates between Rustom
Bharucha and Richard Schechner. Addressing the polemics around cultural
imperialism associated often with intercultural theatre practices as also per-
formance studies as such, she tries to locate the negotiations of the archive
that happens in the case of the ‘intercultural’. Are these negotiations only
that of location whereby archives of ‘traditional practices’ move in space
and that of rightful possession by the communities in which they belong?
Or are there other factors that influence such a hybrid formation? The
chapter tries to locate the archive in space which she calls ‘ground zero’, in
terms of ownership/relationships of power and vis-à-vis shifts in materiality
of the archive. Devika N. Menon’s chapter interjects through studying the
significance of adivasi oral histories and performance practices in tracing
the history of displacement, bondage and servitude of Adiya and Paniya
adivasi communities in Wayanad in North Kerala. The term Paniyan liter-
ally means a worker/labourer and Adiyan is one who is subordinated as a
slave. In the absence of documented archives of the Paniyas and Adiyas, and
a general tendency to exoticize the practices of these communities in purely
ethnographic studies, this study intends to highlight the need to turn to the
performance and ritual-intensive life experiences of these communities
which embody the experiences of their marginalization and displacement
whereby cultural practices become a historiography in their own right. Nela
Milic in the following chapter looks at the Serbian uprising in ’96/’97,
which was an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of President Milosevic
after he annulled elections because of the victory of the opposition party.
Ashamed by the unsuccessful outcome of their protest, the people of the
capital Belgrade, where a number of protesters reached 200,000 daily, never
produced an archive of photos, banners and graffiti, which emerged during
these peaceful demonstrations. Scarce information on the internet and the
inability of the media to reveal the data gathered during the protest left the
public without a full account of the uprising. Nela’s project incorporates the
archive – the website of images, leaflets, badges, flags, vouchers, cartoons,
crochets, poems, etc. – an online record of the elucidated protest available
to the participants, scholars and the public. She explores how it is now serv-
ing as a pedagogical tool, as well as an interrogator of archival discipline
standards. In these practices, she questions the success of any storage as a
platform to capture the past. In the next chapter, A. P. Rajaram explores the
xxxii Introduction
body of the dancer/performer as an archive of artistic actions. The lived
realities of the body continue to form layers of archival knowledge as the
dancer traverses different times and spaces. Such a body naturally has an
inevitable and tense relationship with its own historicity as it continues to
archive and draw on not only the movements and emotions but also his/her
performance history and its journey. He looks at ‘Sadir’ (now popular as the
classical dance, Bharathanatyam), a dance form once practiced by the
Devadasi community regularly in temples and during festivals – and how
today its presence is only in the historical texts and very few living and
performing bodies. In the chapter, Rajaram tries to contextualize the life of
Muthukannammal, a Sadir dancer, as one of the survivors of anti-Devadasi
act in Viralimalai, Pudukottai District, Tamil Nadu and as a performer who
claims her identity as a Devadasi. The final chapter in this section is by
Samik Bandyopadhyay. He looks at how, with the emergence of the twin
disciplines of cultural studies and performance studies in the Indian aca-
demia in the last decade and a half and the strong Anglo-US orientation
standing in the way of a search for a methodology that takes account of the
peculiar multilingual parameters of the Indian experience and its complexi-
ties, a special focus on archiving of missing/lost/unnoticed histories and
practices is indicating a possibility of defining the scope of the disciplines in
India. Bandyopadhyay raises concern about a drive in the academic practice
in these disciplines towards a cursory/superficial reading of the phenomena
under scrutiny, based on inadequate archives and inadequate empirical
investigations. He proposes to explore the possibilities, scope and method-
ology for archival endeavours in oral history for performance studies,
drawing on his own experiences in the field.
The second section, “Dramaturgical Shaping and Re-shaping”, begins
with Freddie Rokem’s chapter, which reflects on his own dramaturgical
engagement in the creation of Passport, a performance directed by Yael
Cramsky that premiered in Tel Aviv in November 2013. As Rokem, puts it
in his chapter, the dramaturgical process for his production can be seen as
the creation of an ‘archive’. Furthermore, he argues that “a performance
archive should at least ideally enable us to re-create, re-perform and re-
archive a certain performance, making it look and sound like itself, creating
a continuity, or it should be documented in such a way that we can imagine
what it looked or sounded like in the past. By exploring these documentary
materials, the performance itself gradually emerged, including its text, sce-
nography and gestural materials”.1 Zuleikha Allana’s chapter is a documen-
tation of a ‘drama’ that she created in response to a photograph from the
Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi. The photograph was taken
in March 1858 by the itinerant war photographer Felice Beato in Lucknow
in the aftermath of the ‘mutiny’ in the army of the East India Company,
which eventually led to the consolidation of British imperial rule in India.
As Allana reflects, the journey into an archival photo enables her to delve
into the trace of something that has happened and question how exactly
one can access what has happened. Anuja Ghosalkar delves into the
 Introduction xxxiii
creation of a documentary theatre piece, Lady Anandi, by raising questions
such as, How do we tell stories from our past without evidence? Does fic-
tion best fill the gaps of history? Lady Anandi, according to Ghosalkar, aims
to draw the audience’s attention to the process of making work rather than
a finished product since the performance evolves in the course of the many
shows. It lives. In the absence of a director, she argues the audience takes on
that role. The next, a collaborative chapter by Savitri Medhatul and Sharvari
Sastry provides an account of various theatrical experiments that seek to
document, revive and/or preserve tamasha/lavani performance traditions.
The first section of the chapter is a broad survey of (mostly Marathi) plays
from the 1950s onwards that incorporated tamasha and lavani into their
formal and thematic frameworks and in so doing made explicit and/or
implicit claims about the ways in which these forms may be historicized,
memorialized and archived. The second section is a dedicated caste study of
one such play, Sangeet Bari; it offers a first-hand account of the aesthetic
and ethical challenges entailed in using theatre as a mode of documenting
lavani performance. In the last chapter in this section, Hina Siddiqui docu-
ments how, through her community work, she has been able to provide the
process and aesthetic structure that makes the community itself a material
archive of the people who inhabit it – the actors, playwrights, directors the
audiences. She argues that communities in urban spaces like Pune tend to be
fragmented with little to galvanize populations into any sort of cohesive
action. Individuals rely on hearsay and gossip to build a picture of the peo-
ple they live among or are completely ignorant of who their neighbour is.
Through her work, she tries to show that any community/society/nation
needs to stop looking at history and culture as impersonal maps on a school
wall and instead discover their own thread in the tapestry of civilization
and work for its preservation and evolution as opposed to trying to save/
change everything.
The third section of the book, “Design and Directorial Methods of
Creation” focuses on the design and directorial methods implemented in
working with the archive. This section begins with the chapter by Ishita
Jain, Harsh Bhavsar and Gavin Keeny that looks at the installation “C’est la
CEPT” (aka “Emptiness within Emptiness”), as an open-ended, perfor-
mance-based cinematic project grounded in ambient architectural and sce-
nographic utility. This project took place in a semi-abandoned building
(badminton court) in Ahmedabad, India, which was the origin of the School
of Architecture (c. 1962), later CEPT University. The prospects of the proj-
ect which the authors call ‘pseudo-psychoanalytical’ question whether
‘emptiness’ is a concept relative to subjective versus objective states. By
hypothetically placing one form of emptiness within another – i.e., via sub-
mission of the theatrical-cinematic work to a design competition for an
installation at the EMST, a never-opened museum in Athens, Greece – an
empty “ancient” building in India (the East) is conjoined with an empty new
(i.e., never-opened) building in Greece (the West), with the conflation
becoming a means for doubling the subjective states under investigation
xxxiv Introduction
and inducing hoped-for catharsis on all accounts. The second chapter in this
section by the trio of artists Ottonie von Roeder, Anais Borie and Aram Lee,
“Inside Out”, investigates the process of taking the museumized artefacts to
the outside reality. The chapter questions the way in which artefacts are
conventionally collected in archives and brought to one spot, where they are
usually waiting in the dark to be chosen one day to be shown. According to
the authors, it connects the artefacts of the depot to the outside reality and
liberates them from the safe context of the archive. The Inside Out Project
that they have been working on, they argue, challenges the artefacts physi-
cally and mentally by confronting them with the banality of everyday life.
Using the archive as a material, they create a new kind of archive out of the
new narratives and adventures happening during the Inside Out Project. By
applying their performative principle to the museum archive, they attempt
to stimulate the trajectory of the museum. Through a collaboration with the
Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen in 2016, they developed the project
Zuiderzeemuseum – Inside Out, which was shown during the Studio ZZM
exhibition in 2017. In May 2018, they were part of the Forecast Platform at
Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. In the third chapter in this section,
Amitesh Grover articulates new relationships between performance and the
archive by exploring facets of his practice of ‘building performapedias’ that
assemble interactivity through objects, bodies, technologies and environ-
ments. In his chapter, he discusses strategies in which performance unpacks
an archive and also produces an array of archives. Taking two of his perfor-
mance projects Back to Work series and Sleep series, he opens up the ques-
tion of creating, convening and grasping shape-shifting the archive of
experience. He proposes new relationships between performance and the
archive by exploring facets of his emerging practice of building performape-
dias. Performapedia, he argues, explores the meaning and threshold of
‘doing as a mode for knowing’. In performapedia, the claim to truth accord-
ing to him gets made during the ‘event’, in conjunction with the participant-
viewer. Its ‘truths’ predicated on its transience; the ‘history’ being created in
this archive is always endemically mutating, he says.
The chapter by Sushama Deshpande documents the process of staging a
play based on the Marathi novel Aaydaan. Aaydaan is an extension of the
performance Whay mi Savitribai! Aaydaan, also translated in English as
The Weave of My Life, is the autobiography of the well-known Dalit writer
Urmila Pawar. She writes that while reading the book again and again, the
weaving of bamboo sticks by Aaye (Urmila’s mother) and the weaving of
words by Urmila Pawar gave the form of the play. She decided to take three
artists to weave moments on stage. Through the performance as elaborated
by her in the chapter, Deshpande has been able to archive the history of a
specific caste. The chapter raises pertinent questions such as, How does a
theatre artist relate to the socio-cultural history of a hierarchical society?
How can he/she relate to the archival material that doesn’t belong to him/
her? What are different ways of creating a play drawing from such archival
material? Finally in this segment is incorporated a conversation with the
 Introduction xxxv
theatre director Sunil Shanbag. In the conversation, he talks about bringing
together archival material of dissent on caste, gender, the relationship
between the individual and the state and language from India, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Syria, United States, Palestine and Iraq. He speaks about how
since 2006 when he worked on Ramu Ramnathan’s play, Cotton 56,
Polyester 84, a lot of his theatre work has attempted to frame ideas that
interest him within socio-political and cultural contexts. For him, this has
meant a fair deal of research, often delving into formal and informal
archives, memory and oral histories spanning varied cultural continents.
Sometimes, he argues, archives are located, and sometimes they are created
to enable the work to happen. His own interest in history and an extended
period of making independent documentaries are strong influences on his
work, he says. His effort has been to find connections, links, between seem-
ingly disparate events/phenomena and to use the theatre to illuminate the
contemporary situation.
The last segment of the book, “Many Methods, Multiple Archives” deals
with the many methods and the corresponding many archives that have
come to exist. Shubha Chaudhuri asks, What does it really mean to have an
archive of the performing arts? An archive of performance of recordings,
texts and manuscripts related to the performing arts? She finds that part of
the answer to this is in what is meant by ‘archive’. Keeping in mind that
audio-visual archives have their own history and that challenges in the
selection, preservation cataloguing or metadata creation, access, use and
dealing with performing arts have their own set of problems, she explores
the role of digital technology in changing how archival material relating to
the performing arts is today accessed and created. She argues that the issue
of rights lies at the core of many of these issues, which need not only be
legal but can be ethical solutions or directions. Her chapter attempts to
provide an overview of this situation in India and provide specific examples
from the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology. Chiara
Crupi’s chapter aims to present the process of “translation” from theatrical
performance to cinematic language. She takes an example from one of her
documentation projects of the performance The Chronic Life by the Odin
Teatret ensemble (Holstebro, Denmark) directed by Eugenio Barba, founder
of the International School of Theatre Anthropology. The production was
filmed during about 20 regular performances with audiences over a period
of two years in different venues in Italy and Denmark. As a filmmaker affili-
ated with the project, she was directing the film. However, she would then
work on the editing of the film with the active contribution of the director
of the performance. She writes about the complex process of being involved
in this collaboration, which sparked her reflection on theatre filming being
a means to preserve live theatrical productions, as well as a context in which
to recreate them. Next in this section is a chapter based on Victoria Mohr-
Blakeney’s research that explores the function of curatorial writing in the
context of contemporary performance. It examines the complex relation-
ship between embodied practice, textual discourse and the archive. In her
xxxvi Introduction
research, she uses the post-structural lens to identify some of the core struc-
tural elements at play in the interaction between writing, embodied prac-
tice, and archival theory, drawing on the writings of dance scholars,
performance theorists and post-structural theorists to expose this complex
interaction. She examines these findings in the context of curatorial writing
and the dance catalogue and applies the theoretical considerations to the
creation and production of a dance exhibition catalogue. The chapter
focuses on the dance performance exhibition No Context (Canada) per-
formed in 2015 and curated by the Nomadic Curatorial Collective (Erin
McCurdy, Victoria Mohr-Blakeney and Cara Spooner), and its accompany-
ing publication by the same title. Finally, Ramu Ramanathan’s chapter
explores the theatrescape of Mumbai vis-à-vis his experience as a play-
wright, a journalist and the editor of a theatre magazine. He talks about the
polyphony of the theatre language in the city through an exploration of the
many histories of it that have given rise to the ‘spirit of Mumbai’, he argues.
His chapter is a sharing of these fantastic stories, often as anecdotes. They
become citations of time that have marked the city where theatre is an
excess, as a coming together of those who have lived in and loved both the
city and its theatre – a living archive.
It has taken us rather long to put together this edited volume since the
conference was organized in 2018. There have been several changes from the
original format of the conference from which we consciously departed. One
of the reasons for this departure was the obvious shift in form – from a live
congregation of theatre and performance artists, scholars and enthusiasts to
a rather removed activity of singular communications with the authors. In
the process of this departure, if any errors are noticed, then its responsibility
is entirely ours. Having said that, we must acknowledge that without the
support from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, especially the support of Prof. Pushpa
Trivedi, colleagues and friends Sharmila, Vaijayanthi Sarma, Suddhaseel Sen,
Arun Iyer, Suryakant Waghmore and the students from the English group
who tirelessly worked for the conference, the initial iteration for the book
would not have been possible. We also must thank Prof. Maya Dodd from
FLAME University for her support. We must thank Inlaks and Asia Art
Archive who made the initial conversations on performance making and the
archive possible through the art grant. Sabih Ahmed’s support throughout
needs to be mentioned here. We would also like to take this opportunity to
thank Sundar Sarukkai for agreeing to write the preface to the book. Finally,
the book would not have been possible without the editorial assistance that
we had in Rinu Koshy, Himalaya Gohel and Purvi Rajpuria.

Note
1 95, The Dramaturgy of the Archive: Interview, Fredie Rokem.
Part I

Concepts, Histories and

Performances
1 Archive and Performance; Madness
and Revolution
On Marat, Sade and Theroigne de
Mericourt
Soumyabrata Choudhury

What I want to do is to speak (firstly) on documentary theatre, but in a

particular way, in a specific way, which is to look at the problem of docu-
menting through the theatre but also representing the documents in theatre
of such events in history which in themselves are problematic events. So in
that sense, the problem of documenting a problem and the problem here
means problems in history. So I am going to name two problems: one is a
problem of revolution and the other is a problem of madness. It’s all there
in the title of this chapter. So I want to look at how madness and revolution
have featured in a certain tradition of documentary theatre, specifically in
Germany and in the history of modern western theatre. I am also going to
take a look at certain questions in Indian social history and culture. I will
do that at the very end, very briefly.
But before that, I want to give an example, which has nothing to do with
my actual cases but an example just to bring to you the fundamental theo-
retical point that I am trying to make, which is this: it’s a story. It’s a little
story. I think it’s a funny story.
The very well-known British actor Laurence Olivier as we all know made
the film Hamlet. Now before that when he was actually performing the role
of Hamlet in the theatre, he played it as “the story of a man who couldn’t
make up his mind”. And the film actually states it in the very beginning.
That’s how he characterizes Hamlet. A man who couldn’t make up his
mind. In the course of things, as the play progresses, we know that Hamlet
can’t make up his mind or decide what to do when he has the knowledge
that his father was murdered by his uncle, Claudius, and all that. Anyway,
the story goes on to the very end, at the climax, when the player king depicts
the story of the murder before him and several things happen such that,
eventually, Hamlet does kill Claudius, his uncle. So at that point, Laurence
Olivier’s acting, unlike the British acting at that time – which was extremely
voice-centric, speaking Shakespeare very beautifully and all that – does a
tremendous sort of athletic vault. He nearly flies down, driving his sword
into Claudius’s heart and along that movement, his voice reaches some sort
of crescendo – again as legend has it – that no English actor had ever reached
that pitch. Of course when we speak of ‘no English actor’ we are talking of
male British actors. It’s an extremely male-centric story. Now that’s the
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-2
4 Soumyabrata Choudhury
background. After many years, Laurence Olivier had grown quite old. He
was at home upstairs while his family was on the ground floor. Basically,
Olivier was attacked by some men who had probably come to rob the
house. They managed to reach the first floor somehow without being
noticed, and when Olivier was attacked, he shouted out. But it seems no one
in the family came to help. Later when the robbers had escaped and he
asked the people present why no one came, they responded by saying that
they thought Olivier was practicing some of his lines from Hamlet, particu-
larly the ones where he spoke at a very high pitch since his film Hamlet was
being shown on TV at that very time. And this is what I am calling, and this
is the point of the story, error. I want to look at an error in an archive. So
this is clearly a case of an error. When you think something is playing on the
TV, in this case the film Hamlet, when it’s not. It is actually a contingent
problem of a robber coming on to you and you cry out for help. Theatre
and performance studies would use the jargon ‘life’ to describe such a
moment. And yet, you read the life as a performance. And it all ends up in
an actual injury. But it is based on reasonable grounds because the pitch
apparently was the same, objectively. So it’s a big mess-up based on a very
justifiable error. So I am going to write that down here. Because that’s what
I really want to talk about.
Error is exactly what in certain specific and heightened situations either
gets positively interpreted as revolutions or with terrible consequences clas-
sified as madness. I want to look at the question of document and archive
in very specific cases through this kind of error, which I think is a structural
problem. Hence error is not to be thought of as merely a subjective misin-
terpretation or misreading of a situation. The error belongs to the structure
of the situation in so far as it is a real objective element in the situation but
has a certain ambiguity and equivocity which lends itself to being variously
interpreted even to the point of a total and disastrous misinterpretation.
What is called the archive already contains the so-called error, only in a
kind of indifferent or ‘neutral form’ which subsequently gets mobilized
when the archive is activated or ‘used’ in a reading. So, in the morning, we
had an excellent discussion with professor Rokem. He made a very lucid
comparison of Diana Taylor’s famous category of archive and repertoire
with langue and parole. It seems to me we need a third category. Let’s call
this third category something like ‘use’. Langue and parole are absolutely to
the point; langue is something like archive; parole is something like reper-
toire. But as Mikhail Bakhtin, the great Russian thinker would say, every
language is realized in a parole. So it’s actually the contrary to parole, the
speech act, actual use of language which is the only reality of language. All
language archive exists only in their singularity which is in their use. But the
use is not a use of an object. Because the object comes to exist only in the
use. This is the problem, the question of the archive, it seems to me.
So in that sense, it is perfectly possible to say that the archive is performed.
The third category of use that I suggested earlier is the same as the one called
‘performance’ in this context. It makes perfect sense not simply the
 Archive and Performance 5
metaphoric sense of archive used in a theatre but also that archive is per-
formed in a sense that performance is kind of a use. And the use is not utili-
zation of the archive. So we have to differentiate from the utilization of the
archive to the use which actually creates the archive which is a kind of per-
formance. This is the theoretical point that I want to illustrate through cer-
tain debates that took place at the end of the 1960s in West Germany with a
new movement in theatre which is called the documentary theatre movement.
And some extremely important representatives of the movement were Rolf
Hochhuth and Peter Weiss. There are some others too, but primarily, we keep
to these two for now. The documentary theatre movement was kind of a
response to some very strict prohibitions that had been issued by the Frankfurt
School thinker Theodore Adorno on any kind of representations of Auschwitz.
So, Adorno famously said that after Auschwitz no representation is possible.
So after Auschwitz, no poetry is possible. To that extent, no art is possible
after Auschwitz. So to the reality of Auschwitz, the reality of genocide, the
Holocaust, no representation is possible. So everything is like blocked after
that. So, to that extent, archive is prohibited by history itself. You cannot,
according to Adorno, use an archive, utilize in this sense, an archive, by say-
ing this is the material that will explain the Nazi phenomenon. He says the
Nazi phenomenon exceeds the explanations which are mere historical or
causal or empirical explanations. It is a singular, irreducible event in history.
So given this kind of prohibition, the representatives of the documentary
theatre movement openly repudiated Adorno’s position. They said, no, on
the contrary, it is this mystification which prevents us from coming to terms
with history. It is precisely this kind of prohibition that makes us unable to
understand something so serious as the event of the Holocaust. So if we
actually have to politically come to terms with something as terrible as the
Holocaust, then there is only one route, which is the archival route. Which
means we have to find out what caused it. What happened? Not that some-
thing happened that we know. But what happened? What in the ‘happening’
happened? This is a very concrete historical question. Yes, after all, all char-
acterizations of the event come through language, and language is already
abstracted, so we say Nazi, we say genocide. But what exactly makes it a
genocide? What happened in that particular moment that the Jews became
so feared and so despised that all of them became targets of that sort of
massacre. And this of course can be brought to India, nearly, as the way
things are going. What I have in mind is obviously the communal question
in Indian reality where minorities particularly Muslims are nearly imminent
degrees of communal genocide. One micro-form of such genocide today in
the garb of a kind of religious totemic violence of the holy cow is the lynch
mob. So, of course, it is a fact that it happened, but the question that Rolf
Hochhuth and Peter Weiss and others are asking was why are we blocked
from the archive, and so one of the key plays of Peter Weiss is The
Investigation. And the word ‘investigation’ is extremely important.
What Adorno had prohibited was any kind of investigation. Investigation
is too forensic, it is too localized, while the Nazi phenomenon is as if
6 Soumyabrata Choudhury
something for which the Frankfurt School was fond of using the Hegelian
work: the absolute. Hence the historical phenomenon of Nazism and
Fascism were subject to a kind of absolute dialectic or even an absolute
negativity. The moment of history at end. And everything has to re-begin
again. In that context, Rolf Hocchuth wrote a play called The Deputy and
Peter Weiss wrote a play called The Investigation and, of course, then he
famously wrote Marat/Sade, which I will talk about in a moment. But before
that, with the play The Investigation, what Peter Weiss did was use the form
of a court scene. The whole play is based on a court enquiry. So, it was a
court scene which actually hosted the materials of the history of the death
camps, in Poland. But interestingly, what Peter Weiss also did was stylize the
actual play. He wrote a play. He didn’t merely present the document as they
existed in the archive. What he did was present the documents in a stylized
form. And what was that style? What was that form? It was a religious
form. It was what is called in Latin rhetoric and Christian rhetoric oratorio,
which is a form of incantation, which is a kind of poetry. So while all the
materials of Auschwitz and the death camps were being brought to the play
in the form of a court investigation, everyone was speaking in a stylized,
oratorial, incantatory style. This clearly meant that you could not represent
the document in the sense that it would be imagined to be spoken all the
way to the present in real history or empirical history. Clearly, an actual
judge or an actual plaintiff or anyone who has witnessed will not probably
speak in poetry, – apart from in Hindi Cinema where courtroom scenes
seem to contain the greatest amount of linguistic and poetic flourish and all
parties speak in a high tone from using sublime literary Urdu to the most
melodramatic kitsch.
They will speak in prose. Prose of history as Hegel would say. Prose of
history is where the court scene would be enacted. So obvious example of
this kind of documentary in a theatrical form is the ‘Jan Sunvai’. The Jan
Sunvai that the civil society does as a kind of representation of the court
form, not to reach a verdict but to present a case on behalf of the people of
the civil society. Hence the Jan Sunvai is a people’s court and yet very differ-
ent from the Maoist genre. The main purpose of the Jan Sunvai is to bring
the hidden archives of a situation in crisis to the notice of the public.
Archives are most often deliberately suppressed by interested parties,
including the state. Unlike the Maoist usurpation, the Jan Sunvai does not
attempt to usurp the state’s monopoly over legitimate violence. It is not
done in a stylized way. It is done like a court. It is not a court insofar as it
doesn’t have the legitimation of the state behind it. The Maoist court is on
the opposite of it. But at the same time, it reflects the form of the prose of
the court. The prosaic discourse of the court. As different from that, theatre,
in the case of Peter Weiss’s play, is actually theatrical. Because it was styl-
ized. Now, what does this signify? The critics have pointed out that what it
signifies were two things. One, as in poetry, there is no conclusion to poetry,
there is no conclusion to a stylized form; the stylized form is actually a critic
of the court form itself. So peculiarly, what the stylized form does, is it
 Archive and Performance 7
represents a court form not as a court but as a ritual. This is a tremendous
critical subversion that this oratorical form in the documentary theatre
actually achieves. It actually achieves a documentary purpose. It achieves a
critical documentary purpose that it presents the archive not in the official
state’s court form but in the form of the play.
Apart from the actual investigation into an event like the genocide, which
is a very serious investigation, it also shows you why the court form as an
archive is inadequate for the investigation. So it actually takes those cri-
tiques very seriously. It says that these bourgeois forms, these state forms
are not sufficient, are not adequate in carrying out true investigations into
the real cause and the real magnitude of the historical event which is the
genocide, but it doesn’t abandon it. It uses it but makes the document ironic.
So this actually produces this category of error. But it does it deliberately. It
doesn’t do it to the contingency of what happened to Laurence Olivier,
which was a pure terrible accident. What Peter Weiss is doing is actually
making the error into an artistic resource and infecting the document with
the error. Now the document and the staging of the document are taking
place in the court, and by the incantatory style, he is heightening the theat-
rical effect but at the same time showing you why the court is a ritual. So it
is a mock theatre of the court where everything is repeated, where every
case is also based on precedence. So, the archive then is revealed to be a
function of, through this incantatory mode, through this fictional mode,
through this stylized theatrical mode to be, the key definition which is at the
heart of Diana Taylor’s category, which is repetition.
This is the key feature of the archive. Repetition. The archive necessarily
is subject to repetition. So, earlier, we heard about langue and parole. They
can only work with repetition. That’s why if we are speaking Marathi,
speaking English, Hindi or Bengali, each of these languages can only exist
in repetition. There is no one who can speak a language for the first time. It
is impossible. Insofar as you are speaking, you only speak at least the sec-
ond time. That’s why the philosophers say the language is always the other’s
language. Which means there must be at least one more English-speaking
person for me to speak English. Even if I don’t know who he or she is.
So, to that extent, it is repetition which makes the archive. Every use of
the archive already presumes that the archive exists for someone else. And
yet, paradoxically, the archive only exists in its use. This I think is the key
point. The archive can only exist in its use, meaning what you do with an
archive, but the archive can only exist in repetition, meaning it must be used
at least another time. So that brings together the question of structure and
parole. That is the use, the actual use. The singularity of the archive.
So these problems come alive, in an even more dramatic way in his very
famous play Marat/Sade. Which has three main characters as we all know,
Marat, the revolutionary leader of the French Revolution; Marquis de Sade,
who was in prison in Bastille while the revolution was taking place, some-
one who committed sexual crimes; and then we have a third character, who
interests me the most. The character, not Mericourt who doesn’t feature in
8 Soumyabrata Choudhury
this play and who I will discuss a little later, but the character called
Charlotte Corday. This Charlotte Corday was played by one of the most
amazing British actresses of that time, who didn’t act that much, called
Glenda Jackson. And this was one of her first roles. And she came through
a process of workshops done by Peter Brook, who directed one of the key
productions of Marat/Sade in the 1960s.
The workshop itself did not concern Marat/Sade; it concerned, one of the
most interesting workshops in documentary theatre at that time. Very
quickly, what happened was Peter Brook, along with Charles Marowitz,
announced the workshop called “Theatre of Cruelty Workshop”, which
referred to Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. And they got together
some twenty young actors and actresses, who then performed for the British
audience a Theatre of Cruelty set of scenarios. And these scenarios were
literally experiments of documentary theatre. Because it referred to not only
documents of things in European history but also to key events. Events, like
I said, which made history problematic. Two such events, let me name them
very quickly. One was the assassination of Kennedy. All of you must have
seen it. After John F. Kennedy died, his hearse, coffin, was being taken; his
wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, was standing behind it in a white coat with dark
glasses on, and that photograph is a very very famous photograph. So the
source of this play was not Kennedy’s assassination. So that’s the question,
what happens when something happens? So for Peter Brook and his team,
what happened when Kennedy died was not simply that he died but that his
death led to a specific photographic constellation. So in one particular pho-
tograph from that constellation, it was Jacqueline Kennedy who constitutes
the main image looking on at a certain distance at Kennedy’s hearse. So
that’s why this photograph forms the main material for the workshop and
in the actual scenario that was presented before the public, it was not
Kennedy’s assassination but Jacqueline Kennedy – the representation of
Jacqueline Kennedy as a figure, a popular figure of representation of women
in the American media. And this was coupled with another case at that time
of Christine Keeler who was a high society lady. It was found out later that
she was actually someone who was used by the KGB,1 so to speak to ‘seduce’
key British ministers. It is interesting to note that while we in India associate
both the logic of caste and religious patriarchy with the notion of purity
with women’s bodies as sites for the measure of this purity and modern
western societies appear to have liberated themselves from this mode of
religio-sexual purity and purification, the question of impurity of women
became the obsession with British media. And Christine Keeler became the
hot topic of this issue. So, what Peter Brook did with Glenda Jackson was
use – or they might have devised it together – her presence in a scene that
signified something like a ritual purification of society contaminated by a
figure like Christine Keeler. The actual scene was a ritual bath given to
Jackson by the rest of the actors in the scenario. Obviously, the ritual form
must not be taken literally. It is a theatrical mode of exposing the ritual
underpinnings of, at the very least, an ambiguous ideology of British society.
 Archive and Performance 9
That’s the whole point of the story. A ritual presentation of her taking a
bath on stage so as to purify herself. So again, the ritual form is used to
respond to the document.
This is taken to another kind of level both in stylization and ritual with
Marat/Sade. So, I am not going to talk about Marat and Sade, we don’t have
the time for that. But I will talk about Charlotte Corday. So when Glenda
Jackson plays Charlotte Corday, if you see the clip, I will tell you how it is,
Charlotte Corday plays the role, slowly. Literally slowly. Every line is spo-
ken, every word is spoken, standing on its own. It’s again written in an
oratorical, stylized poetry diction. Now, is this merely a theatrical device? It
could very well be. Is it just a ritual presentation of historical figures?
Maybe. But there is a twist in this. The twist is, as we all know, Marat/Sade,
as written by Peter Weiss, is actually a staging of Marat and Sade and
Charlotte Corday, the assassination of Marat by inmates of the most famous
Charenton lunatic asylum in France (the persecution and assassination of
Jean-Paul Marat as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton
under the direction of Marquis de Sade). And the play is actually being done
by the inmates of that place as part of a therapeutic programme being con-
ducted at this institution. So history and the document are now instruments
of therapy, science of therapy. And Charlotte Corday speaks slowly for a
concrete ‘documentary’ reason. Her speech style is a simulated document of
a patient who suffers from melancholia or what is called in the play ‘sleep-
ing sickness’. The actress playing Charlotte Corday (Glenda Jackson) is
sleeping all the time. So anyone who has sleeping sickness will speak slowly.
So the real person, who is an inmate, has sleeping sickness, Charlotte
Corday, a historical figure of the French Revolution who assassinated Marat
is on her list, who every time targets Marat and eventually kills him. But it’s
done by a real person, a fictionalized real person; it’s not as if Charlotte
Corday was ever in an asylum. But it refers to a possible delusional melan-
cholic woman who has a sleeping sickness, who is now playing the role of
a murderess, a historical murderess, as therapy. How can history be therapy
through this kind of gory archive? It can only be, again, as a ritualized form.
Only if you are able to play history, pacify history as a ritual. Pacify the
document as a ritual. That’s the only way. And that’s exactly what is Glenda
Jackson’s genius in acting. If you have seen her act, then you will see how
she actually ritualizes the role but ritualizes it not this time for religion but
through a kind of ritual of the asylum.
So, now last two minutes on Mericourt. Now, Mericourt was such a real
person from French Revolution history. Mericourt came from Belgium to
the revolution and joined the revolution. Between 1789 and 1794, she was
one of the most prominent figures of the revolution. She was a woman of
great education; she was not a person who was uneducated. She had a past,
as they call it. In a sense, she is known to have some lovers in Belgium. Now,
what she did when she joined the revolution was to deliberately make her-
self a de-eroticized person. She joined the cold man of the revolution, who
is absolutely the non-polemical figure of the revolution. He was not a
10 Soumyabrata Choudhury
popular leader. He was a writer called Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes. So she was
only seen with this cold man, never with the men of the revolution, in a
sense the heroes. Nevertheless, she was vilified by the men of the revolution
and in the parliament, the first revolutionary parliament and was beaten up,
publicly beaten up. And even at that time, it was said, because of her revo-
lutionary fervour and her enthusiasm, that this energy actually was dis-
placed erotic energy. It is the revolutionary; the men themselves are saying
it about Mericourt. Their own comrades. Her fervour is such an irritant
that it is actually displaced energy. This became a delusional diagnosis in
1794 when peculiarly all these heroes of the revolution were killed by each
other. Nearly all of them died. Only she was spared. Why? Because she was
confined to an asylum by then. So she lived on till Napoleon’s time, but she
lived in the most horrible misery that any human being can live in. But the
point is not that. The point is, in one of these asylums, she was being treated
by one of the most respected psychiatrists of that time called Etienne
Esquirol. And he couldn’t make head or tail of her so to speak ‘illness’. The
revolutionaries have said what they have said. Now this is an expert. This
is a certified psychiatrist who needed to certify the mad person.
So, the archival climax comes with this. Just about two years before she
dies, in the 1820s, that far, from 1789 to 1820, after Napoleon, Esquirol
actually comes up with a name for the disease. Which is a name, medical
science hadn’t heard till now. So he invents a name to archive her. He calls
the disease, and please don’t ask me what it means, because no one does,
lypemania. So lypemania actually becomes the identity; she is, a lypema-
niac. The identity that Theroigne de Mericourt nearly at the brink of her
disappearance, her death, in the most horrible circumstances in a lunatic
asylum gains as a mad person, to that extent gets the security of the archive
for posterity. And exactly by the one who could do it: the doctor invents a
signifier, a word, a label. The identity is entirely invented. Now the point is,
after this, you could have lypemaniacs.
So, if you could make the move of producing literally a fictional signifier,
which is lypemania, for Theroigne de Mericourt, henceforth the archive is
available to medical science so that there could be more lypemaniacs. To
that extent, archive owes its existence entirely to theatre.

Note
1 Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti Committee for State Security of Soviet
Union.
2 Interpreting Material
Ashutosh Potdar

Introduction
The theatrical sphere gets visible only through the act of presenting and
viewing an event of performance. A theatre researcher doesn’t have access
to the particular moment of a performance after its performed, for its
ephemerality. As a result, one has to rely on the archival material produced
before or after the performance. For this chapter, I am interested in studying
the archival material that informs the making and the presentation of a
performance in nineteenth-century India. More specifically, the basic task
undertaken in this chapter is of studying the emergence of an idea of natak1
in the early performance practices in India with a special focus on perfor-
mance practices in Maharashtra. We can call this phase the making of the-
atre phase as newer expressions in the practices of performances had begun
evolving. Methodologically, the investigation has been informed by the pro-
duction and dissemination of the performance practices, and I approach
them with an integrative method rather than an investigation of the individ-
ual elements of performances. There are specific restrictions in this process
regarding medium, period and location of the source material that would
inform the methodological perspective for my investigation into the making
of theatre. The scarcity of useful material makes my aim difficult to achieve.
Indeed, I have to keep shifting my research work between generating impor-
tant and useful information that are facts and creating a theoretical frame-
work for the research. In this background, meanings drawn from various
sources depend upon the relationship between material and other contex-
tual factors that simultaneously influence how signs are deciphered in the
making of theatre.

Mobilities
Before embarking upon a detailed enquiry of archival material relating to
theatrical accounts of the performance practices, I would like to set the
analytical and contextual framework for the analysis. A preliminary inves-
tigation of the nineteenth-century performance practices in Maharashtra
demonstrates that the natak was a creation and result of mobilities between

DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-3
12 Ashutosh Potdar
different cultures. In analyzing these mobilities, the existing scholarship in
Marathi and English, generally, begins with a problematic bipolar under-
standing of performance practices of nineteenth-century India. This, on the
one hand, views the mobilities from the nationalist perspective of glorifying
precolonial native traditions of performances with the assumption of ‘we
had it all’. On the other hand, the ‘modernist’ perspective contends that
western forms stimulated modernity in performing practices and led the
discourse of performance practices towards a new direction. The bipolar
categorization does nothing but offer simplicity either in stamping colonial
power as a monolithic entity or in denying the fact that the nation had
complex performance cultures that have had histories before it encountered
the colonial state. In addition, such understanding ignores a range of per-
formance traditions that would not fit into their categorization drawn on
the European history of theatre2 and their connection with performance
traditions in Maharashtra. In this view, we need to set our premise for our
investigation by closely analyzing precolonial and colonial performing tra-
ditions that were not homogeneously drawn and linearly arranged but con-
stantly overlapping and in dialogue with continuously flowing traditions.

Performing Practices
When we speak of a performance in colonial Maharashtra, it was essen-
tially performance of multiple forms of khel (play). It is, in fact, difficult to
organize performance in the category of either a ‘staged’ work, ‘narrative’
or ‘non-narrative’ because it crossed boundaries of ‘form’ and manifested in
several ways. However, attempts have been made to study performing tra-
ditions either by arranging them chronologically or by setting them form-/
genre-wise. In fact, narrative forms in India have always entailed some kind
of a performance and performance is also some kind of narrative.3 Bharata
Muni in his Nāṭya Śāstra, a discourse on ancient Indian dramaturgy dis-
cusses the science of drama and considers ‘non-staged’ kavya as a synonym
of drama. The kavya is identified by its orientation towards pleasure of any
kind. On the basis of modes, the kavya is either drisya (visual) or sravya
(audio) or mixed. The kavi of the kavya may go for varied kinds of drisya/
sravya modes like akhyana, katha, keertan, etc. Whatever is produced by
sastrakaras (who develop science), either drisya or sravya, is perfor-
mance-production with prekshak (spectator) in their mind. In the same
way, in the early heydays of Marathi medieval literature, Mahanubhavas
and Varkaris produced literature in Prakrit and not in Sanskrit to propagate
their ideas. These narratives did not have the dichotomy of writer and
reader but srota (spectator) and vakta (performer). Whichever kind of text
it may be, it was produced as a discourse between srota and vakta. The
discourse between the two is known as akhyan (narration to be told). In
Marathi, it has a specific verb, ‘akhyan lawane’, which refers to an akhyan
to be presented. Such discourses would have been taken down in written
form by scribes or ‘archivists’ of the time while they were being narrated/
 Interpreting Material 13
performed. Here, a performer plays a role to tell ‘katha’. ‘Katha’ in his sense
does not mean merely ‘fiction’ but a philosophical, spiritual and cultural
discourse. The same applies to the ‘uninspiring style’4 of the historical
bakhars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, we
can easily connect a bakhar narrative with ‘military intentions’ in its depic-
tion; on the other hand, it deals with battles, murders, family feuds and
deaths in performative manner. Most of the time, a bakhar in its dramatic
expression has been caught in debates on whether it is historical or nonhis-
torical. On the one hand, historians did not approve of its ‘inauthenticity’
because of its inclination towards ‘imaginative’ literature, and on the other
hand, literary/performance critics did not consider it for its non-literariness.
However, blurring of boundaries of genres/types of expressions has been a
creative aspect of the bakhar-like narrations.
Before newer theatrical expressions could evolve in the mid-nineteenth
century, it was a performance of impromptu actors with “Excellent acting
(wearing) the air of perfect spontaneity”.5 An actor from a walk of life
would not be trained, but he would pick up ‘acting’ from watching other
performers. In a form like keertan, a performer and a spectator would be
bhakts (devotees), not simply ‘theatre-goer’ or ‘performer’, entailing quali-
ties of a connoisseur as well as a devotee. Their interest was to participate
in and experience a spiritually performed activity that carries one towards
anand (bliss). Obviously, in such a performance, a performer’s body (and
not stage properties or scenery) would go beyond becoming just a tool to
decode worldviews. Coomarswamy elaborates his point by noting that “in
Kalidasa’s Shakuntala the words natya etc. imply both acting and dancing;
we have used the word ‘dance’ in our translation only for want of any
English word combining the ideas of dancing and acting. Indian acting is a
poetic art, an interpretation of life, while modern European acting, apart
from any question of words, is prose, or imitation”.6
Coomarswamy further observes, “The Indian actor relies only to a very
small extent on properties, and still less on scenery”.7 The various forms of
traditional theatre were essentially improvisatory in their nature with a loose
and flexible structure. The performances, which were mainly addressed as
khel, during the course of its development could deviate from main action to
indulge in elaboration by repeating the dialogues in a variety of delivery pat-
terns and stating the same idea in both prose and verse dialogue. A form like
tamasha showed even greater flexibility when an actor on stage would come
out of one character’s role to shift to another to comment on the complexities
of a situation, the emotional conflicts of a character or the moral values
involved. The plays were sung and danced out rather than spoken or enacted.
To achieve this, acting would be highly stylized and choreographed.

Performance Practices within Context

The Indian performance culture began to face significant changes in the
very idea of performance through the social and political changes at the
14 Ashutosh Potdar
beginning of the nineteenth century. The foundation of the Company Raj in
this period in Maharashtra, which followed the rule of the Peshwas, had
become stronger. The major contribution of the Peshwa was the unfolding
of a nascent form of national consciousness by the inculcation of
Maharashtra dharma, which had been strenuously nurtured by Shivaji,
from its authentic and popular roots dating back to the days of early Varkari
saints.8 As we know, scholarship on colonial hegemony has framed nation-
alism within the discourse of anti-colonialism. Against this background, it
would be interesting to note that the complexity of the period precludes
such a static evaluation of the period. For a few artists, the company rule
was in a way a welcome change. Raosaheb Vasudeo Ganesh Bhave in his
biographical note on Vishnudas Bhave has recorded the contemporary feel-
ings towards the establishment of the colonial state after the end of last
Peshwa’s regime. He writes, “Maratha chieftains had settled with their
domains. Everyone could manage their business peacefully. …Brahmans
had undertaken jobs of the English as the jobs achieved greater market
value, this class (of Brahmans) was flourishing”.9 Further, Bhave goes on to
demonstrate how the peaceful period of the company rule had a positive
effect on the Bhave family and the performing practices in Maharashtra. In
addition, while comparing performance practices pioneered by Vishnudas
Bhave with popular forms like tamasha, the biographer seems to be suggest-
ing that the company rule brought about a junction between two cultural
trends in Maharashtrian society. Regarding the performing of community’s
relationship with the colonial state, it would be important to note the dif-
ferent nature of non-Brahmin performing traditions like jalasa initiated by
Jotiba Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj. The ‘purvarang’ of a jalasa would start
by propitiating Shivaji (by presenting a ballad) and thanks giving to Ingraj
prabhu.10 On the one hand, there was the institutionalized ‘order’ and
standardization introduced by the new rulers, and on the other hand, the
older tradition of managing artistic expressions continued to exist. Earlier,
the standardization was brought by the Peshwa regime. Although the
Peshwas encouraged forms like tamasha and lavani, they also attempted to
purify them. The tamasha and lavani, which were once a prominent form of
lok (mass), had set out to receive royal patronage during the regime of the
last Peshwa and, obviously, were subjected to standardization and brah-
manical purification in the production and consumption of the forms. In
such attempts, the forms started becoming more and more sophisticated
and stylized. One can see the change in the lavani as women performers left
behind the bawdiness and roughness of the earlier form of the lavani to turn
it into a soft, delicate form, portraying a woman’s aspirations for her hus-
band who has gone to his work.
After the political fallout of the Peshwa Raj, the Maharastrian society
was to strengthen the process of institutionalization and standardization of
cultural practices already initiated at the hands of the neatly and systemat-
ically drawn and manipulated colonial system. The conjuncture of two
independent as well as conjoining historical processes began documenting
 Interpreting Material 15
and dividing cultural traditions into the classical and the non-classical. As a
result of this drive to purify art, Sanskrit theatre became a classical form,
and others like tamasha and lavani became non-classical. Macaulay’s min-
utes on education, the British officers’ projects of revising citizen’s history
and re-writing it, the state’s anthropological documentation of societal
structures and translation of canonical European texts for administrative,
as well as pedagogical purposes, were some of the reasons that shaped the
process of cultural formation with more sophistication and rigour. In the
process, one can see how lavani or tamasha were rejected within British
India’s project of modernity. For instance, Saadhudas, the rajkavi (poet of
the state) of the princely state of Sangli noted in his introduction to a biog-
raphy of Vishnudas Bhave11 that playing a character like radha was consid-
ered deprecating. He quotes Tukaram, “Radha houniya naache jo pongada/
to hoy hijada janmojanmi” (One who dances being raadha will be con-
demned to be a eunuch for all consequent lives) and claims that only the
actor who plays the female character of a dignified woman in a pauranik
(mythological) play will be appreciated.
In this regard, the example of the Dakshina Prize Committee helps us
understand the dynamic relationship between the state and cultural prac-
tices. The committee had been instituted to encourage Marathi language
and literature as part of Mountstuart Elphinstone’s reforms of the existing
institution of dakshina, money paid as charity to learned Brahman under
the government of the Peshwas. The committee considered supporting only
the translation of plays from Sanskrit as well as canonical plays, mainly of
Shakespeare. In such attempts to ‘modernize’ the state, the idea and forma-
tion of the state were limited within European canons as well as the lan-
guage of the dominant caste that had developed associations with the state.
In this background, when we talk of the performance traditions in
Maharashtra, a ‘new’ performing community was not just a product of colo-
nial encounters but also a result of the community’s dialogic relationship
with the ongoing traditional performance practices. We can also see that
there was not a singular attempt of rejecting or accepting the traditions or
‘modernity’. Instead, we can say that they built creative links and relation-
ships with various interconnected phenomena.

Interpreting Material
Theatre scholarship in India has emphasized two main roles of the archive.
One, the archive remains the substantive source in writing the history of the
theatre of the nation. Shankar Bapuji Mujumdar was the manager of
Kirloskar Theatre in the nineteenth century. Founded by Annasaheb
Kirloskar, the Kirloskar Natak Mandali has been credited with creating a
newer vocabulary of theatrical form.12 Shankar Mujumdar writes in ‘Ekach
Abhipray’ as an introduction to the book Maharashtra Natyakala va
Natyavangamay, “More and more material of theatre-art history should be
published in Maharashtra language (Marathi). It will be useful in writing
16 Ashutosh Potdar
the future history of the theatre of our nation”.13 Thus, this view considers
the archive as a ‘source’ for the historian: as information and data that can
serve the historical project when verified as evidence. Another role of an
archive as reflected through the archival work and subsequent analytical
writings of Shriniwas Narayan Banhatti is to develop a model for the his-
torical understanding of theatre. This particular function encompasses both
archivists and historians. The two functions of the archive as a source can
be seen combined by theatre historians like Shriniwas Narayan Banhatti in
the voluminous work, History of Marathi Theatre, Part I (1843–1879). In
this book, while writing the history of Marathi theatre, Banhatti throws
light on how archives are organized, used and shape historical inquiry.
Thus, as Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait write:

The archive only preserves a minute sample of the past’s traces and
fragments; nonetheless, in history— as de Certeau would have it—
everything begins with the gesture of setting aside, of putting together,
of transforming certain classified objects into ‘documents’.

The historian, then, takes up evidence “which had its own definite status
and role” and, through writing, turns it “into something else which func-
tions differently”.14 Thus, the archive establishes the framing network for
all methods of investigation. Thus, the archive sanctions not only research
procedures but also the historical questions and problems that serve as the
catalyst for historical inquiry.
For this chapter, I am looking into the archival material that is not part
of the actual event of performance. As an announcement, the aim of such
material could be to create excitement for the upcoming performance and
encourage the public to experience the ‘live’ theatre. At the outset, this
material is primarily a written form of communication. Of course, there are
visual elements in the material such as typographical arrangements, stamps
and logos that may extend beyond textual properties for the communica-
tion. The material provides us with information such as names and dates of
a performance and entry tickets for a show. The material informs the per-
formance, and it comes before or after the performance. This material, such
as an announcement of a performance, either advertises the upcoming show
or records an event of the performance through the accounts maintained by
a theatre troupe. Despite the material’s essential role in performance prac-
tices, it remains the most neglected source of information in the theatre
archive. As far as Marathi theatre practices go, the material hasn’t been
maintained at all. Whatever material we get to see is either printed in thea-
tre history books or published in souvenirs released in the celebration of
birth or death anniversaries of well-known actors or artists. Despite this
typical interest in treating archival material in celebrating our ‘glorious
past’, they are largely ignored in the systematic analysis of theatre or his-
tory. The research into the archival material can be understood as a begin-
ning towards establishing a historical understanding of performative
traditions. Further, the material may help us understand the social meaning
 Interpreting Material 17
of the material such as caste and class dynamic of participants through their
surnames. However, such material is, as Christopher Balme writes, “fore-
play but not the act in itself”. Additionally, the theatre-related archival
material from colonial times helps us assemble information such as move-
ments of theatre companies, records of their theatre shows and the com-
pany artists’ responsibilities within the organizational set-up. The material
can also be analyzed in order to understand the role of the theatre in the
public sphere. This way we can take forward the existing theoretical frame-
work or challenge. Another interesting aspect of colonial archival material
is that in the early years, theatre was not deliberately identified with the
actors of contemporary time. Instead, content-based announcements were
brought out to inform the audience about the play. Specifically, references
were made to spectacular scenery and stage effects through these announce-
ments. In later days, with the emergence of popular actors and female
impersonators such as Balgandharv, theatre announcements began high-
lighting lead actors in the play.
Sometimes, it’s difficult to draw any conclusion about an enacted perfor-
mance event exclusively from a material. For instance, the record of
Vishnudas Bhave’s performances between 1855 to 1862 shows that Bhave
Natak Mandali did seven tours of plays across Maharashtra barring the
year 1857–1858. But the 1857 war doesn’t seem to have affected the theatre
company. Additionally, throughout Bhave’s work, “Natyakavita Sangrah”,
or writing on him or the material of contract letters do not have any refer-
ence to his political inclinations or his co-artists’ views on 1857. It seems
that he had chosen not to perform that year. However, we don’t have mate-
rial that would establish the exact reason behind not performing in that
particular year. The other documentary evidence refers to the rebellion of
some of his troupe members Bhave Natak Mandali. As the document shows,
Bhave has written to his patron, King of Sangli:

I have worked hard for thirteen years to prepare troupe members. They
had agreed to follow my orders and accordingly, signed the agreement.
Even then, the members have betrayed me and taken my plays to per-
form on their own. They shouldn’t be allowed to do so and should be
summoned to follow my orders.15

Thus, the document helps understand that popular company artists like
Govind Karmarkar, Givba Kanitkar, Raghupati Phadke and several others
abandoned the company. However, we don’t have material to establish whether
the later performances happened without them or didn’t happen at all.
Thus, as a strategy, while focusing on exploring the theatrical sphere, we
may decide to not just focus on the relationship between archival material
and an event of the performance. A primary reason is that the theatre
doesn’t, in Christopher Balme’s words:

just consist of a succession of performance events where bodies and

spaces are transformed by semiotic processes into signs and perceived by
18 Ashutosh Potdar
spectators in the here and now. The theatre also consists of a realm out-
side its architectural and performative coordinates. Every theatre exists in
a spatial and temporal realm that is more conditioned by structure than
by event. Most theatres are first and foremost institutions that function
over a long duration in a public sphere that is located temporally and
spatially outside the heightened enchantment of the “event”. Theatres are
examples of institutional cultures that need to be addressed from per-
spectives that are culturally and not just aesthetically determined.16

Thus, against this background, our focus could be to understand how to

interpret the material that’s not a part of the actual ‘event’ but of the
broader theatrical public sphere. The purpose of interpretation of historical
material is to theorize about the role of such material (visual and non-
visual) in shaping the identity of performing artists and audiences as it
emerged in nineteenth-century India. The material is helpful in our grasp of
the various aspects of the emergence of modernity like consumer culture
and national identity. At the same time, with such material, we can see that
technological developments enabled mass production of forms of theatre.
Needless to say, the visual forms were based on changing tastes of the con-
temporary audience. In addition, as I will discuss hereafter, it would be vital
to understand the dynamic of the social and cultural influences that gener-
ated the material.
The administrative policies of the colonial state and the changed nature
of service sectors had allowed the emergence of new economic structures to
facilitate the growth of a new middle class. This class adopted European
values, ideas and manners that were to influence the production and dis-
semination of theatrical expressions. Among these changes, the artistic
experience of khel got transformed into a well-planned, properly arranged
in-house theatrical experience. Until then, a performance which was open
to ‘limited all’ within caste hierarchies was further limited to the class who
could pay for a ticket. Following is an advertisement of Bhave’s theatre
group published17 in the Times of India in 1853:

Hindu Theatre (24 November 1853)

The Hindu dramatic Corps most respectfully beg to acquaint the Bombay
public, Native and Europeans, that they will have the honour to appear
on the boards of the Grant Road Theatre, on Saturday the 26th instant,
when the interesting play of Raja Gopichand and Jalander will be per-
formed in Hindustani.

Vishnudas Bhave (1819–1901) pioneered the new Marathi theatre after

witnessing plays from Karnataka. He revised his performances after travel-
ling to Bombay in the late 1840s. For the first time in Bombay, Bhave and his
group saw a parsi theatre amidst diwa battis lit for the performance. Ramu
Ramnathan writes in his paper about the Bombay theatre of the times:
 Interpreting Material 19
With the evolution of new form of drama, the theatre has evolved. In
1846, the Grant Road theatre in Mumbai, known as Shankersheths
Natyashakha was a castle-like structure, equipped with stage machinery
but lit with coconut and oil lamps. These theatres witnessed a variety of
plays, from Shakespearean to Indian myths like Harishchandra to Nala
Damayanti. Plays like Indrasabha had a bit of everything: songs, fairies
and demons appearing from the sky, and real horses too for battle scenes.18

The European theatre companies had begun performing in Grant Theatre

(previously known as Badshahi Theatre). The theatre used to run house-full
shows and groups had to pay high rent. Initially, Bhave had to drop the idea
of performing at the Grant Theatre and moved to a suburban area of
Bombay: Phanaswadi and Girgaon. Meantime, with the financial support of
businessmen like Nana Shankarshet and Bhau Daji Lad, he could perform at
the Grant Road. Bhave’s company performed a Marathi play, Indrajeet Vadh
on 9 March 1853, which was attended by Parsis, Gujratis, Bhatiyas and
Muslims, along with Marathis. An interesting aspect here to note is that to
attract a cosmopolitan audience of Bombay, Bhave’s troupe chose to perform
Raja Gophichand in Hindustani, which was attended by a fair number of
heterogeneous audiences composed of diverse religious, ethnic and linguistic
groups representing merchants, government servants, Europeans and Parsis.
After the show, as Vasudev Ganesh Bhave has recorded, Bhave’s group had a
box office collection of Rs 1,800 with which they paid off their loans.
A close examination of a poster that was created to publicize shows of
the Altekar Hindoo Drama gives a sense of who was being addressed among
lok in Maharashtra. The poster reflects a new worldview, which was intro-
duced through the educational policies of the colonial state. Also, the new
performing community had been getting acquainted with innovative ways
of conveying what they wanted. The images used in the poster interact
simultaneously with the evocative image of ‘hindoo natak’, appealing to a
specific identity within contemporary society and the class that was getting
defined by its paying capacities. It is visible that the practitioners were
keenly aware of performance practices being shaped through the union of
various narrative forms that had been in existence. In a way, it was the close
fit between earlier religious dramas and communities of believers address-
ing specific communities.
At this stage, it is important to state here that although newer theatre
practices in Maharashtra were emerging while adopting the elements from
South Indian and European performing traditions, they were simultaneously
strengthening links with forms of khel that had continued to exist within the
tradition. The poster demonstrates the link that drew on indigenous forms
like akhyan, khel in the public life of the emerging paying class. The poster
informs “tonight they will have a khel in the akhyan style”. It also describes
how the performance will present engaging and fantastic scenes of
Narayanrao’s death (an important and famous political episode in Peshwa
history). This poster provides evidence for supporting my argument, as
20 Ashutosh Potdar
stated at the beginning of the chapter, that we cannot address cultural flows
in the colonial period only within the colonial framework by generally clas-
sifying the age as the ‘modern’ age of realism only because the performing
actors had begun accepting European values and exhibiting their ‘real and
trained bodies’ on the stage. There also existed contemporary expressions
continuously inherited from the past to mix with the contemporary.

More on Material
The signed legal agreement of a contract19 between performing artists and
the creative director of the travelling theatre company was a new experi-
ence for the performing community, which till then had relied on boli vyav-
ahar (oral transaction) of communication. With such a transaction, the field
of performance activities entered into a formalized relationship between the
performing artists and their ‘owner’ companies. This was to affect artistic
figuration, training of the performing actors as well as management of the
theatre practices of the period. With the formal and written agreement letter
signed by two actors in Vishnudas Bhave’s Sanglikar Mandali (1843–1862),
the ‘professional’ theatre practices introduced an era of organized theatrical
practices with a ‘trained’ group of performing artists. The agreement was
signed for ten years by Sitaram Bhat, an actor in Bhave’s group who was
‘accepted by’ Rajashree Vishnupant Dada Bhave to “teach him to sing in
Ramayan etc. plays”.20 The provisions in the ‘company-centric’ are dicta-
tions of what Bhave expected from Sitaram though it was signed by
Vishnudas Bhave and Sitaram Bhat. While reiterating his loyalty towards
Bhave, the actor offers an indemnity to his teacher/guru in case of any con-
flicts or issues within the group. Some of the amendments (kalame) in the
legal document given next shed light on the changed dynamic of theatre
practices:

• He (the actor) will not complain about whichever role Bhave offers to
him or wherever Bhave wants him to travel for a performance.
• After a performance, I (the actor) will accept his fees from whatever
amount we (the group) get from a khel (show). However, I (the actor)
will not say anything if you (Bhave) do not offer anything.
• I will hand over any item I will get at the time of a khel, and I will not
cheat you.
• I will not cheat like those who cheated you during the Bombay trip.
And, I will not teach any other person what you have taught me with-
out your permission.

One of the amendments also states that, if they face any loss in khel, the
actor will share the loss. However, there is no mention of if he will share the
profit.
These professional groups21 attempted to create ‘finer’ artistic produc-
tions while drawing from what was ‘raw’ material that existed in folk or
other popular contemporary forms. In a detailed survey of these changes,
 Interpreting Material 21
Krisnaji Appaji Kulkarni justified the fineness of the groups’ productions
when he compared the lalit and tamasha and the bhagwat performances
from Karnataka with pauranik (mythological) plays that were being per-
formed in Maharashtra. In fact, the ‘inspiration’ for Bhave’s pioneering
work was in his royal patron’s discomfort with the ‘roughness’ of the per-
formances of the Bhagwat Mandali that had travelled from Karnataka to
perform in the princely state of Sangli in Maharashtra. In addition, as
Saadhudas has recorded, for the supposed fineness and to create new mod-
els, these groups looked at the Sanskrit theatrical traditions and refashioned
the traditions weeding out the dhangaddhinga (boisterous activities) of folk
performance. 22 At one level, the form that emerged was appealing, as
Sudharak, a newspaper reported on 12 October 1903 to the ‘common
folk’.23 However, at another level, a general critique about the performance
from a critic like Appaji Vishnu Kulkarni was that the companies were not
achieving their best given the fact that the Marathi theatre had inherited a
rich shastriya (scientific) tradition of staged and musical performances.
With reference to the early plays, he alleged that “they have dissolved clas-
sicism (shashstriya sangeet) of music by inclining itself with light music,
absorbing what was topical, catchy, and entertaining without regard to
high/cultural taste”.24
The new companies had begun following a disciplined process of training
their actors through rigorous rehearsal sessions. Depending on individual
temperament, the performance artist’s caste and class background25 and
stylistic community, artists explored various modes of expression in the
contemporary period. On the one hand, it gave an opportunity for artists to
try out different possibilities for their artistic endeavours; on the other
hand, these activities created newer hierarchies beyond the existing caste-
based hierarchies. Most of the actors who were involved in the performance
activities were mainly from the Brahman castes. But, even within the privi-
leged caste group, their respective responsibilities were divided on the basis
of the nature of the roles performed, the actor’s age and his experience. A
letter by actors in the Altekar Natak Mandali (1874) written to the man-
ager of their group demonstrates these newer hierarchies within the group.
The letter says that senior artists should get heavy work done from others.
Among the middle staff, one should decide who can cook, do shopping or
serve food. Materials like stage properties should be taken care of by the
middle staff. 26

Questioning the Material and Its Interpretation

After the discussion on the interpretation of the material to demonstrate
how an idea of new theatre emerged in the nineteenth century, I would like
to go on to talk about a critical intervention into the process of making the
theatre that claimed that the creative expressions were an invention of the
ruling Brahmin class in the nineteenth century. In this regard, I will begin
with Jotiba Phule’s letter to Marathi writers. Jotiba Phule (1827–1890), a
visionary thinker of the lower caste movements in colonial India, wrote a
22 Ashutosh Potdar
play, Tritiya Ratna (The Third Jewel) in 1885. In this play, a cunning
Brahmin priest exploits an ignorant and superstitious peasant couple, and
later, a Christian missionary enlightens the couple. Broadly, the play
addresses how systemic intervention by the dominant caste of Brahmins
had ideologically imposed their authority over the lower castes. It is a
known fact, as Phule himself has recorded in his short book, Slavery, that
he had attempted to publish the play, The Third Eye with support from the
Dakshina Prize Committee. But the influence of Brahmins on the committee
resulted in the rejection of the play. Therefore, the play was not published
at that time. A volume of collected works of Mahatma Phule’s literature
published by ‘Maharasthra Rajya Sahitya Ani Sanskriti Mandal’ (the
Maharashtra state-controlled body established to support arts and culture)
states in its prologue to the play that the play was published in Purogami
Satyashodhak in April–June 1979.27 As Rosalind O’Hanlon observes:

I have not been able to find out whether the play was ever actually
performed. The fact that there are three copies suggests that the text
was actually passed around amongst Phule’s circle. An internal refer-
ence on the page 24 of the play suggests that Phule hoped that as the
commentators urges the audience ‘if you should read or listen this
debate’ to take heed of his warning of the treachery of Brahmins.28

In his open letter to Marathi Granthakar Sabha (‘A Meet of the Marathi
Writers’) published in an issue of Dnyanodaya as a response to the invita-
tion sent to him by the Sabha to attend the meeting, Phule questioned the
validity of existing literary practices for the society which had been exploited
by the dominant caste and most of the creative writers and theatre directors
that we have discussed so far came from that caste. He told them, “The
feelings expressed in our meetings and books do not appear in books writ-
ten by them or in their meeting. How will people with their heads in the
clouds understand what adversities and troubles we have faced?” Further,
he announced in the letter that “Your literature and our literature can never
come together. Therefore, we will develop our own literature and will hold
our own conferences”.29
The archival material and the material interpretation refer to the tech-
niques and principles employed in the design and presentation of theoretical
conclusions. This seems fairly straightforward to formulate. However,
Jotirao Phule’s literature and the Satyashodhak (truth-seeking) movement
that he led has provided critical perspectives and newer formulations raising
concerns about the nature of the interpretation of the material. Phule’s dis-
course challenges material chosen to investigate the creative expressions and
at a deeper level, demands a re-interpretation of ‘shared’ historiographic
traditions that had established certain methodologies for the investigation.
Basically, Phule challenges the assumption that lok (a Marathi plural noun
to indicate ‘mass’) is a homogenous and singular (Brahminical) identity. The
cultural practices were split into the representation of bahujan (mass) among
 Interpreting Material 23
lok and abhijan (elite). Not surprisingly, bahujan and abhijan were continu-
ously thriving among lok. This idea of the lok, leads us to intervene into
historiographic practices that are prompted by Phule’s re-invention of tradi-
tions by breaking the existing frame of reference in cultural practices to
include history and reality. Mahatma Phule’s discourse and material gener-
ated within this discourse give us an opportunity of addressing ‘public’ and
public memory that ‘material’ carries with different worldviews. We have
seen that as reflected in Mahatma Phule’s letter. Therefore, the historical
material poses a problem in their choices of representation of ‘shared mem-
ories’. The making of theatre went through a dynamic process of construc-
tion of performance which was simultaneously being re-constructed by
Phule’s cultural practices. As I have argued, the performance practices that
were barred by the newly emerging middle class as ‘rough and unsophisti-
cated’ played a major creative part in performance practices of Jotirao Phule.
It was the material for him to denounce the existing system of exploitation.

Notes
1 The Marathi word natak is an equivalent to theatre in English. It is not an
unorganized dramatic activity of khel (play). As explained in this chapter, natak
emerged as organized and professional activity in the latter half of the nine-
teenth. It was different than what was earlier understood as khel.
2 In one of the earliest books on history of Marathi Theatre, Krishnaji Appaji
Kulkarni maps the Marathi theatre history but grants very few pages to such
forms that have no connection with Sanskrit or English theatre. They are
referred to as non-sophisticated, non-polished whenever he refers to them at the
beginning of his book, Marathi Rangabhumi (1913).
3 For detail discussions on the complexity of performative/narrative traditions in
Maharashtra, see Potdar 2007: 120.
4 Raeside 1968: 791–808.
5 Coomaraswamy 1917:6
6 Ibid.: 5.
7 Ibid.: 12.
8 Prachi Deshpande has traced these changes in her book. See Deshpande 2007.
9 Bhave 1943: 53.
10 Bagal 1933.
11 Bhave 1943: 22.
12 Meera Kosambi writes in Gender, Culture and Performance: Marathi Theatre
and Cinema before Independence, “The Kirloskar tradition’s popularity and
longevity was proof of the significant space it had carved out as a relatively
realistic, musically enriching, and socially acceptable form of entertainment. On
the one level it bridged the divide between a mythological and a social or family
play; on another it ‘musicalized’ the audiences far more deeply than any other
regional theatre tradition in India”.
13 Dandwate 1931: 9.
14 Canning and Postlewait 2010: 66.
15 Mote 1975: 10.
16 Balme 2014: 47.
17 As quoted in Bhave 1943.
18 Ramnathan 2006: 3.
19 Mote 1975: 10.
24 Ashutosh Potdar
20 Mote 1975: 10.
21 A few other major theatre companies that flourished following the success of
Bhave’s group include Altekar Natak Mandali and Ichalkaranjikar Natak
Mandali.
22 Bhave 1943: 10.
23 Kulkarni 1903: 123.
24 Ibid.: 134.
25 Mote 1975: 14.
26 Ibid.: 14.
27 Phadke 1991: 4.
28 O’Hanlon 1985: 123.
29 Phadke 1991: 5.

Bibliography
Bagal, Mahadevrao Khanderao (ed.). Satyashodhak Hirak Mahotstave Granth, A
Diamond Jubilee Publication, Kolhapur, 1933.
Balme, Christopher. The Theatrical Public Sphere, Cambridge University Press,
2014.
Bhave, Raosaheb Vasudhev Ganesh. Natyapratibha: Adya Maharashtra Natakkaar,
Vishnudas: Vishnu Amrit Bhave: Prabha Press, Sangli, 1943.
Canning, Charlotte M. and Postlewait, Thomas (ed.). Representing the Past: Essays
in Performance Historiography, University of Iowa Press, 2010.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda. The Mirror of Gesture: Being the Abhinaya Darpana of
Nandikesvara, Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1917.
Dandwate, Ganesh. Maharashtra Kala va Natyavangmay, Bhashadhikari Shakha,
Vidhyadhikari Shakha, Badoda, 1931.
Deshpande, Prachi. Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western
India, 1700–1960, Columbia University Press, New York; Permanent Black, New
Delhi, 2007.
Kulkarni, Krishnaji Appaji. Marathi Rangbhumi, Venus Book Stall, 1903.
Mote, H. V. (ed.): Vishrabdh Sharada Part II: Marathi Rangbhumi, Maharashtratil
Sangeet, 1975, pp. 10–11.
Phadke, Y D (ed.). Mahatma Phule Samgra Vangmaya, Maharashtra Rajya Sahitya
Ani Sanksriti Mandal, Mumbai, 1991.
Potdar, Ashutosh. “Narration in Performance of Varkari Keertan in Maharashtra”.
Journal of Drama Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, (July 2007) pp. 119–126.
Raeside, Ian. “Early Prose Fiction in Marathi: 1828–1885”. The Journal of Asian
Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (August, 1968), pp. 791–808.
Ramnathan, Ramu. “Mumbai’s Forgotten Theatre People”, A Paper Presented at a
Conference Regional Multiculturalism, Centre for Performing Arts, University of
Pune on March 4th and 5th, 2006.
O’Hanlon, Rosalind. Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and
Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth Century Western India, Cambridge University
Press, 1985.
3 Performance, Its Archive and
Historicity
Notes on Intercultural Critique
Sharmistha Saha

‘Intercultural theatre’, which came to be known as a form of performance,

especially during the postcolonial period, is one of those rare performance
genres that has received an unprecedented amount of criticism worldwide
and especially from postcolonial theatre scholars. This form, which invari-
ably includes the work of ‘western’ theatre practitioners, borrows from the-
atrical, ritualistic or performative traditions that are usually not from their
own continent (performances that borrow from traditions within the same
continent although different cultures are not usually called ‘intercultural
theatre’1). One of the main criticisms against this form has been its failure
to comprehend or rather ignore the cultural and historical context to which
the ‘source’ form belongs. ‘Intercultural theatre’ has been accused of appro-
priation or wrongfully taking away that which can also be called ‘stealing’.
Rustom Bharucha, one of the critics of this form (this chapter will primarily
engage with his critique), goes to the extent of saying that it emptied ‘source
cultures’ like India of its cultural tradition while filling the ‘target culture’,
which in this case to him is the ‘west’. This chapter tries to understand the
dynamics of such ‘appropriation’, or ‘performance stealing’ if you will, by
looking at two concepts vis-à-vis performance (a) the archive and (b) histo-
ricity. I am particularly interested in these two concepts because they have
been understood as ‘housing’ for and providing ‘historical actuality’, respec-
tively, to the ‘matter’ of life in general and in this case theatrical perfor-
mance. In doing so, the chapter will also contemplate the ‘matter’ of
performance. But to begin, I would like to quote within parenthesis an ori-
gin myth of theatrical performances according to Chapter XXII of the
Natyasastra (NS) as translated by Adya Rangacharya. It serves as providing
‘purvaranga’ (Oxford reference website translates it as early staging before
the commencement of the main drama) to thinking about the archive and
historicity of performance in this chapter.

Parenthesis

(Bharata in NS allegedly says…)

DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-4
26 Sharmistha Saha
I shall now describe how the vrtti-s came into existence and how they
were, in different ways, applied to plays. Once, Divine Vishnu by his
māyā withdrew all the worlds and turned them into an ocean and lay
down on a snake-bed. There, the two asura-s, Madhu and Kaitabha,
intoxicated with their strength and itching for a battle, began to threaten
him. Patting their arms (i.e. challenging him) the two began to fight with
the Imperishable Lord, the Creator of all beings, using their knees and
fists. They (the two parties) attacked each other with harsh and various
words of abuse and (even) the oceans shook (with their rushing at each
other). God Brahma, listening to the various words (of abuse) shouted
at each other, felt slightly perturbed and said, “What is this exchange of
(abuses)? Abuses and counter-abuses are flowing without an end. Is this
the Bhāratı̄ vrtti? (i.e. the way words are used). Kill the two (demons)”.

Listening to Brahma, Vishnu said, “I have invented this Bhāratı̄ to serve

my purpose. It will be the Bhāratı̄ style of a speaker since words (i.e.
language = Bhāratı̄) predominate. Now I shall kill them”.

So saying Vishnu began to fight, with pure and perfect gestures and
angahara-s2, those two (demons) who were experts in fighting. During
the fight, the steps of Vishnu were placed in various holds here and
there and they became a heavy burden (bhāra) to the earth and the
Bhāratı̄ style came into existence because of that bhāra. The bow (of
Vishnu) called Śārnga, as it was turned (in aiming) this way and that,
was brilliant and flashing in quick turns and its steadily increasing sat-
tva (strength) created the Sattvati style. The knot in which Vishnu tied
his hair (keśa) and his various (graceful) angahara-s brought into exis-
tence the Kaiśiki style. And then during the course of the fight, various
cārı̄-s3 were used, as the fighters were full of Samrambha (enragement)
and āvega (excitement) and these various movements of the fight pro-
duced the Ārabhati style.4 Whatever movement Vishnu employed,
Brahma made it the origin of a vrtti and accepted it by remarks whose
meanings accorded (to the movement).

When both Madhu and Kaitabha were killed by Vishnu, Brahma said
to that enemy-destroyer, “Oh, Vishnu, you have destroyed the demons
by angahāra-s which were unusually straightforward, expressive and
graceful. …The four vrtti-s”. (20–24)

The name vrtti is given because (the wielding) depends on various emo-
tions and sentiments (vrt = to behave?). The sages utilised that behav-
iour of words and gestures as the abhinaya conceived in the Natyaveda.5
(2010:168)

Part I
In this section, I will try to explore how performance has navigated its relation-
ship through and with the archive. This exploration is a way of summing up
 Performance, Its Archive and Historicity 27
the debates that have gone on to validate the material being of the performance
rather than insisting on its ephemerality. This would help us to access the ‘mat-
ter’ of performance. To begin with, I will look at the figure of the artist-per-
former as an archivist who through body movements ‘reactivates’ the archive.
In this case, a very specific context of performance, that dramaturgically lean-
ing towards working with archival material, is considered. André Lepecki in
the essay “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-enact and the Afterlife of Dances”
highlights the ‘will to archive’ of the performer in the context of those who
particularly work with archival material related to dance. By ‘will to archive’
he means the “author’s intention as commanding authority over a work’s
afterlives”. He turns the figure of the dancer/performer to the archivist whose
active, generative approach to ‘historical material’ led dance re-enactments to
resist reactive use of history. He borrows from Michel Foucault’s understand-
ing of the archive as a system of formation and transformation of statements.
In the Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault elaborates on the idea of
statements as a linguistic unit that is different from a sentence, proposition or
speech act. By statements, Foucault means any series of signs, which are the
basic units of discourse, which depending on the ‘field of use’ can have an
enunciative function. The enunciative function of the statement borrows from
the context in which a statement appears on the one hand and what the state-
ment refers to on the other. It is independent of the subject making the state-
ment and must have an associated enunciative field where it comes to appear
and make sense. A discourse according to him is a group of statements that
have definable conditions of existence. It is a historical event. An archive
according to Foucault is a system that enables the appearance of statements as
historical events. Any archive is characterized by discontinuity and formation
or transformation of statements. Lepecki argues borrowing from this elabora-
tion of the statement and its relationship to the archive “that it (the archive)
predicates, from the start, its own onto-political performance as one of endless
memory failures”. Whether it is cultural or personal memory or bureaucracy,
it is always constitutive of acts of exclusions and misplacements – a true
Foucauldian dispositif according to Lepecki, which dictates what deserves a
place in it and what should be excluded. “Will to archive” he suggests:

as referring to a capacity to identify in a past work still non-exhausted

creative fields of “impalpable possibilities” (to use an expression from
Brian Massumi [2002, 91]). These fields of virtual “abstraction pertaining
to the thing in general” (and to artworks in particular, I would add), these
fields that “concern the possible” (Massumi 2002, 93), are always present
in any past work and are that which re-enactments activate.
(2010:31)

‘Will to archive’ in dance therefore according to him is a system of simul-

taneously transforming past, present and future – an economy of the tem-
poral. If therefore the body is seen as the archive (not metaphorically but as
a reading of the body as monad borrowing from Deleuze by Lepecki), the
28 Sharmistha Saha
re-enactments are the dancer’s intervention as the archivist, and ‘will to
archive’ in dance then is only possible through re-enacting, in movement.
‘Will to archive’ is locating the ‘creative fields of impalpable possibilities’ in
past work and reactivating them as affective history. He writes:

[N]ot only to point out that the present is different from the past, but
to invent, to create – because of returning—something that is new and
yet participates fully in the virtual cloud surrounding the originating
work itself – while bypassing an author’s wishes as last words over a
work’s destiny. This is one of the political acts re-enacting performs as
re-enactment: it suspends economies of authoritative authors who want
to keep their works under house arrest.
(2010: 35)

While Lepecki is mostly concerned with the artist-performer’s authorial

and, therefore, political intervention in dismantling and in re-activating archi-
val material in dance performances, the archive itself has also been seen as an
act, “as an architecture housing ritual, rituals of ‘domiciliation’ or ‘house
arrest’ – continually, as ritual, performed” (Schneider 2001: 105). According
to Rebecca Schneider, the preoccupation of the west with the ephemerality
and the claim that performance is always at its ‘vanishing point’ is symptom-
atic of a cultural habituation to the logic of the archive, which is west-identi-
fied (she calls it arguably white-cultural). She thinks that such an understanding
is myopic of the archive’s dependence on performance and asks to ponder
upon ways in which the archive performs the equation of performance with
disappearance, even as it performs the service of ‘saving’ (101–102). She shifts
focus from residue in ‘house arrest’ to “a network of body-to-body transmis-
sion of enactment-evidence, across generations of impact” (102). The body,
according to Schneider, therefore becomes a site like in the case of Lepecki,
which makes performance possible through what she calls “messy and erup-
tive reappearance challenging via the performative trace”. While Lepecki’s
interest is in political possibilities in re-enactment in dance, Schneider looks
at performance as such. Schneider is cautious about claiming any authenticity
in this performative trace. In her elucidation, these performative traces remain
not as ‘material’ but as ‘immaterial’ (not antithetical to material), which
becomes possible as a result of collective interaction. The community is at the
heart of her theorization of the performative trace. In Schneider’s reading,
performance remains in ritual acts of occlusion and inclusion. While it was
Jacques Derrida who called the archive built on ‘house arrest’, Schneider
explains it as “the solidification of value in ontology as retroactively secured
in document, object, record” (2001: 104). She argues that in creating the
archive that can regulate, maintain, institutionalize, what it instead produces
is loss. So any institutional archive of documents and record remains is a site
of loss that has often conveniently killed the author. But in so doing the
archive has ensured his/her remains. In her reading, the ‘house arrest’ is per-
formative, and to further her argument, let me now call this space where it is
‘housed’ ‘ground zero’. I will elaborate on this later. Schneider writes:
 Performance, Its Archive and Historicity 29
To read “history” as a set of sedimented acts which are not the histori-
cal acts themselves but the act of securing any incident backward – the
repeated act of seeming memory – is to rethink the site of history in
ritual repetition. This is not to say that we have reached the “end of
history”, neither is it to say that history didn’t happen, or that to access
it is impossible. It is rather to re-situate the site of any knowing as body-
to-body transmission.
(105)

Lepecki seems to agree with Schneider here in the fact that it is the body
of the dancer (or any performer as according to Schneider) that is able to
re-activate the trace or remains of the archive. Only Lepecki re-labels the
artist-performer as archivist, which is interestingly revelatory. For one could
think from Schneiders’s argument about the ‘object’ remains in the act, rit-
ual practice or ‘taking place’ of the archive – that she would name the archi-
vist as the performer! Schneider writes:

We are reading, then, our performative relations to documents and to

documents’ ritual status as performatives within a culture that privi-
leges object remains. We are reading, then, the document as performa-
tive act, and as site of performance.
(2001: 105)

Part II
As a speculative exercise then one could argue that any object in ‘house
arrest’ when brought to the performance space which I have called ‘ground
zero’, is re-activated dramaturgically through authorial intervention in per-
formance. This performance space or ‘ground zero’ is a broad spectrum. It
can be defined by two concepts – i.e., the ‘intra-scenic axis’ and the ‘theat-
ron axis, that Hans Thies Lehmann puts forward in the book Postdramatic
Theatre. Borrowing from the Greek word ‘theatron’, which originally des-
ignated the space of the spectator, Thies Lehmann elaborates on what he
calls ‘theatron axis’. He differentiates it from the ‘intra-scenic axis’, which
is the space of communication of the interlocutors/actors. He writes, “All
varieties of monologue and apostrophe to the audience, including solo per-
formance have in common that the intra-scenic axis recedes compared to
the theatron axis”. Here the actor speaks to the audience addressing a real
person rather than a fictive character. He writes, “[T]heatrical discourse
has always been doubly addressed: it is at the same time directed intra-
scenically (i.e. at the interlocutors in the play) and extrascenically at the
theatron” (2006: 127). This interspatial negotiation in theatre, key to any
performance space, becomes the ‘ground zero’ from where re-activation
(the kind Lepecki refers to) or body-to-body transmission (the kind
Schneider discusses) happens where any ‘matter’ that is material or ‘imma-
terial’ can gain political energy. Basically, anything can be the matter of
the archivist-artist-performer’s intervention. This performance space that
30 Sharmistha Saha
sanctions interspatial negotiations has been argued to be – “a neutral per-
formative space with the potential of being transformed into space of any
order” by Kapila Vatsayan (2018: 60). Her discussion on this space begins
with an exploration of Bharata’s NS, where she takes us to the worldview
that might have influenced the author of the NS. She starts by exploring the
kind of text the NS is. She highlights that, as per Bharata, it is a ‘prayoga
sastra’, which can be literally translated as writing a ‘theory’ of ‘praxis’. It
does not denote something purely speculative and contemplative; however,
it does/or may suggest what Vatsyayan defines as “abstraction of principles
from a body of facts, or more precisely, the phenomenon of practice” (42).
Although for the sake of translation she prefers the word ‘theory’, she clari-
fies that it is “an abstraction, a deduction from experience and practice,
and in turn can play an inductive role” (43) and is subject to change as
Bharata also suggested to contingencies of ‘time’ and ‘space’. Nevertheless,
she seeks to study the layers of unsaid, unspoken and equally unambiguous
levels in a text that is wrapped with ‘myths’ and ‘legends’ as the parenthesis
I began this chapter with. To Bharata, his text shares the worldview of his
predecessors; it deals with all branches of knowledge (vidya), all dimen-
sions and orders of space and time, the universe (sarvaloka) and suggests
the super-mundane (adhidaivika, not sacred but divine Vatsyayan reminds
us). She writes, “[F]rom a divine, an acausal origin of a happening in no
time, a revelation, an intuitive experience, drama is born” (48). Bharata
borrows from the worldview, speculative thought, methodology of vedic
rituals (yajna) as per Vatsyayan. She points at a few principles of that
worldview. Borrowed from the Upanishads, the first one is bija or seed –
“organic inter connectedness of the parts and the whole, and a continuous
but well-defined course of growth, decay and renewal” (49); the second is
the ecological balance and equilibrium between the inanimate (jada) and
animate (cetana) worlds, as also different members of the animate; the
third one is that of purusa – concept of structure for comprehending the
universe, where the parts and the whole are inter-connected and inter-
locked; the yajna is the ritual re-enactment of dismemberment and remem-
berment of the parts and the whole. Vatsyayan argues that the structure of
‘drama’6 is in itself purusa that borrows from several concepts from the
Upanishads. In the NS’s schema, the body and mind are interdependent
“mutually effecting and affective”. However, they need to be “disciplined,
restrained and groomed” (through sadhana – i.e., practice/rehearsals/train-
ings/performance, etc.) by the artist-creator-performer for a ‘total experi-
ence’. Vatsyayan quotes from the last chapter of the NS:

He who always hears the reading of that (sastras) which is auspicious,

sportful, originating from Brahman’s7 mouth, very holy, pure, good,
destructive of sins and who puts into practice and witnesses carefully
the performance (drama,8 one may add the word artistic) will attain the
same blessed goal which masters of Vedic knowledge and performers of
sacrifice (ritual puja9) – attain.
 Performance, Its Archive and Historicity 31
It is on a conceptual ground such as this (further elaborated by Vatsyayan
in the book) that Bharata creates the space of performance as an analogue
to the physical layout of the yajna. The ‘intra-scenic axis’ and the ‘theatron
axis’ together turn into the site (a micro-model for the cosmos) or a ‘ground
zero’ that enables transformation, renewal, reconnections (the yajna would
conduce moral duty, i.e., dharma; economic well-being, i.e., artha; refined
sensibilities, i.e., kama; and lead to liberation, i.e., moksha according to
Vatsyayan). In the creation myth quoted in the previous section called
“Parenthesis”, which is an “acausal origin of a happening in no time”, a
causation of a divine order (a divine order like in the origin myth as you see
in parenthesis of the NS), what emerges out are the happenings for the
future ‘ground zero’. It is clear from Vatsyayan’s elaboration that here one
isn’t suggesting a mimetic representation of those happenings (whether
divine or not) but an enabling of conditions for it, creating the site for it
from ‘matter’ of the past, enabling them in the present at the performance
site and for the future – transforming the matter of performance every time
through the renewal of connections (except divine matter). Lepecki locates
this ‘matter’ as movement ‘via the choreographic activation of the dancer’s
body as an endlessly creative, transformational archive’ (46). It is a show-
ing, an outward manifestation or bearing/manner of past works as affective
history. This outward manifestation or bearing I argue has been termed
‘vritti’ in the NS. Interestingly, Vatsyayan does not include much discussion
on ‘vritti’ in the book. One reason could be how ‘vritti’ has been understood
over time. NS is known to have been transmitted orally between the second
century BC to the second century AD and came to be circulated as a written
manuscript between roughly the twelfth and eighteenth century AD. Later
during the colonial period, the discovery of the manuscripts of the NS led
to significant influence on the text’s bearings from different commentators
(2018: 32). The interest in the NS and the theatre of colonial India devel-
oped with the publication of the manuscript of Shakuntala or ‘Sacontala’ by
William Jones in English translation in 1789.10 Sylvain Levi’s book pub-
lished in 1890 called Le Theatre Indien written in French is one of them. In
his work, although NS does not receive much critical engagement, he does
consider the concept of ‘vritti’. He translated ‘vritti’ in French as les
manières, which is often translated in English as style. In fact, it was in the
English translation of his work that Narayan Mukherji translated the word
to style. This is how the majority of the critical works around the NS viewed
the word ‘vritti’, either as style or characteristic of making theatre (Levi uses
the word ‘drama’). Vatsyayan also uses it in the same way as style and
doesn’t engage with the concept of ‘vritti’ as such. However, Maria
Christopher Bryski in her work Methodology of the Analysis of Sanskrit
Drama brings this discrepancy to the fore and translates the word as
‘demeanour’ in the essay “The Four Demeanours (Vritti)”, which also goes
on to mean a showing, an outward manifestation bearing/manner. She
highlights that vrittis are fundamental categories that require evaluation on
the basis of the exact nature of this fourfold concept and the practical utility
32 Sharmistha Saha
in analysis of Sanskrit drama. For our purpose, I would stick to the first,
which is the conceptual ground on which the idea of ‘vritti’ is based. As has
been mentioned in parenthesis, the vrittis came into appearance when
Vishnu got into conflict with two demons, Madhu and Kaitabha. Bryski
mentions that within such mythology, the interaction between two poles of
discursiveness between gods and demons, the world functions. And this
specific creation myth marks the moment of discursive reality when com-
munication was established. In the NS, these ‘means’ that evolved out of the
conflict were speech (bharati vritti), conscious demeanour (sattvati vritti),
delicate demeanour (kaisiki vritti) and violent demeanour (arabhati vritti).
She highlights borrowing from V. Raghavan’s analysis of ‘vritti’ that it is
man’s activity in the direction of achieving the four purusharthas or roughly
goals or duties such as dharma, artha, kama and moksha. To this Bryski
adds the “communication aspect of man’s activity”. She writes, “An activity
which is not witnessed and which communicates nothing to any body can-
not be called vritti”. (This brings us to the performance space with sanc-
tions of interspatial negotiations, the ‘ground zero.)
She then categorizes them as controlled by consciousness (bharati) and
controlled by emotion (sattvati, kaisiki, arabhati). She further borrows from
the concept of traigunya (roughly means ‘three qualities’) in order to define
vritti. Here is how she charts it:

Traigunya
Sattvaguna (ontic substratum Rajoguna (Emotion) Tamoguna (Physicality)
of consciousness)

She relates them to the three purusharthas and consequently comes to the
following equation: “sattvaguna=dharma=consciousness, rajoguna=kama=
emotion, tamoguna=artha=physicality”. However, none of them are mutu-
ally exclusive categories. Thus a verbal demeanour falls within the realm of
consciousness or dharma, yet it is not without emotion. She gives the exam-
ple of precision in communication within the realm of dharma through
mudras or stylized and codified hand gestures though rational and remain-
ing within the sphere of dharma but yet activating the sphere of kama with
growing emotional charge. Bryski therefore indirectly brings to the fore the
role of trained communication or language which in dwelling within the
performance space activates affective energies. For that matter, language as
such has often been understood as a historical process (Agamben 1988:
171). But what one needs to note here is that according to Bryski, mudras,
although they carry forward ‘historical succession’ as codified language, are
yet able to transcend themselves. It works like the re-enacted pieces in André
Lepecki where the performer becomes the archivist, or as the ritual process
of ‘taking place’ of the archive in Schneider, where the archivist becomes the
performer. This possibility of transcendence carries ‘spiritual essence’ like
Walter Benjamin argues for human language. Benjamin writes that though
language is referential and designates concrete things (in rational terms or in
the realm of dharma if you will) that are communicated through it,
 Performance, Its Archive and Historicity 33
nevertheless it is also an expression of ‘spiritual essence’ (geistige Wesen)
that transmits itself within it. This ‘spiritual essence’ is that of the speaker
and in this case that of the performer. Benjamin writes, “[B]ecause man’s
spiritual essence is language itself, he cannot express himself by means of
language but only within it, in its texture”.11 In the ‘ground zero’, this tex-
ture emerges in the act or ‘vritti’ (speech, conscious demeanour, delicate
demeanour and violent demeanour), which Bryski has categorized into two:
controlled by consciousness and controlled by emotion. In the sphere of
action, she argues dharma, artha, kama; the three purusharthas are ‘axiolog-
ical consequences’ of the three gunas (qualities) – i.e., ontic substratum of
consciousness, emotion and physicality. So this opens up three different
spheres apart from movement in performance or modes of communication
or language that carry in their texture the ‘spiritual essence’ of the performer.
Bryski writes that dharma perceived in action could be called cetanavyapara
or the consciousness function, kama the bhavavyapara or emotion function
and artha the vastuvyapara or the thing/material function. As mentioned
earlier, since none of the purusharthas is mutually exclusive in how they are
reached through the vrittis, Bryski suggests that bhavavyapara or the emo-
tion function reigns supreme, which signifies less of the verbal or gestural
codes of communication and more direct expression of the body (pure
physicality), costume and song. Thereafter vastuvyapara or the thing/sub-
stance function appears whose importance increases with the increase of
emotions. She writes that the violent demeanour (arabhati) with its anger
and passion finds the previous modes of communication decisively inade-
quate. Speech is replaced by roar of wrath and gestures are intensified by
means of material props such as swords, bows, arrows and maces.
Vastuvyapara of the artha sphere becomes dominant. The three demeanours
(bharati, sattvati, kaisiki) albeit present recede into the background.
Consequently communication enters the sphere of artha (1997, 12).
Hence one can see that it is not only in movement (speech and the three
different demeanours) or codified gestures that one is able to access affective
energies and ‘spiritual essence’ but things/substances/matter as mode of com-
munication may also hold the same possibility in its texture. Interestingly, in
another paper called “Moving as Thing: Choreographic Critiques of the
Object”, André Lepecki suggests a “shared mode of being thing and moving
as thing”, eliminating any hierarchy of the subject (performer) and the object.
There he explores the performativity in objects and the choreographic force
defining and inhabiting such objects (2012), in a way that placing thing/
substance/matter within the ambit of the ‘ground zero’ they acquire onto-
political force. And that can be true for re-enacting past performances not
only as movement or dance but also in the act of placing of past object or
archival material in the activated performance space. One can say that ‘spiri-
tual essence’ is accessed in the dance of bodies as also dance of materials
(dance of all matters ‘material’ and immaterial’) within the site of perfor-
mance, the ‘intra-scenic axis’ and ‘theatron axis’ together, creating an ingres-
sion into each individual present in the ‘ground zero’ – a space that becomes
synonymous with ‘spiritual essence’ of the present community or community
34 Sharmistha Saha
in presence. NS further elaborates on this interspatial negotiation through
the concept of ‘rasa’ or taste, but that is beyond the scope of this chapter.

Part III
In the previous section, I explored ‘ground zero’ as a paradigm that is made
possible because of a community in presence. ‘Ground zero’, which has been
termed a ‘neutral space’ that exudes possibilities, it was discussed, has three
main characteristics; i. it liberates ‘matter’ kept in house arrest, ii. this ‘mat-
ter’ is both immaterial and material, and iii. it is synonymous with the ‘spiri-
tual essence’ of the present community or community in presence. In this
section, I will look at what ‘ground zero’ means in relation to historical actu-
ality or ‘historicity’. For that, I will look at two simultaneous developments
– intracultural theatre in India and the critique of intercultural theatre. It is
not an exhaustive study of either but rather I have used citations in order to
understand ‘historicity’ and its relationship to performance and its ‘matter’.
The 1980s saw a surge of writings about theatre in India that went on to
consider the period ‘great-cultural renaissance’ in the post-independence era.
One of the primary features of this period is the insistence on going back to
the theatre roots, especially by modern Indian theatre directors; some of them
were trained or had been exposed to theatre in Europe or North America.
Although such a discussion had already begun post-independence, and one
knows of it especially through the proceedings of the Drama Seminar of 1956,
what the 1980s saw was a surge of independent directors in urban areas
invested in what to them meant the ‘roots’. Suresh Awasthi in his “Theatre of
Roots: Encounter with Tradition”, an article published in 1989 in The Drama
Review, then edited by Richard Schechner, first coined the term ‘theatre of the
roots’ for such performances.12 A number of measures were taken by the gov-
ernment cultural body ‘Sangeet Natak Akademi’ to sponsor “traditional per-
formances, festivals, and exhibitions in Delhi and other cities all over the
country” since the 1960s. According to Awasthi, this drive by the academy led
to the cultural renaissance. He writes that stylization is the essence of the
theatre of roots. After breaking away from the realistic mode in its search for
roots, the new theatre embraced stylization – the hallmark of Indian tradi-
tional theatre for centuries. The stylized approach to theatre brought about a
revolutionary change in the art and techniques of the actor, and in the entire
process of transforming the dramatic text into performance text.
So the ‘matter’ of performance was effectively translated as a few aes-
thetic elements which Awasthi calls ‘stylization’ that seemed to have their
‘roots’ primarily in the Sanskrit theatrical ‘traditions’ and the ‘folk’ forms.13
While there was a consolidation of sorts of aesthetic principles that could
now rightfully be named as ‘theatre of the roots’ produced and consumed
by urban India,14 simultaneously, a line of attacks began on what came to
be known as ‘intercultural theatre’ in the 1970s and ’80s in Europe and
North America. Aparna Dharwadkar has succinctly put together this debate
around the ‘intercultural theatre’, which has been to this date incessant as
primarily focusing on
 Performance, Its Archive and Historicity 35
Euro-American hegemony disguised as universality and benign cultural
exchange; of a fetishizing, dehistoricized aestheticism; of a transcultural-
ism that erases all cultural particularity; of ‘cultural violation’ and ‘inau-
thenticity’; of an imputed ‘sameness’ that erases essential differences; of a
‘body-centred’ epistemology that merely reinforces the mind/body dual-
ism; and of a persistent reduction of theory to the level of performance.
(2005: 156)

What is relevant to the discussion of the ‘matter’ of archive, performance

and the ‘ground zero’ that I have elaborated on in the previous section is this
insistence on ‘authenticity’, ‘violation’ and ‘erasure’ that is based on a claim
to history and cultural rootedness. What I aim to understand is, what does a
claim to history and cultural rootedness mean in the volatile spaces of per-
formance? In this section, I will try to elaborate on this claim vis-à-vis the
critique of ‘intercultural theatre’ by one of the pioneers of this polemics,
Rustom Bharucha, a theatre scholar whose writings have had a significant
impact on theatre scholarship both in India and around the world. Rustom
Bharucha was in principle aligned with ‘intracultural theatre’, some of whose
manifestations one can see in the ‘theatre of the roots’ movement or what he
calls ‘returning’, and he felt that ‘what we need in India is a stronger aware-
ness of our intracultural affinities’. However, he accused the ‘west’ of appro-
priation/wrongfully taking away or ‘stealing’ thus emptying ‘source cultures’
like India of its cultural tradition while filling the ‘target culture’ as men-
tioned earlier (1993: 244). Given that in the previous section it was discussed
that the ‘matter’ of performance remains in the material as much as the
immaterial, what implications then does that have on the claim of ‘stealing’
performance? Can there be ‘performance theft’? I shall begin by giving an
overview of Rustom Bharucha’s 1984 article in the Asian Theatre Journal
called “A Collision of Cultures: Some Western Interpretations of the Indian
Theatre” (1984a) in order to understand what implications ‘performance
theft’ might have in understanding performance as such and intercultural
theatre to be specific. In the article, Bharucha analyzes a few examples of
how the ‘west’ has dealt with Indian theatre. He chooses to discuss the works
of Antonin Artaud, Gordon Craig, Jerzy Grotowski and Richard Schechner.
As one can see, the range of his discussion concerning the ‘west’ here is quite
broad. At the same time, the category ‘Indian’ remains undefined in the arti-
cle too. He begins by accepting that there isn’t any overriding western view
on Indian theatre and “no systematized cultural imperialism that undermines
the philosophical premises of Indian culture and life”. He takes a differential
approach in discussing each of the theatre auteurs. He begins with Antonin
Artaud’s failure to recognize the historical context of the Balinese dance that
he had seen at the Paris Colonial Exposition in early August 1931. For
Bharucha, all of Artaud’s theatre speculations may not be ‘mystical’ or ‘cos-
mic’, yet his ahistorical elaborations and visionary speculations cannot be
applied in theatre. Next, he goes on to talk about the work of Gordon Craig
and his debate with Ananda Coomaraswamy on the question of training
of the actor. While Craig rejected the actor as the means of theatrical
36 Sharmistha Saha
expression since the actor is unable to surrender personal emotions entirely,
Coomaraswamy argued that if trained, the actor could function with as
much precision and rigour as a marionette. Bharucha shows that Craig went
on to reject Indian theatre entirely later because he thought it would not be
possible to understand Indian theatre fully and that it might also hinder the
progress of western tradition. Craig’s rejection of theatre of India, at least
from its influence on his work, does not seem insular to Bharucha. In fact,
Bharucha notes that his rejection was demonstrated in his adulation for the-
atre of India. He juxtaposes Craig with Grotowski. While Craig mytholo-
gized Indian theatre, according to Bharucha, Grotowski and his student and
friend Eugenio Barba demystified such sacrosanct associations. Grotowski’s
theatre was not interested in that which codified but was a laboratory that
borrowed from Indian techniques but not as showpieces. In his discussion,
Bharucha is least resentful of Grotowski’s work and investment in Indian
theatre. However, in a later work, Bharucha does bid adieu to Grotowski for
his personal nature of investment in paratheatrical work that is not aligned
with Bharucha’s interests and the nature of his engagement with the ‘partici-
pants’ of such work which he found irresponsible, even unethical given the
politics of Grotowski’s experimental work that claimed to lay in the periph-
eries (1993). Bharucha, further discussing Richard Schechner in the essay,
talks about Schechner’s fascination with fragments and locates this fascina-
tion in Schechner’s belief in ‘universals’, which often are based on misplaced
understanding of historical contexts according to Bharucha. One example
that he provides us is Schechner’s reading of Ramlila, which fails to see the
core of spiritual belief embedded in the mythological roles played by the
actors, with one of Schechner’s misjudgements being his comparison of such
an actor to a western actor like Lawrence Olivier who plays Hamlet.
Bharucha finds it rash. He borrows from Clifford Geertz’s argument against
‘universals’ and says speculatively of the same performance in two different
contexts (and he means geographical locations here) that “they would still
mean two different things to their respective audiences”. Finally, Bharucha
rounds up his criticism by asking – what about the ‘other’ culture? He writes:

If interculturalism in the theatre is to be more than a vision, there has

to be a fairer exchange between theatrical traditions in the East and the
West. At the moment, it is Westerners who have initiated (and con-
trolled) the exchange. It is they who have come to countries like India
and taken its rituals and techniques (either through photographs, docu-
mentation, or actual borrowings). The sheer poverty, if not destitution,
of most performers in India clearly minimizes their possibilities of trav-
elling to the West. Only a few Indian gurus and dancers have had the
opportunity to visit European and American countries for lecture-dem-
onstrations and classes. Likewise, the exposure of many Western schol-
ars and artists to the performance traditions of kathakali, chhau, and
yakshagana remains limited in duration and depth.
(1984a: 17)
 Performance, Its Archive and Historicity 37
Schechner went on to write a reply to Bharucha in the same journal, the
same year. His defence began by pointing out Bharucha’s lack of informa-
tion on his work. He reclaimed his belief in universals by pointing out that
in his work when he deals with forms of other cultures, he looks for “under-
lying action structure/process, and identify analogies”. In response to the
accusation of ‘stealing’ (appropriation/wrongfully taking), he claimed that
all cultures imbibe from each other and that this phenomenon is “world-
wide, multicultural, and multivocal”. Bharucha responded to Schechner’s
reply (1984b) by insisting on his argument on ‘historical contexts’. Now
this entire intellectual engagement with theatre brings us to confront two
issues that Bharucha raises in so far as ‘intercultural theatre’ is concerned
and which are not adequately responded to by Schechner. These are (a) that
the west has been appropriating or ‘stealing’ from Indian theatre, and this
was in no way a mutual exchange, and (b) that in this appropriation or
‘stealing’, the matter of performance (material/immaterial) had been
uprooted out of its ‘historical context’. So one is back again to the primary
question of ‘performance stealing’. Let us try to address the question of
‘performance stealing’ first.
Arjun Appadurai in an introduction to the book The Social Life of
Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective calls ‘stealing’ or theft other-
wise condemned in most human societies the ‘humblest form of diversion of
commodities from preordained paths’ (2003: 26). It seems to me that when
Bharucha raises the question of ‘stealing’, he raises similar concerns but not
as a ‘humblest form of diversion’. Unlike ‘art theft’, ‘performance theft’ does
not have any strict laws against it (although there are some on the copyright
of dramatic texts) nor can surveillance keep track of ‘performance theft’
like in art galleries or museums against ‘art theft’. Popular culture in the
form of novels and cinema at large has had a fascination with ‘art theft’,
which it has not shown with ‘performance theft’! This brings us to the ques-
tion of what aura do art objects have that ‘matter’ of performances do not?
Walter Benjamin argues that in the modern age, the possibility of reproduc-
ing art mechanically has led to the diminishing of its value. In the case of
performance, such an effect of value or ‘authenticity’ has often been
attempted by curatorial decisions to make available a performance for a
limited number of viewings. Especially experimental performance forms
have often tried this trick. Bharucha talks about Grotowski trying to con-
trol the number of participants who would be allowed in a performance in
his paratheatrical performances (1993). So the artwork’s material aura of
value or ‘authenticity’, is seen to have found its parallel in theatre by limit-
ing the number of performances and often limiting viewership. But what
does one limit when one limits the number of performances along with its
viewership? In Schneider, the archive of performance can be located in
body-to-body transmission, and Lepecki performing the archive enables it,
reactivates it. The moment one disables transmission one tries to put the
‘matter’ in ‘house arrest’. The logic of limiting performances is hence I
would argue similar to the logic of the archive. Both can be read as
38 Sharmistha Saha
‘the repeated act of securing memory’ in the hope of accessing authenticity
like history writing. In the case of performance, such a ritual as allowing for
limited viewings facilitates the desire to access a performance’s material/
immaterial authenticity. But what it fails to acknowledge is the transforma-
tive potential that performing15 might have as one can see with Lepecki’s
dancer-archivist. Erika Fischer-Lichte tries to address the question of trans-
formative potential of performance from the point of view of ‘intercultural
theatre’. Fischer-Lichte argues that the name ‘intercultural theatre’ that was
coined for works of several theatre directors in the early postcolonial years
of the ’70s and ’80s is symptomatic of the rising dominance of the ‘west’ in
cultural matters of the east. Although the term implies a certain kind of
‘equality’, however, in all cases of theatrical works, the west was a constant.
She argues that the exchange of theatrical and cultural elements has existed
for decades, even before the intercultural theatre was conceptualized but
within such ‘intercultural’ theatrical works, it is difficult to identify cultural
specificities. According to her, cultural binaries or even a concept of ‘hybrid-
ization’ presupposes an authentic value in matters of culture or theatre, and
in more dynamic processes such as these, it is not useful. On the other hand,
whenever non-western performances have been called ‘intercultural’, she
argues that it was expected to perform a western text, that the ‘west’ had an
intellectual authority over these texts, which in turn became the controlling
authority of a performance. She highlights that there have been attempts in
distinguishing ‘hegemonic intercultural theatre’ against the non-hegemonic
‘intercultural performance’ but to her, in such transference, the danger of
the latter becoming the heir to the former’s ‘objectionable binary logic, its
implicit contradictions, as well as its problematic relationship to postcolo-
nial theory’ would remain. She rather proposes Verflechtungen von
Theaterkulturen translated as ‘Interweaving of performance cultures’. Since
cultures have always thrived with each other she argues that interweaving
of performance cultures can thus be described as an aesthetic Vor-Schein, as
the philosopher Ernst Bloch put it: the anticipation in and by the arts of
something that will become social reality much later, if at all. Such anticipa-
tions are not based on particular contents, ideologies, Weltanschauungen,
and so on, but on the very processes of interweaving cultures that occur in
performance (2014: 12).
Although somewhere Fischer-Lichte suggests the possibility of achieving
cultural ‘openness’ in ‘interweaving performance cultures’, she does not
entirely counter the question of cultural hegemony. Bharucha’s concern
about how global capital might shape such performances or the traffic
related to such performances remains undisputed. Although Fischer-Lichte
gives the example of the use of the English language as a way of working
towards such a possibility of transformation as was done in the Institute for
Advanced Studies for ‘Interweaving Cultures’ at Freie Universitaet, it can-
not be overlooked that the English language has also been a hegemonic
imposition on several cultures facilitated by the global economy. Performance
within such a global dynamic is not resistant to being appropriated or
 Performance, Its Archive and Historicity 39
uprooted if one is to consider Bharucha’s argument. But in order to under-
stand what is the ‘matter’ of performance that becomes part of such an
unequal exchange one needs to understand the social as well as the eco-
nomic life of the ‘matter’ (both ‘material’ or ‘immaterial’) of performance.
Here Arjun Appadurai’s (2003) analysis of what a ‘commodity’ might
mean might be useful. He argues that commodities have existed in a wide
variety of societies, although differently from modern capitalism. Borrowing
from Georg Simmel he writes, “[A] commodity is anything intended for
exchange. This gets us away from the exclusive preoccupation with the
‘product’, ‘production’ and the original or dominant intention of the ‘pro-
ducer’ and permits us to focus on the dynamics of exchange”. Appadurai’s
argument helps highlight the central problem with Bharucha’s critique and
the postcolonial critique of ‘intercultural theatre’ at large, which primarily
had to do with ‘performance stealing’ and dishonouring cultural and his-
torical contexts of the performance. Bharucha, even while engaging with
the intercultural performance ‘matter’ of those he relatively seems to
approve of, like the works of Grotowski or Eugenio Barba, is unable to
look beyond the material outcome of such diversion. By diversion,
Appadurai means “calculated and ‘interested’ removal of things from an
enclaved zone to one where exchange is less confined and more profitable,
in some short term sense”. Bharucha in the first instance in the article pub-
lished in 1989 gives us a generic opinion about the lack of fairness in ‘inter-
cultural theatre’ that can be only possible when the traffic is from either side
of the globe and then later in the book Theatre and the World: Performance
and the Politics of Culture talks about aesthetic matters that have compro-
mised the theatre of the ‘source’. For example in the afterword of the book
where he conclusively writes his critique against ‘intercultural theatre’, he
talks about Sanjukta Panigrahi performing in Faustus and comments,
“Watching her perform drunken mudras with a bottle in her hand, for
instance, would possibly suggest more ‘de-formation’ than ‘reformation’
from my cultural perspective”.
He reiterates metaphorically that intercultural theatre suggests a “swing
of pendulum” although it squeezes out knowledge. Every time, he reduces
his critique to the necessity of being ‘enclaved’, as it were, in ‘his’ nation,
India. In his invoking ‘intracultural theatre’ over ‘intercultural theatre’, it is
this desire of restricted commodity flow within India (the ‘matter’ of perfor-
mance through its exchange as discussed borrowing from Appadurai reaches
its ‘commodity candidacy’/being suitable to be ‘commodity’) that is the most
problematic of his argument. Can one deny that today many state govern-
ments in India realize these performance forms to be cultural capital and
have been promoting them as ‘commodities’ to seek tourism? For example,
the Kerala government’s advertisement and large hoardings on ‘Kathakali’,
‘Koodiyattam’, ‘Sarpam Thullal’, etc., are extremely prominent not only on
their website but even at metro stations in the ‘west’. Moreover, as discussed
in the previous section, every performance in the ‘ground zero’ is expected
to go through a transformation like in a ritual space or the ‘yajna’ as
40 Sharmistha Saha
Vatsyayan discusses. In that sense, it is a ‘terminal commodity’, which means
“because of the context, purpose and meaning of their production, (it)
make(s) only one journey from production to consumption” (2003: 23). In
the case of performance ‘matter’, this journey is from ‘ground zero’ until it
reaches the next ‘ground zero’. In a situation where internally the ‘matter’ is
so volatile, what do we expect to hold on to as one’s own? Bharucha seems
to be holding a moral stance and basing it on community relations of which
he calls himself a part on the basis of his national identity. He claims this
authority on the ‘knowledge’ that the ‘source culture’ has. Considering that
knowledge on both poles has technical, mythological and evaluative compo-
nents, which are susceptible to mutual and dialectical interaction, Appadurai
writes, “[I]t may not be accurate to regard knowledge at the production
locus of commodity as exclusively technical or empirical and knowledge at
the consumption end as exclusively evaluative or ideological”.
It would have perhaps been useful if in Bharucha’s study, he would
explore how the exchanges happen after all. What are the narratives of
these exchanges between what he calls ‘source culture’ to ‘target culture’?
Who facilitates them? Bharucha extensively covers the interest of those
individuals who are interested in the ‘target cultures’, which is invariably
the ‘west’, but what is the interest of individuals of ‘source cultures’ in being
part of ‘intercultural theatre’ projects? What are the social, economic and
political relations of such an exchange of travel? How are locations of
travel determined? Who determines these locations or such travels? Because
ultimately Sanjukta Panigrahi, who was an exponent of Odissi (erstwhile
dance of the gotipua-s!) and had trained extensively with Kelucharan
Mohapatra (gotipua himself), by her own choice also travelled for her col-
laborations with Eugenio Barba for the production of Faust. How is it that
the exchange between Mohapatra and Panigrahi is rightful (or does not
require mention) and between Barba and her is appropriation/‘performance
stealing’? Rather, by simply accusing the so-called west of appropriation/
performance stealing, Bharucha dilutes the vast and complex socio-
economic and political relations that are at work in such an exchange. And
those complexities can be understood when we start studying the actors of
such exchange not only from the side of the so-called west but also from
what Bharucha calls ‘source culture’ as also those who were the mediators
on the way. There are negotiations and often aspirations, social economic
and cultural, of individual artist-performers who have enabled body-to-
body transmission in their community space and now find themselves else-
where exploring the volatility of the ‘ground zero’ and what could emerge
out of that. To accuse the ‘west’ of appropriation/‘performance stealing’ is
to ignore these negotiations and aspirations. Bharucha seems to acknowl-
edge this misplaced sense of postcolonial angst (1993: 248), a new ‘postco-
lonial nationalism’ if you will, which he vehemently tries to deny (1993)
and base the denial on ‘historical context’ and ‘historical contradictions’ of
the performance. One of the ways that the 1989 Nehru Centenary Theatre
Festival organized by the government-sponsored Santeek Natak Akademi
 Performance, Its Archive and Historicity 41
(national academy of music, dance and drama) tried to address the question
of nationalism was with its focus on diversity by having representations
from varied forms and languages of theatre of India. But it remained, as
Aparna Dharwadker points out, a “predominantly metropolitan and urban
enterprise” (2005: 50). But the question of ‘tradition’ and ‘folk’ remained at
the heart of its imagination, while the perspective remained urban as
Dharwadker argues.16 Postcolonial criticism against the ‘west’ and in this
case ‘intercultural theatre’ is symptomatic of such urban privileged aspira-
tions and has little consideration of the day-to-day navigations and evolu-
tions of communities that in reality practised many of the forms since ages
and at the same time has no respect for individual artist aspirations. We
discussed earlier that even at the level of the performance, it is the ‘spiritual
essence’ that an individual performer is able to bring within the interspatial
negotiations of the present community who together make possible the
‘ground zero’. It is an individual and at the same time collective act. This act
because of the interspatial negotiations that are key to its taking place does
not acknowledge ‘stealing’, and at the same time, it is this negotiation
between individuals within a present community or community in presence
that makes it a historical actuality.
Now let us consider the question of ‘historical context’ a little further. In
order to understand what it really means to place a ‘matter’ within histori-
cal actuality and to locate contradictions within it, it is also important to
understand what history means and what the act of history writing is.
Several historians have attempted this exercise, and it is beyond the scope
of this chapter. However, since history writing involves several methodolog-
ical registers, including the archive, and I have shown how it dialogues with
performance, maybe it is only fair to have a look at its ‘authenticity’ claim,
which critics of ‘intercultural theatre’ seem to insist upon. V. Sanil in the
article “Thought and Context: Philosophy on the Eve of Colonialism” has
an interesting way of looking at it. He talks about Roland Barthes’ concept
of the ‘punctum’, which is a mark of a photograph’s chance encounter with
reality. It does not mean that that moment of the real was merely chanced
upon by the camera (both were in the same place at the same time), but ‘the
absent referent comes to haunt the photograph’ producing ‘an effect of the
real’. Sanil argues that such ‘adherence implies the ‘having-been-there’ of a
unique referent and thus, ‘the return of the dead’ (2015: 51). One may say
in the age of fake news and WhatsApp forwards that even this claim to
being a unique referent is obliterated, but the fact is there is also a way to
know if evidence is doctored or not. The circulation of the matter of life
continues in the form of photographs and videos narrativized by that which
in today’s day and age is called ‘fake news’, but it also carries remains. It is
possible for us, as members of communities who participate in this system
of circulation, to decide if the technologies of photoshopic aesthetics will
take over or that of verifying aesthetics. Coming back to the point Sanil was
trying to make that this ‘effect of the real’ gives us a model to think about
historicity which in the form of history guides us to the ‘singularity of the
42 Sharmistha Saha
haunting reference’ but at the same time it combines with the ‘plurality of
death’. History tells us all this, not as a narrative but in its being and also its
reference to subjective conditions of time and space as Sanil argues. The
subjective conditions, which the ‘ground zero’ of a theatrical performance
also enables. One can call these subjective conditions ‘finite histories’ bor-
rowing from Jean Luc Nancy. In the book The birth of presence (1993)
Nancy writes that it is by suspending pure time that ‘we’ can claim ‘our17
time’ by spacing ‘spaces’ – metaphorically like a handful (community) of
collected water out of a river (as a pure value of the flow of water). Nancy
calls this ‘finite history’ in which saying ‘we’ becomes possible like the
‘ground zero’, which makes ‘we’ possible. Nancy writes, “[F]or community
itself is this space” of history. Here, by community he understands a com-
mon being, which happens through the history that it writes for itself. It
would be therefore interesting to see under what conditions within Europe
or North America ‘intercultural theatre’ developed and at the same time
consider the conditions under which ‘intercultural theatre’ was welcomed
or rejected by certain performers from the so-called source cultures, with-
out reducing them to narrow ethnicities or nationalities or even geographi-
cal paradigms. Maybe it wouldn’t even be futile to study the ‘historicism’ of
the ’80s and the ’90s when an insistence on ‘historical context’ and its ‘con-
tradictions’ developed in studying theatre (and at large culture) in India as
if one was trying to desperately trace one’s own ‘roots’ which s/he could
then claim belongingness to. In 2020, when this chapter was written and
the space that ‘us’ means is churning, a different representation of time is
being chalked out. More numbers of artists are now travelling to Europe,
North America and even to the rest of the world (although that remains far
less in number because of the forces that enable commoditization) from
India. Terms like ‘local’, ‘global’ are in a soup in an online pandemic, and
there is also a pandemic outside that has made socio-economic divisions
stark. The many ‘ground zeroes’ are in lockdown, and the world, as a per-
formance site itself, seems to have replaced all of them together. At least so
it appears in this heavily mediatized world. Yet in all of this, over rubbles of
past histories, new sites for performances are being scouted, archives are
being housed and histories are being written, in smaller spacing outs, some
corner that is able to recuperate out of the mediatized ‘ground zero’ that the
world has become, as micro-communities of freedom with their own ver-
sions of ‘ground zero’. In that sense, like theatre and the archive, history’s
performative strength lies in being a repetitive ritual housed within a writ-
ten text or an oral narrative even, with its ‘ground zero’ made possible by
microcosms and their ability to transcend themselves. To quote what Sanil
writes in this context,

To represent time means to set up a theatre in which space and time can
emerge as characters. This drama stages the very birth of the subject
endowed with a sense of history, culture, and science.
(2015: 53)
 Performance, Its Archive and Historicity 43
Notes
1 See Erika Fischer-Lichte (2014) for more details.
2 Movement of limbs
3 Dance step
4 Adya Rangacharya’s footnote here writes, “This is surely a later ‘derivation’
which is as untenable as childish. In various other place bharati = language or
words”.
5 A very long quote that is from the English translation of the Natyasastra by
Adya Rangacharya and becomes critical to understanding the relationship
between the archive, historicity and performance; therefore, in the benefit of the
later elucidations it could not have been avoided.
6 It has been seen that in the earlier writings in India on theatre, the words ‘drama’,
‘theatre’, ‘performance’ in English have often been used interchangeably. For
further discussion on the words used in Indian scholarly engagement with the-
atre, drama, performance or the Sanskrit word natak, see my work Theatre and
National Identity in Colonial India (2018).
7 Brahman in this case is used as the soul or Atman of man; it is the ultimate real-
ity that pervades the universe. It should be noted here that not all castes had
access to the vedas; however, the Natyaveda (NS) was meant to be heard by all
castes. In fact, some of the concepts such as rasa or dhvani were rejected by Dalit
aesthetics according to Sharan Kumar Limbale (2004).
8 As explained in note 4.
9 Yajna.
10 On the basis of a manuscript by Wilhelm Haymann, a German scholar who first
wrote an article on it in 1874. Although before him parts of the chapter were
published as appendices in the Biblioteca Indica series (Calcutta, 1861–1865).
Then came a series of other manuscripts published often in parts as and when
the orientalist scholars could lay their hands on the several versions of
manuscripts.
11 As quoted by Bernd Witte (1997: 37).
12 Interestingly, Sangeet Natak Akademi organized the Nehru Centenary Theatre
Festival in 1989, inviting performances of varied forms, although mostly from
metropolitan areas like Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi and smaller cities such as
Pune, Mysore, Gwalior and Trivandrum apart from two other remote areas
Heggodu (with metropolitan patronage) and Imphal (Ratan Thiyam, a leading
figure of the ‘theatre of the roots’ movement).
13 Anuparna Mukherjee in a paper titled “Acrobating between Traditions and the
Modern: The Roots Movement and Theatre’s Negotiation with Modernity in
India” (2013) states the roots movement pioneered “an alternative modernity”
that attempted to redefine modernity from certain non-western vantage points
simultaneously intervening and working towards an evolution of variegated
traditions of lok-parampara. I am not fully convinced by her argument, espe-
cially since she completely ignores the economy of use and circulation of many
forms within India, which often also travelled internationally as representative
of ‘Indian culture’. It is not even clear what ‘lok-parampara’ is supposed to mean
here. Is it to be translated as ‘folk-tradition’ or ‘people’s tradition’. While ‘folk-
tradition’ has often been spoken about in the several nationalist theatre histories
in pre- and post-independent India, ‘people’s tradition’ has its lineage in the
communist cultural movement in India. To be modern like Dipesh Chakraborty
argued in the essay “The Muddle of Modernity” (2011) needs to be seen as the
ability “to judge one’s experience of time and space and thus create new possi-
bilities for oneself”. To claim, an ‘alternative’, therefore, to the modern only
reinforces the site of the ‘normative’, which then revolves around traditions of
thought provided by the ‘west’ or ‘Europe’, however slippery that may be.
44 Sharmistha Saha
14 In 1981, when Badal Sircar was asked to write about ‘intercultural theatre’ by
Richard Schechner in TDR, he spoke about his theatre Satabdi. Here I would
like to quote him in order to give some insight to what I mean by theatre pro-
duced and consumed by urban India. Sircar says, “The proscenium theatre that
the city-bred intelligentsia imported from the West constitutes the second the-
atre of our country, as it runs parallel to the folk theatre-the first theatre-practi-
cally without meeting. This theatre can be and has been used by a section of
educated and socially conscious people for propagating socially relevant sub-
jects and progressive values, but it gets money- bound and city-bound, more and
more so as costs go on rising, unable to reach the real people. Historically there
appears to be a need for a third theatre in our country – a flexible, portable, free
theatre as a theatre of change, and that is what we are trying to build. This
theatre is not an experimentation in form; we have no concern for taking theatre
as an art from point A to point B. We nevertheless have to explore to find the
best form to communicate our theme as directly, effectively and intensely as
possible to our audience – through such exploration new forms often emerge”
(1981: 56–57) In fact, when invited to participate in the Nehru Centenary
Theatre Festival in 1989, he refused to do so because of his difference with the
festival.
15 It is often seen with certain performance forms such as Commedia dell’arte or
Ramlila of Ramnagar that the same performance is repeated year after year, or
actors play the same characters throughout their careers. This phenomenon can
be explained by the transformative potential of each performance in its own right.
16 For more details on the Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival, see a report written
by Kavita Nagpal (Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Autumn, 1991), pp.
168–177.
17 Italics mine.

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4 Invisible Histories
Tracing Displacement, Bondage and
Resistance through Adivasi Songs and
Performance Practices in Wayanad
Devika N. Menon

Situated in the Western Ghats, the hilly northern district of Wayanad in

Kerala with its sizeable population of Adivasis, or indigenous people, pro-
vides the ideal breeding ground for ‘natural resources’ and ‘indigenous crafts
and culture’, coveted by both global entrepreneurs and local traders. What
makes Wayanad stand out is the significant presence of Adivasis who still
today bear a history of subjugation as bonded labourers working in agricul-
tural fields and plantations owned by big landlords or in estates owned by
multi-national companies mushrooming in Wayanad. However, a cursory
glance at most literature on the socio-political history of Kerala and, specif-
ically, Wayanad reveals the invisibility of Adivasis, especially the most mar-
ginalized Paniyar and Adiyar communities, from dominant historical
narratives. It is then as an interrogation of this invisibility that I approach
the question of the archive in this chapter. Without revisiting the fairly long
and important debates about the archive as an institution denoting power
(to represent history) and authority to select and omit what can be decreed
as an authentic record, the archive in this chapter is approached from the
point of view of immaterial registers of historical articulations, very much
an omission from the archive. How can one challenge hegemonic frames to
read histories of communities pushed to the margins of historiographies?
Can embodied practices studied as the ‘repertoire’ by Diana Taylor (2003),
especially in the context of Adivasi communities which are marked by a rich
corpus of ritual performances and songs, help peruse this question?
One of the first available documentation of Wayanad in colonial records,
Rao Bahadur C. Gopalan Nair’s book, Wynad: Its People and Traditions
(1911), includes detailed passages about Paniyars and Adiyars. He writes:

This [Paniyar] dark-skinned and curly-haired tribe of a Negroid type is

found in all the amsams of Wynad. As agricultural coolies they are a
necessity in a country where it is difficult to secure labourers for work
in the paddy fields. The tradition about their origin is interesting.
Ippimala, a hill which no one in Wynad could localise and which is said
to be somewhere near the Tamaracherry1 ghats was the home of the
Paniyars. They were savage tribes living in caves and thick forests, com-
ing out only at nights and feeding on paddy and other crops. The
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-5
 Invisible Histories 47
Grounden landowners finding their crops always destroyed by these
black beasts managed to secure a number of them by means of nets
known in Wynad as Thandati and in six months taught them their
language and to go on errands. These domesticated Paniyars induced
their friends of the forest to join them, and gradually they spread from
place to place. Now we find them in parts of Coorg and Mysore, and in
Wynad and in the hilly tracts of the neighbouring taluks in the plains.
The only reference to the Ippimala tradition now is the word “Ippi” to
which the Paniyan gives utterance when he is frightened say when his
master thrashes him.
(1911: 100)

In colonial writings, it is not shocking to find mention of indigenous popu-

lations as savages who were tamed through colonization. Gopalan Nair
further goes on to add that “they are excellent-field labourers. … [Paniyars]
are a necessity to Wynad cultivation; they alone are able to control the wild
cattle of this country and work in the soft and clayey soil, which sinks to the
touch” (ibid.).
In comparison to this, I chanced upon a recent representation of Paniyars
by Vasudevan Cheengalloor, a Paniyan himself, in a small booklet about
Paniyars called Nanga Ippimala Makkal (We Are the Children of Ippimala,
2011). Placed beside Gopalan Nair’s colonial anthropological description,
this depiction is quite telling. Elaborating on the characteristic features of a
Paniya man and woman, he writes:

A mundu2 tied around the waist till the knees (tax was imposed by the
karnavars3 if it extended beyond the knees), cloth hanging over their
shoulder to cover the chest, curly hair till the nape of their neck or tied
up in a knot, no facial hair (fines were imposed for growing moustache,
carrying umbrella or wearing slippers), lips red with beetle nut stains
displaying strong teeth, a sharp knife in hand (to face any adversity).
But with that knife, no Paniyan has ever killed anyone instead they
were the ones who were killed and plundered. Women wear a dark
chela4 till the knee, red or black urumal5 over the upper body. Their
hands and wrists are adorned with metal bangles, bedecked in neck-
laces made of different stone, earring made of circassian seeds called
kunnikuru assembled inside a ring made of waxed palm leaves. With
piercings on the upper ear lobe, big nose rings called muringakutthuka
on both nostrils, as well as rings on toes and fingers, they chew beetle
nut, and carry a tiny pouch called paakku to carry beetle nuts which is
tied to the tip of their chela and is worn as an embellishment. Women
are also as healthy as men.
(12–13)

The aforementioned sartorial and physical representation of Paniyars,

though in passing, nonetheless gleans over restrictions imposed by erstwhile
48 Devika N. Menon
landlords seen in the bracketing of references to impositions against facial
hair, clothing above knees, restriction of the use of umbrellas, et cetera. In
contrast to the earlier representation by Gopalan Nair as “professional bur-
glars, [who] waylay and rob travellers” who do not “ hesitate to commit the
gravest crimes”, Vasudevan’s articulation shows the historically marginal-
ized Paniyan for whom even his simple knife cannot protect from death and
plunder, a reference to the violence of colonization and enslavement.
In another instance, A. A. D. Luiz writes in his anthropological account
titled Tribes of Kerala (1962):

Their [Adiyas] name is reported to have originated from an old rule

that they should maintain a distance of ar (six) adi (feet) to avoid pol-
lution. …Their name means slave or vassal.
(1962, 27)

Despite the commonplace term ‘Adiyan’, they call themselves Ravulars in

their oral renditions and narratives and claim that they were given the name
Adiyar by landlords (as told to me by an Adiya headman, Kariachan). They
claim that they were originally from Kodagu,6 present-day, Coorg (on the
Kerala-Karnataka border). About Paniyars, Luiz writes,
They earned a living out of doing services of various kinds ranging from
agricultural labour to night watchmen, murder, plunder…lack of land
under their custody. (Ibid., 31)
Indeed, the transformation of the ‘savage tribe’ as represented in colonial
archives into bonded labourers, which is the meaning of the word Paniyan,
and slaves as the word Adiyan suggests saw a long process of enticement,
violence, subjugation and displacement under various actors in different
stages of history. Many like K. Panoor (1963), K. J. Baby (1993), O. K.
Johny (2010) and others have written about how the subordination of
Adivasis as slaves by feudal landlords called jenmi preceded colonial rule
and continued well within the precincts of the modern democratic state
even after the transfer of power in 1947.7 Yet, there is no substantial docu-
mentation of how this process of subjugation was carried out.
Even within dominant regional historiography, K. J. Baby, a famous
writer and educationist who has extensively worked among Adivasis in
Wayanad, writes about how they have been portrayed as informers (1993).
Baby critiques P. K. Gopalakrishnan’s Keralithile Samskarikacharitram
(The Cultural History of Kerala, 1974) in which the author writes, “In
order to get information about the enemy’s [Pazhasi Raja] whereabouts,
British officer’s bribed many Paniya men with money to work for them.
On 30th November 1805, three Paniya men disclosed information about
Pazhasi Raja’s8 hideout to Barber (395)”. However, Baby cites a letter
written by T. H. Barber addressed to the principal collector (607, Malabar
Manual) about the same incident where he writes about the East India
Company’s attempts to coax and coerce local landlords and natives to
disclose information about Pazhasi Raja and help them capture him.
 Invisible Histories 49
“After many efforts”, he writes, “in the end many landlords came forward
and promised to send their Paniyars (agricultural labourers) to collect
information about Pazhasi”. Comparing these two documents of history,
Baby challenges P. K. Gopalakrishnan’s trifling reference of Paniyars sim-
ply as those who disclosed Pazhasi Raja’s whereabouts to the Company.
He asks, “Who then are the snitches – the landlords or adivasis?” It was in
1805 that Pazhasi Raja was defeated, and Wayanad came entirely under
the rule of the East India Company. Baby remarks that it is doubtful
whether those like Paniyars and Adiyars even realized this change as they
continued to live and perish, slaving to fulfil the dreams of landlords who
decided what they should do and how they should live (1993, 18–19).
Thus, available historical sources show that their identity was designated
by landlords who owned them and in relation to them. Poignantly visible
in the normalization of how the nomenclature of oppression is ascribed as
their official identity as Adiyan (slave) and Paniyan (labourer) by the gov-
ernment even now.
In the previous paragraphs, I have tried to provide a glimpse of how
Adivasis are represented in colonial and dominant historical writings as
trifling footnotes to the larger scape of history writing of Wayanad. Apart
from this, state, legal, cultural and political institutions tend to exoticize
Adivasi rituals and performances by isolating them from their social con-
text and presenting them as embellishments for rallies, cultural festivals or
tourist attractions. Juxtaposed against this, the historical predicament of
the forest dweller9 transformed into a slave and bonded labourer is absent
from documented archives. Bringing back the question of the archive, I
refer to an article titled, “History and Memory: The Problem of the Archive”
(2004), where Francis X. Blouin Jr. writes about the long trajectory shift of
the archive from being the place of study to the object of study. He raises
pertinent questions about the political and cultural constructs according to
which records were assembled and presented. He, therefore, asks, “What,
then, is the authority of the records in validating a historical understanding?
What is not there? What is the authority of the absence in affirming broad
cultural realities?”(ibid., 297).
In the context of this chapter, the absence of Adiya and Paniya narratives
denote two things – namely, the need to trouble the conceptual self-assured-
ness of materials that come to be recognized as the archive and to restage
the past in an archive of improvisations based on Adivasi embodied prac-
tices. Here, my claim is not for an uncritical turn towards Adivasi self-artic-
ulations as authentic registers of their history and culture but to understand,
really, the hierarchy of materials that come to dictate the idea of the archive
and to reopen the word archive to read the genealogy of their subjugation
ambiguously lodged at the intersections of archive and embodied practices.
Taking this forward, I cite some of the Adiya and Paniya songs and oral
narratives I recorded from various Adivasi colonies and gathered from a
few regional texts in Wayanad in the following sections. By doing so, I
intend to show how the notion of social hierarchy as pre-ordained is
50 Devika N. Menon
performed, transmitted and challenged through their oral narratives and
songs. Another aspect that would be of concern for me is to understand
how obeisance to existing structures of oppression operates in Adivasi oral
renditions and performances and whether it can unpack the silences met
with in available historical archives.
An Adiya oral narrative narrated as a song goes thus:

Children, “We want to learn to write”.

Mother, “Evuthachante evuthu nee padikonda, evuthachan evuth-
achante evuthukolukontu thachu ninte basha keduthikalayum”.
(Do not go to learn writing from the scribe. He will strike you with
his writing rod and destroy your language.)
Children, “We want to learn singing from the song master”.
Mother, “Pattuchante pattu nee padikonda, pattachan pattachante
pattukolu kontu thachu ninte pattu keduthikalayum”.
(Do not go to learn singing from the song master. He will strike with
his song rod and destroy your song.)
(Baby 1993, 29; translation his)

Clearly, the aforementioned song is a critique of dominant knowledge sys-

tems. It also expresses the fear of loss of one’s own language and songs, and
thus one’s own sense of being, depicted in the act of whipping by the music
teacher and scribe, both representatives of an oppressive system. The fear of
being thrashed as part of the process of learning dominant knowledge sys-
tems also represents the apprehension of the violent and dominant process
of assimilation into mainstream society. The song can be seen as a portrayal
of the vulnerable view of the subjugated Adivasi body subsumed by the
dominant and authoritative knowledge of the music teacher and scribe in
this context. Here, Diana Taylor’s (2003) observation about the legitimacy
of the written word over performed and orally transmitted traditions in the
context of Latin American performance practices and the need for decen-
tralized systems of knowledge transmission by considering the repertoire of
embodied practices is helpful to direct how to read the absence of Adivasi
history from what is normally recognized as the archive.
Offering a fascinating view of how their collective past is imagined,
Chamachan, one of the elders in Ozhicody colony, narrated a tale about the
first Paniya man and woman to me. According to him, both were siblings
above the waist and from below they were man and wife suggesting a con-
jugal relationship. From the forest which was their home, they were cap-
tured by the jenmis who enslaved them and brought them to their agricultural
fields to work as bonded labour (interview December 2018). Vasudevan
Cheengaloor (2011) describes a similar myth about the apparent origin of
Paniyas. The following is my translation of his narrative:

It is believed that Paniyars came from Ippimala. Upon confronting

something shocking or surprising, we utter the word, “Ippi” in fear or
 Invisible Histories 51
as an exclamation. Escaping confinement, Ippimala and Korappali
were siblings who roamed freely in the forests alongside wild animals
regardless of summer, rains and winter. The Ippimala thamburan10 and
ambalam shanti11 decided to entrap them. For this purpose, they
befriended an adivasi man. As per the adivasi man’s advice, they made
a powerful net made out of special elements. On getting caught in the
enchanted net, Ippimala and Korappali fainted. The unconscious sib-
lings were brought to the Ippimala temple where they were made to
stand with their hands folded as though in prayer and face all the four
directions to regain consciousness. Delicate and limp like cotton, their
bodies were given form and shape with the backbone of a fox. This was
followed by the ponnuruvam, a ritual ascribing them with their sexual
identity under the guidance of Ippimala muthazhi.12 After that they
were given a sheet to cover themselves and sleep. Under the sheet, the
cunning thampuran sprinkled cowhage powder on them. Troubled by a
terrible itch, the two started scratching and they felt the first instance of
sexual urge when their skin rubbed against each other. Thus, according
to the myth they became husband and wife and gave birth to five
daughters and five sons. Their children grew up and gave birth to
grandchildren, gradually, their family became a prolific clan occupying
the terrain- plains (vallivayanadu), mountains and ghats (parakketinte
mele, parrakettinte thazhe), and valleys of the region (chullichuram).
Eventually, cheichadiyamaru were subjugated into paniyars or workers.
They were made to sow seeds and work with spades in the fields of the
Thampuran, were employed for engraving and carving work at the
temple, or made to wash utensils.
(2011: 11–12, emphasis mine)

Collected and preserved as part of the civilizing anthropological project of

the colonial empire, Gopalan Nair’s depiction of Adivasi beliefs quoted ear-
lier simply embeds the narrative of Ippimala and other Adivasi beliefs as
ornamental descriptions about indigenous culture engulfed into the space
of the colonial empire. Discernibly, numerous Paniya narratives, depict the
apocryphal Ippimala as the idyllic place of the past when their ancestors
lived in freedom and abundance before enslavement by the Chettis and
Gowders (Vasudevan Moopan-Ambalavayal colony 2014, also mentioned
by Tharuvana 2011). Thus, Ippimala is symbolic of their past, which is now
lost forever. Mala in the local dialect is mountain. It is imaginary in the
sense of a real place named Ippimala but is symbolic of the forests. Ippimala
is also comparable to Mavelimantam of the Adiyas.
The following myth was narrated to me by Karian moopan from
Kaithavali Adiya colony in Thrissaleri:

Aryan (Vishnu) and Baniyan (Sivan) [later represented as gods of the

Savarnas], were in search of sand to cast human beings in. They went
to Mavelimantu as he lived underneath a termite hill and the soil in his
52 Devika N. Menon
land was known to be the finest. The two gods stole soil from Maveli’s
land in his absence. When all attempts by Maveli to get hold of those
who stole from his land proved futile, the gods proposed a test to him.
The criterion was that the direction of flow of grime in a stream of
water would decide the real culprit. If it flows upwards, the gods would
be found guilty. But, if it flows downwards, Maveli would be guilty.
Thus, the gods beguiled him with the false hope of justice since grime
in flowing water would inevitably move downwards. When he realised
that the gods had entrapped him, they struck him with a jar rendering
him unconscious. They then took the stolen sand out and created
human beings out of it. But these were insipid forms cast in mud. In
order to scare them into life, the gods summoned the fearsome goddess
Mali .
(Mariamman)

Notwithstanding a few variations, the myth of Mavelimantam is charged

with a strong yearning for a lost past. K. J. Baby explains the concept of
Mavelimantam in his novel by the same name as “a place where the eyes
and ears of the masters do not reach, a shore of a serenely flowing river
where land is ploughed only to feed and not in excess, a time where there is
no need for women to bear the children of the masters and a world where
the children of the Mantam can decide, on their own, what they should do
in a lifetime” (cited by Vinod Kalidasan, 2016).
Figuratively, both Ippimala and Mavelimantam are not just depictions of
the longing for their collective imagination of an unfettered past. Ippimala
symbolizes the sprawling forests which were cleared out and wrested away
from them while the loss of Mantam represents the loss of soil and thereby
displacement and colonization. Most narratives about their ancestors circle
around their imagination of anteriority in the forests, represented by the
idyllic Mantam or sprawling Ippimala, before entrapment, capture and
enslavement (and displacement) by the cunning of gods or landlords. Like
Ippimala and Korappali, mythic Paniya ancestors mentioned by Vasudevan
Cheengaloor, according to one of the Adiya narratives, their first father and
mother, Melocharan and Keeyorathi were caught in a snare set by the
Thampurans.13 The masters treated the ancestors well and introduced them
to a number of amenities and modern comforts before freeing them back
into the jungle. However, this was just another, but even more powerful,
trap of the masters – the ancestors returned to the masters in search of the
comforts they enjoyed and got enslaved forever (Baby 1993, cited in Vinod
Kalidasan, 2016). The conversation between Melocharan and Keeyorathi is
rendered as a song. The translation by K. J. Baby is provided here:

Melocharan: Ettu kootage erumayoo kaliyoo

Evidekku moviya lattuva movviya
(The cattle abound in all the eight sheds.
Where shall we graze them?
Oh, where shall we graze them?)
 Invisible Histories 53
Keeyorihti: pakkathappante balleeya malekku
Lattutha vannaya lattutha vannaya
(Take them shall we to Tamburan’s silver hills?)

Melocharan: kwangmu nokthama…immaththa banaya

Noktha mavviya kwaginte odiyoo
Ennelimavviya kwangumu kileppo
(Look ye here, at this fatty tuber.
Shall we dig it up with a jack tree’s hefty branch?)

Keeyorathi: praavi badeelu kwangumu kilepo

Praavi chedi chediye nariyo bantono
Pakkathappante belliyoo pareyoo
Oadeeleduthava lannaya…lannaya
(The jackfruit tree stinks.
Let’s go get Tamburan’s silver rake)

Melocharan-tenuman nokthama tenumu nokthama

Immaththa bannaya…tenumu tenumu
Evidemu lavviya…teeyumu kittuvoy
Choorigadaeelu teeyumu eduppo
(Look at this beehive, dripping with honey.
Let’s get some fire from the choori plant.)

Keeyorithi-choori chedi chediye

Narino bantono
akkathappante belleeya theeppetti
Oadeeleduthava lannaya…lannaya
(The choori plant stinks.
Let’s go get Tamburan’s silver matchbox)
(73–73, translation his)

Depicting the latent fear of loss of their history and, hence, obliteration of
existence, through the gradual yet sophisticated discourse of appropriation
into the practices of dominant classes and castes, the song straddles a sense of
loss and longing for their forests and the life practices of their mythic past
before enslavement. This fear is represented in Melocharan’s attempt at coax-
ing a reluctant Keeyorathi, who is enamoured by the life practices of the land-
lord, back into their forest and into their lifeworld. The song also portrays an
unfathomable awe and fear of the landlord and his property. Foregrounded as
the difference between their symbiotic and sustainable existence and the
destructive practices of the dominant ruling classes, this dichotomy finds pro-
found reverberations in contemporary Adivasi narratives which represent
their subjugation to the dreadful allure of development as the epilogue to their
displacement from forests which is akin to the loss of freedom and identity.
Historically enslaved, the displacement and marginalization of tribal com-
munities in Wayanad continued through years of migration of settlers into
54 Devika N. Menon
Wayanad in numerous phases – in the 1920s, ’50s and later in the ’90s –
pushing them further out of their forests and taking over forest land, turning
them into refugees in their own land (Steur 2011). Even today, Mantumakkal
continue to remain subordinated as Adiyans (slaves) and Paniyans (bonded
labourers). In this context, the Mavelimantam, as K. Vinod points out, “is
not just the tribal land but the whole tribal world now forgotten in coloni-
alism” (2015). Unfortunately, the tragedy of Mavelimantam does not end
with the brutal killing of Maveli. The children of Mavelimantu who were
cast out of the soil stolen from Mavelimantam were brought to life by sum-
moning the fearsome goddess Mali (Karian moopan 2014). Known as Mali,
Mariamman or Valliyooramma, Karian moopan described Mali with bulg-
ing eyes, blood dripping from her tongue, and, livid with rage, she menac-
ingly charges towards anyone in her sight. Indeed, Mariamman is horrifying;
she is also history gravid with contestations between her local and regional
representations and brahmanical appropriations. The myth of Mavelimantam
descends into an awfully fearful denouement when Mantumakkal who try
to flee (from capture) or are unresponsive (depicted as insipid mud casts) are
coerced into enslavement by summoning the horrifying Mali or Mariamman.
This is the tragic paradox of Mavelimantam. Not only is their land usurped
(from Mavelimantu in the myth), but the gods are also accomplices in their
subjugation by landlords. An Adiya song describes this alliance between
dominant cast gods and landlords:

Adiyoru bovve ponaru nakkau

Onpathu thenda undave
Kothikudipa poovakozhi
Pirichukudipa poovankozhi
Neenkademmeku neekikkonam
Kappumuu, kayathiu poyninto
Appaline palle, Arunarine palle
Arnkilum povadekku palle
Edamana, Vadamana, njetticho
Poyanmade neekkikko

(Do follow the Adiyas everywhere and

I’ll give you nine garlands.
I’ll give you tender coconut to break and drink.
I’ll give you fowl to kill and drink blood
You should go where ever they go
and move to wherever they move.
In the river, and in the lakes,
in the whirlpool, you follow them
Follow them even amidst the kaitha14 thickets
Like a little mouse
Who startles one with its sudden ‘chi…chi’).
(Baby 1993, 13; translation his)
 Invisible Histories 55
According to the narrative, Mariamman hunted them down from the deep-
est caves when they tried to flee from oppression as per the orders of the
landlord. As mercenaries of landlords, gods played a significant role in
spiritually subordinating them. Allegorically, the state machinery, including
police and law, seem to have replaced gods as the agents of oppression in
contemporary times. Incidentally, there are police records of runaway
Adivasi labourers from the fields or plantations of landlords as early as the
nineteenth century (Panoor, 1963, 77).
Focusing on ramifications of the sacred bidding of landlords and gods,
the fable of the contested practice of slave trade,15 now obsolete, in the
precincts of Valliyoorkavu temple festival in Wayanad becomes significant
to understand how the construction of the fear of dominant caste gods
sustains structures of exploitation. Many Paniya songs portray the wrath of
Vallooramma (the residing deity in Valliyoorkavu) when enraged in great
detail. Even the thought of absconding from the fields of landlords and
fleeing from bondage are construed as culpable acts in many songs and
anecdotes where notions of crime and fear of retribution are the leitmotif.
Vallooramma is the one who punishes them for such acts of ‘defiance’.
A Paniya song about Valliyoorkavu goes thus:

Valloorcāvil bhagavatikku
Janmamāyittula padathilu
Moovayiram vittu vidaykaanundu
Moovayiram vitthil kili thelippan
Randolam nalloru paithangalum
Nitya thozhil kili thelipaan
Kuttikal pādatu irangunéram
Cippumalamélu ‘cinnumoopan’
Ténum kondangottaduttu cennu

(On the fields inherited by Valliyoorkavu bhagavati16

A thousands seeds are to be sown,
To tend and harvest these thousand seeds
And to labour daily
Children and youth go into the fields
When Cinnu moopan from Cippu mala17
Went near them with tena18)

Kandu bhayapettu odunallo.

Pinālle odunnucinnumoopan
Anneram kuttikal vairamvillicu
Kottiyoorperumāl tunacidénam
Mutappan daivam tunacidénam
Malayatil vazhum bhagavtiyum
Itrayum deivangal tunacidénam
Nrityavum dharmavum kāturakshikénam
56 Devika N. Menon
(On seeing him they ran in fear
And behind them ran Cinnu moopan
The Children screamed in unison
Be the grace of Kottiyoor perumal19 be upon us,
Be the grace of Mutappan20 be upon us,
And of the goddess that resides in the hills,
May all these gods shelter us,
And every day, may our daily labour be protected.)

Pānjodi valoorkavileti
Kandupidichalo vallooracan
’Ceeni’ne pidichukettunalo
Udane parayunnu cheenu anneram
Enne onnum cheyaruthu vallooraca
Ivide adimayāyi nilkum njan
Vallooru adimayayi ninnu cheenu
Kollatil vallooru kondadum
Thudimutti cheengini kettiyaadum
Malayttil vazhum bhadrakali…

(They scampered hurriedly to valliyoorkavu

On seeing Ceeni,
Vallorachan21 tied him up,
Then said Ceeni,
“Do not do anything to me Vallooracha”.
“I shall stay here as your slave”,
So stayed Ceeni as a slave in Valliyoor
And once every year, he sings and dances for the goddess
To the tunes of thudi and the rhythm of reed flute
For the bhadrakali22 who resides in the hills).
(Panoor 1963, 71; translation mine)

This song describes the travails of a Paniya moopan named Cheeni who is
subjugated by the landlord of Valliyoorkavu. Sanctioned by the gods, the
landlord binds the moopan with impunity. The moopan himself offers to be
a slave under the landlord and offers to serve in his fields and propitiate the
gods through ritual services. Here, the Paniya slaves are doubly bound by
the fear of their gods and the power rendered to the landlord by these gods.
They were subjected to extreme forms of punishment by the landlords if
they did not comply with their work. For those who dare to flee or run
away from the fields or slacken in their work, it was believed that Bhadrakali
would unleash her anger upon them and their people. The song amply indi-
cates how the exploitative contract of work in Valliyoorkavu gets sanctified
as a ruthless arrangement between landlords and gods. Both Paniyas and
Adiyas considered that any agreement where Vallooramma stands as a wit-
ness should be abided by, and in the light of this prism of fear, they are
 Invisible Histories 57
coerced into the lowest position in the social hierarchy as cheap service of
unquestioning labour.
References to this hierarchy of social position are prevalent in many
Adivasi oral narratives. According to an oral narrative of the Paniyas, the
last sections of people to be gifted land by the gods were Paniyas. Seeing
their miserable condition, Kali Mala devam (God of the hill) appeared in
front of the gods on their behalf, and they were finally gifted a pinch of
land. But the irony is that Paniyas can gain access to this land only after
their deaths. Furthermore, the spirits of deceased landlords would be await-
ing them even in the world after their deaths, where they would have to
continue their services with the landlord to whom they were bonded in their
lives (Raju 2011, 58–60; Baby 1993). Hence, they had no escape even in
their deaths. Bondage and slavery ensnared them in life and in death, turn-
ing resistance into an obsolete coefficient. After all, there was no point in
fighting for land that could not be theirs even in their deaths. These narra-
tives evince their rendition of betrayal by gods and a ‘fate’ they were cheated
into accepting.
Continuing with the myth of Mavelimantam, Karian added that when
Mali was summoned to frighten the mud figures, Ravullars, who came to be
known as Adiyas, were those who screamed, “Athava!” on seeing her. The
story goes on to narrate that the ones who retorted bravely became
Thampurans, the ones who muttered, “Emmi”, in fright became Paniyas.
Theeyans were the ones who responded with a cry, “Uyyi”, and those who
uttered, “Allah”, became Mappilas (Moplah; Karian 2014, Tharuvana
2011). Thus, the myth echoes the diversity of people divided into hierar-
chies of caste and class based on their response to fear. Adiya and Panya
oral narratives lay emphasis on this division of labour that hints at the
structure of caste endemic to Hindu religion. These narrations latently
express the injustice perpetrated upon them by representing the treachery
and deception of dominant Hindu gods. There is no ambiguity about their
gods as is seen in the representation of Mali as malevolent. The fear of being
engulfed in the fury of Mariamman or Valliyooramma led to their capitula-
tion in front of the landlords. She betrayed them, first in cohorts with the
gods who deceived Mavelimantu and the second time by aiding landlords
to ensure their dominion over Adiyas who are the children of Mantu. These
myths also depict a formidable rupture in time after the slaying of
Mavelimantu. The emphasis on the intractability of Mavelimantam is not
lost without significance.
In his book, Wayanad Ramayanam, Azeez documents the latter part of
the myth.
All the people belonging to different castes were given different occupa-
tions and alongside that knowledge (of reading and writing). But the ances-
tors of Adiyas, Ithi and Achan, went back home and slept peacefully. By the
time they woke up, everyone else had finished acquiring the knowledge of
reading and writing. Immediately, they ran to Ariyan and Baniyan to seek
knowledge of the written and spoken word. But, by then, the palm leaves
58 Devika N. Menon
on which everyone was taught to write had exhausted. Still, Ithi and Achan
were relentless in their request to gain knowledge of reading and writing.
After reprimanding the two of them for sleeping while the knowledge of
reading and writing were handed over to others, the gods informed that
there were no more palm leaves left. But they took pity on the two whose
requests continued unabated. The gods then foraged for fallen shreds of the
elongated tips of palm leaves which were torn off earlier. They collected
them and threw them in fire burning them into ashes. They collected these
ashes and smeared them on the tongues of ithi and achan. After that gave
them a boon, “Your clan will not have written or read words, your reading
and writing will be in your tongue”. (2011: 92–93, translation mine)
The aforementioned narrative is a splendid contortion of how alienation
from language and, hence, power to write history is in turn represented by
Paniyars as god’s blessing of oral history to Adivasis. Besides, it subtly cri-
tiques the imposition of prevailing structures of exploitative hierarchy
imposed forcibly by landlords and, spiritually, by the gods who were accom-
plices in their subjugation.
The relationship between jenmi, gods and Adivasis in bondage is predi-
cated on fear that generates obedience to social structures of power. This
constructs an ideology of sanction and authority that legitimizes caste ine-
quality reproduced over generations. The Adivasi body which internalizes
the disciplining aspect of fear carries these markers, albeit constantly con-
testing it in contemporary narratives. An Adiya work song rendered by
Karian moopan (September 2014) is presented next:

Ee vellupinu thambran vanthan

Ainte bayali indunaattilu
Naatikum eyvelupukkum
Naangalokke ponom
(Thamburan came early in the morning,
His field is in Indunaadu,23
All of us have to leave for his land
Early in the morning)

Naangapoycha pinne peniyavaronom

Thambirakum naatinadonom
Kakkakiryende munne
Ainte bayail ethonam
(We have to work after we reach
In the fields of the Thamburan
Even before the crow caws24
We have to reach the fields).
(Translation mine)

Even before the cawing of crows, that is before dawn sets, they had to reach
the fields of the Thamburan or the landlord. When he beckoned, they had
 Invisible Histories 59
to leave for his land and work for him in his fields. Unlike the regulation of
work with time in an industrial context, time in this context is recognized
as something that continuously binds them. When labour is performed as
debt or bond labour, time emerges as a concept that perpetuates ceaseless
toil. That is, bondedness becomes ceaseless; toil becomes ceaseless; time
becomes ceaseless. They had to render their services to the landlords when-
ever asked for. Following from Lazzarato’s work, the landlord, here, sells
‘time’, whose sole owner is god, to the indebted servant. He adds, “As a
thief of time the usurer steals god’s patrimony” (ibid., 47). Thus, the Adivasi
labourer, already subjugated by bondage and gods, perspires to render his
supreme duty to the gods by working unquestioningly in the fields of the
landlord. They had to reach before everyone and leave after sunset. The
time to break for lunch was decided according to their hunger. Men were
given 2 sers of rice, and women received 1 ser of rice. With this measly
amount, the entire family had to feed themselves.
In a context underlined by the dominance of exploitation under land-
lords and caste-feudal social relations, the cultural practices and renditions
that emerge are shaped by the same social relations. A lullaby sung by
Paniyas narrates how elder siblings put the younger one to sleep by describ-
ing that their mother has gone to the fields to feed them. While waiting for
their mother to return with rice grains from the field, the children try to put
the newborn to sleep who starts screaming in hunger.

Ba vo ba vo
Mollukutty ba vo
Ammeyila maperippannam
Naattinaduvannam poyullo
(Ba vo ba vo, dear child, ba vo
Our mother has gone to sow the seeds
And plough the fields).
(Nair 1976, 116; translation mine)

The song continues with a depiction of the mother’s response who asks
them to wait a little longer. She has not finished her work in the field, and
her children are calling her to suckle her newborn. She sings that if she
leaves without sowing the field, the landlord will withhold her kooli (wage)
and will refuse her valli (remuneration for bond labour – that is, 1 ser of
rice) for the day’s labour. She laments that her children will go hungry if she
goes home to feed her younger one without completing her work in the field
(ibid.). In these songs and performance practices, it is the unfreedom in
bonded systems of labour that gets resonated. The relationship between the
notion of time, endurance of labour, subjugation in bondage and land coa-
lesce with the need to abate hunger – that is, the most basic necessity to
sustain life.
Historically, the experience of Adivasi communities who were traded as
slaves in Valliyoorkavu under the sanctimonious alliance between gods,
60 Devika N. Menon
landlords and moopans leaves an indelible sense of loss and estrangement
in most Adiya and Paniya oral narratives and songs. This also generates a
discrete subtext for the first instance of recognition and thereby resistance
in its most sensory and bodily form, as seen in the desire to run away from
fields. Reading the body of the subjugated slave as a dynamic site of struggle
sutures the chasm between oppression and resistance by bringing to the
fore, what Conquergood calls:

the whole realm of complex nuanced meaning that is embodied, tacit,

intoned, gestured, improvised, co-experienced, covert, and all the more
deeply meaningful because of their refusal to be spelt out…meanings
that are expressed forcefully through intonation, silence, body tension,
arched eyebrows, blank stares, and other protective arts of disguise and
secrecy.
(2002:146)

These are a set of expressions and articulations, “loud, long and deep”
(ibid.), which could be seen as resurfacing in the very ontology of later
political mobilizations, both communist movements and Adivasi assertions
in Wayanad. The very same metre and gestures articulated in their songs
which carry both the sensory and intangible memory of exploitation are
reorganized within political movements to address the edifice of exploita-
tion which renders them hungry and bonded to the land and the owners of
this land who aggressively and forcibly acquire it.
The history of bondage and servitude of Adiyas and Paniyas has been
complex. The edict of bondage was sealed by the gods whom Adivasi peo-
ple served and appeased for a lifetime. These services of labour were to be
offered as their duty and not as work for livelihood. In the absence of
Adivasi narratives in historical records about the experience of bondage
and negotiation of structures of power, the embodied sphere of performance
and oral narratives present multitudinous ways to understand how bond-
age was internalized, embodied, experienced and negotiated by Adivasi
communities. Practices like the Valliyoorkavu slave market and various
Adivasi songs elaborate on the ambivalence between recognition of oppres-
sion and a desire to escape it, and acceptance of bondage, thus evincing the
unfreedom in bonded systems of labour.
Here, as far as how the subjugated Adivasi accepted the dominance of the
jenmi, the Sircar and the state as pre-ordained, I argue that the so-called
process of civilization smugly disguises coercion, rendering the history of an
entire people and, thereby, their historical consciousness invisible. Socially,
economically and politically denigrated within the structure of caste, mired
under feudal social relations under the rule of false owners of the land, the
songs and myths of Adiyas and Paniyas can also be studied as interstices
that utter what cannot be articulated within the coercive structure of
bond(ed) labour. In that sense, Adiya and Paniya songs and embodied prac-
tices orbiting the ever-modifying realm of folklore and oral narratives dispel
 Invisible Histories 61
the aura of permanence of the archive to speculate about improvisations as
a process of historical narration. The works of many like Lynn Hunt (cited
in Blouin, 2004) in cultural theory already point to the relevance of memory
as recollection to push the boundaries of historical understanding and
imagination. In the present context, such an engagement allows perfor-
mance studies to converse with contemporary historiographies in order to
interrogate and expand the limitations of historical enquiry which exclude
the experiences and embodied practices of marginalized people.
The recognition of injustice inscribes the first act towards resistance.
Against the narrative of bondage and subjugation, the utterances of a com-
munity and the expressions of their bodies alter the lexicon of resistance
against the language and written texts of dominant classes. The transforma-
tion of these minute acts of resistance, with changing sites of performances,
through embodied practices and myths has produced an enormous register
of Adivasi articulations against the narrative of state archives.

Notes
1 Between Wayanad and Kozhikode (Calicut).
2 Cloth covering the lower body.
3 Literally ancestors, the word in this case refers to feudal landlords.
4 Cloth worn by women to cover their body.
5 Kerchief for tying round the head.
6 In a conversation with Karian from Kaithavali Adiya colony in Thrissaleri,
Wayanad, September 2014.
7 Transfer of power from the colonial British Empire to an independent Indian
government under the Indian national congress.
8 Keralavarma Pazhasi Raja was the king of Kottayam, including regions in the
Malabar encompassing Wayanad, who put up a strong resistance against the
East India Company from 1774 to 1805. By employing the means of guerrilla
warfare, he evaded capture for a long time and sought refuge in the forests of
Wayanad; he was finally killed on 30 November 1805 by officers of the East
India Company in an encounter after a tip off in the forests along the borders of
present-day Kerala and Karnataka.
9 A recurring theme in most adivasi imaginations of their past which is articulated
as an uprooting from the forests where they lived freely.
10 A term used for someone in a position of power in the feudal hierarchy, in this
case a landlord.
11 Temple priest.
12 An old woman or grandmother.
13 Feudal landlords who in their myths trapped and enslaved them.
14 Pandanus or ketaki flower, flower of the screw pine tree.
15 O. K. Johny in his book writes that there is no documented evidence of slave
trade in Valliyoorkavu. Their bondage to a particular landlord was fixed and
sealed for a year during the temple festival, and the money given as vallipanam
was used to buy things at the Valliyoorkavu festival.
16 Goddess, the residing deity of Valliyoorkavu.
17 Hill.
18 Grains of raggi preferred by both Adiyas and Paniyas in their diet.
19 The deity residing in Kottiyoor temple.
20 Siva.
62 Devika N. Menon
21 The head priest of Valliyoorkavu or the jenmi in Valliyoorkavu.
22 The Goddess Kali, who is known for her fury.
23 The name of a place.
24 It means even before dawn sets.

Bibliography
Baby, K J. Nadugadhika. Translated by Shirley M. Joseph. Bangalore: Visthar, 1993.
Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies Interventions and Radical Research”.
TDR/ The Drama Raview (New York University and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) Vol. 46, No.2 (Summer 2002): 145–156.
Francis X. Blouin, Jr. “History and Memory: The Problem of the Archive”. PMLA
Vol. 119, No. 2 (March 2004): 296–298
Gopalakrishnan, P. K. Keralithile Samskarikacharitram (The Cultural History of
Kerala), Kerala Bhasha Institute, Trivandrum 1974.
Hunt, Lynn, and Victoria Bonnell, eds. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in
Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Kottayil Kalidasan. “Vinod”. Studies in South Asian Film & Media, Volume 7
Numbers 1 & 2, 2016.
Kazanjian, David. “‘When They Come Here They Feal So Free’: Race and Early
American Studies”. Early American Literature 41.2 (2006): 329–337. Project
Muse. Web. 12 December 2013.
Johny, O. K. Wayanadan Rekhakal (Notes on Wayanad). Kozhikode: Mathrubhumi
Books, 2010.
Lazzarato, M, and Joshua David Jordan. The Making of the Indebted Man: An
Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Cambridge, Mass.; London, England: MIT
Press, 2012.
Luiz, A. A. D. Tribes of Kerala, 1962.
Nair, Rao Bahadur C. Gopalan. Wynad: Its People and Traditions, 1911
Nair, Somasekharan. Paniyar. Thrivananthapuram: National Book Stall, 1976.
Nanga Ippimala Makkal (We Are the Children of Ippimala), PEEP Publication:
Kalpetta, 2011.
Panoor, K. Keralathile Africa, 1963.
Raju, E. T. Ippimalayude Thazhvaram (The Valley of Ippimala). Bathery, Wayanad:
Voice Documentation Centre, 2011.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.
Tharuvana, Azeez. Wayanadan Ramayanam (Ramayanas from Wayanad).
Kozhikode: Mathrubhumi Books, 2011.
5 Materializing Site
Nela Milic

The Serbian uprising in ’96/’97 was an attempt to overthrow the dictator-

ship of President Milosevic after he annulled elections because of the vic-
tory of the opposition party. Ashamed by the unsuccessful outcome of their
protest, the people of the capital Belgrade, where protesters reached 200,000
daily, have never produced an archive of photos, banners and graffiti, which
emerged during these demonstrations. Scarce information on the internet
and the inability of the media to reveal the data gathered during the protest
have left the public without a full account of the uprising. My project is that
archive – a website of images, leaflets, badges, flags, vouchers, cartoons,
crochets, poems, etc. – an online record of elucidated protest available to
participants, scholars and the public. It is a pedagogical tool and a scene
from which to interrogate archival discipline and question the success of
any storage as a platform to capture the past.
This visual chapter addresses the historical condition of the upraising,
using it as an elusive material that challenges archival processes and is a joy
to engage with. It is pointing at the problem with indexicizing that intrinsi-
cally adopts power. However, when the subject of the archive is the opposi-
tion to authority like political protests are, it becomes difficult to create,
manage and navigate it. The monumental station of events that occurs in
every archive with the attempt to capture them fixes those events, even
though they are anything but stable affairs.

The Facts
In municipal elections on 17 November 1996, in almost all cities in Serbia,
the opposition coalition Zajedno1 (“Together”) won. The results were over-
ruled through a blatant intervention by the government in civil service and
judicial institutions. Hundreds of thousands of citizens reacted by coming
out on the streets. There were mass anti-war and anti-regime protests in
Serbia during the conflicts in the ’90s, but ruthless police action stopped
demonstrations, and the country sunk into wars, nationalist euphoria and
economic ruin. Political opposition – tired, disillusioned, preoccupied with
everyday survival and emigration of the young and educated – appeared
non-existent.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-6
64 Nela Milic
But the electoral results in 1996, set off overt dissent that lasted for three
months. The co-ordinators were the Zajedno coalition and student councils
of Serbian universities. The participants ranged from committed peace-ac-
tivists to ardent nationalists. They affirmed the idea of Belgrade as the world
city, as well as the capital of Serbia that belongs to its residents.
Their visual and textual references – pictures and statements on banners,
coupons and graffiti in the street, were of a democratic nature, and they
demonstrated a desire to be accepted as such – modern European instead of
a ‘trigger happy’ nation which was painted by global media. Protesters
wanted to be taken as members of civil society by partaking in a peaceful
movement and opposing the violence executed on the orders of the Serbian
regime. An illustration of such a desire was a banner designed by Slavisa
Savic and carried at the front of the walking procession, stating “Belgrade
is the world” – not some crazy place where leaders do what they want and
everybody follows.
The ‘civilized behaviour’ that was exterminated by Milosevic’s followers
re-appeared in the ‘liberated spaces’ (Spasic and Pavicevic 1997) as observed
by Lazic (1999) and the non-violent character of the protest inserted it into
democratic resistance. Those who were constantly critical of the regime
emphasized the importance of cosmopolitanism and celebrated communal
identity.
Protesters’ accessories gave rise to a petty trade in postcards, badges,
whistles, raincoats, hats, plastic trumpets and other souvenirs that were
insignia of an international protester’s identity. They are now objects of the
protest’s archive described here.

The Purpose of the Archive

“All human artefacts and practices have extension in time, whether or not
they have extension in space. Their freight of past is essential to their mean-
ing”, claims Segal (2013: 6), but the sole encounter between the researchers
and the sought object is what makes research matter.
However, Serbian researchers must assure that the Balkans’ cultural past
is more knowable to both historic and artistic research so that the clichés of
Balkan-ness are diminished. Furthermore, they should reveal the impact of
their imposition as an imperial act, as a western interpretation of the east
and a dissemination of that framing worldwide.
Collection, ordering and cataloguing are inherently violent ways of
obtaining knowledge. In this project, I lend its power to the east by using
classification to place the protest at the centre of the national narrative and
so, liberate the artefacts from the outskirts of local as well as global knowl-
edge about Serbia and the Balkans that is confined by violence, conflict and
war. In a way, I am Balkanizing taxonomy and reorganizing the order with
which the region has been depicted by the west and rewriting its story from
the east.
 Materializing Site 65
Even though the most obvious selection process in the archive is that of
typifying the text and images to follow the path of assortment, this process
is an attempt to apply and devise a method of representation. Therefore, the
rhizomatic structure (Deleuze and Guattari 1972) of my archive tries to
defy linearity in terms of the gathering, chronology and systematization of
its objects. The bulk of its material is also corrupted by local interpretations
at the time it was confided to me because people are not indifferent to his-
tory. So I can only make yet another story from those versions of it.
Through engaging in this revision of history with fragments I could
access, I made archiving an arts practice. By following the dynamic of the
protest itself in my archive artwork, I have tried to capture, but also con-
tinue, it. As Pyzik states, “[A]rt has long tended to aestheticise politics; the
weakness of modernism is that it’s too non-committal, always working to
efface its own traces; what the left needs is an engaged political art that can
practice what it preaches – a ‘powerful aesthetic of protest’” (2014).
My networked archive is a practice of actualization, reproduction, inter-
pretation and re-impression (Derrida 1995). The method of archiving is,
therefore, a process of creation which produces continuity of cultural tradi-
tion, but simultaneously changes this practice – just like the daily proces-
sion walk by the protesters became architectural planning. As protester
Slavisa Savic said to me in an interview, “That walk is in my view the best
tourist tour, the city can never be seen from that angle…when you walk in
the middle of the George Washington Street, only then can you realise that
architecture – that is a completely different city” (2007).2

Performative Cartography
Theatrical status of the artefacts carries a sentimental attachment to them
and a desire that they perform the past. Many badly shot images, ripped
posters and blurred placards have a greater meaning in my archive than
being just pieces of paper and fabric. Due to their contextual and historical
value, they are evidence through which the archivist and the public ren-
counter the event, forging a life to it again and sharing this time in Belgrade
history.
I compiled the archive as a platform for the meeting of different voices,
which have been quieted or dissolved into the noise of con/temporary polit-
ical pressures. The purpose of it was to develop the storage of cultural mem-
ory, a prototype for the encouragement of archive as activism. Via digital
re-enactment, evaluation of the past is now jointly discussed by people in
the present with an urge to find a direction for the future.
However, one had to search deeply for the meaning of protest parapher-
nalia on the street. For example, fancy dress and disguise greatly contrib-
uted to the celebratory atmosphere of the protest as part of its spirit of
defiance. There were masks, handcuffs and teddy bears and life-size puppets
of Milosevic and his wife who also appeared as dummies and cartoon char-
acters in slogans, poems and panels.
66 Nela Milic
The narratives and artefacts created during the protest were social prod-
ucts that engaged others through the patterned, though improvised, prac-
tice. Whistles, trumpets, bells and pans were sold as weapons, complete
with a license to carry arms, and you could also obtain a license to access
various parts of the city. Many artefacts were distributed freely. The most
interesting was the presence of flags raised to show alliance with the coun-
tries that many travelled to due to the government’s actions and behaviours
(Canada, United Kingdom, Germany) to make that government angry
(United States) or to perform the role of the alleged foreign mercenaries the
protesters were called, as on the regime’s television channels.
Graffiti was on the walls but also on banners that carried them through
the city, making the thoughts realized on paper just before they moved onto/
from the concrete of the streets. This visual catharsis delivered by ordinary
people drew references from cultural heritage and encouraged participation
in political struggle.
My archive objects are holding in their variety a plethora of historical
possibilities for how the event developed. Furthermore, heterogeneous
sources – analogue and digital archives, institutional and personal accounts
are vehicles for histories from when they emerge. We need to question them
when considering their artefacts as ‘evidence’, or we can accept those meth-
odologies in them, like my archive, as an interpretation of history.
Furthermore, digital cultural forms do not just replace or succeed analogue
forms as Van Dijck (2007) accentuated – a shoebox full of photographs
provides the viewer a different experience than the scans of them on the
computer monitor. New technologies are influenced by remediation and
merged with the representational strategies of older forms.
Artistic work with databases, archives and displays is a media perfor-
mance where data collection takes place beyond conscious ordering. With
an urge to inform the world about their unique experience on the streets,
demonstrators in unity sent a different picture of Belgrade around the globe
via radio, television and internet. This city as a place, a dot on the map that
keeps escaping, moving, disappearing and getting inscribed itself has been
engraved in the archive via Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopia as
layered, ‘impossible space’ where opposites coexist. The idea of accumulat-
ing everything about the protest for the archive in order to constitute a
place of all times that is itself outside of time is a project that he sees as
belonging to modernity, to western culture of the nineteenth century. I use
the same technique to reverse the gaze and offer a view of protest from the
east to the west for a change.
The protest was an event with a city as its stage. Its archive attempts to
use its artefacts in the same way – spill them through its compartments,
allowing the objects to inhabit it so that they win the space like the citizens
re-claimed Belgrade during the demonstrations. The temporality of both
conditions (physical and virtual) is what connects them – protest unexpect-
edly flashes through piles of objects of archivist’s memory and global his-
tory too as we suddenly come across its artefacts while browsing the net.
 Materializing Site 67
There online, the archive collector is again a part of the protest community.
So, the longing to gather the artefacts was a desire for re-constructing the
community more than rebuilding an event of protest. The aim was to reach
out and communicate with people who were once together on the streets.

Archive as a Political Practice

The virtual demonstration of the archive draws on the elusive nature of
memory; hence, this protest collection can never claim to be a historical
resource. My archive is an artwork, a creative podium of an event from
history whose objects from photographs to newsletters are also art pieces.
The archive highlights its own false existence but directs to the truth. That
truth is always the only one we’ve got, even though it is just a point of view.

When you police a boundary…you believe in it. … By contrast, when

you study a boundary, it is put at risk, denaturalized, perhaps modified,
perhaps maintained for strategic, not essentializing reasons.
(Bal 2003: 264)

The questions the protest archive pose are why insist on the boundary, and
who or what is invested in such an assertion? Building a path from the east
to the west and back is policing a boundary, but going around both and
arriving at the beginning of the journey might be scoping and scrapping for
the understanding of the intricacies that each of those parts of the world
carries in their history and culture.
The act of constructing the protest archive and its analysis contributes to
the narrowing of the vacuum of knowledge existent about the Belgrade
protest and about artworks that criticize the regime on its own territory.
My practice is relying on formats used then and tries to continue the legacy
of revolt by keeping its medium and aesthetic alive.
Its function now is to rebel against the regime of popular representation
of Belgrade and Serbia in western circuits. As Todorova (1997: 59) reveals,
“In the face of a persistent hegemonic discourse from the West, continu-
ously disparaging about the Balkans, which sends out messages about the
politicization of essentialized cultural differences, it is hardly realistic to
expect the Balkans to create a liberal, tolerant, all-embracing identity cele-
brating ambiguity and a negation of essentialism”. Still, the protesters cried
in solidarity for a new social contract different to the one delivered to them
by the state and, later on, the western world.
The protesters created an early democratic society – inclusive, transpar-
ent and free in speech, but it was not sustained beyond protest, not only
because of the (de)pressing representation of the Balkans in the west but
also because of the economic state, which does not allow for these values to
be upheld by constantly focusing solely on survival.
The archive attempted here is a political apparatus, not just because it is
created around the political activity but also because of the choices that are
68 Nela Milic
made to collect artefacts, the format and methodology of gathering data are
political decisions. I am seizing this archive and its associated collective
consciousness as a tool for resistance in countering dominant histories with
different narratives. This is done because the archive is not simply a place to
amass memory but a site that can render the history of the present more
visible, which can uproot the authority of the past to question that present.
What has been written about the Balkans can be interrogated in the archive.
It is in perpetuated renewal and tautness within which the past and present
come together and hopefully, influence each other so a better Serbia is
found.
My archive contains historical accounts and empirical tropes of memory
– my own and those of my research contributors. It is up to archive users to
find their own ‘fact’ in it. As every archive is an artwork due to the processes
of its creation that I deem inevitable for its establishment and maintenance,
mine is not looking to be part of the archival science, but the art world. It is
more interested in how to transfer the experience of the protest via its arte-
facts than weave its historical narrative. By selecting, placing and making
visible the objects in the archive, I draft, edit and curate it just like an art-
work, so it is never a reflection of the reality but a representation and sub-
jective interpretation of it.

Reflection
If politics is the art of the possible (Bismarck 1867), then there is hope
within power because there is no exit from the realm of possibility
(Appadurai 2010); the possible cannot be exhausted. Politics is art precisely
because it reflects the imaginative. Resistance emerges as a reaction to poli-
tics, and the Belgrade protest testifies to this. Its slowness, duration and
persistence depicted a potential to change – one can observe the develop-
ments of revolutions and track the ability and disability of political acts in
relation to the imaginary of those states for which the upraise became a real
event developed precisely because of the possible. We imagine ourselves in
the future and only then are we prompted to act.
This research is precisely about a desire for the possible, but unable to
build, successful archive, even though I denote and use it as a practice, a
display, a method, a tool, a platform, a text, a map, an image, a resource, a
repository, a laboratory, a gallery, a museum, a classroom, a paradigm, a
stage, an activism, a story, a network, an object, an artwork, a product, a
diary, a technology, a narrative, a database, a memory, a connection, a rela-
tion, a bridge and a passage to the people, to the place, to the belonging, to
the past, to the present and to the future.
Since the protest, I created a community around the archive, a group of
optimists, activists and enthusiasts in order to revive Belgrade’s collective
spirit and hearten its consideration in the current governance wrapped up
in blame culture. What else can I propose to Serbia from the west apart
 Materializing Site 69
from building up its reputation, the value that could sadly invite a desire for
even stronger exploitation?
I offer an online package for capturing the past that could shift the offi-
cial narratives into only one possibility, among others. That archive is a map
of a failed revolution in Serbia under Milosevic, but it reveals the accom-
plishment of academics, artists and citizens buried under the war stories.

Notes
1 Zajedno political coalition was set up in 1996, and it consisted of Serbian
Movement for Change, Democratic Party, Citizens Alliance of Serbia, Serbian
Democratic Party and Democratic Centre.
2 Savic, S. in interview 2007.

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6 From Oblivion to Acceptance
Sadir Dancer Muthukannammal’s Presence
as a Challenge to Representations
A. P. Rajaram

Introduction
This chapter is developed out of an intense period of interviews with
Muthukannammal (89; Viralimalai, Tamil Nadu) one of the few surviving
Sadir dancers, who claims her past as a former devadasi. This forgotten
devadasi chooses to sidestep many issues of current social complexities but
speaks in detail about the problems that the community suffered after the
Anti-Devadasi Act and her Sadir training along with the devadasi commu-
nity. Sadir was a dance form practiced by members of the devadasi com-
munity who are dedicated to a local temple through a ritual, and the form
is a precursor of Bharatanatyam. Muthukannammal was dedicated to the
Viralimalai temple to practice and perform Sadir and to perform within and
outside the temple during the festivals, which lives only in her memories.
During the last few years of Independence and after, India started to build
its nation on both political and cultural fronts. There were so many laws
and reformations introduced, one among them was the Anti-Devadasi Act.
Because of this act, the entire community of devadasi in India went through
a cleansing and reformation, ceasing their community from serving in the
temple, dancing in the temple and in the festivals and taking up alternative
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-7
72 A. P. Rajaram
jobs such as farming. The survivors of the community and their artistic
knowledge were forced to alternative survival, and hence, their artistic
knowledge became an epitome of a performance genre; lots from the com-
munities were inspired and received help in developing this performative
dance form, but still lots of art form (cultural capital) was lost. It is believed
that only with the help of these surviving devadasis can the Sadir dance
form and other associated performance forms be preserved, or else these
forms will only survive in texts rather than as performances.
This chapter is constructed out of the conversation with Muthukannammal,
which discusses the dance and lifestyle of a devadasi before and after the
Anti-Devadasi Act. Muthukannammal acts as a source of the performance
activity held during the colonial period in the regime of the Pudukkottai
kings in Viralimalai, Tamil Nadu. This chapter tries to understand the jour-
ney of a devadasi through her changing times, with the performance aspect
of her life being cast into shadows of disapproval and disrespect, even as her
dance form is appropriated as the nation’s identity by the country.
Many of Muthukannammal’s references in our conversations, referred to
a connection between a section of their dance and a particular space within
or outside the temple complex. As the performative knowledge of many
devadasis was shared and inspired many of the other community dancers to
borrow their art form, they either adapted or reperformed the entire piece
in the name of Bharatanatyam. Here in this chapter, its conclusion would
highlight the representation of the Sadir dance form, and a specific item of
the locality, the Viralimalai Kuravanchi, was discussed as its appropriation
and inspiration of the form in which Muthukannammal could claim only
by her memories through the nostalgia of the performance repertoire.

Anything that is remotely associated with the performance can belong

in an archive. The archive can include material detailing the processes
of creation, of production, and of reception. Clearly, each of these
archival traces of performance warrants consideration in its own right.
(Reason 2003)

The term ‘devadasi’ means servant – of the God – the people who belong to
the devadasi community are those members who dedicate themselves to the
service of God through a sacred ritual ceremony. These community members
dedicate themselves to work and organize to take part in the daily day activ-
ities in the temple and perform other vital work in preparing and performing
the festival to their dedicated temple. The basic work of these community
members was to engage themselves with artistic practices of their own forms
such as singing, dancing or playing instruments. This dedication and pattern
of work was found to be common and widely practice in the southern part
of India in almost all of the Hindu temples. These practices continued for
ages until the Anti-Devadasi Act was passed in 1954, and slowly, the dedica-
tion of people to the temple was reduced and ceased around the 1980s. The
Anti-Devadasi Act1 of 1954, a legal act in independent India formally
 From Oblivion to Acceptance 73
terminated this dedication of members to the deities and the practice of the
artistic traditions of the community. While the complete abolition of dedica-
tion to temples happened over a gradual course of time, the existing mem-
bers were revived and reformed into a new community group and adopted
a new source of income. In Tamil Nadu, the devadasi community was
grouped under the ‘most backward class’ community, along with the com-
munity names Isai Velalar/Melakarargal (which literally means ‘one associ-
ated with the musical instruments’).
As the nation was being built, the members of the devadasi community
were altering themselves to accept and adapt to different means of survival,
such as farming and other possible modes; some managed to continue per-
forming their art form, but many were forced into prostitution. Some of the
families’ conditions changed after industrialization and commercialization
emerged in the country, as this benefited many small towns and villages
because these companies generated employment opportunities; this was a
prevalent situation in most parts of South India, especially in Tamil Nadu.
The devadasi system was understood with the help of many ethnogra-
phers and many dance scholars who have explored this system in South
India. Most of them focus on the cult, the role of the members as perform-
ers and their work situation among the community in respect to the temple,
as top take turns in serving the temple. Authors like Amrit Srinivasan,
Davesh Soneji, Saskia Kerserboom, Avanti Meduri and many others have
dealt extensively with the dance history of the devadasi community, locat-
ing the performers in “the position of a servant” or “the puppet of god”.
Very few scholars have focused on the performative genre, the training and
the repertoire of the devadasi dancers.
The devadasi tradition once had its roots strengthened in the society; the
community accepts the individuals after a sacred ceremony. The dedication to
the temple is done when the individual is a child by his or her family members.
The dedication was often done by the people of the devadasi community, but
other community members can also dedicate their children to the temple. The
dedication rituals involve people from different communities bringing their
children to the temple, especially the young girls who would be married to the
presiding deity of the temple they are dedicated to with the help of the head
priest. There is a long history of dedication of individuals to the deities. In
fact, there are references in literature about the different ways of getting them
married, depending upon whether they belonged to the upper or lower castes.
The members of the devadasi were from almost all other sections and com-
munities of the society and once they perform the ritual of Pottukatuthal2
(Srinivasan 1985), they get themselves affiliated with the respective temple,
along with their patrons. The priests played a key role in the ritualized formal-
ization of the devadasis’ affiliation to the specific temples with the support of
the king or the village heads, as well as the families. This ritual signified a
marriage between a voluntary individual and the presiding deity.
According to many ethnographers and dance scholars, the devadasi com-
munity members were known to have belonged to two categories, Periya
74 A. P. Rajaram
Melam (Srinivasan 1985)3 and Chinna Melam. The members who are tradi-
tionally associated with the musical instruments, such as drums, the Thavil,
Urmi Melam, Pambai and wind instruments like Nayanam, Thrutti and the
clarinet, are known to belong to Periya Melam. People who could sing and
dance belong to Chinna Melam. Even after the Anti-Devadasi Act and when
the devadasi practice cult was forced to end, very few families from the
devadasi communities engage themselves in artistic traditions. These people
have only their intangible culture as their cultural capital, and they claim it as
their only wealth, which they believe can never be claimed by anyone else.
Some of the members had to shift from practicing their traditional knowledge
of dance (some still claim as Sadir) due to the shift in economic dependency.
This chapter speaks about the performance, the body as an archive, reen-
acting the banned performances through the conversation between a Sadir
dancer, Muthukannammal, and a performance research scholar. This chapter
explains her experiences with the training given to the devadasis from the
devadasi community and her survival through all the legal rampages that she
had to go through in her life after the Anti-Devadasi Act, including trying to
maintain a balance as the performance practitioner as her identity and exter-
nal economical plunge forcing her to take up an alternative profession iden-
tity either legal or illegal. Muthukannammal explains how some of the Sadir
performances were altered to Bharatanatyam by some of the Bharatanatyam
exponents; her art form was learnt from her and her family members. Very
few Bharatanatyam dancers acknowledge her art form as their source, and
some completely ignore it, as they had made some alterations to her reper-
toire form, leaving her unable to claim her own intangible culture.

The Devadasi Cult in Viralimalai

Among all the other devadasi communities in Tamil Nadu, the devadasi
community from Viralimalai in Pudukkottai District claims that the train-
ing that the members received from their ancestors is different from the
other Sadir dance repertories. Muthukannammal is 89 years old and still
physically active, and she shares the memory of her life from her childhood
days, the time when she was given away to the temple and the hardships
that she went through in her life. Talking to her about the Sadir dance form
gives us an understanding of the knowledge of the performance repertoire
that she received and the practice of the art form after the ban by law to be
performed in different places with the help of the local wealthy people in
order to survive. The embodied knowledge of these performers was engraved
within their bodies because of their system of training and practice. This
knowledge cannot be explained without performing them to someone, so
the knowledge of the entire performance repertoire of this devadasi per-
former is enclosed within her body.
In order to receive this information and the first-hand knowledge which
she hasn’t shared with other researchers, I had to have continuous interviews
with Muthukannammal for three years. Initially, the information, I received
 From Oblivion to Acceptance 75
was the same as she shared with other local magazines and newspapers.
After a while, she understood the interest and started to speak about her life
as a forbidden dancer. Her acceptance of sharing the information helped me
to understand her as an individual who was part of the devadasi community,
her association with the temple and with the survival of the socio-political
policies from Anti-Devadasi Act to the latest ‘ThaiMan Meetpu thitam’4
from Tamil Nadu. The survival of such conditions along with her performa-
tive knowledge made her an archive of resources to the dying art form of
Sadir and other related dance forms starting from Bharatanatyam to a few
folk-dance forms. Hence, I believe that with the help of the arguments about
the body by André Lepecki (Lepecki 2010) that the body becomes an archive
with the will to imbibe the knowledge and reenact it later. Muthukannammal’s
memory about the performances could act as an archive of knowledge of
devadasi performances forms, as by quoting Carolyn Steedman’s argument,
as a common desire to use the archive as a metaphor for memory explained
by Mathew reason that (Reason 2003). As Muthukannammal is one of the
last survivors of the art form, and she can still perform the knowledge of
Sadir, her body has become the archive of knowledge of Sadir dance. Her
performative repertoire’s knowledge has been shared by some researchers
and performance scholars in the current past. Moreover, the Sadir dance
form went through changes when Rukmani Arundale and Balasaraswati cut
out the erotic elements to create the new form, Bharatanatyam. Because of
Anti-Devadasi Act, the Sadir dance couldn’t be performed in public, yet its
revised version was quickly accommodated and practiced by various people
in the country, but the devadasi could not even have a claim to their own art
form out in public. This is explained in the latter part of the chapter. Hence,
to understand more about Sadir, it took the help of a Bharathanatyam
dancer5 to understand the knowledge and its movement practices, the simi-
larities and its variances. It was tough to gather all the information shared by
her, so only a few ideas which are relevant to this chapter have been shared.
Some of her own words are translated from the language of Tamil to English.

Muthukannammal
Muthukannammal was born in Viralimalai, a small village situated in
Pudukkottai district, Tamil Nadu. Viralimalai as the term ‘Malai’ in it sug-
gests a hill. So, there is a small hill, and a temple is located on top of it. The
name of the village has different etymologies; one among them is the term
‘viraliar’, which means ‘dancers’ as mentioned in Sangam literature. The pos-
sibility of this place getting its name from the dancers is highly probable – the
hill where there were many dancers, which came to be known as Virali-malai,
Viralimalai. The main deity out here is Lord Murugan; this temple has been
mentioned in many songs from Sangam literature, one among them is
Tiruppugazh. This temple was taken care of by different kings, but when
king Vadi Lakkaiya Naicker acquired the temple and its allied properties, the
temple was renovated and built by their successors and the descendants of
76 A. P. Rajaram
the Marungapuriyar kingdom. In the eighteenth century, the temple was
under the control of the king of Pudukottai, Thondaiman. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, during the Karnataka War, Viralimalai and
Tiruchirapalli were military areas.6 The temple was then a renowned seat of
Sadir and now the Bharatanatyam dance form and boasted of a separate
dancer for each of the 32 Adavus (dance movements). Most of the inhabit-
ants of this village can trace their descent from the Isai Vellala (Melakarar)
community.7 This temple has a good reputation from the past and had many
patrons such as kings, zamindars, etc. The present-day condition is very dif-
ferent; the people who live here are those who moved in from different places
because of commercialization around this village. There are many multina-
tional companies, which function on the outskirts of Viralimalai as the geo-
graphical location supports the transfer of goods manufactured from there
because Viralimalai is situated between Trichy and Madurai (two developed
cities in Tamilnadu). People who live here belong to different castes and com-
munities. The devadasi community is dominant demographically and they
are the landowners, which after the reformation they are called by the name
the Isai Velalars, this community belongs to the most backward communities
in Indian community parameters. They have the political dominance as local
councillors, but economically, they are still weak. There are people from dif-
ferent communities who migrated for work and are economically well off. In
fact, many people from other places migrate here, and the locals immigrate
to nearby places for work. Lots of rituals and ceremonies are actively cele-
brated in Viralimalai, where the Isai Velalar community has a vital role to
play, as the locals still need their presence during the rituals and festivals,
even though they do not have a hold over the temple. The deity Subramaniyan
temple is now taken care of by the Hindu temple’s association. Hence after
the law, the Isai Velalar community members are not allowed to perform any
rituals and performances within this temple, because of this, the community
members had to travel to different locations for performing in festivals. Due
to this condition of the Isai Velalar community, very few survived with the
pittance earned by performance, while many others from the Isai Velalar
community were helpless and forced to take up alternative means of making
money ranging from working in the local companies to travelling to distant
places to earn through menial jobs. In recent times, the condition got better
because of factories and companies that have emerged as employment pro-
viders, which helped the most downtrodden Isai Velalar to survive and
become economically independent. As Muthukannammal belonged to the
chief natuvannar8 family, the survivor who can still perform in the commu-
nity, she was interviewed by lots of social magazines which speak about the
social life of people that will confirm the dark age of their community. So she
was warned by the younger generation not to speak anything about the dark
period of survival to the media or in front of cameras. However, today,
Muthukannammal, an independent woman who possesses the knowledge of
the performing traditions and belongs to the Isai Vellalar community, shared
her experiences and the problems of the art form.
 From Oblivion to Acceptance 77
The interview with Muthukannammal is shared here to help us under-
stand the rigour of the dance form and her role in the temple.

The Interview of Muthukannammal Acting as an Archive of Sadir

Once Muthukannammal was approached for the interview, she was glad to
share her experiences. Yet, the information I received was the same as that
she had shared with other magazines; it took some days for her to under-
stand the research purpose and to locate her knowledge from her memory,
which is between the performance knowledge and its practice. I have one
more advantage which made her comfortable as I have lived in that locality
for more than 30 years, which gave the familiarity and comfort in answer-
ing my questions. She initially, as always, explained her daily role as a ser-
vant serving the deity Subramaniya of the temple of Viralimalai. Next
comes her interview translated from Tamil by me:

She was serving in the Viralimalai, Subramaniya Swami temple for a

very long time. She has memory of her service to the temple from the
time of the Maharaja of Pudukottai, Marthanda Thondaimaan, and
after him, his son took the responsibility of supporting the temple and
the people associated with it and after him on the tradition came to
an end. The Maharaja took care of the Devadasi by giving them food
and payment for their service. Every Devadasi was paid with food
and money including the Periya Melam and Chinna Melam. All of
them were given land for farming by the Maharaja. During their time,
there were festivals throughout the twelve months. According to her,
the tradition of supporting the Devadasi by the Maharajas of
Pudukottai was very old. She drew from her memory from the time of
her father and claimed that she has seen two generations of the
Maharajas.
She claimed her dance art form was called Sadir from her childhood
and she was taught the art form as Sadir and only now people have
started to call it Bharatanatyam. She was dancing from the age of seven
and her father was Nattuvanar (the person who does the Nattuvangam,
which is basically teach the Sadir dance with the proper beat and move-
ments, the name came from the wooden flat plate which they hit it with
the stick to hold through the beats and dance accordingly). His name
was “Ramachanderar nattuvanar”. Her paternal grandmother was also
Nattuvanar, her grandmother’s younger sister was also a Nattuvanar,
and they all have danced Sadir and also did their service at the temple.
They were the teachers for the whole area or the whole village, who
taught Sadir to other Devadasi-s. This was from the time of both her
maternal and paternal great grandmothers, and then it was inherited by
her father. Her paternal grandmother was also a Nattuvanar who was
trained in Hindi, Telugu and Sanskrit and so they trained their students
dance along with these languages.
78 A. P. Rajaram
After giving a brief history she started recollecting the everyday routine of
her in associated with the temple in the past, Muthukannammal narrates it
in complete detail:

There were in total thirty-two people who provided service to god in the
temple; we used to get ready around eight o’clock in the morning. We
were supposed to reach the temple, grind the fresh rice into rice paste
with the grains that came from the Pudukkottai palace. There were
thirty- two plates, good bronze plates, which we would clean and upon
which we would write “OM SARAVANA BAVA” in an artistic manner
with the rice paste. The ritual ended here. With the “uuchi kaalam” (the
mid-day around twelve to one pm), the Devadasi-s returned to their
homes. Therefore, the routine compromised a shift of going in the morn-
ing and returning during the uuchi kaalam. In the evening the songs were
sung, around six o’clock, with players playing the “melam” (drums).9
Muthukannammal explains about the economic dependence of the
Devadasi to the temple by sharing her memory of her salary during
those days, which was Six “Anas”10 and the food they received by the
temple was a huge ball of rice. They were also given an “Appam” (edi-
ble item very similar to pancakes) made from the oil grinded from the
Pudukkottai jail during their murai (turns) and when they performed
during their murai, each of them were given two rupees as payment for
their service to god. Likewise, every Devadasi within the family was
paid and so they offered their service to the god as their duty. During
festivals such as Soora Samharam, Thai Poosam (tamil cyclic ritual fes-
tivals), those entire ten days will be filled with festivity. At that time of
the festival, the Utchavar11 was brought down to the mandapam (arena
for rest and performance) which is in the foothill and the Moolavar12
would be kept at the main temple itself. Once the deity was located
down the hill, every day in the morning the deity would be taken on a
procession in a palanquin, which was carried on the shoulders and cir-
cumambulated around the Viralimalai hill. During the night, there was
Sadir performance according to the murai followed in the mandapam.

Muthukannammal explains her training as the most enjoyable and happiest

days of her life because she was very excited to perform with her cousins and
to be taught by her father. There are two kinds of performances that hap-
pened during the olden days: one that was performed in the temple and the
other in the common area for the public and around the hill. She explains her
dance training done in the temple as her day-to-day schedule, which usually
started around seven in the morning with initially all of them having to prac-
tice the ‘Adavus’, which are 60 in number, and then the ‘Alaripu’, which was
practiced for an hour. Next are the Sathiswaram and then the Saptam and
later the Varnam. She added that the Varnam would take hours and hours to
finish because within the Varnam, there were about seven to eight
Theermaanams (dance patterns). Followed by that was the Saitheeyyam,
which took almost two to two-and-a-half hours. Muthukannammal still
 From Oblivion to Acceptance 79
remembers all the Theermaanams and the ‘jathi’, which she sang with pas-
sion. After all these things, there would be the practice of ‘Thillana’ for about
an hour. After the “Thillana; Muthukannammal speaks about the training of
the forms which are performed in the public spaces which is the interesting
‘Modiurru’”, a couple dances a drama commonly called the snake dance. A
couple danced at a very slow pace, with many Adavus involved using the legs.
Other than the dance forms performed, there were some acrobatic perfor-
mances performed by the male members of the community, and
Muthukannammal further elucidates the acrobatic performance. One among
them is called ‘Karnam’ (meaning somersault). Detailing it, she recounts that
the performance contained two pillar-like structures in either wood or stone
in a short distance, and both pillars were strongly planted in the ground. A
strongly twisted rope was tied to both pillars, leaving some space in between
at the middle of the rope where the performer would be tied around his waist
firmly. Once the person was ready, he would be made to stand on the ‘Ural’,
a stone device that was in the shape of two inverted cones meeting on their
tips. This device was used for grinding grains and other stuff as a common
household object. The performer, once balanced on the Ural, would rock the
Ural with his legs but balance his upper body even while he rolled it back and
forth with an increasing speed. After attaining a particular speed, he would
be pushed through the head towards the ground so that he would start doing
the somersault with the help of the rope tied to his waist at an outrageous
speed. This was wonderful acrobatic entertainment during the festival.

Claim of Space through Performance

One of the reasons I claim Muthukannammal as a source/archive while inter-
viewing her about the performance elements is because she constantly brings
in the context of the performance spaces of the locality. This was explained
while I was questioning her about the performances in detail. When I asked
her about the meaning of ‘Adavu’, how one performs it, her response was
“it’s that thing which we perform in that particular space”, “the place near
the temple’s chariot location, etc”. I was intrigued by this referential locus of
a performance element to a geographical location. This kind of referencing of
a performance element could be done because long ago those spaces were
believed to be controlled/owned through the autonomy of dance perfor-
mance. After the Anti-Devadasi Act, these places no longer belonged to them,
as they are no longer allowed to perform at those places or in the temple. The
community members constantly feel alienated from the performance space
instead of having their whole right to the dance performance.
The space and performance inter-relate and connect each other within this
context in two ways. The devadasi performance was shaped according to the
space where it was performed and its physical morphology. Devadasi dance
was intended for the temple and other festival celebratory spaces alterna-
tively; the performance itself got its shape from the space, giving it a unique
identity and memory in this case study. Muthukannammal, when asked what
is ‘Varnam’, instead responded about the performance and the performative
80 A. P. Rajaram
structure. She explained, “[I]t is that we dance from the temple chariot park-
ing space to the village entry check post”; this answer helped me understand
that there was a strong affinity between the performer, performance and per-
formative space. Muthukannammal’s reference to spaces might have been
because once those spaces were claimed through the performance and later
after the Anti-Devadasi Act, not only the claim of the performance genre but
also the performed space were no longer left to the devadasi people. And so
because of the fact that the space can no longer be claimed by the devadasi,
after the banning of Muthukannammal ’s performance, it is only with mem-
ory that the space and the performance were claimed by her.
The previous section explained the performance genre and the geospatial
affinity towards the performance created by the devadasi through years and
years of practice in and around the temple; those were in practice during the
olden days. The survivors among those practitioners have a tragic life of
their own. Once the Indian government passed the bill into an act, the abol-
ishment of the system took a long time. It took from 1954 to 1988 to
announce that the dedication system had completely stopped. Then, the
government was least interested in the people of the community other than
providing them with a pension and farmlands. There was some farmland
offering made during the ’60s and ’70s to them by the government accord-
ing to Muthukannammal who narrates:

The government stopped us from dancing in the temple and from our
services to the god. My father was the chief Nattuvannar and he was
given land but we were asked to pay some amount for it and the time
limit was given for about twenty years, I think…there were lands allot-
ted to us also but for women they were free. My father after being the
chief Nattuvannar for about thirty years didn’t know what to do so we
sold them and paid the debts. Now our time is not so good, my family
lost some male members recently, it is hard for me to survive.

The Question of the Representation of the Art Form

The last section of this chapter explains the role of the ethnographer and the
ethnographic material acting as the representation of the art form. The ques-
tion here is that, once the documentation of the performance or the artist is
completed, what happens to the material or the performative knowledge?
Who has the claim of that tangible performative knowledge? Does the
researcher hold the ownership or the artist? This problem of the claim over
the performative tradition is common, especially in dance. In traditional
ways, when a dance form was learnt in the form of guru-shishya Parampara,
a condition in learning the art form was followed regularly. It was always a
regular practice that the shishya acknowledges the guru while he/she per-
forms, but what does the nature of the documented material hold in terms of
research material. In an earlier section of this chapter, the performer explained
the ownership of space through performance; hence, the researcher claims
ownership over the material. The researcher suggests that the material
 From Oblivion to Acceptance 81
acquired through the interviews or documentation can reflect only one sec-
tion of the artistic forms even though that dance form/dancer has been inter-
viewed repeatedly. It was observed that even though the Sadir dance form
was researched by many dance scholars, Sadir’s artistic knowledge does not
contradict or claim to be the predecessor of Bharatha Natyam. Saskia
Keserboom, in her book Nityasumangali, explains that the Sadir dancers are
represented as the temple dancers of the colonial past; now they are just
forgotten performers in the state. The question now goes further as
Muthukannammal, one of the last Sadir dancers, and her intangible knowl-
edge were shared with contemporary Bharathanatyam dancers and dance
researchers, but where does her artistic knowledge stand in the artistic world,
and does she have the claim of her art form if she is not acknowledged.
There are few dancer/researcher scholars such as Shri Swarnamalya
Ganesh, a Bharathanatyam exponent and Tamil actress, an active dancer
who regularly conducts workshops and classes with Muthukannammal.
She has now changed her dance school repertoire’s name to Sadir dance
repertoire and acknowledges Muthukannammal’s artistic form. As the dis-
cussion is about the claim of the dance form, what if the Sadir dance item is
performed by Bharatha Natyam exponents? Who has the claim and repre-
sentation of the dance form? One of the pioneer dance scholars Dr Padma
Subramanyam has also done research on one of the Sadir dance pieces: the
Viralimalai Kuravanji. Kuravanji is a term that is a mixture of two words,
Kurava and Vanji, Kurava are the tribal community members who have the
lives of a nomad and gypsy culture in Tamil Nadu. There are many varieties
of Kuravanji, such as Kutrala Kuravanji and Kurinjimalai Kuravanji. The
mythology about the deity Subramanya is that he has two wives, and one of
the wives is from the Kuravar community. Hence there is a dance piece
among the Kuravanji in relation to the deity in the devadasi performance
repertoire. Dr Padma Subramanyam learnt the Viralimalai Kuravanji form
from Muthukannammal’s father, and she continued her research with the
help and support of the Tamil Nadu government by receiving funds in 2005.
Later, she worked on the form and altered the Viralimalai Kuravanji style
learnt from Muthukannammal’s father and then presented it in a ticketed
stage show in 2014.
Viralimalai Kuravanji, the same dance form, enters the archive as per-
formed by Muthukannammal and Dr Padma Subramanyam, yet there are
alterations in the dance form. But now who has the claim to the Kuravanji
dance form? When this artistic piece is performed on stage in different loca-
tions, does the real Sadir dancer ever have a claim on the form as she holds
the status of an archive? Also, when famous and well-known dance research-
ers perform the dance piece, where does the claim fall? This is where
Muthukannammal’s presence as a Sadir dancer who acts as a representa-
tion of the dance form questions whether she can claim the art form as her
own. So, hence, the query on the representation of the art form from the
past from the Sadir dancer is always threatened by her presence, as she still
has the claim of the artistic form as coming from the devadasi community
and being an iconic representation/archive of the Sadir dance form.
82 A. P. Rajaram
Notes
1 Anti-Devadasi Act is an act which is called the Madras Devadasi (Prevention of
Dedication) Act, which is also termed the Tamil Nadu Devadasi (Prevention of
Dedication) Act or the Madras Devadasi Act. This law was a result of a series of
acts that were passed in order to stop this devadasi tradition right from the Anti-
Nautch Campaign by the colonial British in 1888. These agitations continued,
and Dr Muthulakshmi Reddi, an advocate belonging to the same community,
proposed a bill to the Madras Legislative Council in 1930 in order to pass an act
to stop this dedication of women to the temples. This bill was passed as a law
that was enacted on 9 October 1947, just after India became independent from
British rule. The law was passed during the Madras Presidency, which made it
illegal to dedicate girls to Hindu temples and ended the performance of the Sadir
within or outside of the temple premises. This bill was mainly introduced to stop
the devadasi women from entering into prostitution, which was very prevalent
at the end of colonial rule and became worse after the law during the postcolo-
nial times in Tamil Nadu.
2 Davesh Soneji in his book Unfinished Gestures:Devadasis, Memory, and
Modernity in South India (Chapter 4) explains the term ‘Pottukattuthal’ as the
upper caste way of getting married to the deity as Muthukkanammal was mar-
ried to the deity.
3 Amrit Srinivasan writes in her article about devadasi tradition where she
explains the two huge parallel traditions of Periya Melam and Chinna Melam in
an elaborate manner and their service/work to the deity and the society.
4 Thaiman meetpu thittam is a law which came into effect in Tamil Nadu in 2013,
which explains that the land which was given to devadasi families after the Anti-
Devadasi Act was reported to have been plundered by the real estate people. In
order to save them from this plundering, the government came up with the law
stating that the land, which had the name of the devadasi in the past 36 years,
will now belong to the Tamil Nadu government; people who own the land now
can only use it till they die and cannot sell it.
5 Shrinkhala Sahai, eminent scholar researcher pursuing her PhD in theatre and
performance studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi. She has been a practitioner of Bharathanatyam from the age of 5.
She was recently taught by Muthukanammal and discussed the movement pat-
tern and the body dynamics of the dance pattern with the Sadir dancer.
6 From the website http://murugan.org/temples/viralima.htm accessed on
25/07/2013 on 2:03 pm.
7 From the website http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/1202435 accessed on
25/07/2013 on 1:15 pm.
8 The senior teacher/guru who teaches Sadir dance by creating the beat with a
small stick struck onto a flat wooden board called nattuvangam and the person
who teaches using them was assigned as nattuvanar irrespective of gender.
9 Interviewed and transcribed by me on 30/12/2013: Viralimalai.
10 An Anna (Hindustani ānā) was a currency unit formerly used in India, equal to
1/16 rupee. It was subdivided into 4 paisa or 12 pies (thus there were 64 paisa
in a rupee and 192 pies). The term belonged to the Muslim monetary system.
The ānā is not commonly used since India decimalized its currency in 1957.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_anna.
11 Utchavar means the statue of the deity, which will be used for taking it out of
the sanctum and will be used for circumambulation of the space.
12 Moolavar is the main deity, which is kept at the temple undisturbed for worship
at the sanctum sanctorum.
7 Archiving for New Emerging
Disciplines
Samik Bandyopadhyay

We started archiving for theatre in the 1980s. We set up a small organiza-

tion in 1981 in Calcutta. As far as we were concerned, the disciplines of
performance studies or culture studies hadn’t grown into disciplines in
India yet. We had a basic interest in the dance and musical forms too but we
focused on theatre. But for us, right at the beginning of archiving, we real-
ized for our work the ideas that had been vaguely there; they were getting
into place. As we started working, exploring and trying to get hold of as
much information as we could gather about theatre that is lost, that is no
longer there, other frameworks and other forms had already evolved.
So we were trying to explore the roots of the theatre that was around us,
and in which we were engaged at the time. We discovered that divisions
between music, dance and theatre, and even different cultural practices,
were unreal and artificial. It was something there at the back of the mind.
But the moment we tried to handle materials that we were trying to bring
back, this became a reality. These divisions did not work at all.
And we could easily get back through whatever findings we were making
to a point where it was a seamless continuity of all these practices and one
single cultural experience. We also realized quite early that by working with
the division which had been very firmly entrenched into our mindset and
thinking patterns through the colonial system in our country, we were miss-
ing out on a lot of the possibilities that a living creative theatre held within
itself. In a sense, we realized while we were studying Bengali theatre, soon
we would find the same thing in other theatres in other languages in our
country. Also, it was at a point in time when theatre was really popular in
the cities or in the small towns where theatre developed and grew in the
nineteenth century. The cities had come up for the first time. It was a new
situation where new cultural practices were emerging, and theatre was com-
ing to hold centre stage. We realize that popularity had somehow eluded
this new theatre. There were these great big actors on the scene.
But even at the archival level, we try to find out how their place was sold.
How many people came to watch plays? How many shows would a par-
ticular play have? When we went to these details, we discovered that this
theatre, the urban theatre in Bombay or in Calcutta, the first two major
cities that emerged, along with Madras, was not really a popular
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-8
84 Samik Bandyopadhyay
phenomenon. The myth of the popular theatre that has been created is kind
of a semi-commercial proposition –the myths about the great actors, a lot
of writing about them, their pictures being circulated and so on. But once
we tried to find out how many shows there would be and how many tickets
were sold, we discovered another story in which it was not popular. And
one of the factors, through our archival exploration, we came to realize was
that [there was a] split between singing, music, the dancing body, the chore-
ographic movement; once these were thrown out of the theatre, theatre
became more [of a] disembodied voice. Big straddling figures on stage,
speaking in great voices – it didn’t reach the people. It didn’t touch the
people; it didn’t convey the meanings. So it was a kind of collapse of com-
munication or collapse of sharing. And all this, we could put into a kind of
logic through these findings which we started making only in the 1980s.
Otherwise, it would be a mythical kind of history where these great big
actors and anecdotes about them, etc., all collapsed. And we discovered
very few plays that had a lot of music in them.
In Bombay, which had a different kind of history, where, thanks to what
we call the Anglo-Maratha Wars in the 1890s, the chieftains had found a
sort of settlement in which they didn’t have to fight the rival Maratha
Rajahs or the British, there was peace; there was a sense of security; there
was also a question of local cultures and local identities. The Raja of Sangli,
the Peshwa of Pune and the Rajas of these different feudal territories were
looking for identity, a kind of independent assertion for themselves. This
also coincided with the fall of the last Mughals.
The masters of Indian classical music were thrown out of their secure safe
spaces. They were scattered, and they came to be patronized by the rajas of
Western India. A move away from Northern India. A different movement of
Indian classical music. Music and theatre came together at that point in a
different historical manner in a different historical process – the beginning
of the Sangeet Natak. And the Sangeet Natak challenged a different kind of
theatre trajectory. The trajectory of the classes which established an indus-
try of travelling theatre. A whole industry, a different system altogether of
the travelling theatre. Which began in continuity evolving trajectories out of
the Sangeet Natak line. So solidly entrenched in music and travelling music
together.
With some of the greatest new figures in the Indian classical music scene
acting, the convention of a wonderful singer-actor developed. Hiro bhai
Hirabai was singing and acting. Ram Marathe, Bhimsen Joshi, all of them.
Great composers appeared in the new style that was evolving in Northern
Indian music. So, different kinds of combinations, sharing and exchanges
between theatre and music [had been going on] which had been artificially
separated in the colonial knowledge system. It was creating a different kind
of performance, a much richer performance, a much more enduring
performance.
So, these histories that have been covered over in colonial structure of
historicizing and colonial historiography were cracked open. And only with
 Archiving for New Emerging Disciplines 85
our access to these details could we find our way into other histories and
build up another possibility for theatre where they need the urgency of
bringing in music and dance folk practices in a larger performance space
rather than taking false pride in the autonomy of theatre or dance or music.
Side by side, the other thing we started realizing after we had exhausted in
a way the very little material that we had – the material scattered over in
print, in manuscript – we could bring them into the archive space. Once we
exhausted this, there was a whole new space for oral histories. Interviewing
practitioners, spectators, auditors and creating a methodology – how to do
this? How to handle this and also guard ourselves against the interview
practices that had been part of the anthropological work in India started by
the great colonial anthropologists? It was a great deal of work on one level,
but their interview methods always had this question of dominance and
dealing with people who were supposed to not know, not understand and
therefore the things have to be teased out of them so to use a kind of a
domineering interview method. So, this had to be reworked, restructured,
rediscovered on our own terms. There were no rules; there was no given
methodology available to us at that point in time. Bringing all these prac-
tices together, matching one with the other, we had to create a kind of a
community between the interviewee and the interviewer so that we could
share rather than the master asking questions; rather than the investigative/
interrogating method, there was more of a sharing method, creating a con-
versational area, a conversational space where I shared things. I brought my
doubts, my questions. I brought my uncertainties and shared them with the
person from whom I was trying to gather information. Different kinds of
communities had to be created rather than the question-answer structure.
Variations of these had to be created considering the people with whom
they would relate to.
Obviously, the master would have the right, would have the authority to
speak down to me. Because I don’t know anything. He knows so much. So
this balancing act – how do I question it? Only reverentially? Struck by the
awe? Or also be engaged in a way that is not detrimental. So, create these
psychologically charged lived spaces. It was a very, very difficult operation.
And I think we have come to a stage where a lot of these experiences,
sceptical, are becoming experiences, rather than being worked out as sys-
tems of methods; these are in play. And a lot of exchanging and sharing at
the level could happen, then maybe we could create an oral history, rich
enough, meaningful enough, honest and objective enough than what we
have today. And for this I think, more than the structured or very institu-
tionalized practices of archiving that are around us, we have to improvise
other ways and go deeper down into this process. Because as far as written
and documented material is available, a lot of that, at least 70 percent of it
is gathered. But it is time now to get into memory and bring it out as data.
I think that is the more urgent area at the moment. And I think some of
these thoughts and experiences that I share and some perspectives will help
us to proceed. And we have Shubha who has a solid body of work, working
86 Samik Bandyopadhyay
in this sphere – and we have more to share and even offer answers to some
of these questions.

Q&A

Q: The question that I have been thinking about is why is it that the urban
theatre, which is modelled on European lines, didn’t work, but if you
were to bring say Jatra or other types of folk-influenced theatre into the
urban space which is always getting influenced by the latest forms of
western entertainment, will it be a kind of parallel to Agantuk? Do we
look at our own theatres not as part of a lived experience but as some-
thing that is already distant from us? I wonder if there is a problem of
that sort, or am I missing out and maybe there are other things?
(SB): Actually, historically in our country, in the seventies, there was a phase
when Sangeet Natak Akademi declared a policy where the state should
take an initiative on relinking and reconnecting the lost folk traditions
and urban experimental theatre. And the easy way they chose was to
offer fellowship to theatre directors who would be prepared to work
with, this was the term, “to work with a traditional or a folk form”. It
was a situation where theatre was, anyway the experimental urban the-
atre, was badly funded, badly financed. So it was a matter of survival
for these young theatre directors at that point of time. So here was the
easy money available if they could work with a traditional or folk form.
So not from their own initiative, not from their own urgency, not from
their feeling for any such form or any such experience at all. It was a
kind of a compulsion. For more than ten years, this experiment contin-
ued. Funds, festivals, exposure everything…so what was happening?…
An urban theatre director chooses a form out of nowhere, and decides
to go over to the place and do some investigative archiving and with
whatever little materials, substantial materials that he has gathered, he
puts it into his urban theatre and produces something. Which looks
different, which looks exotic.…
These are implants, I would say, of some folk music. Nothing more
than that. [They] never become an organic part of his practice, of his
experiment. Nothing more than that. You can see the different layers.
And this became a model, dangerously. The project was dropped off
after ten years but this became a model. For people going into this strange
place, picking up something, even with all due respect, at the end of the
day, if you look objectively at Habib Tanveer’s work, it amounts to that.
After the first three or four productions, where at that point Habib was
at least telling us. In an interview, he told me that, I am just an outside
intervention. He knew what his role was at that point of time. But then
he decided to make it his theatre. And they nurtured people as just play-
things in their hands. And their own creativity was stifled in the process.
So even the best of these experiments, these so-called experiments,
interactive re-creativity didn’t lead anywhere. And that’s where the
 Archiving for New Emerging Disciplines 87
importance of serious archive through learning, recording, document-
ing, making it reach a repository is. And then going into that space and
sharing that experience with them, rather than coming into the scene as
an outsider and picking up select things.
A lot of the work of the Eugenio Barbas of the world has been in the
same direction. An extremely exploitative, uncreative eroticization. The
dominant culture and the backward culture – that politics is always in
play at these effects. And there is the need of solid serious archiving,
rather than this kind of cursory gameplay.
Q: Can I just ask one backup question to this? If there is time. … I was also
thinking that there is a question of creating an audience who knows the
code, the codes that are going to be shared across community. … I think
one of the problems that we have at school level, our way of let’s say
Indian literature or culture is taught is through a list of names or texts
and its context. Why was this text written in that time? Those things
are not discussed. Or the organic, let’s not go into organic, but the
connection between the text and how to interpret them, we did within
the quotation marks, if we did that at all. So I think there is that barrier
that needs to be…
(SB): There is a serious lack of history. It is divested of history and turned
into individual stories. That has been our reading of performances in
our country, unfortunately.
Q: I want to ask you about the cultural dimension of the practice of archiv-
ing. I wonder if there is a possibility of sporting some differences in the
practice of archiving, because we have pluralities of culture because we
have different kinds of institutionalization of theatre. And what are
those differences? Historically speaking.
(SB): I think these should come into later discussion. Because these are the
major things entering into a different subject. Of course, we will discuss
this.
Q: I think my question may also come later in the conference. The idea of
how does a practitioner use an archive. In perhaps a stereotypical way,
your practitioner is not your researcher. You know, it's not the idea of
walking into a room and doing a research before walking out. This is not
how it usually happens, though it should. So how does one, a practitioner
of any sort [use an archive]? Even when the lines of playwright, actor,
director, are blurring now, so how does the archive become useful and
what form does this archive take? Is it a library? Is it an internet archive?
And for someone who works with forms and movement on stage, how
interesting is a written archive? Maybe some thoughts on that?
Q: I have a specific question to the oral history part of the talk. I was read-
ing about the colonial practice of oral history archive, and the…the
idea of authenticity, the idea of credibility of a testimony; they become
paramount in a colonial practice. Which when we say accessing the
memories of people through a space of interview which is more of a
sharing than the master narrative. And I was wondering, memory by
88 Samik Bandyopadhyay
virtue is recreated every time it is retold. Which is very much an inher-
ent part of story-telling in our country because of the plurality of cul-
ture. So in what ways do you encounter this issue of authenticity of
testimony? Does it play any role at all?
(SB): So when you talk about authenticity, there is also a point that you are
hinting at which is very, very real, which is memory changes so-called
reality…goes on changing, evolving out of that. That is that. So when
we are bringing several memories, the plurality of memories also comes
into play. There is a scholar, a researcher, who studies this understands
this and is born into this experience, not just as an outside investigator.
The point that I am making is to get into a community, become part of
the community and then share it. Rather than the question-answer
structure, a strict question-answer structure…then there is scope. There
is an opportunity to compare testimonies. Then try to reach a kind of a
commonality. Be more sceptical, objective, play one against the other.
Maybe both are part of the reality in a way. So all these things come
into play only when there is an engagement with this oral historiogra-
phy and writing that history down eventually.
Q: If I could follow on that. … I remember interacting with the British Oral
History Society, and they have these forms that you get your interviewees
to fill and sign up, and I was in a session with one of the oral historians
who was sharing her experience. She said, “You might want to do it after
the interview so that they don’t feel intimidated. Oh, I am going to be
held accountable”. So this idea of manipulation which is very much a
colonial practice which now we are employing to [our] own people, but
I am wondering how we do it here. What are the logistics of oral
historiography?
(SB): That’s what I am saying – these have to be creative; we have to impro-
vise. Such conferences will lead us to that. We really haven’t reached
that point.
Q: But we do acknowledge that it needs to be different than that…
(SB): Yes, it needs to be different.
Q: Thank you, that was really enlightening. I come from a field of visual
arts. And I wanted to ask you that there has been a way, especially since
independence in India, kind of institutes that started to stand for nation-
state and certain kind of classicalization of certain traditions becoming
ossified that bodies themselves, and traditions and performativity itself
came to be regarded as being a repository of being an archive. So say
when you have a national craft museum, you don’t only have the craft
objects but you also bring those bodies that make them and have them
try to perform the making of those objects in order to show something
of a long eternal tradition that has been carrying over that is practically
embodied and then performed in front of you to show this long, long
tradition. And likewise, say, for instance, classical traditions and all of
these have come to stand for…have been practically carriers of knowl-
edge and archive. So at what point did this exteriorization of archive
 Archiving for New Emerging Disciplines 89
occur in theatre where this embodiment was not enough and it has to
be manifested through documents. Was there a point in this discipline
that makes this separation necessary or was it practically going hand in
hand since late nineteenth early twentieth centuries?
(SB): It was going hand in hand but not with any critical awareness of the
differences or the bridging…not much. So even now say these recon-
structions, I would say of “folk fairs”, fairs are created. Not the actual
fairs. Fairs are created; they are timed, and they become tourist hubs.
People are encouraged to buy tickets and go, and stay for a particular
constructed fair. All this is creating a different kind of an economy alto-
gether where the archive part of it, research part of it, understanding
part of it is waived. And then it becomes a kind of constructed commer-
cial performance. And so many happening over the country now.
Q: And it also comes with, for lack of a better word, a hyperbole that perfor-
mances must not be archived. So I was just wondering, it is not to be
anti-archive but basically to reinforce the fact that the body is the archive.
So it’s not really going against the archive but as you said, the concentra-
tion of the archive is embodiment and the exteriorized archive is suspect.
(SB): But these reconstructions go into another area.
Q (AP): So maybe it’s not about institutionalization of archive, but for
instance, in the early twentieth century in Marathi, there were masters
who were trained actors, company actors called “masters”…so all these
masters in the twentieth century took materials of what was happening
in the past, and it was also through the process of training actors, they
brought the archive. So it is only about archiving per se, or is it about
bringing non-formal, non-institutional processes within the creation of
performance itself? So how did it happen in the twentieth century?
(SB): I think the number of layers that come into play, as you suggest, where
a creative tradition continues with breaks and cleavages and fissures,
but still it continues. So it carries on the tradition. Say like the great
masters teaching their craft, that continues. So that also can, to a cer-
tain extent, be documented from the practice. Something that is very
important and something that has happened with some scholars, who
have developed a skill of describing a performance in greater detail.
Finding a language, finding a way of recording, writing it out. That
doesn’t give you the whole story or the whole piece. But part of it is
then archived even from a living practice. So that is one way of dealing
with it when it lives and continues. When it doesn’t or when it is in the
state of precariousness, then what happens? And then there are pres-
sures of a kind of a forced archiving where somebody from outside
gives it a certain structure and tries to put it within that and manage it,
control it, define it in a manner. Which has happened. And even the
other thrust that is happening, which is this kind of an interventionist,
reconstructionist archiving. There is a politics, Shubha and I were dis-
cussing it yesterday, who crave for seeking recognition for a classical
form. Not even taking stock of the fact that no Indian language, bhasha
90 Samik Bandyopadhyay
in India has a term for the classical. No bhasha in India has a term for
that. Whether it’s “Margi”, Dhrupadi or something else. These do not
convey the meaning of the classical in a western or European sense. I
don’t know why we need it. But there are more funds and there is a
different kind of politics in it. And an archive becomes a tool in that.
SHUBHA CHAUDHURI: So just one thing on the craft museum. It is coming
from a very different space. It’s coming from the museum world. So
there is community and museums and such. And looking at process has
been as important as the product. I think there is this whole emphasis
within the object world about looking at process. So I think that’s
where it is coming from. So when we say we want to see craft being
made or whatever because otherwise you look at it as a product com-
pletely divorced from the community it came. So I think it’s coming
from there, rather than the body.
Q: I just had a question about what’s to change in the institutionalized
practice of archiving into this kind of oral history? So what do we do
with the other end where everything is converted to a document, or
converted to video? So I am speaking about very personal experience of
working in theatre where we document everything and you don’t know
what to do with it. You have videos, transcriptions, documents and
sometimes have to think till what end? So I am just wondering if we
have to think of new ways of restoration and dissemination that don’t
kind of privilege the document, or is there some other way? I don’t
know if there is. Is there some way of storage that isn’t so text-centric,
so visual-centric? I don’t know what that is but that’s also a direction
to think.Benil Biswas: Thank you sir, for the brilliant introduction. It is
related to the earlier comment that you made about bhasha. I was
thinking that the moment of the archive, the archival impulse, if we try
and take it back to colonial thinking, of creation of these disciplines
you talked about, Anthropological Survey of India, Archeological
Survey of India…but was it then before colonialism we did not have
any kind of archival thinking? Or was there some sort of archival
impulse in a bhasha tradition? Do we have that kind of thinking?
(SB): I think there was a tradition. For example in Manipur, you have piles
and piles of pothis (manuscripts) and N. Khelchandra Singh has done
remarkable work in sorting them out, cataloguing them, annotating
them, massive collection of books. And the pothis are often elaborately
illustrated. And they are illustrated directly from the bodily movements,
from manual practices, pictures drawn immediately by the practition-
ers or the Gurus, in the pothis. So there was this tradition. And there
was even a kind of historiography. Using these pothis as pothis as
immediate documentations recorded to leave it to posterity, to share it
with the larger community beyond the geographical territorial borders
of confinement of the practice. So that attitude was there. Otherwise,
the pothis wouldn’t have been written at all and illustrated at all. So
that practice was there.
 Archiving for New Emerging Disciplines 91
Q: I was going back to the point where you mentioned video, and the idea
that someone sees a performance, and you walk away from it and sup-
pose there isn’t a documentation of it, and that the archive lives on in a
particular way as opposed to say a recording someone else sees of a
famous recording, so what’s important to me is the idea of video docu-
ment inherently a lossy video. There is already loss inherent in how it’s
recorded, the way it’s staged. It has a completely different understanding
for those who see it later as opposed to those who experienced it. And I
think that’s one of the ways in body as archive and embodying it.…
(SB): I would say one bit ahead on the loss from the recording itself but still,
given that, something is better than nothing. Going by that logic. Just
that logic. Very pragmatic. Something should remain. And at that level,
there should also be a development, we can do that, often expertise of
documenting, somebody who documents dance, shoots videos of dance
or theatre or music has to create a kind of a craft of doing that, a more
specialist expert craft. For example, in 1989, my friend Girish Karnad
was chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi. And I was also a member
of the committee. And we did a massive festival for the centenary of
Nehru where 25 major theatre productions of post-independent India
were chosen. And in cases where original directors were still around
and active, they were asked to restage that production. Knowing full
well that it won’t be that production but still something of that would
remain. In cases where the directors were not around, still tried to do
the production in the old manner. So an attempt was done. It was part
of the same project to shoot them at venue. The rest worked. Within its
limitation, granted. But when it came to the video recording, video
shooting, what they did – they chose Kamani auditorium, and at the
tenth row, right at the centre, they put the camera and they shot. You
can’t imagine what a drab, dull and pointless exercise it was. All of
them. So even that expertise, that someone uses the camera, locates
them, somebody who has seen the performance before, or even stay for
the rehearsal in this particular case, and know where to emphasize and
how to bring it in, what can get lost…nobody even thought of that. So
this whole exercise, one end of it, is completely unusable.
Q: Just a small reference, sorry I am bringing a rock and roll reference,
through different friends, I have always heard this story, that Velvet
underground did this show in the sixties, their very first show, and
everyone who was in the audience came out and formed a band, or
became musicians. And very famous musicians came out of that first
show audience. So this is just a story that I heard, and I was trying to
find a documentation – nothing is found. I just heard it in different
references in strange spaces. It’s just that kind of documentation is
valid. That’s an archive for me.

Thank you, Samik Da.

Part II

Dramaturgical Shaping and

Re-shaping
8 The Dramaturgy of the Archive
An Interview
Freddie Rokem

(SHARMISTHA SAHA): Freddie, in this conference on performance-making

and the archive, we are looking at how transformations happen as one
works with the archive in creating performances. But you have written
in “Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in
Contemporary Theatre” that as we look at the archive, we are also
looking at the circulation of the representation of representations. So, it
would be wonderful if you could elaborate on that through your work
as a dramaturg and also as a theatre scholar.
(FREDDIE ROKEM): First of all, I want to thank you for this opportunity to
participate in a discussion where I will not be present (at the conference
itself), and I want to begin by suggesting that there are many different
kinds of archives and that each archive in some way reflects the materi-
als which are documented in this particular archive. An archive of
births, marriages and deaths in a certain community will no doubt in
some way reflect the formality of such events, designated by a certain
date. And it will no doubt be a very different archive from the docu-
mentation of a family through photo albums or even the objects they
own. Ideally, a historian works with several archives, documenting dif-
ferent aspects of human culture.

The first issue I want to raise is at which point and how the search for doc-
umentary materials in an archive acquires a performative dimension when
we begin applying some kind of dramaturgical tools for understanding and
interpreting these materials. A performance archive should at least ideally
enable us to re-create, re-perform and re-archive a certain performance,
making it look and sound like itself, creating a continuity, or it should be
documented in such a way that we can imagine what it looked or sounded
like in the past. Like watching a Shakespeare performance at the Globe
Theatre in London, believing in some sense that this is what it actually
looked like when this play was first performed. For me, however, the inter-
esting question is what a production of Waiting for Godot would be like at
the Globe, creating a confrontation between performance cultures and aes-
thetic practices.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-10
96 Freddie Rokem
The challenge of the archive is primarily not to reconstruct past perfor-
mances but to think about it as a resource for further performances. I think
the distinctions that have been made, for instance by Diana Taylor, between
the archive and the repertoire have somehow missed the point because the
archive originally reflects a form of management and its hierarchies. Today,
from the performance perspective, the archive has to be looked at in the
same open fashion as the concept of performance itself. In a way, the archive
has to reflect what it is about. So, a performance archive will look very
different from a church archive, or any other institutional archive in a more
sort of governmental sense. And it is this bridge between the live body of
human beings which I believe is part of the archive of what the actor knows.
Photographs of the actor, even presentation of the actor on the stage as a
performer, are a part of the larger concept of the performance archive. So,
at this point, I am really in favour of opening as many divisions within this
concept of archive instead of creating borders between objects and human
beings. And with regard to dichotomy between archive and repertoire, I
think they should work as de Saussure’s distinction between langue and
parole, between the resources of expression provided by a certain language,
supposedly kept in the archive, and the specific choices made in order to
express something, to make a statement, representing the repertoire.
So one of the things that I have been doing now here in India is to watch
Kudiyattam theatre in Kerala. What fascinates me in Kudiyattam perfor-
mances is who gives a cue for the drummers. Who gives the cue to whom?
Actors to the drummers or the drummers to the actors? And it seems that it
is a dialogical process. It’s not a one-way process. The way the actor gives a
cue to the drummers is by raising his fist, and stopping drumming is by
showing an open palm. And then they stop just a split second afterwards.
But sometimes, drummers give the cue. And this ambivalence between the
things is very interesting. And I think watching film material of this back
and forth between the drummer and the actor is much easier. But in the live
performance (as opposed to watching a recording), this dialogue becomes
much more interesting and engaging. Especially when you talk about an
ancient form of theatre like Kudiyattam.
So, I think we should enter the archive with a very open mind, with
regards to what we want to find there. And when we have found what we
were supposedly looking for, often without knowing what it was, we are
beginning to construct a repertoire transforming the synchronicity of the
archive into a diachronic repertoire, which evolves in time. The repertoire
will be the parole, the selection that we will make, from that enormous
archive. And we stumble on things we never expected and those are very
exciting moments. It is when we don’t know what to look for, and ask,
bring something new, something else and suddenly there is something that
catches our mind, something that creates a new encounter.

Q: I was just wondering…when you spoke about encounters – a central

notion in your recent book – you say these are encounters, these
 The Dramaturgy of the Archive 97
accidents in the archive, would you talk a little bit more about that and
the role it plays in performances?
(FR): The book I wrote was about the interaction between the discursive
practices of theatre and performance on the one hand, and philosophy
on the other. And it’s called Philosophers and Thespians – that is, peo-
ple who are philosophers meeting and encountering people of the thea-
tre. It could be actors; it could be playwrights; it could be directors.
And the most fabulous documentation of such an encounter is in Plato’s
banquet symposium where Socrates meets two playwrights. He makes
a little fun of them and gives them a lecture but they meet as bodies, as
human beings. They are documented in Plato’s dialogue, The
Symposium. And as an answer to that I believe that Brecht wrote a
whole set of materials that he called the “Messingkauf Dialogues” [also
known as Buying Brass]. And it is a documentation, of course, fiction-
alized, just as Plato’s dialogue, of a philosopher who is invited by the
actors of the theatre to come and sit and talk about theatre after the
performance. So suddenly this philosopher enters the theatre. There
he meets two actors, a light electrician and a dramaturg. They sit for
four nights and talk. It is kind of an Indian performance, going on for
several nights.
The dramaturg begins by asking, “What brings you to the theatre,
Mr Philosopher?” “I am interested in what happens between people.
And since you are creating imitations of things that happen between
people, I am interested to see how it works”. And that’s how the whole
discussion begins. It was never finished; Brecht did not complete it. It is
his equivalent to Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the Passagenwerk, which
was also never finished. Of course, the Passagenwerk is much more
comprehensive. But it is also about circulation of bodies within an envi-
ronment. In Brecht’s case, it is a fictional environment, the performance.
But in Benjamin’s case, it is not a fictional environment, but the inven-
tions of the modernist city and consumer society. So there are many
differences. These are of course both constructed as archives. Benjamin
certainly created a huge archive, extracting/copying passages from
carefully selected books in the National Library in Paris, creating a
meta-library. So to come to your question specifically, it is the encoun-
ter that matters. First, between people and secondly between people
and the “memories” that archives contain. The repertoire is the “story”
of those encounters.
Q: In connection with the circulation of archival material, I want to ask
what you think exactly circulates in performances?
(FR): First of all, every performance is some form of circulation of archival
materials. It could be an old play. It could be actors on stage. Marvin
Carlson has written beautifully about ghosting in this context. There is a
kind of inner circulation of an actor/actress who carries their roles with
them at least in our eyes, but I believe also for themselves, and I think we
can even stretch this and say every performance is a performance of an
98 Freddie Rokem
archive or many archives. And they are brought together. And that’s part
of the ephemerality of the theatre; that after the performance, they will
spread out in different places and different shelves. Different forms of
heaviness and lightness, photographs, memories.…
Q: I think it gets clearer when you actually differentiate between the con-
cepts that you use from de Saussure, like langue and parole for exam-
ple. When you say langue and the vastness of langue…so it seems, in a
way, you mean life itself. So the archive of performance is life itself. And
it is always already working as an archive. And what you are suggesting
from what I understand is that we do not necessarily go back to the
institutions of archive for creation or performance.
(FR): I think that that “life” has to be lived already or been archived as a
reflection on something that has happened or experienced. Therefore,
there is a lot we can learn from those institutions. But I think we want
to put things together. And we want to know about the performances of
Hamlet in Mumbai in the nineteenth or twentieth century. Because we
want to know something about great actors in Indian theatre. And we
want to explore what they were like. One more specific form of archive
is Brecht’s Modelbooks which he initiated, and that is a subject in itself.
These Modelbooks are a development of photography. In Theaterarbeit
(published in 1952), Brecht talks about the aspect of theatre which is its
“photographability”. It’s a Benjaminian term. The “-ability”, like in
“reproducibility”. Brecht talks about the “photographability” of thea-
tre, creating a new, independent work of art. And if we go from those
independent works of art back into what we want to explore, not only
academically process, we are in a creative process. (On Passport)
Q: Would you talk a little about your experience as a dramaturg?
(FR): These photographs are from a performance called Passport where I
worked as a dramaturge. I was asked by the director Yael Cramski who
is a colleague of mine at Tel Aviv University, a director in a fringe thea-
tre. It premiered in November 2013. It was the first time I worked with
her. Afterwards, in 2015, we also worked together on an adaptation of
Kafka’s The Trial, called Citizen K.
But I want to begin by explaining how we assembled a collage, or
made a montage, in Passport. Passport is a play about being a refugee,
particularly during the Second World War, but seen in a contemporary
context of what has happened already, which when we see it know was
going to happen or was beginning to happen five years ago. Since then
what we now call the refugee crisis has become one of the major prob-
lems in today’s world. We don’t know how to deal with it. The Israeli
refugee crisis was triggered by the very strict policies of the Israeli gov-
ernment of accepting refugees, particularly from Africa where they
lived under threat.
So, by going back to the Second World War, we wanted to throw
some light on the vulnerability of being a refugee. The director came to
me after she had done an interview with her father, who was a refugee
 The Dramaturgy of the Archive 99
during the Second World War, fleeing from the Nazis. He had been
hiding in wells, trying to survive by getting a job in a bakery for a week
that could sustain him for a long time, and so and on and so forth.
She had made a private interview which was also an archive that she
had “made” by travelling with her father back to Poland where he was
born and recording him in his village. She said to me that she does not
“know exactly what to do with this material, but I want it to live in a
theatrical surrounding where there are other texts”. And she said, “I am
very interested in this Brecht play which has not been translated into
English which is called Conversations of Refugees. It was written in
1941 when Brecht himself was a refugee. That’s the only word we can
use. He wasn’t in exile. He was a refugee in Finland before going – via
the Soviet Union and Moscow and Vladivostok and from there to
California – to Santa Monica where he spent several years during the
war. Conversations of Refugees was a play written en passage. It
‘records’ a conversation between two German refugees who have fled
from Germany, now passing through Finland. The reasons for their
meetings and why they have become refugees are somewhat secretive
and obscure.
They are like Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot in some basic
sense. And they meet regularly at the railway station in Helsinki. And
they say, “Cigarettes are lousy, the coffee is worthless but the conversa-
tions they are wonderful”. So they have a good time. One of the wise
things that one of them says – I think it is Ziffel; it is Ziffel and Kalle.
So Ziffel says, “Well, human beings can be created by mistake, in a door
entrance, takes five minutes. A new human being! That’s all it needs.
But to get the right passport, you have to work really hard. It’s the
passport that matters”.
So, we started selecting passages from this play. Then Yael, the direc-
tor said, “I want something more. This is not enough”. So, we started
to explore, and, finally, we came to another story, not unrelated to being
a refugee, the life story of Walter Benjamin, who was at this time, after
having left Berlin together with Brecht, staying in the same hotel in
Paris. They planned to write a detective novel together. And as Brecht
went on to Denmark before going to Sweden and Finland, Benjamin
stayed in Paris. From Paris, Benjamin had an extended, very frequent
correspondence with his childhood friend Gershom Scholem, who in
the meantime had become a professor of Jewish mysticism at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Benjamin is writing letters to Scholem
saying it is difficult and hard. And Scholem writes back that he under-
stands, but since his mother is in the hospital at that moment, he will
not be able to invite him to come to Jerusalem right now. She is going
to Port Said for an eye operation. Eventually, Scholem writes, “Maybe
you should come now,” and Benjamin writes back, “I am not sure it’s
possible right now; I am in the middle of writing something”. They go
on like this back and forth, sometimes with disappointment, sometimes
100 Freddie Rokem
with anger, sometimes in complete helplessness about what’s happen-
ing. In September 1949, the correspondence ends. It takes another year
before Walter Benjamin commits suicide on the border between Spain
and France, trying to flee from the Nazis.
We made a selection of letters and finally there were selections from
three texts. The personal text of the director’s father, the play by Brecht
and the correspondence between Benjamin and Scholem. So, it became
a collage or a montage. The characters met for only one little moment.
Besides this singular moment, when Benjamin offers a cigarette to the
two characters in the Brecht play, the different worlds/texts/archives
were always separated, even if the spectators see them all at the same
time. The question this raises is how different human experiences
become part of a larger, comprehensive event, which we today call the
“Second World War”. As experiences, they are always limited or partial
for those who lived them. The retrospective perspective, created by
combining archives, enables a more synoptic view and understanding.
The performance takes place in and around a big sandbox. On both
sides, there are two benches, five actors, two for Brecht, two for
Benjamin-Scholem correspondence and one for the survivor, the story-
teller/father who brings the other two “texts” together but with his own
story as a point of departure, frequently addressing the spectators
directly. In the background, there is a moon, with a ladder standing in
front of it. And the moon is actually a clock. But it’s not a regular clock;
it’s a clock of years, from 1933 to 1940. Only on the right side of the
circular moon/clock; the rest is empty.
The two characters in the Brecht play sit on both sides of a table,
hold conversations and drink. The meetings between Benjamin and
Scholem usually take place as they are standing. The storyteller/father
moves around. Each story is presented according to its own spatial
scenario. The Brecht characters get drunk and enjoy themselves.
Benjamin and Scholem stand up facing each other confrontationally.
This is the part of the story where it gets difficult. Scholem asks
Benjamin to explain how Jewish he feels. And Benjamin refuses to
answer the question. The result is a letter with a lot of anger which he
never sends but which Scholem himself found as he was editing the
correspondence between Benjamin and himself after the war. The
unsent letter had been found in an archive in Moscow, as Benjamin had
been able to hide his correspondences from the Nazis.
This is the outline of the performance we created. It received a warm
welcome from the spectators. I think they understood something,
though maybe not every detail of what it means to be a refugee, to be
alone and separated from the public sphere. It’s not something that
anybody would ask for, but too many people get it for just being who
they are.
 The Dramaturgy of the Archive 101
Q: You mentioned that Benjamin had not replied to the question if he is a
good Jew. But he somewhere mentions that his identity is his passport,
the title of the play is Passport where the story is about refugees who
could hardly have a passport.
(FR): Brecht wrote his play about the difficulty of getting a passport, no
doubt knowing how critical it is to the right passport to move from one
country to the next. In the United States, he was definitely a refugee in
exile. He was monitored by the FBI from the very moment he stepped
on the ground of the US. From the FBI files, another interesting archive,
which are an open-source material of about 350 pages, with many
black cross-outs, we can learn that Brecht was on the verge to be
arrested for espionage. His telephone was tapped.
Q: In a way, a last question to you. I was wondering, performances that
work with the archive, they tend to creatively arrange the archive and
organize the archive to create a performance. But what does the archive
do to the performance? Historically, have you seen or do you see that
archival materials have impact on form of say theatre or the other arts,
any changes that it…to an artistic practice…
(FR): I don’t know. Maybe at this conference you will find an answer, but I
think that finally what the archive “contains”, in the broadest possible
sense, has to be framed. Theatre, performance, even art depends on a
frame, some form of framing. And that is a discussion for another time.
But it is something which artists and researchers active in a project of
building a new archive do from the old ones. They create a new archive,
as a collection of materials from a performance, after it no longer exists
in its own right. This is a perpetual process. But each stage is based on
new forms of framing and contextualizations.
9 Rehearsing the Witness
The Bhawal Court Case
Zuleikha Allana

My work in and with the archive began in 2010 with a photograph from
the Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi. The photograph of dis-
interred bones at Sikandar Bagh Palace features a studied composition of a
white horse, four men and an array of the skeletal remains of several
human beings, set against a neoclassical ruin that has seen recent shelling
(Figure 9.1). This image was taken in March 1858 by the itinerant war
photographer Felice Beato in Lucknow, in the aftermath of the ‘mutiny’ in
the army of the East India Company, which eventually led to the consoli-
dation of British imperial rule in India.

Figure 9.1 The ruins of Sikandar Bagh Palace showing the skeletal remains of rebels
in the foreground, Lucknow, India, 1858. Felice Beato. Photograph courtesy
Alkazi Collection of Photography.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-11
 Rehearsing the Witness 103
Reconstruction: The Transparent Performer
The composition of a photograph is the staging of reality. And in this, photo-
graphs are provocative source materials. Any photograph contains features
that could be considered to be the elements of a performance – people and
place. The perspective of the figures and their relationships to landscapes and
events could be considered to be the material with which one could explore
the quality of the performer and forms of performative experiences.
Seen at Secundrabagh (Figure 9.2), an ‘essay’ I made in collaboration
with the Raqs Media Collective, is a performance of 50 minutes, staged
against this archival image. The performance uses the original photograph
taken by Felice Beato and a textual annotation on the photograph by the
Raqs Media Collective as a scaffolding upon which it considers capturing a
historical event by recreating and reinterpreting the moment of staging or
composition. Once this moment is unmoored from its context, it is poised
between that which is real and that which is constructed. This, for me, is the
moment of performance.
The work’s central axis is the consideration of the simultaneity of the
past, present and the (speculated) future in a photographic artefact. The
photograph is seen both as something that is staged (in the past) and some-
thing that is re-told (in the present). The two performers refer to the element
and composition of the men in the photograph fluctuating between narra-
tive and experience – they are both, the imagined witness and participants
in Beato’s act of arrangement.

Figure 9.2 Kavya Murthy and Bhagwati Prasad. Seen at Secundrabagh. Zuleikha

Chaudhari in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective. Weiner
Festwochen 2012. Photograph courtesy of Raqs Media Collective.
104 Zuleikha Allana
The figures in the picture and the performer(s) are not the subjects, but
rather, points of reference and points of view within and of the landscape in
which they are situated. They look outwards, pointing away from them-
selves and drawing attention to details of elements in the landscape that
surround them – the restlessness of an imagined sacrificial horse, and its
reluctance to carry forward the imperial expansionist mandate, the many
different ways in which it is possible to survey and measure the landscape,
a debate on the possibility of life on an alien planet.
By reconfiguring elements and details from the original image, a layer
of “other images” are created, which in themselves constitute a range of
possible ways of looking at this photograph or any other image. In a way,
the performance takes the form of rehearsal – dialogic and playful, an
improvisatory scrutiny of a set of moves and arrangements of people and
place.
The figures in the photograph/s have a neutral gaze. They seem to be
detached – at a remove from the events they are ostensibly part of, i.e.,
both the moment the photograph was taken and the historic moment to
which its staging refers. Their neutrality helps us enter the image. The
three men in the photograph look directly at the viewer, while the fourth
seems to be looking within the landscape; the performers simultaneously
look around as well as at the viewer, and the viewer looks back at the
performers and the image the performers have created. This gaze is trian-
gular, and it allows the border – of the photograph and of the proscenium
arch – to dissolve. The role of the spectator and the performer collapses;
their gaze becomes interchangeable. The performer and the spectator are
simultaneously within the moment (of the image) as well as outside of it,
at once producing distance and proximity. They are as close as possible to
the smallest details and equally as far to the whole picture. Each point
between these two distances provides new points of view, further details
and information, more ideas and more questions. In ‘seeing’ this moment,
the suspended time of a photograph is made elastic in performance such
that we arrive at a stilled time. The act of looking and measuring is the
only event that remains.
To consider the photograph in the archive is to consider not just a prob-
lem of history, but also a question of the poetics of the real, of memory and
oblivion. How does an event relate to its reiteration; how does memory
relate to the remembered? What does history mean on the stage? How can
we bear testimony in the theatre?
In order to consider some of these questions, I began to explore the
Bhawal Album, part of the Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi –
a set of 90 photographs used as evidence in the Bhawal Court case, a histor-
ical court trial.
The Bhawal Court case was a pre-Independence court case that revolved
around the identity of a wayfaring sannyasi (or Hindu religious ascetic),
rumoured to be the heir of one of the last great zamindari estates in Dhaka
(now modern Bangladesh). The Bhawal estate was the fifth largest estate
 Rehearsing the Witness 105
in the district of Dhaka, and more crucially, one of the few properties still
outside the domain of British rule at the time. Ramendra Narayan Ray
was one of three brothers who inherited the estate from their father. In
1909, he went to Darjeeling to seek treatment for syphilis but apparently
died there at the age of 25. Soon after his death, his two brothers also
passed away, leaving the Bhawal estate in the control of the British Imperial
Court of Wards. In 1920, nearly a decade later, a man appeared in Dhaka,
covered in ashes, and sat in quiet meditation along the banks of the
Buriganga River. He sat on the street for four months, attracting attention,
and rumours began to circulate that this was the second Kumar of Bhawal.
There was speculation and disbelief at the resemblance of this man to
Ramendra Narayan Ray, in physique and in appearance. Those who saw
him were convinced he was the second Kumar, even though he spoke
Hindi, not Bengali, and despite the fact of his reluctance to confess to his
identity as anything other than an ascetic. Arrangements were made for
him to meet the Kumar’s family in Jaidebpur. The second Kumar’s wife,
Bibhabati Debi, refused to meet this man, steadfastly maintaining her
position that this was an impostor and that the Kumar was dead. The
Kumar’s sister, Jyotirmayi Debi, became convinced that this man was,
indeed, the second Kumar.
In 1921, the claimant arrived in Dhaka in the Bhawal house with two
lawyers to meet the district magistrate and collector to record his claim. A
series of witnesses were systematically put together to establish that this
was, in fact, Ramendra Narayan Ray. Unwilling to legally accept this impos-
tor’s identity, the Court of Wards also began to gather evidence to suggest
that this man was not the second Kumar. Over the 16 years in court, the
man’s physical attributes, birthmarks, testimonies, witnesses and memory
were put together as forensic evidence to establish the identity of the man.
The case was on trial from 1930 to 1946 and was fought in the District
Court in Dhaka, the High Court in Calcutta and, finally, in the Privy Council
in London. The battle finally ended in 1946 with a victory for the plaintiff,
who died two days after the verdict was given.
A set of photographs in the Bhawal Album are of Kumar Ramendra
Narayan Roy (before his alleged death in Darjeeling) and of the plaintiff –
the sanyassi – dressed to look like the Kumar (Figure 9.3). These photo-
graphs, used during the original trial to establish likeness between the
plaintiff and the Kumar (and thereby confirm identity) given the plaintiff’s
alleged loss of memory, were the basis for my project Rehearsing the
Witness: The Bhawal Court Case.
The impostor/actor is the central focus of my access to the Bhawal mate-
rial and from where the project has spiralled outwards with three iterations
over four years in terms of both its form and content with the rehearsal and
the audition as key ideas.
Acting is a form of reality production. An actor has been taught how to
take on a character or become someone else; they use techniques of adjust-
ing physicality, the construction of different emotions and the production of
106 Zuleikha Allana

From the album evidence in the case of Ramendra Narayan Roy.

Figure 9.3 
Photograph courtesy of the Alkazi Collection of Photography.

affect to create a believable reality. Believability within the context of thea-

tre is credibility in the context of the law where the production of reality
relies on the plausibility of a narrative and the assumption of a stable and
consistent identity of the witness.
Everything about the plaintiff is disavowed and therefore uncertain in the
eyes of the law: his name, his history, his memory, the sense of his identity’s
continuity in historical time. Yet he is called upon to attest to his identity
within a space defined by notions of subjecthood and citizenship as framed
by the law and the Constitution. In what way does the radical ‘freedom’ of
such a subject, existing outside all official structures of identity as recog-
nized by the law and the state, double and resemble and become homolo-
gous to the ‘non-existence’, and therefore the radical freedom, of the
impostor and the actor, the everything and the nothing?

Re-enactment. Rehearsal
At the Mumbai Art Room, the first iteration of Rehearsing the Witness: The
Bhawal Court Case in 2015–2016 focused on how narratives are produced
 Rehearsing the Witness 107

Figure 9.4 Installation photograph. Mumbai Art Room. Photograph by Philippe Calia.

by conditions of viewing and the experience of the spectator. Here the pro-
ject uses select original evidence from the trial including testimonies, photo-
graphs and drawings as reference material for auditions, open rehearsals
and a fictional retrial (Figure 9.4).
In the context of performance, a rehearsal is repetition – this means con-
tinual reproduction in order to represent reality. The rehearsals at the
Mumbai Art Room were of the two central testimonies of the Bhawal trial
– Kumar Ramendra Narayan Roy, the plaintiff (Saif Ali) and the first
defendant, Bibhabati Debi, wife of the second Kumar of Bhawal (Mallika
Taneja). This material bears the burden of proving one’s self, of convincing
the court that you are who you say you are and that what you say can be
believed. The testimonies of the plaintiff and Bibhabati Debi offer contra-
dictory versions of the same event – the Kumar’s death and subsequent
cremation (Figures 9.5 and 9.6).
In viewing the project, the viewer is asked to be complicit in it – on
the one hand he/she is put into the position to watch/judge – gauge how
good the actor is – that is, how believable the actor in rehearsal is while
also watching the process through which ‘truth’ is produced and
constructed.
On the other, the viewer can choose to access/enter the work by audi-
tioning. An audition is typically an introduction where an actor has to
present a self-portrait as well as his technique and ability to become some-
one else. The representation is real and staged at the same time. The audi-
tion script interlaces the cross-examination of the plaintiff’s testimony
with a series of unscripted questions asking auditionees to describe them-
selves. These questions extend from the generalized questions of name,
occupation and place of birth into questions that bring up the relationship
of the self to the law, goodness and morality. This flux, between the
description of the self by way of personal detail and the description of
the self vis-a-vis one’s location in a larger society, creates a layer of
108 Zuleikha Allana

Figure 9.5 Rehearsing the Witness. Bhibabati Debi (Mallika Taneja), Kumar Ramendra
Narayan Roy, plaintiff (Saif Ali) and lawyer A. N. Chaudhary (Prayas
Abhinav) with Zuleikha Chaudhari. Mumbai Art Room. Photograph by
Dheer Kaku.

performance itself. In the act of answering questions in unscripted real

time, the notion of the self and ‘I’ is mediated by the idea of a script read-
ing, in which one inhabits another’s role. These double insertions of ‘I’ and
‘myself’ create a moment of self-reflexivity, even as they allow one to think
of how the self can be fictionalized.
Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case, Mumbai Art Room
2015–2016.
 Rehearsing the Witness 109

Figure 9.6 Ext LXI. Photograph of the second Kumar in dhuti and coat taken by
P. W. 788 Mr Winterton. [Evidence in the case of Ramendra Narayan
Roy ‘Kumar of Bhawal’]. Courtesy: The Alkazi Collection of
Photography; Ext XLVII. Photograph of Ramendra Narayan Roy (plain-
tiff) in dhuti and coat taken by Edna Lorenz, Calcutta (evidence in the
case of Ramendra Narayan Roy ‘Kumar of Bhawal’). Courtesy: The
Alkazi Collection of Photography; photograph of Ramendra Narayan
Roy, plaintiff (Saif Ali) in dhoti and coat taken by Dheer Kaku, Mumbai.

Audition text

Plaintiff Cross Examination. Audition 3

(In the audition, Zuleikha Chaudhari will play the part of Zuleikha
Chaudhari and the lawyer, A. N Chowdhary. The part of the actor and
the Plaintiff will be played by the auditionee)
ZULEIKHA. Title Case No. 5 of 1933. Deposition of witness No-10
for the plaintiff, taken on solemn affirmation, on 18 December 1933:—

ACTOR. My name is Kumar Ramendra Narain Roy, son of Rajendra

Narayan Roy Bahadur. My age is 50 years. I reside at Joydebpur,
District Dacca. My occupation is Zamindar. My grandfather was
Raja Kali Narayan Ray Bahadur. Rani Satya bhama was my grand-
mother. Rani Bilasmoni was my mother. I am the plaintiff.
Cross examination:
Q.—What is your name
A.—
Q.—What is your date of birth?
A.—
Q.—Where were you born?
A.—
Q.—Where do you live?
A.—
110 Zuleikha Allana

Q.—Are you married?

A.—
Q.—What is your education?
A.
Q.—What is your occupation?
A.—I am an actor.
When you have to experience an emotion or make other people feel an emo-
tion you’ve got to think of something real and something that has been etched
into your memory for a while. I found myself among several Sanyasis at
Darjeeling.
Q.—You understood, they were not Bengalees?
A.—No, I could not say. I had lost memory.
Q.—You said “where am I” but did you know what language it was?

A.—No. Later I spoke to them in Hindi. I can’t say if I knew it was different
from Bengali.
Q.—You understood what language they talked?
A.—Yes, Hindi. I had no consciousness then of any distinction between that
and Bengali.
Q.—You remembered Bengal?
A.—No. I knew before I went to Darjeeling there were other parts called
western provinces, such as Madras, Bombay, Bihar, Orissa and North
West Provinces.
Q.—Punjab?
A.—No. I asked – it came out of my mouth – where have I come? I was not
conscious that the Sanyasis were different from me. I saw the matted hair
and that they were naked, and the ash on their body, but I had no con-
sciousness of any distinction between them and me. I had no conscious-
ness as to whether I was a Bengalee, or Punjabi or English at that moment.
I lay on a Khatia under a Chhapra. I had no memory of any different kind
of bed or bedstead. Nor if I was a Bhadralogue or a peasant. Nor of a
house-holder or Bairagi nor of a Yogi or Bhogi. Nor if my previous life
was happy or miserable. No consciousness at all of my past – like a baby
just born. I can’t recall if I knew Bengali or Hindi – only the Sanyasis
spoke in Hindi and I understood, and I understood they were Hindusthanis.
It was as if I was born a new. I did not know if I was a man or a ghost.
Q.—You remembered your Bengalee?
A.—No.
Q.—You had consciousness you knew Bengalee?
A.—I had not. I had no consciousness of being surrounded by hills or whether
I was in a sea. I could not recognise trees, nor sky nor cloud. There is the
outside world that you know. There is this inside world where you know
who you are.
 Rehearsing the Witness 111

Q.—Is it easy to remember?

A.—
Q.—Can we trust our memory?
A.—I found myself – I was lying on a Khatia. That was on firm ground and
the only house was a tin chhapra. There were four Sanyasis there besides
myself. I asked “where am I.” I was at the same place for 15 or 16 days. I
do not remember what happened after that. I left after that. I went with
the 4 Sanyasis. We went on foot and also by train. The next thing I
remember is that I was at Benares – at Ashighat, Benares. There is nothing
left to remind you of the water. No birds circling around and the shore-
line has receded 120 kilometres. However there is still a stiff wind blow-
ing, which plays around the rotting carcasses dotted here and there. The
4 Sannyasis were with me still. At this time I had lost all memory of who
I was. I don’t remember if I got into a train. Or how I went to Benares.
Whether by train or on foot. Sun. Crows have pitched into the eyes of a
frozen corpse atop a mound. The small, white sun, visible through a pale
layer of haze, has shed its familiar whitewashed hue, but it doesn’t help.
The sky brings remorseless cold; masses of air unwilling to adapt to
human scale. The only animals in this landscape are clouds. Kangra.
Kashmir, Baramula Subdivision, Sreenagore which is capital. Thence we
went to Amarnath. We went to these places on foot or by train. On foot
we traversed jungle and hill through rubble and construction-debris
where The children draw landscapes out of garbage between broken stat-
ues in flight from an unknown catastrophe. Over me the expected air-
plane appeared. The air-pressure swept the corpses from the plateau.
There was thunder and lightning and a rain of fire. At first it smelled bad,
like garbage and then it was a good smell, like sweet apples. Then like
garlic. Then like eggs. It was very quiet, but the animals were dying.
Q.—Is it easy to forget?
A.—
Q.—Where did you go?
A.—I went home.
Q.—Have you ever broken a law?
A.—

Q.—Would you consider yourself to be a good person?

A.—
Q.— Is a law­abiding citizen always a good person?
A.—
Q.— How would you define goodness?
A.—
Q.—Are you a moral person?
A.—
112 Zuleikha Allana

Q.—Are you a part of my target audience? [YES] [NO]

A.—My function is to witness. And there is no possibility of failure in this
regard. I offer testimony to anyone who asks. There is no privilege, no
priority, no hierarchy. If you ask you will receive my response. My
response is more important than your question. Because I feel, I do not
reveal fully. I reveal only what my emotion can deliver in a believable
way. I can say anything I want. But what I say becomes a testimony when
it is attached with the appropriate emotion.
Because actually you do not matter. You are a listener. Or rather you
matter only after I speak. While I am speaking, I can blank the world out
because the production of myself happens in isolation
Q.—What does acting mean for you?
A.—
Q.—Does the actor prepare? Does the actor forget?
A.—One becomes a fearful actor. I mean it involves forgetting, forgetting the
compulsions, forgetting the context, forgetting the inter-twindness of
things. How intensely you are able to simulate another time will depend
on how firmly, how deeply you are immersed in the here and now.
Q.—What is difficult to forget?

A.—
Q.—What is easy to remember?
A.—
Q.—Is acting about becoming another? Or is it a fragmentation of the self?
A.—When we were talking about the enactment of sanity and you said that
you’re insane. I said that the law will of course try to break your perfor-
mance. To see if it is breakable, if it is fragile, if it is a performance. Will
you break the actor or will you believe the actor?

The audition offers the opportunity to consider how we interpret and

access something that has already happened – a performance or a historical
event. Inhabiting a reading, creates proximity to the act of interpretation,
bringing it to the present via a change in perspective. The viewer becomes
part of the construction of the event. S/he is never outside of the event; s/he
cannot see the whole.
Rehearsing can also be a metaphor for a way of thinking and an operat-
ing strategy. When used as a strategy, the rehearsal foregrounds that which
takes place on the periphery. The fictional retrial at the Mumbai Art Room
was designed to focus on the performativity of the law and incorporate
non-actors into the theatrical production in order to ask questions about
 Rehearsing the Witness 113
both legal performance and theatrical and theoretical production. In this
way, I was re-conceptualizing for myself how to make art and thinking
about how theory is made. Can we also think of academic or theoretical
production as rehearsal: a series of tentative moves towards framing and
reframing discourse?

• Much has been said about how the law has shifted its emphasis today
to the domain of forensics, where it is considered that the object holds
the ‘truth’, can tell the story, to the extent that at times it seems to have
superseded the place of the witness, as testimony is always subjective
– how would present-day protocols about the use of forensics and bio-
technology in making truth claims about identity be applied to the evi-
dence that remains?
• What is the relationship between history, theatre and the law and how
they deal with the idea of the event?
• What is the relationship between the production of memory and the
role of the archive, and how does that pertain to the retrieval and reliv-
ing of an event?
• What are the implications of the body-as-password for our understand-
ing of the truth about identity?
• If the sannyasi is in fact the Kumar, then who was cremated in
Darjeeling?
• What is the relationship between asceticism and the self/identity?

These questions were expanded upon by a number of ‘expert witnesses’ at

the fictional retrial at the Mumbai Art Room – the speakers included Akeel
Bilgrami, Bhrigupati Singh (anthropologist, Brown University), Mayur
Suresh (lecturer, School of Oriental and African Studies, London), Başak
Ertür (lecturer, School of Oriental and African Studies, London) Sabih
Ahmed (senior researcher, Asia Art Archive), Philippe Calia (artist and pho-
tographer), Malavika Jayaram (fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and
Society at Harvard University) and Avi Singh (lawyer).
This material was critical in framing the project – law as performance;
the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth-produc-
tion. Here law’s performativity describes a way of forming, of performing
the world through a certain structure of the use of signs that is always at the
same time a procedure and a connection of a (historical) sign to a (new)
context. The concept of performativity here describes a mode of doing
something to the world.

The Impostor as an Actor or the Actor Is an Impostor

The second iteration of the project at the Kochi Biennale 2016–2017,
Auditioning the Plaintiff (Figure 9.7), considers one of the fundamental
questions in theatre – the relationship between the actor and the character.
Where does the character end and the actor begin or vice versa?
114 Zuleikha Allana

Figure 9.7 Auditioning the Plaintiff: The Bhawal Court Case. Kochi Biennale 2016.
Photograph courtesy of A. J Joji.

Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case. Kochi Biennale 2016.
Performance text

When you want to feel an emotion or want to make other people

experience an emotion, you have to think of something real, some-
thing that has been etched in your memory for a while.
My mother said that she doesn’t remember much because she was
only three years old when she crossed the border. Nobody really
knows why they drew the line, but they drew it. They made the line
jagged and wavering so that it looked natural. But there’s no line. You
basically climb up the mountain and you cross the mountain to cross
the border. And when she was on the other side, she said that she
remembered she should call out to her parents. She thought those
mountains that she was where her home was – she thought that her
home was quite near so she called out to her family who were on the
other side of the mountain.
 Rehearsing the Witness 115

I could not recall who I was or where my home was when at Amarnath.
I used to think sometimes in my mind as to where my home was and
where my relations were.
I would tell my Guru this. We would talk about my going back to
my home and relations. Guru said – “I shall send you home when the
proper time comes”. I asked what he meant by proper time. I under-
stood that if I could renounce the worldly attachment and Bari and
Ghar, and relations and come back to him, he would take me into the
Sanyasi.
From Amarnath the 4 Sanyasis and I went northwards into the hills
and got to Chamba, a Rajdhani. Thence we went to Kullu. Then we
went to Sachitmandi. From there we went to Nepal. From Amarnath
till we went into Nepal the time that elapsed was 2 or 3 years. We four
went from Sachitmandi to Nepal in 2 or 3 years. From Nepal we went
to Tibbet. From Tibbet we returned to Nepal. Nepal to Tibbet and
Tibbet to Nepal took 3 or 4 months.
From Nepal we descended after a year’s stay at Nepal.
We went to Braho Chhatra above Nepal. There I recollected my
home was at Dacca. I told the Guru this. He said: “Go, your time has
come.” He said: “Go back to your home”. I asked where I could find
him again.
I thought this could be a new beginning.

In an audition, actors witness their lives, including the fact that they are
actors looking for work. On the one hand, there’s a documentary and on
the other, fiction. Acting is part of the actor’s biography. And being able to
show and tell themselves is part of their acting job. And the fact that they’re
presenting themselves in an audition, i.e., in a frame in which they want to
convince the audience – the judge or the jury – of their biographical self-rep-
resentation is already ambivalent. Is it really his/their story? Are they really
actors? Is this really an audition? Or is this all a fake? The scenario is
ambiguous – it is about the creation of an ambiguous, unreliable witness.
And so an unreliable reality.
This iteration looks at theatre as a space where being oneself and being
someone else merge, where telling the truth and faking it become indistin-
guishable. The audition at the Kochi Biennale is by a single actor on the ‘set’
(a landscape) with a two-channel video in the form of an audition that
loops multiple times. In the course of the audition, the actor introduces
himself differently on separate occasions – Oroon Das, Rehaan Engineer,
Atul Kumar with the two-channel video functioning as a mirror and as a
mnemonic device to which the actor constantly refers. This ‘audition’ also
integrates an audition (in the manner from the first iteration) with the
viewer.
116 Zuleikha Allana
The Actor as a Witness
How does the actor performing an archive become a witness to a historical
event? Can the actor’s role as a witness and his interpolation determine the
kind of relationship between the historical past and the present?
The third and ongoing iteration of Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal
Court Case is in the form of a retrial. Initially performed at the Dhaka Art
Summit, 2018 the retrial focuses on citizenship as performative – a template
and a score, the successful performance of which is always the matter of an
ongoing test. One achieves citizenship, one loses it; one’s performance is
either applauded, or it fails to live up to the demands, requirements and
standards that accrue to it.
How is identity written into history and played out in the domain of the
law, as opposed to the actual complexity of real lived experiences and rela-
tionships? The state – that is, the British Court of Wards – is one of the
parties in the Bhawal case and we see, via the testimony of expert witnesses
on the body as evidence (and as the site where identity is played out) and
photographs (to establish likeness and thereby confirm identity), what the
state considers and requires as identity, and where the individual locates
identity.
The retrial, staged with a director (myself), a real lawyer and a real judge,
re-enacts sections from the original testimonies, as well as produces new
ones. The witnesses, contemporary experts in their own fields, speak from
the original testimony, as well as offering his or her own opinion as an
expert. The judgement is not pre-known.
Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case. Dhaka Art Summit,
2018. From the petition framed by Nauriin Ahmed and Umer Aiman Khan,
The Legal Circle, Dhaka

Judge: What are the terms of reference?

Court Master:
That it may be declared that the Plaintiff is alive and is Kumar
Ramendra Narayan Roy, the second son of the late Raja Rajendra
Narayan Roy of Bhawal;
That a direction be given to the relevant authorities to issue to the
Plaintiff all the necessary identification documents;
That the Plaintiff’s possession and ownership may be confirmed in
respect of the one-third share of the properties described in the
Schedule of the Court below;
That a decree or order be passed in favour of the Plaintiff for the
payment of compensation by the Court of Wards in respect to one-
third share of the properties described in the Schedule.
 Rehearsing the Witness 117
Expert Witnesses in Order of Appearance:

1 J. L. Winterton (plaintiff’s witness), artist and photographer, being

trained as such at Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Paris and London who
deposed to striking resemblances between photographs of the second
Kumar and of the plaintiff, it being his opinion that the subject of the
photographs was the same person at different periods of life and to the
resemblance of features as seen from an examination of the second
Kumar’s photographs and the plaintiff in life. Expert witness: Shaidul
Alam, photographer, Dhaka.
2 J. H. Lindsay (defendant’s witness), retired ICS (Indian Civil Service),
secretary of the School of Oriental Studies in London and former col-
lector of Dacca. He was the collector of Dacca from 1919 to the spring
of 1922 and deposed to events with which he was concerned following
the plaintiff’s return in 1921 – e.g., his interview with the plaintiff, the
enquiries he caused to be instituted, his questionnaires and letters he
had received and had written. Expert witness: Nandini Chatterjee, his-
torian at Exeter University.
3 Percy Brown (defendant’s witness), artist, secretary and curator of the
Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta, who did not see any resemblance
between photographs of the plaintiff and earlier ones of second Kumar.
Expert witness: Rahaab Allana, curator at the Alkazi Foundation for
the Arts, New Delhi.
4 Dharam Das, one of the rescuing sadhu and subsequently the guru of
the plaintiff. According to the plaintiff, this Dharam Das visited Dacca
in August 1921 but did not testify, the Dharam Das called by the
defendants, being a bogus Dharam Das. Dharam Das (defendant’s wit-
ness) deposed to the plaintiff being one Sundar Das (alias Mal-Singh) of
Aujla, Punjab, his chela. Expert witness: Ahona Palchoudhari,
Anthropologist, Brown University.
5 Bibhabati Debi, widow of the second Kumar of Bhawal, defendant num-
ber 1. She is the eyewitness to the Kumar’s death on 8 May 1909 at the
house called “Step Aside” in Darjeeling. She represents the Court of Wards
in the suit. Performed by Samina Luthfa, sociologist and actor. Dhaka.

Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case. Dhaka Art Summit, 2018.
Testimony.

Court Master: I would like to call Bibhabati Debi.

(Enter Samina Luthfa)

ZC: Deposition of Bibhabati Debi witness No. 7 for defendants 1, 3

and 4, taken on solemn affirmation on 5 March 1935 before the
Subordinate Judge, 5th Court Dacca.
118 Zuleikha Allana

SAMINA LUTHFA (SL): Amar naam Bibhabati Debi, sworgoto Ramendra

Narayan Ray er bidhoba stree ami, ami Brahmin. Amar boyosh
46. Ami Kolkatar Landsdowne Road e thaki.
My occupation is I am defendant No. 1.
Raja Rajendra Narain Roy’s Second son was my husband. He is
dead. He died at Darjeeling. He died 25th Baisak 1316. He died at
midnight.
ZC: Please take a look at the plaintiff. Please take a look.

(Witness asked to look at the plaintiff and does so. She takes a good
look at him, and asked to do it again, does so in my presence and says)

SL: This is not the man who was my husband. He could not possibly be.
Our last trip to Kolkata was in the winter of 1315. We went for the
treatment of the Second Kumar’s illness. His illness was (biliary colic),
syphilis and occasional fever also. The doctors treated him. Gave him
medicine. They recommended change to Darjeeling or Mussourie at
the end of the cold weather. In 1316, the boro Kumar and the second
Kumar who would go to Darjeeling. Satya babu was then at Uttarpara.
He was written to by boro or maybe the second Kumar. And he came.
We started for Darjeeling on 5 Boishak 1316.
CM: Is it a true that Jyotirmoyee sister and Satyabhama were supposed
to accompany you but your brother Satya Babu dissuaded them
SL: No.
We reached Darjeeling on 7 Baisak, 1316. After three or four days
of our arrival at Darjeeling. Dr. Calvert was called. He came and gave
medicines to the Second Kumar on the whole, after arriving at
Darjeeling, the second Kumar kept well enough except for a few occa-
sional illnesses. He was generally well up to 3 or 4 days before his
death. His illness began on Wednesday night. He had fever and “colic
pain” at night – at midnight. Towards the dawn, the pain and the fever
grew less. The pain grew less towards the dawn. No doctors came that
night. On Thursday morning, the doctor came, Dr. Calvert. Up until
the mid day, the Kumar was well but in the afternoon his fever and the
colic pain away. Dr. Calvert did not come in the afternoon. He did not
at all come in at Thursday. He came on Friday morning. He wanted to
give the Kumar some injections. The Kumar would not agree. Nothing
would induce him to agree. On Friday, the Kumar was well through
out the day. In the evening, the fever and the pain came again.
 Rehearsing the Witness 119

Dr. Calvert did not come. Debaron Babu came to us. On Saturday
morning, Dr. Calvert came. He again wanted to give the injection. The
Kumar would not agree. The doctor left. At 10 or 10:30, the Kumar
had vomiting tendencies and a slight colic. At 12pm…no, maybe after
that, his pain increased very much. There was blood and mucus in his
motions. When we saw blood and mucus in his stools, we sent for the
doctors. Dr. Calvert was nowhere to be found. He took much time to
come. Dr. Nibarun came.

ZC: Do you remember any, other symptoms apart from the blood and
mucus in the stools?
A.— No. Except for the colic, restlessness and the vomiting tendencies.
He vomited once or twice. At around 2 or 2:30 pm, Dr. Calvert
came. He wanted to give that injection to Kumar. The Kumar did
not agree in the beginning but in the afternoon, I and the others
pressed him. I induced him to take it. I said, “Why are you so nerv-
ous about it? Even I can take it. You need not be afraid.” At around
2 or 2:30 pm, Dr. Calvert came and he stayed on till dusk. When he
went to his house to have his dinner. He returned in about an hour
or so. After the injection the Kumar’s motions ceased. He had none
after the injection. It was Dr. Calvert who gave him that injection.
Perhaps twice, I do not exactly remember. After Dr. Calvert came at
around 2 or 2:30 pm, two nurses came. The second Kumar’s pain
grew less. But he started to lose strength and to gradually sink. The
nurses rubbed a white powder all over Kumar’s body. It was pre-
scribed by the doctor sahib. Dr. Calvert left our house a little after
Kumar’s death. At the moment of Kumar’s death, I was there in his
room. I had been in his room since I came to know about the fact
that his condition was bad. It was from after the injection.
Before that, when the doctors came, I used to come out of the
room and wait by the door of the adjoining room. But after the
injection, I never left the room. The second Kumar got his first
injection in the afternoon. It is difficult to fix the time. Not cer-
tainly at 3 but maybe between 4 and 6. At the moment of his
death, Dr. Calvert was in his room in which he died. Ashu Babu,
Nibaran Babu, the doctors, they were present there.
ZC: Were there any other doctors on Saturday night?
SL: My uncle Sutra Narayan brought a doctor. He was brought at dusk.
The two nurses, they rubbed the white powder all over the Kumar’s
body. His hands, feet, abdomen, chest and that everywhere. It didn’t
occur to me that the rubbing of this powder on his chest or abdo-
men was causing him any pain or discomfort. After his death, I and
120 Zuleikha Allana

my brother, Satya, two nurses and two maid servants were there in
the room in which the Kumar died. Ashu Babu, Birendra and
Mukondo were coming and going. But I remained in the room. I
spent the whole night there. Whether my brother Satya was there
throughout the night, I do not remember. But I was there until the
corpse was taken down the next morning. The Kumar’s body lay on
the bed in which he died. I threw myself on the bed and I was weep-
ing. The next morning, they had taken the body. Taken down the
bed and gone. The second Kumar’s body was never removed from
his room throughout the night. After it was removed, I saw it one
more time. It was left in the garden. Laid on ground, flowers were
put around. I could see the body from the upper storey. The second
Kumar’s body was cremated on Sunday. On Monday, we left
Darjeeling. After the death of the Kumar, I have taken over his share
of the Bhawal estate. Since his death, I live the life of Hindu widow.
ZC: Thank you.
J: Your witness Mr Barua.
Cross-examination:
Q.—What is your name?
A.—Samina Luthfa
Q:—What is your education?
A:—I got a PhD in Sociology.
Q:—What is your occupation?
A:—I am an actor
JB: You are here to testify as Bibhabhati, but you know that you are not
Bibhabati. Do you think you are qualified to testify as an expert?
SL: To me, performance is how I see the world and also how I want to
see it. So, it's a political position. It’s about realities – what was,
what is and what I can make into a reality.
As a sociologist, we look at an individual from the outside but
as an actor, we have to start from inside. So you have to inhabit, in
order to be able to analyze the character of Bhibhabati. You actu-
ally expose, her and mine truths and lies, but without judging.
JB: So, you have just said that in your acting, by inhabiting a charac-
ter, you expose the lie and truth, but don’t you agree that every-
one’s truth is a partial understanding of reality?

SL: I agree.
JB: So, your version of truth may not be the only truth in reality?
SL: Can you or anyone present in this court be able to say that they
do have a complete and considered understanding of the reality?
 Rehearsing the Witness 121

JB: Okay. I have got your point but I am going to relate your response
to my next question – like this way. Being married for 7 years and
you don’t have any children, did you ever have any known medi-
cal condition which was the main reason?
SL: So you’re trying to imply either of these two things. Number one,
Bhibhabati was sterile. Number two, she never slept with the
Kumar. Isn’t this one of the most age-old tool for patriarchy
attack on women. Given your activist background, this is not a
question that I would expect from you.
JB: Please don’t judge me or any other person from this question. I can see
you are uncomfortable talking about your conjugal life, so let me ask
you – in your deposition you have come across as someone who was
very attached to her husband. What is the basis of this conclusion?
SL: You are assuming that she didn’t have any attachments with her
husband. But there is no reason why we would assume that. If
you analyze the character and if you want to define Bhibhabati
– who is she? She is a 13 year old girl who is married to a 4 years
older man who happens to be a prince – and she goes into this
household with lot of in-laws and she was obviously told that it
was probable and acceptable that her husband went to the pros-
titutes. Despite, the things that she learned about this man she
was expected to be a dutiful wife and in that stage, in that situa-
tion, probably what she felt, whatever she felt about this man,
she thought this is what love is.
JB: Well. in your deposition you say you that you witnessed the Kumar
dying in front of you, and being his wife, who loved him, you
must have been very upset?
SL: Bhibhabati was upset because she saw and believed that her hus-
band died.
JB: So, as you have already said you were upset. Do you feel that you
were fully aware of what was happening around you? Do you feel
that Bibhabati Debi was a credible eyewitness?
SL: The Kumar’s health was the central focus of the family. That’s why
they went to Darjeeling, but when they saw this sudden change in
this health and traumatic decline of the Kumar’s health started, it
was definitely quite difficult and it was a big challenge because
Bhibhabati was probably 20 years old and she hadn’t had this
kind of responsibility before. It must have been quite overwhelm-
ing for her. So, I’m not saying that she knew everything. She prob-
ably knew what was happening, but not everything that was
happening around her. And to answer the second part of your
question, is this coming because, you know Bibhabati is a woman
and you know, for me, what is more important is whether or not
she was aware of this situation - the fact was that she believed
that her husband died.
122 Zuleikha Allana

JB: So, you’re talking from the point of belief.

SL: Yes.
JB: Ok here is my next question. So, we can clearly assume that your
sense of reality and your belief are intertwined in your deposition
which leaves a room to conclude that the Kumar had actually not
died that night?
SL: It is to me completely irrelevant whether the Kumar died or not.
JB: Why?
SL: This is because what she saw and what other people have said.
They were talking about it because they were family members
and other staff who saw and witnessed the fact that he died. But
what to me is more interesting and more important here and to
consider about Bhibhabati is what happened afterwards.
Depending on the fact that Bhibhabati believed that her husband
has died, what she has achieved? If you list it, she has achieved a lot.
She went back to the Bhawal estate and moved out of her in-laws’
house. She claimed the full amount of her husband’s life insurance;
she resisted the Court of Wards for trying to take over her estate. She
complained about her financial irregularities in the estate. And she
actually had her own money and she managed this money – she had
a house, two cars, servants and the family. She actually had groomed
herself and she achieved quite a lot of agency and an independent self.
JB: So, in that case, what you’re saying that Bhibhabati in this 14 years
has transformed to become another person. And in that case, would
not that be the case that this present freedom and the way of living
is the main reason she was denying that this person is Kumar.
SL: So, when we talk about Bhibhabati, I have already established that
she was quite attached to her husband. So, now if you think – even
for me if something happens and the husband dies and he returns,
if I am or Bhibhabati is, attached to the husband, it is very likely
that she is going to accept it, if she recognizes him as her husband.
But what if Bhibhabati herself has changed, if she has become
different person – from a frail, young woman who didn’t know
what to do about life to someone who is asserting independence.
Would that husband be recognizable to her? Is because she was a
woman and a woman’s independence, is dispensable?
JB: So you’re trying to make a point there. If he is man that his feeling
of man is always expandable to someone else’s pride. Is that what
you’re trying to say?
SL: It’s not about whether it’s a man or not. The fact is whoever is the
most deprived here, in the most disadvantaged position.
JB: Well as you said it's a disadvantaged position, I can see that there’s
a conflicting interest between the man and woman. And this actu-
ally played a vital role in determining the judgment of the original
case. Wouldn’t you agree?
 Rehearsing the Witness 123

SL: Isn’t it fairly likely and isn’t it what we see today even 100 years
after?
JB: Well, it depends, that is what we are looking for. From the deposi-
tion of the Bhibhabati if I come back from the contest again, you
as an expert witness can clearly conclude that sense of pride and
unity had influenced your opinion in your deposition before this
court, it is quite impossible to form an opinion of the facts with-
out taking the position of a human being. Do you have anything
to say about it?
SL: Why would you want to become neutral? In this case, if you look
at the life, today’s life even, there are so many competing interests
– there’s gender, sexuality, ethnicity, whether you’re migrant or
not or you have a passport valid or not – these kind of things, they
are intersecting and at times they are at odds to each other. So, in
such a case the thing that you base on is that you don’t want to be
neutral. You have to take a position, you have to be taking the
position in favor of the person who is the most marginalized here.
JB: So, there is a question of taking a position in this?
SL: Yes.
JB: Thank you, Ms. Luthfa. Your Honour, I’m done with the witness.

6 The plaintiff, Kumar Ramendra Narayan Roy, also known as “Mejo

Kumar”; the second of the three Kumars, married to Bibhabati Devi, is
supposed to have “died” on 8 May 1909 at the house called “Step
Aside” in Darjeeling.

Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case. Dhaka Art Summit,
2018. Testimony.

ZC: What is your name?

AR: My name is Arup Rahee.
ZC: What is your date of birth?
AR: 23rd July 1975.
ZC: Where do you live?
AR: I live in Dhaka.
ZC: What is your occupation?
AR: Strategically speaking, I’m a poet, singer, writer and activist, but
these are not in the modern European bourgeoisie sense. I prefer
to call myself as an activist, a practitioner, that is Shadhona in our
baul-fakir tradition.
ZC: Have you ever acted?
124 Zuleikha Allana

AR: Yes, I appeared in a full-length feature and a telefilm.

ZC: What part are you auditioning for today?
AR: I am auditioning today for the plaintiff, the second Kumar of
Bhawal, Ramendra Narayan Roy.
ZC: What does acting mean for you?
AR: In baul fakir tradition, it’s all about practice. It’s all about trans-
forming oneself to be in another state of being and to express one-
self in another context, to experience the self from different
perspectives. That is a life under examination - an experimental life.
ZC: And what is your acting technique?
AR: Acting in a sense is about emancipation. And this is about the
actualization of the potentials of one own self in another context.
At the same time, it also takes up the challenge of crossing one’s
own limitations. This requires strategic action. You just have to
learn your lines; you have to know where you are, who you
embody and who you are talking to. You have to know why. And
then it becomes simple to just say those words so they sound as if
you have never said them before, as if it was the first time.
ZC: Is it easy to remember?
AR: I remember my childhood. “Duure boshe thako tumi, durer dha-
rono nei, toboi thako, aie bigyane dhorochou, durer o par jao, jol
diye joler chobi aako. Shei din forin ra laal.. Ure, ure Dhan khete
jure, Aie deshe er agomoni gaye, Pater gondhe bhora duba, pash
diye pai haate choli Ghasher nupur baaje pai”. I was brought up
in a village. Seeing my childhood trees cut for bypasses and roads,
the rivers have shrunk, destroyed for land acquisition and irriga-
tion my home, my roots, my land, my place has disappeared. This
is a very traumatic experience.
ZC: What do you remember?
AR: I could not recall who I was or where my home was, when I was at
Amaranth. I used to think sometimes in my mind as to where my
home was and where my relations were. I would tell my Guru this.
We would talk about my going back to my home and relations.
Guru said, “I shall send you home when the proper time comes.” I
asked what he meant by proper time. I understood if I could
renounce my maya for my bari ghar, and relations and come back
to him, he would take me into the Sanyas. This conversation was
after I left Amarnath and this was one year before I returned home.
From Amarnath the four Sanyasis and I went northwards into the
hills and got to Chamba. Thence we went to Kullu. Then we went
to Sachitmandi. From there we went to Nepal. From Nepal we
went to Tibet. From Tibet, we returned to Nepal. We went to Braho
Chhatra above Nepal. There I recollected that my home was at
 Rehearsing the Witness 125

Dacca. I told the Guru this. He said, “Go, your time has come”.
He said, “Go back to your home”.
ZC: So does the actor remember? Does the actor forget?
AR: When I was a child, I could go wherever I wanted in my village
into deep jungles and there was no one to stop me from going up
to the horizon. But when we live in boundaries under a sovereign,
there are state machineries and apparatus to define us, to index
us, to identify us as per their requirement. To govern our body,
our images, our gaze and our imaginations, our dreams and mem-
ories. Under a sovereign, you’re free only to abide by the rules
imposed on you. You can no longer be a wanderer. The actor’s
challenge is to resolve the dialectic between his memories and
institutional memories. You may say I am a nobody but that
doesn’t mean that this home is not mine.
ZC: What is the compulsion to remember?
AR: The compulsion to remember comes from the urge to constitute
one’s own self. I cannot live as a definition in someone else’s imag-
ination. I have to make choices that will make me who I am and
who I want to be. My function is to witness. And there is no
possibility of failure in this regard. I offer testimony to anyone
who asks. There is no privilege, no hierarchy. If you ask, you will
receive my response. My response is more important than your
question. Because I feel, I do not reveal fully. I reveal only what
my emotion can deliver in a believable way. I can say anything I
want. But what I say becomes a testimony when it is attached
with the appropriate emotion. I am addressing a group here but I
can also talk to myself. And when I talk to myself, the same mate-
rial that I was guarding before becomes accessible. Because actu-
ally you do not matter. You are a listener. Or rather you matter
only after I speak. While I am speaking, I can blank the world out
because the production of my self happens in isolation. This is a
game not just because of the literary bind that the narrative finds
itself in, but because this is playable. When we were talking about
the enactment of sanity and you said that I’m insane, of course
the law will of course try to break the performance. To see if it is
breakable, if it is fragile, if it is a performance. Will you break the
actor or will you believe the actor?
ZC: Thank you.

Legal scholar Robert Cover proposed the world of law as a system of

tension, which bridges concepts of reality to an imagined alternative.
According to Cover, these polarities are maintained and moved forward
through the device of the narrative. It is through narratives that we build
and understand the relationship between our social constructs and our
126 Zuleikha Allana
vision of potential futures. These narratives require a leap of imagination in
order to connect not only ‘what is’ and what ‘should be’ but also what
‘might be’.
This third iteration of Rehearsing the Witness represents the original
Bhawal material and the historical event in order to examine and critique
it – produce the possibility of an alternate past. But the retrial also decon-
structs and reconstructs the archival material case to produce alternative
possibilities of thinking about evidence and identity.
What sort of justice and judgement can we find in a theatre? What can
theatre uncover about the theatricality that is always present in courts and
is integral to political life? And how do we judge actions differently when
they are staged in a theatre rather than narrated in a courtroom? Legal
judgement is presumably objective, fact and evidence-based. To experience
and judge a trial aesthetically, by contrast, would mean to judge the case
based on the virtuosity of the acting, on immediate impressions and emo-
tions while watching, and on the atmosphere in the courtroom. Are legal
and aesthetic judgements mutually exclusive?
Theatre is the space where things are real and not real at the same time.
Where we can observe ourselves from the outside while also being part of
the performance. It is a paradox that creates situations and practices that
are symbolic and actual at the same time. How can theatre as theatre reflect
on what it means to be public? How can theatre not only mirror society but
also be a part of changing it? Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court
Case considers the relationship between re-enactment and retrial and
whether the performance/retrial can facilitate a legal paradigmatic shift.
10 Documentary Theatre and My
Performance Practice
Anuja Ghosalkar

Dear Readers,

(Kindly read this statement aloud)

Revolutions can, and often have, begun with reading.1

The act of reading is central to my practice as a documentary theatre maker.

In my performances, Lady Anandi and the one following it, The Reading Room
– the document and its many iterations form the core of my artistic work.

In The Reading Room, there are no actors, no pre-written scripts. Only

an intimate audience of 10–12 people, who are requested to bring a letter
from their personal collections. These letters are read alongside ones I have
curated from the public domain. For instance, an amorous letter that Karl
Marx wrote to Jenny is curated such that, it may be in the same envelope as
a letter that an audience member brings, the contents of which are of a
mother offering sex advice to her daughter. Here the reader is the same as
the listener. The performer is the audience. There is no embellishment, only
text, voice and body. Each performer reads in their unique way – with trep-
idation, quirky intonations, stutters, errors since they are not trained per-
formers. At the end of each show, the audience is requested to donate their
letters to me, the postmistress. These letters in turn are used in the next
performance of The Reading Room. There have been about 15 Reading
Rooms across India thus far, and I hold 80 odd letters from various partic-
ipants who have come, read and shared letters with me.

Lady Anandi, a solo that preceded The Reading Room, is the story of two
actors separated by 100 years. One, my great grandfather who played
women characters (in late nineteenth-century Marathi theatre), convinc-
ingly, and the other, me, struggling to be a woman on stage. The text of
Lady Anandi is structured such that all the fictional scenes are ‘read aloud’,
by me, weaving in stage directions, noticeable holding a piece of paper. And
the researched parts are recounted by rote. The motif of the letter is con-
stant in the show. In the opening scene, Lady Anandi responds to her fan
who has brought her flowers saying, “What’s the use of flowers? They all
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-12
128 Anuja Ghosalkar
smell the same. Write me letters and let me smell you on them. Write to me
and tell me what you think, when I wear my hair down”. The climax of the
performance uses the fan mail as the point of culmination.
The choice of holding the pages of the text and reading from them was
vital to underline that fiction was filling in the gaps of history, that imagina-
tion was replacing memory. Lady Anandi is an act of remembering my great
grandfather, Madhavrao Tipnis. And that exercise is seldom linear, often
incomplete and jagged. I wanted to make the process of finding documents
in an archive and piecing together fragments of research apparent to the
audience. It was the piecing together of these documents that triggered my
imagination. In Lady Anandi, fiction extends the narrative when archival
documents fall short and fiction is often used in the guise of archival mate-
rial as epistolary evidence (Figures 10.1 and 10.2).

(Kindly read this excerpt aloud)

Lady Anandi – Scene 102

The actor breaks out into the audience and reads letters placed near the
saree. Actor facing the stage (Figures 10.3 and 10.4).

Dear Anandibai,

I am sorry if I offended you the other night. That was not my intention. I only
wanted to show you my admiration. I cannot forget how radiant you looked

Figure 10.1 An archival black-and-white image from the iconic Marathi play Kichakvadh.
 Documentary Theatre and My Performance 129

Figure 10.2 An archival black-and-white image from the play Bhaubandaki.

Figure 10.3 A female performer, wearing black, is standing in front of a mirror,

reading a letter.

that night. I was shocked to know that your hair isn’t real. I always thought
when you wear your hair down, it might be like my mother’s, thick, black, long.
I cannot write very much, but since you said write to me, I am attempting it. No
one can know I am writing to you. I hope this reaches you and you will reply.
130 Anuja Ghosalkar

Figure 10.4 The female performer is standing with her back to the audience; she is
holding a piece of paper and reading from it.

Figure 10.5 A female performer is standing in front of a projected archival image of

her great grandfather.
 Documentary Theatre and My Performance 131

Figure 10.6 A female actor is holding a piece of paper in one hand, and the other is
on her hip.

Your admirer,
Indumati

Actor facing the audience (Figures 10.5 and 10.6).

Dear Indumati,

I was surprised and happy to receive your letter. It is because of people

like you that I get up on stage every evening. Otherwise, after 30 years of
doing this every day, I am now weary and tired. I am sorry if I disappointed
you. When I was younger I did have long black hair and flawless skin, much
like yours. You are so beautiful. I wish to see you again, soon.

Waiting for your response eagerly.

Madhav

Actor facing the audience.

Dear Indumati,

You have not replied to my letter. Did I offend you in any way? That was
not my intention. I wanted to thank you for your letter, that’s all. The
strangest thing happened to me. I received incense sticks from an “an
ardent” admirer. Was it you?
132 Anuja Ghosalkar
Forever yours,
Madhav

Actor facing the stage.

Dear Anandibai,

It is most odd that someone should send you such a beautiful present and
not claim it. I wonder why? Maybe she wants to remain unknown? First,
tell me did you like the smell of the incense sticks?

In admiration
Indu

These fictional letters punctuate my documentary theatre piece. Reading

from fraying sheets of paper, sometimes the audience interprets these letters
as evidence – that my great grandfather in fact had a fan who expressed her
love through these notes. As discussed previously, the entire design of Lady
Anandi is such that research is ‘performed’ and fiction is ‘read aloud’.
Because this is a documentary theatre piece, each document that appears in
the show assumes a sanctity – even a fictitious document.
As a performance maker, my practice is critically linked to the archive
and documents (fictitious, missing or otherwise). While Lady Anandi was
an act of activating a personal family archive using photos, play scripts,
newspaper articles and attempting to fill in the gaps, The Reading Room is
an act to gather narratives through letters, to create a repository of personal
correspondences that were seldom written for public consumption. Through
The Reading Room, the participants who bring in letters, have to look into
old trunks, under beds or reach out to long forgotten lovers or estranged
family to retrieve these documents.
The gesture of sifting through, choosing or researching their personal
collection for letters starts well before they come to The Reading Room.
During the performance, these documents change hands, are read by
strangers, allowing that letter to come alive in the present moment. What
was once a memory of a time or emotion gone by, during the reading, it is
a breathing, pulsating document. The archive is revitalized!
3What seems the most ephemeral and fragile may in fact be the most

enduring. Flesh fades, diminishes and dies. On the breath and through the
performing body, story keeps its airy lightness and flooding force, suggesting
one possibility of life – beyond-death. In this sense, memory endures, para-
doxically, because it moves. Only through movement can memory take up
residence and build a dwelling place within us. As sites of accumulation we
become shelters, or living archives, for memory. Our bodies hold a myriad
of incomplete pieces, the presence of which we are sometimes unaware.
It is the performer’s body and her breath that infuses the archival collec-
tion with vitality.
 Documentary Theatre and My Performance 133
The performers in The Reading Room are non-actors, and their bodies
“hold a myriad of incomplete pieces”; it is in and through their bodies that
the archival collection comes alive. The people who bring letters to read,
some are doctors, lawyers, bankers, students and homemakers; some speak
softly; others tremble and shake while reading; some others are confident and
clear; some are shy and don’t look up. I see this as a critical intervention as a
performance maker – here an actor pretending to be a character is done away
with. There are no long rehearsals, no assigned roles based on body type,
gender or age. Everyone reads the letters they chance upon. Due to the design
of The Reading Room, the participants rarely get to read their own letters;
they end up with a complete stranger’s missive to perform. These untrained
bodies bring a vulnerability to The Reading Room; their nervous, reluctant
bodies reveal the joy they feel being ‘actors’ albeit for 80 minutes. Among
many characteristics of documentary theatre, this is a significant one to me,
the non-actor, “the experts of everyday life”4 as Rimini Protokoll, the well-
known German documentary theatre company characterizes its performers.
However, in Lady Anandi, I tell the story of my great grandfather; the perfor-
mance is framed as – Anuja Ghosalkar, the actor-researcher appears as herself,
delving into her family history. There is no other actor. I, Anuja, play every char-
acter that appears in the performance, including my great grandfather, his older
brother and my great grandmother. As if time past and present are mediated
through me. I present my own story, nobody else represents me. This representa-
tion is complex, because I, happen to be an actor. So am I pretending to tell the
story of my great grandfather? Is it my story to tell? Are the archival photo-
graphs that I project on my body as evidence truly of my great grandfather?
“At its best, documentary theatre complicates the idea of documentary and
of the real, of a document, and even what it means to document; documentary
theatre troubles our already troubled categories of truth, reality, fiction and

Figure 10.7 A female performer, wearing black is standing, facing the audience, reading
a letter. OR A female performer, wearing black is standing, facing the audi-
ence, reading a letter in a sharp beam of light that looks a like a corridor.
134 Anuja Ghosalkar

Figure 10.8 A female performer, wearing black is standing in front of a projected

archival photograph. She is intercepting the beam of the projector light
and part of the projected image is captured on her hand.

acting”,5 says Carol Martin. This rings true for me because my performance
practice thrives on such complexity, where borders between categories are
unguarded. While the document is central to my creation of documentary
theatre, it is by no means the only defining factor, dear reader. The illustra-
tions of my work only serve as a point of entry. I chanced upon this form a
few years ago, and there is no singular or homogenized definition of it.
In addition to the use of the document and the archive, the complicity of
the participating audience in documentary performance making, the com-
plex role of the actor/researcher/participant and finally the ability of this
form to bring forth personal histories are the pillars that my documentary
performance-making practice is built on.6 “Documentary theatre can
directly intervene in the creation of history by unsettling the present by
staging a disquieting past”. We are at that juncture in India, where we face
the risk of being excluded from our own history. To challenge the grand
historical narrative being constructed by the state, the need is to gather
several little histories, alternate historiographies, document social move-
ments, intervene in archives and give voice to the unheard – to gain control
of the present, however chaotic. Documentary theatre is a platform that
allows for such exciting explorations and interventions.
Given that my discovery of documentary theatre and its numerous
nomenclatures – like verbatim theatre, theatre of the real, theatre of testi-
mony – happened by accident, I am still exploring its formal contours and
its possibilities. In order for the form to proliferate and to fuel multiple
perspectives, I designed a series of workshops, titled Starting Realities with
my collaborator, German dramaturge Kai Tuchmann. These workshops are
designed to encourage a fresh new set of documentary theatre makers,
extend audiences and create a pedagogy around this form, with the aim to
curate India’s first documentary theatre festival in 2020. Working across
three diverse cities – Bangalore, Mumbai and Cochin, the participants came
 Documentary Theatre and My Performance 135
from disciplines as diverse as medicine, sociology, photography, journalism,
filmmaking, research, visual arts, classical dance and theatre. Through the
workshops, the idea of what constitutes a document and what an archival
collection is was pushed. The ‘documents’ we examined were not just pieces
of paper, but an event, a body, a gesture, a place, a sound, social media
messages, emails, Instagram stories.
For instance, an experimental filmmaker brought the poetry of Muktibodh,
a pioneering modern Hindi poet, and juxtaposed it with a digital image of his
home in Bihar, that he painted over with Photoshop. As the audience wit-
nessed this image being transformed by rough Photoshop strokes, we heard
poet Muktibodh’s verse in Hindi on the aesthetics of colour. Another work-
shop participant used gesture since she was a Kathak dancer, and her perfor-
mance was a comment on women in dance, which ended with a series of
questions about a woman’s body. Other participants used WhatsApp, while
some read out excerpts from their Tinder chats. The voice of an infamous TV
news anchor was used to make a social comment, and in another partici-
pant’s presentation, the audience was tied up with rope. A visual artist in
Cochin used an airbrush to erase text she found disturbing, creating provoc-
ative graffiti. One actor used a Malayalam folk song to comment on caste.
Unconsciously, Starting Realities and its participants were engaging with
Peter Weiss’ tenets of documentary theatre, “by quick cutting, the situation
is switched to another, contrasting with it. Single speakers oppose a number
of speakers. The scenario consists of antithetic pieces, of contrasting forms,
of changing values. Variations on a theme. Raising the pitch. Moving to the
climax. Interruptions, dissonances”.7 This Peter Weiss text was shared with
the participants during the workshop, and we read it as a group, discussed
it in depth and even critiqued many of its outdated ideas such as documen-
tary theatre and its ability to explain reality in detail.
As a practitioner of documentary theatre, I lean towards a nuanced, even
complex understanding of the form, and the following statement accurately
captures the essence of my artistic practice.

The once trenchant requirement that the documentary form should

necessarily be equivalent to an unimpeachable and objective witness to
public events has been challenged in order to situate historical truth as
an embattled site of contestation. Indeed, documentary performance
today is often as much concerned with emphasising its own discursive
limitations, with interrogating the reification of material evidence in
performance, as it is with the real-life story or event it is exploring.8

Yours truly,

Anuja Ghosalkar

P.S. My documentary theatre practice is deeply linked to the ephemeral

and dynamic idea of the archive – a live site where materials mix with
memory, paper crumbles, words vanish, photographs blur and sound fades
to make way for newer, recently discovered documents.
136 Anuja Ghosalkar
(Kindly read this aloud)

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.9

Notes
1 Page 1, Arundhati Roy – The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation
of Caste: The Debate Between B. R. Ambedkar and M. K. Gandhi. Haymarket
Books Publication 2017.
2 Page 18, Scene 10 – Lady Anandi. Written by Anuja Ghosalkar 2016. It is a
story of Anuja Ghosalkar’s great grandfather, Madhavrao Tipnis, a female
impersonator in late nineteenth-century Marathi theatre. This is an excerpt.
3 Page 116, Remembering Toward Loss: Performing and so There Are Pieces. Rivka
Syd Eisner in Remembering: Oral History Performance, edited by Della Polock,
afterword by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2005
4 Rimini Protokoll: https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project/experten-
des-alltags.
5 Page 88, “The Use of Media in Documentary”, Carol Martin, Get Real –
Documentary Theatre Past and Present, edited by Alison Forsyth and Chris
Megson. Published by Palgrave Macmillan 2009.
6 Page 18, Bodies of Evidence, Carol Martin, Dramaturgy of the Real on the World
on Stage, edited by Carol Martin, published by Palgrave Macmillan 2010.
7 Page 43, Peter Weiss. This text was originally delivered as a paper to the Brecht-
Dialogue held at the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin, 12–16 February. It was sub-
sequently published in Theater Heute, March 1968. Translated by Heinz Bernard.
8 Page 3, “Introduction”, Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson, Get Real –
Documentary Theatre Past and Present, edited by Alison Forsyth and Chris
Megson. Published by Palgrave Macmillan 2009.
9 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48597/burning-the-old-year Naomi
Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year” from Words Under the Words: Selected
Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995).
11 Archiving Tamasha and Lavani
through Performance
Sharvari Sastry and Savitri Medhatul

Section I: Archiving Tamasha and Lavani through Theatre

Introduction
Provisionally, tamasha may be described as a popular, composite, travelling
entertainment programme, usually performed in towns and villages on tem-
porary stages and tents. Lavani, a genre of (usually erotic) poetry, music and
dance, is a standard element – among others, including an invocation, a skit,
a commentary, a farce, etc. – of tamasha, but is also performed independently
in non-tamasha contexts. Tamasha and lavani have a long history that dates
back at least 300 years; while there is no clear consensus on their origins, it
is widely understood that these forms first flourished under the patronage
o*f the Peshwa rulers (1674–1818) and were largely performed by mem-
bers of the so-called low-caste Mahar, Mang-Matang and Kolhati commu-
nities. On account of its immense popularity and extraordinary versatility,
tamasha has frequently been used for political mobilization, as reflected in
the social awareness campaigns of nineteenth-century anti-caste social
reformer Jotiba Phule, who adapted the tamasha into a new politicized
genre called the jalsa, which was then adopted, with some alterations, by
the anti-caste movement led by Dr B.R. Ambedkar. Throughout the twenti-
eth century, many governmental and political organizations had dedicated
cultural squads called ‘kala pathaks’ that performed tamashas targeting
specific sociopolitical issues.1 In 1948, the Bombay State sanctioned an offi-
cial ban on tamasha on charges of obscenity; the decades that followed
were marked by sustained attempts, especially on the part of upper-caste
intellectuals and artists, to preserve, revive and reform these forms.2 The
scholarship of Sharmila Rege and Veena Naregal documents the multiple
ways in which the reformatory attempts spearheaded by the Tamasha
Sudharana Samiti (Committee for Tamasha Reforms) since the 1950s have
dictated the modern historiography of tamasha and further marginalised
lower-caste tamasha and lavani performers. However, from the 1950s and
’60s onwards, there was yet another domain where contesting claims were
being made about how tamasha may be reformed, revived and archived –
namely, theatre.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-13
138 Sharvari Sastry and Savitri Medhatul
“Tamasha has slunk into the theatre”: the hybrid genre of the “tamasha
play”.
As noted earlier, the repurposing of tamasha towards various dramatic
ends has a long and complex history – dating back to the satyashodhak
jalsa – that is beyond the scope of this chapter to summarize; however, from
the 1950s onwards, tamasha increasingly became not only a formal trope
but also an important thematic concern in various proscenium-style Marathi
plays. Such “tamasha plays” steadily gained popularity throughout the
1960s, in part fuelled by the larger national post-independence zeitgeist,
which actively patronized and celebrated the revival of ‘precolonial’ cul-
tural forms, and in part, arguably, as a response to sociopolitical and cul-
tural transformations effected by the Samyukta (Unified) Maharashtra
Movement, which resulted in the formation of the linguistically demarcated
state of Maharashtra in 1960.3 There was, however, one play that was rec-
ognized as having pioneered this aesthetic ‘revolution’ by reinventing the
tamasha in the format of a compact, scripted proscenium play, in order to
make it accessible to educated, ‘white-collared, middle-class’ theatre-going
audiences: namely, Vasant Sabnis’ Viccha Mazi Puri Kara (Fulfill My
Desires, 1965).4 This play was written with the express aim to restore lok
kala (folk/popular art) to its allegedly lost status as a powerful, popular
medium. In the foreword to the printed text, Sabnis writes,

Folk theatre [lok kala] is a very powerful form; but over the course of
time it has become neglected. It has to change with the times, without
losing its essence. Because that has not happened, this form has fallen
behind. Therefore – with the conviction that it is only by eliminating
the undesirable and vulgar elements that have entered this form, and
situating it within a modern context will this form achieve popularity
again – I have written a few skits [vags].5

Structurally, the play follows the form of a conventional tamasha, complete

with a gan (invocation), gavalan (Radha-Krishna-themed farce), batavani
(commentary), vag and, of course, lavani. The longest and most convention-
ally ‘dramatic’ aspect is the vag, which revolves around a fabulistic plot
about a havaldar (constable) who wants to become an inspector and con-
spires with his lover, the dancer Mainavati, to con the current Kotwal into
stealing the king’s bed and getting arrested for the crime. Hilarious and
entertaining as this skit is, interspersed with lavanis performed by Mainavati,
it is in the batavani that the play offers an elaborate meta-commentary on
the tamasha. It is structured as a dialogue between a lekhak (playwright)
and a shahir (A balladeer/troubadour), in which the former offers sugges-
tions on how to improve the tamasha, many of which are rebuffed or mis-
understood by the shahir. Although the pedantic lekhak is clearly intended
as a caricature, his exhortations to cleanse tamasha of its excessive vulgarity
resonate with Sabnis’ remarks in the foreword. It is worth pointing out that
the lekhak – and by extension Sabnis – doesn’t call for the expurgation of
 Archiving Tamasha and Lavani 139
all risqué elements from tamasha; rather, through a very elaborate metaphor
of a desirable woman, he advocates that these be made less profane. The
playwright first poetically evokes the image of a prototypically beautiful
woman – with a graceful, delicate body, majestic face, golden complexion
and deep eyes – and asks the shahir to conjure her up in his imagination. He
then uses the standard batavani trope of inversion, employing similar poetic
conceits to imbue the woman with diametrically opposite characteristics:

LEKHAK: Shahir, continue to hold this woman before your eyes –

SHAHIR: Held –
LEKHAK: Shahir, now if you invert the woman’s form –
SHAHIR: Invert? The woman is the same, right?
LEKHAK: Yes, the woman is the same…
SHAHIR: Ok then do what you want…
LEKHAK: Shahir, how do you invert her form? [Recites] “From her nose, the
dangling of snot…”6

Interspersed with the shahir’s protestations and wisecracks, the playwright

composes an entire poetic verse describing this ‘inverted’ beauty, complete
with dangling snot, lice-infested hair, dirt-ringed neck, wax-stuffed ears,
bearing an overall shabby countenance and reeking of sweat. The shahir,
who has been fruitlessly waiting for a real-life woman to materialize on
stage, is duly aghast at this description and objects to the playwright’s soph-
istry. The playwright explains that just as a woman is only appealing when
she is ‘proper’ in appearance and countenance, so too, the comedic and the
erotic (i.e., vinod and sringar) are only appealing when they are presented
with propriety. When the shahir expresses scepticism about such a possibil-
ity, the lekhak offers him a script that conforms to these standards; in many
ways, Viccha fulfils those criteria perfectly, replete with vinod and shringar,
at times suggestive, but well within the bounds of bourgeois respectability.
Viccha emerged as something of a popular classic of the Marathi stage,
with the original production completing over 1,200 shows, that by one esti-
mate was watched by more than one million people, only to be followed by
a number of revivals and adaptations for the stage and the screen.7 Its mas-
tery is that it works at a curious double register: it satirizes the gentrification
of tamasha, even as it in some measure participates in it. The play expresses
an overt interest in restoring tamasha to its original vigour, and in so doing,
it evinces a sincere belief in the recuperative powers of performance.
However, it conspicuously elides any mention of caste, despite the fact that
tamasha is widely recognized as being originally performed by so-called
lower-caste artists. The only artist mentioned in the play, as representative
of the lavani and tamasha tradition, is the ‘great man’ Patthe Bapurao; this
gesture must be read in the context of the concerted effort, from the 1940s
onwards, to canonize the work of Brahmin-born poet Patthe Bapurao at the
expense of other, equally prolific, lower-caste shahirs.8 In a somewhat simi-
lar vein, Viccha was credited with many ‘firsts’ – such as developing the
140 Sharvari Sastry and Savitri Medhatul
loknatya (a hybrid genre that recasts of rural, ‘folk’ traditions like the tama-
sha within a modern, urban idiom for city audiences) and being the first to
perform them in indoor auditoria as opposed to in open-air grounds. These
claims to novelty overlook the contributions of radical poet-performers like
Annabhau Sathe (who is said to have coined the term ‘loknatya’ and per-
formed them widely), or Shahir Sable, whose politically charged tamasha
plays were introduced into indoor auditoria in the 1950s. However, one
aspect of Viccha that was indeed remarkably novel was its profound self-re-
flexivity and meta-commentary on the tamasha form.
The self-conscious interspersing of tamasha and drama (i.e., ‘natak’) that
Viccha enacted and announced was echoed in various plays throughout the
1960s and 1970s, such as Katha Akalechya Kandyachi (Tale of the Half-
Wit, 1969) by Shankar Patil and more scathingly in Datta Bhagat’s Avarta
(Whirlpool, 1976). The plot of Bhagat’s play exposes caste-based oppres-
sion, primarily through a retelling of the legend of the seventeenth-century
poet-saint Tukaram, involving his (fictional) son Manohar. Manohar’s
transgressive plan to enter the Hindu temple (which is forbidden to mem-
bers of the ‘untouchable’ castes, to which Manohar belongs) attracts the ire
of the villagers and the ruling chiefs, and Tukaram and Manohar are ulti-
mately punished for their heresy. The dramatic action is framed by the ban-
ter between two narrators who belong to very different traditions of
performance – a sutradhar (associated with classical/bourgeois drama) and
a songadya (a stock narrator-figure in tamasha). As the play opens, the
songadya assumes a posture of impatient anticipation, peeking into the
wings, obviously waiting for something to happen. When questioned, he
reveals that he is waiting for Radha and the milkmaids to appear since that
is how the show generally begins. The sutradhar then informs him that his
wait is futile; for “nowadays, there is a ban on the Radha-Krishna scene”.
Indeed, these conventional characters do not appear, and the promise of the
gavalan remains unfulfilled. This narratorial commentary continues with
the following exchange:

SONGADYA: Yeshibai’s tamasha has come to town!

SUTRADHAR: If it has come, let it come.
SONGADYA: It has slunk into the theatre
SUTRADHAR: If it has slunk, let it slink.
SONGADYA: It has become “loknatya”
SUTRADHAR: Let it be…what is wrong in that? […] What’s wrong if tama-
sha becomes a little lady-like?
SONGADYA: Lady-like! Who could object to that? But then it’s no longer a
tamasha, it is a drama! [= natak] 9

The appropriation of tamasha, by its conversion into a ‘natak’ performed in

theatres for the entertainment of the middle classes, is interpreted here as a
symptom of wider, enduring caste-based exploitation. The gentrification of
tamasha is presented as an irreversible process that leaves no scope for
 Archiving Tamasha and Lavani 141
return. Although prima facie this play seems to be structured as a tamasha,
none of the elements fully materialize; we never see the ‘Yeshubai’s tama-
sha’ that has supposedly come to town and hear only a vicarious fragment
of Vithabai’s celebrated lavani recited by the songadya. This strategically
unfulfilled dramaturgy does not allow for any sense of optimism about the
potential for preservation through performance. It is worth noting that
while Viccha is never explicitly mentioned in the play script of Avarta, the
theatrical premise and the metaphorical idiom of the banter between the
two narrators reads like an unmistakable satire of Sabnis’ batavani. The
destruction of tamasha is conveyed in more literal terms in Rustom
Achalkhamb’s Kaifiyata (Petition, 1982), a play that is structured as a tama-
sha-within-in-a-play, presented by a shahir to a dramatized audience. The
plot unfolds as a series of chronologically disparate vignettes attesting to
the persistence of caste-based discrimination and culminates in the tamasha
theatre being literally burnt to ashes by the dissatisfied audience members,
as indicated in this final exchange:

SHAHIR: Stop! Don’t be so reckless. Until now, you’ve burnt our houses,
burnt our people, and today you are setting fire to our art as well. Oh,
stop!
THE SECOND ONE: All that’s nothing. Come on, set it on fire. (They set fire
to the theatre. Pandemonium.)10

This issue of the marginalization of Dalit tamasha artists within the larger
cultural landscape finds articulation in different registers. Yogiraj
Waghmare’s Aga Je Ghadalech Nahi, for instance, is also written in the style
of a tamasha and dramatizes the large-scale violence and injustice that
ensues when a shahir, who is granted a favour by the king as a reward for
his talents, requests that a local music school to be renamed in the memory
of his guru. A more recent play, Sex, Morality and Censorship (Gokhale and
Karnik 2008) comments on this phenomenon by drawing parallels between
the censorship of Vijay Tendulkar’s 1972 play Sakharam Binder and the
ongoing gentrification and sanitization of tamasha and lavani. It weaves
together excerpts from Sakharam Binder, dramatic re-enactments of legal
battles, vignettes from old dramas and lavanis. Its intricate and concentric
plot structure cannot bear full summary here, but an essential aspect is that
its professed dramatic framework is based on a tamasha. Interestingly, an
adapted version of the batavani from Viccha is recreated in Sex, Morality
and Censorship to signal testimony to the tenacity and versatility of tama-
sha. Through many such vignettes and anecdotes, two narrator-like charac-
ters, Shahir and Lavanya (a lavani dancer), offer a searing critique of the
hypocritical middle-class morality that threatens the very existence of pro-
vocative forms like the tamasha and lavani. Early in the play, the Shahir
laments, “The satire of social norms, the lampooning of people’s pretences,
the candid discussions of sex – that punch, that chutzpah, where has that
kind of tamasha gone?”11 Over the course of its unfolding, the play attempts
142 Sharvari Sastry and Savitri Medhatul
to retrieve some of “that kind” of tamasha, signalled primarily through the
cultural edification of Lavanya, who learns to develop an appreciation for
the older traditional lavanis, rather than the commercialized filmy ones,
which in turn teach her how to dance for the love of it, and not just for
money.
Thus, even as the play effectively conveys the hazards of censorship
and gentrification, the performance of the uncensored scenes from
Sakharam Binder and ‘traditional’ lavanis offers temporary liberation
from these totalizing forces; the censorship of tamasha is not represented
here as an irreversible process, and play embodies the recuperative
potential that may be harnessed through performance. The role that the
figure of Lavanya plays in this process is especially significant, given that
she is a literal (as her name indicates) embodiment of these performance
traditions. Such dramatized representations of the tamasha artist – espe-
cially the female lavani dancer – also have a longer history within mod-
ern and contemporary Marathi theatre, and are often used as a site to
make claims about how tamasha and lavani ought to be historicized and
memorialized.

A Portrait of the Artist: Representations of the Lavani Dancer

Much like with early Marathi cinema, the lives of famous shahirs provided
the impetus for plots of various stage plays in the mid-twentieth century,
such as Honaji Bala (Yashvant Marathe, 1954), Kavi Anant Phandi
(Vishwanath Gokhale, 1955), Patthe Bapurao (Narayan Bhave, 1957),
Prema, Tujhe Naav Vasana (Lust for Love, S.B. Chavan, 1968, also about
Patthe Bapurao). Some of these plays are no longer readily available, and it
is unclear whether they were ever actually performed. However, the interest
in the lives of tamasha artists – whether real or fictional – has been an
enduring theme on both stage and screen. Many of these plays take the
form of a love triangle involving a married upper-caste man and a tamasha
dancer. For instance, Shantaram Patil’s Aika Ho Aika (Oh Listen to Me,
1951), Gopal Takalkar’s Nartaki (Dancer, 1968), Shankar Patil’s Lavangi
Mirchi Kolhapurchi (A Spicy Temptation from Kolhapur, 1968) R. Bargir’s
Jalimanchi Peekli Karvanda (The Fruit Is Ripe, 1970) are all variations on
the same basic plot. In many of these plays, the lavani dancer is painted as
a charming, but ultimately powerless, character who has no control over
her own destiny. An illustrative example is the lavani dancer Radha’s final
lines in Nartaki, after she is compelled to forsake her love for the upper-
caste shahir who already has a wife:

RADHA: Shahir, some kinds of wood are made into shrines, but some wood
is destined only for burning. … I am one of those! I’ll say one last thing,
Shahir, I’ll always hold on to the companionship of your poems…my
door is forever open to your poetry…(unlocks the latch) I’m leaving!
Shahir, take care of yourself!12
 Archiving Tamasha and Lavani 143
It is in this respect that Tichya Aaichi Goshta, a one-woman show written,
directed and performed by Sushama Deshpande, marks a significant depar-
ture from the trend. This play was written in 1993 and has been continuously
performed for two decades since. 13 As the full title – Tichya Aaichi Goshta
Arthat Majhya Aathavnicha Phad (Her Mother’s Story, or, a Space for My
Memories) – indicates, the play performs a quasi-fictional autobiography of a
lavani dancer. It consolidates months of ethnographic research at Aryabhushan
Tamasha Theatre in Pune into the composite life narrative of Hirabai, a lavani
dancer, and makes an explicit claim about who has the right to record and
disseminate such experiences. The documentary impulse at work here is even
written into the script, for the catalyst for Hirabai’s reflections is that her
journalist daughter Ratna, who has hitherto been ashamed of her mother’s
life and career as a dancing girl, desires to write a feature on her after the
latter receives a prestigious award. Although Hirabai refuses her daughter’s
request, it becomes an impetus for her to “come before you all myself, to have
my say, my way”.14 As the protagonist recounts the experiences of the typi-
cally lower-caste, ostracized tamasha dancer, who is denied many privileges
(such as the right to marriage and family) accorded to bourgeois women, she
frequently exhorts the audience – especially the women who would otherwise
rarely encounter a lavani dancer in a performative context – to bear witness
to, and reflect upon, their complicity in furthering these injustices. The potency
of the play derives in large part from these direct addresses; the play ends with
the protagonist calling upon the audience to take responsibility for her death
rituals and “not allow the caste panchayat to lay a single finger on her
corpse”.15 The particularities of Hirabai’s circumstances – and of Deshpande’s
intervention – arise from the fact that Hirabai is not part of a travelling tama-
sha troupe but is associated with a different form of lavani performance called
sangeet bari. The differences between these two strands will be explained
more fully in the next section, but it is worth pointing out that sangeet bari
artists, who dance for private audiences in exchange for bids, are routinely
characterized as more risqué, even by other female tamasha artists them-
selves.16 In Tichya Aaichi Goshta, the occupational hazards of being a lavani
dancer are presented in conjunction with the empowerment that accrues from
being a domestically unbound, economically independent woman. While
there are a few lavanis interspersed throughout, as a whole, the play is con-
cerned not with the state-of-the-art form per se, but with documenting the
triumphs and tribulations in the lives of the artists who perform it.
This dedicated focus on documenting lavani lives is echoed in Savitri
Medhatul and Bhushan Korgaonkar’s 2015 production Sangeet Bari. The
crucial shift signalled by this work is that Sangeet Bari does not portray
lavani dancers, but features them as collaborators in the production. The
anecdotal journey through their world, facilitated by two narrators, is inter-
spersed with a wide variety of lavanis performed by artists primarily from
the same Aryabhushan Theatre in Pune. Here too, audiences are interpel-
lated to bear witness, to interrogate their own preconceptions and preju-
dices, and to willingly submit to the spell of the lavanis. The process of
144 Sharvari Sastry and Savitri Medhatul
developing this play entailed a serious reckoning with the stereotypical
ways in which lavani dancers are typically represented, with the ethical
stakes of documenting forms like tamasha and lavani and with the affective
power and potential of performance. Approaching these issues through an
artistic, rather than academic, lens has its own peculiar complications.
These issues are further explored in the next section of the chapter, which
reflects on the creative process of making a production about lavani danc-
ers. It is presented as a first-person narrative by Savitri Medhatul, who leads
us through her journey of creating the theatre production Sangeet Bari.

Section II: Sangeet Bari: A Case Study

I am going to share our journey with lavani. When we say ‘our journey’,
that is me, Savitri, and my working partner Bhushan Korgaonkar. We have
been researching and working along with lavani artists since 2006. Our
journey has gone through three stages; we started researching for a docu-
mentary film which was made in 2008. Then a book was published. And
now we have this production. So, I will briefly take you through this jour-
ney. Movies and plays, that’s generally our first exposure to lavani in
Marathi, tamasha films or Madhuri Dixit doing something – that is actually
not lavani, but people think its lavani. So when we started researching
lavani, we realized that the narrative we have is very problematic. So (a)
people don’t know what the real lavani is and (b) the character of the lavani
woman is that she is either a very bad woman who is going to take all your
money and destroy your home, or she is “Tulsi tere angan ki” (i.e., a damsel
in distress) who is exploited by anybody and everybody in her life. But
that’s not how it is. So we went to Aryabhushan theatre, Sushama Deshpande
sent us there. We decided that this is the story that we need to tell and that
was the motivation behind making a documentary film. We researched for
two years and then the documentary film Natale Tumchya Sathi (Behind the
Adorned Veil) was produced in 2008.
Now, I was a new documentary filmmaker, and this was my first film. So
it had all the problems that a first-time filmmaker could have. Starting from
no budget to not having much experience. It’s all about passion, but you
really don’t have much experience. And the other thing was about gaining
trust from people so that they come in front of the camera and talk. Many
of the ‘customers’ who come to these lavani performances refused to be
shot on camera.
Before I go further, I am going to briefly tell you that the lavani artists I
work with belong to the kind of lavani called sangeet bari. This is different
from the tamasha. Tamasha is more of a travelling form and has far more
public performances in open fields in the villages. Tamasha troupes are large,
and every Tamasha group could consist of 50–60 members who travel from
one place to another performing the show for seven to eight months in a year.
Tamasha goes on for the entire night. It starts after nine in the evening and
goes on till early morning. But a sangeet bari is a permanent establishment.
 Archiving Tamasha and Lavani 145
There are these permanent theatres where these artists live 24/7 and there are
performances each evening. There are no narratives or skits. It is simply
entertainment full of lavani songs and dances. Sangeet Bari groups are known
as ‘Parties’, and each Party consists of 10–12 people, including the owner,
dancers, singers, musicians and servants. Each group is owned by women
and is recognized by their name: for example, Shakuntala Purnima Nagarkar
Party, Sunita Anita Dhondraikar Party, Mohana Mumtaz Mhalangrekar
Party. These performances are generally for rich men from upper castes. So it
is contested whether Sangeet Bari can really be called lok kala (folk art)
because the access to these performances is not public. So this is a specific
kind of lavani performance and lavani performer. They come from specific
castes; they follow specific social systems where you once start performing
lavani, you are not allowed to get married and so on. There is a whole big
world out there, which I am not getting into right now. So when I say lavani
and when I say lavani women, I am talking about this form of lavani.
The film we made, Natale Tumchya Sathi, was well-received. But the
problem is that many people don’t agree to be interviewed. And when you
want to screen your film, another issue is, how many people actually want
to watch your film? In India, there are not many documentary film screen-
ings, and not many people come for screenings. We are still struggling with
that but our association with lavani and these women and these artists
continue.
In 2014, Bhusan Korgaonkar, my partner, wrote a book called Sangeet
Bari. It is written in Marathi and at present is being translated into English.
The book had more stories than we could capture in the film. We were able
to change people’s names, so we got far more intimate stories of people that
we could incorporate into the book. But again, the issue of dissemination of
this information comes into the picture. How do you share this? What is the
impact of this data, this archival material that you have created? And we
kept asking ourselves, what was it that made us fall in love with lavani? We
were not able to create that impact either with the film or with the book. The
power of live performance is that it needs to be experienced. And what do
we do about that? Why does any kind of mediation between a lavani artist
(who is telling her own story) and the audience just not work? That’s when
we came up with the concept of doing this theatre production Sangeet Bari.
Now Sushama (Deshpande) had done a theatre production in the 1990s,
which was a one-act play based on her research on lavani, but it was a fic-
tional piece of writing which she chose to present. I have worked with Sunil
Shanbag and I have seen Cotton 56, Polyester 84 and these are the images I
have in my mind. I am a documentary filmmaker, and we all stick to our
comfort zone, which for me, is non-fiction. So we decided that our produc-
tion may not have a typical narrative style a play generally has, but we will
do a production in collaboration with the lavani artists. So we will bring
them on stage; they are an active part of this ‘performance archive’.
This is a collaboration between our theatre group (Kali Billi Productions)
and these lavani artists. In the production, Bhushan and I have our own
146 Sharvari Sastry and Savitri Medhatul
first-person narrative of the exploration of the world of sangeet bari, which
we share with the audience, which in turn, creates a framework to under-
stand sangeet bari. Then we have live performances where these women
come, dance, sing and talk to the audience, interact, haggle, etc. This is the
interactive performance that we have created. At the beginning of the per-
formance itself, we state that there is no fourth wall. This is not your typical
play. If you don’t interact with us, this is not going to work. So audience
interaction is a very important part of our performance.
So who watches these performances? When we shared the idea of doing
this performance, we told the lavani artists that there is your theatre and
there is my type of theatre. Can we build a bridge between the two? And
can we create a synergized effort in bringing you to my theatre and hoping
that audiences from my theatre will come to Aryabhushan?
There is a lot of discussion about bringing acceptance to lavani and how
to keep lavani non-sanitized, but there needs to be a certain degree of
acceptance. All these conversations are ongoing, but the first step is you
start coming and start performing to the people who don’t have access,
who don’t go to these kinds of theatres where lavani is performed, but who
come to watch plays. Let’s give them a taste of what is out there. So we
have a mixed audience. We have “family audiences”, we have men, women
everybody in the audience. Everybody enjoys it equally. Our artists used to
be uneasy, saying “[H]ow do we perform for women? How do we flirt with
women?” They are used to managing men! In the first few shows, they just
avoided looking at women. And then we started having groups of women
coming and whistling. In the intervals, they would come and tell us, “[W]
hy are you not looking at me? I have been whistling for so long! That’s so
not fair! You have to come and flirt with me also”. So gradually, our artists
got around to this idea. This is an art form that can be enjoyed by men and
women equally. We have lot of kitty party women coming to our shows. A
group of 10 to 12 women comes together, and Shakubai (Shakuntalabai
Nagarkar, a veteran lavani artist) gets completely crowded, and they want
to take selfies with her. It’s quite fun! We have as much fun backstage as we
do on stage. The idea was to tell a story but let people tell their own stories
too, to try and reduce the subjectivity as much as possible. There is a cer-
tain framework to this production. There is a certain graph to the produc-
tion. Because all that has to be planned. It has to be in two hours. We have
to give some kind of an emotional graph for the audience so that they feel
something. It is not only for fun. We talk about a lot more serious stuff. So,
all those calculations are absolutely there. But then there is also a lot of
space left for spontaneity, for these women to share that space with the
audience members and connect on a one-on-one basis. And that has been
our effort.
Even when we go for some kind of lecture demonstration, I never go
alone. There is at least Shakubai with me. Even if we have just ten minutes,
she will do at least one song. Because going alone and speaking defeats the
purpose of what we are trying to do.
 Archiving Tamasha and Lavani 147
The documentary film Natale Tumchya Sathi was made ten years ago. We
wondered what to do; can we put it online? And then the problem started.
All the people we interviewed during the filming had asked us “It’s a docu-
mentary film, no? So not many people will watch it”. So if I want to now
share it online, it will need a whole different discussion to be opened with
the people involved in it. I will have to ask if I can share the film online.
Once it’s online, anyone can access it. For instance, an artist, Mohanabai,
was part of our early production. She specifically said, “I will come, do your
shows, but none of the press coverage should have my photo. Because
Marathi papers are read everywhere and I don’t want people from my vil-
lage to know that I am doing this kind of work because of the social stigma
attached to lavani performances”. So, such complications also come up in
this kind of archiving when you are working with the artists. How do you
share their material? ‘Ethics’ is a very big word, but these are some areas we
are negotiating right now.
We have been running shows of Sangeet Bari for three years, and the
show has had a great impact and we have received fantastic response. By
bringing this genre of lavani performance into public auditoriums, but still
maintaining the intimacy of a private baithak, we are able to more widely
share both the art of sangeet bari and the life stories of the artists who
perform it. We hope that it will help to dispel many preconceptions about
lavani dancers and the so-called immorality of their art and lifestyles. This
show has not just touched the lives of people who have watched it but also
the artists who are part of it. It has given them an opportunity to experience
lavani not just as a means of livelihood but also as a creative, collaborative
form of art.

Conclusion
In this chapter, we have attempted to present two perspectives on the ways
in which tamasha and lavani are represented and documented through the-
atrical performance: one in the form of a critical survey and the other as an
artistic reflection. In so doing, we also hope to situate our thinking within
the broader conversation, within theory and practice, about the relation-
ship between performance and the archive. The nature of this relationship
– the uses it can be put to – depends upon the presumed ontological status
of performance: does performance necessarily “become itself through dis-
appearance” thereby leaving no traces? Or does it endure – through embod-
iment, reenactment and prolepsis?17 Critical scrutiny of self-reflexive plays
of the kind indexed in this chapter is fertile for exploring these kinds of
questions. The “tamasha plays” surveyed in this chapter privilege different
aspects of the ontology of performance; some, like Viccha Mazi Puri Kara
and Sex, Morality and Censorship, evince an underlying sense of optimism
about the possibilities of retrieval and return through (re-) performance;
others, like Avarta and Kaifiyata, emphasize the irredeemable and nonre-
productive quality of performance, and some, like Tichya Aaichi Goshta
148 Sharvari Sastry and Savitri Medhatul
and Sangeet Bari, foreground the profound power of live affective transfer.
In adopting an experimental format for this chapter as a collaboration
between researcher and artist, we have tried to further accentuate the fun-
damental ways in which performance and research are co-constituted.

Notes
1 In the jalsas championed by Phule, the conventional erotic lavani was replaced
by songs praising science and education and condemning practices like dowry,
enforced widowhood and so on. The Ambedkari jalsas dropped this element of
entertainment altogether. See Rege, Sharmila, “Understanding Popular Culture:
The Satyashodhak and Ganesh Mela in Maharashtra” Culture and Society (Los
Angeles; New Delhi: SAGE: Indian Sociological Society, 2014), and Rege,
Sharmila, “Some Issues in Conceptualizing Popular Culture: The Case of the
Lavani and Powada in Maharashtra”, Play-House of Power: Theatre in Colonial
India, ed. Lata Singh (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 137.
2 Naregal.
3 From the 1950s onwards, there was a concerted attempt to cultivate an authen-
tically ‘Indian’ cultural sphere for the newly independent nation by reviving
supposedly ‘precolonial’ cultural forms. Within the domain of theatre, such
dramaturgical experiments received extensive state patronage and were galva-
nized into a movement called the “Theatre of Roots” under the leadership of
Suresh Awasthi during the 1970s. See Bharucha, Rustom, Theatre and the
World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London New York: Routledge,
1993); Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava. Theatres of Independence: Drama,
Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 2005); Mee, Erin, Theatre of Roots: Redirecting the Modern Stage
(London: Seagull, 2008); Peterson, Indira Viswanathan and Davesh Soneji,
Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India (New Delhi; New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008. The Samyukta Maharashtra Movement
was a campaign launched in the 1940s to demand the formation of the state of
Maharashtra along linguistic lines, which would be populated by Marathi-
speaking peoples who traced their lineage to the legendary Maratha warrior
king, Shivaji Maharaj (1627–1680). The movement was aimed at displacing the
social and political hegemony of the Brahmins, and securing gains for all
Marathi-speaking non-Brahmins (mostly from middle and non-Dalit lower
castes), who were recognized as constituting the demographic of the ‘Marathas’.
This campaign – which was ultimately successful in 1960 – was the site of a
“remarkable ideological convergence”, bringing together leaders from the radi-
cal communist Left and the conservative nativist Right, who jointly demanded a
monolingual, non-Brahminical dominion. See Hansen, Thomas Blom, Wages of
Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton, N.J:
Princeton University Press, 2001).
4 An obituary written in the wake of Sabnis’ credits Viccha as having started a
“revolution”; see “Viccha Vasant!” Maharashtra Times, 16 October 2002); the
claim that Viccha made tamasha accessible to middle-class viewers is echoed in
virtually every contemporary review and retrospective account of the play, but
his particular formulation is drawn from the reminiscences of Sabnis’ daughter,
Shubhada Shelke. See Shelke, Shubhada, “Lekhache Ghar, Aamche Ghar”, Lalit
(July 1991): 13.
5 Sabnis, Vasant. Viccha Majhi Puri Kara: Gaṇa, Batavaṇi aṇi Vaga. Pune:
Continenta; Prakashan, 1968. This and all other quotations from plays in this
chapter are my translations from the original.
 Archiving Tamasha and Lavani 149
6 A crucial aspect of the pun that is lost in translation here is that in Marathi, the
same word, ‘roop’, can be used to mean ‘form’ or ‘beauty’. Sabnis, Vasant,
Viccha Majhi Puri Kara: Gaṇa, Batavaṇi aṇi Vaga (Pune: Continental Prakashan,
1968), 11.
7 According to Tevia Abrams, a million people had watched the show by 1973.
See Abrams, Tevia, Tamasha: People's Theatre Of Maharashtra State, India
(PhD diss., Michigan State U: UMI, 1974), 120. A Hindi version of the play
entitled “Saiyan Bhaye Kotwal”, translated by Usha Banerjee and directed by
Waman Kendre, premiered in 1987. An English version, entitled “Tempt Me
Not”, also directed by Kendre, was produced in 1993.
8 This phenomenon has been superbly scrutinized by Veena Naregal, who traces
the divergences between the career of Patthe Bapurao, a Brahmin-born poet
who was resurrected and revered, and that of Annabhau Sathe, the radical Dalit
poet, performer and activist, whose ‘subaltern legacy’ has been virtually forgot-
ten. See Naregal, Veena, “Lavani, Tamasha, Loknatya, and the Vicissitudes of
Patronage”, in Marga: Ways of Liberation, Empowerment, and Social Change in
Maharashtra (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 2008).
9 Bhagat, Datta, Avart: Ekanki Sangraha (Vanjirabad, Nanded: Sharada
Prakashan, 1978), 4.
10 Achalkhamb, Rustom, Kaifiyata (Kolhapur: Prachar Prakashan, 1982), 38.
11 Gokhale, Shanta, and Irawati Karnik, Sex, Morality and Censorship”, play
script, Mumbai: 2009, 5.
12 Takalkar, Gopal, Nartaki (Kolhapur: Shetye Prakashan Mandir, 1968), 77.
13 Since 2016, Rajashee Wad has been performing her version of this show, adapted
from Deshpande’s script.
14 Desphande, Sushama, “Tichya Aaichi Goshta”, play script, Mumbai; Pune,
1994, 3.
15 Deshpande, “Tichya”, 39.
16 See Paik, Shailaja. “Mangala Bansode and the Social Life of Tamasha: Caste,
Sexuality, and Discrimination in Modern Maharashtra”. Biography, vol. 40 no.
1, 2017, pp. 170–198.
17 For an account of performance-as-disappearance, see Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked:
The Politics of Performance (London; New York: Routledge, 1993). For varied
perspectives on its ‘staying power’, see Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the
Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003); Schneider, Rebecca, Performing Remains: Art and War
in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011); Bernstein,
Robin, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race.
Social Text 27(4) (2009): 67–94.
12 Narratives of Existence
Witnessing Lived and Imagined Realities
Hina Siddiqui

Introduction
Communities in urban spaces like Pune tend to be fragmented with little to
galvanize populations into any sort of cohesive action. Individuals rely on
hearsay and gossip to build a picture of the people they live among or are
completely ignorant of who their neighbour is. The purpose of my work is
to help people discover, develop and share stories about themselves, their
families, communities and neighbourhoods through community theatre.
The larger point here is that I think we all – as a community/society/nation
need to stop looking at history and culture as impersonal maps on a school
wall, but instead discover our own thread in the tapestry of civilization and
work for its preservation and evolution instead of trying to save/change
everything. The outcome of this work is the collection of various stories
representing personal histories, communal microculture and imagined reali-
ties where the role of the theatre practitioner is to provide the process work
and aesthetic structure that makes the community itself a material archive
of the people who inhabit it – the people are the actors, playwrights, direc-
tors as well as audiences and the community itself is the document they
consistently rewrite.
What this chapter is not:
A treatise on methods of archiving
A formula to archive or to make a tangible document that can be included
in a physical archive
A sentence or so would be required to connect the two points above and
below
A case for or against the politic of whose story is told and by whom. It
however does deeply acknowledge that representation matters
And now that we have established the points we will steer clear of, here
is a summary of what this chapter is instead:
It is a personal story and a way, maybe, of collecting personal stories, not
for publishing, exhibition, performance or any other form of self-­
aggrandizement, or indeed for an archive, but for the sheer purpose of col-
lecting stories. Collecting stories like collecting seeds to create a repository
that may or may not be of use to the future, though it increasingly seems

DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-14
 Narratives of Existence 151
likely to be crucial. Stories of people. And in the process discovering the
value they hold for those whose stories they are.
In that sense, it could be an archive in and of itself.
And a hope of a new, by no means original or singular, way of looking at
the way the arts can interact with the public.
Disclaimer:
We are not the tellers of anyone’s story. We are collectors, indiscriminate
in the act of collecting.
Some Key Definitions:

Community A group of people forming a collective either as a function of

shared geography (a particular neighbourhood) or shared
identity (individuals who identify as queer).
The individuals who participated in Coming Out, even though a lot of them met each other
for the first time in the rehearsal room, are a community by function of shared identity.
Personal Histories Stories, anecdotes, legends and memories that emerge from
individuals within communities that are closely tied to their own
lives, or in some cases that of their family members and/or
ancestors.
One of the women in our labour research described her typical day; it formed a litany as
follows:
5:30 am: Wake up
5:45 am: Go to the local nala/dhobhi ghat to bathe and use the toilet, do her toilet
6:00 am: Report for work at the young woman who has just given birth’s house to cook
7:30 am: Return home, fill water, wake kids
7:45 am: Cook breakfast and lunch
8:00 am: Pack lunches while kids eat breakfast
8:30 am: Escort older child to middle school, bus stop located 20 mins away
9:00 am: Return home, wake husband
9:30 am: Serve husband breakfast
10:00 am: Husband leaves for work; she eats breakfast
10:30 am: Drops younger kid to anganwadi, leave for work
11:00 am: Report for work at the Sindhi man’s house who is insistent that he wants her
to come to Hong Kong with him and work for his family there
12:00 noon: Report to second house, clean, wash, water the plants, feed the dog
1:00 pm: Report to third house, eat lunch provided to her, wash, sweep, clean
2:30 pm: Return home, collect younger child from anganwadi, put him down for a nap
3:00 pm: Clean the house
4:00 pm: Chai and gossip with the neighbours, younger child wakes up, is given milk
and biscuits
5:00 pm: Fill water again, wash utensils and clothes for her house
5:30 pm: Older kid returns home, serve her some snacks
6:00 pm: Older child babysits younger child while mother goes to fetch something to cook
6:30 pm: Cook dinner
7:30 pm: Husband returns home
8:00 pm: Husband watches TV, till dinner is ready
8:30 pm: Dinner
9:00 pm: Put kids to bed
9:30 pm: Cleans vessels, cleans up floor after dinner
10:00 pm: Phone call to mother who is very sick
10:30 pm: Clean up
11:00 pm: Sleep
This was the day that she lived every day for years. It is her personal history and her present.
152 Hina Siddiqui

Authentic From a source who is part of the community theatre process,

concerning their personal history, experience or perception and
in some cases imagination. Not to be confused with factual.
One of the sex workers who was a part of the small community theatre project
we ran at Pune’s Red-­Light area, spoke about why she left her village. She was
drunk at the time, but not overly so. She told us about how it was difficult to
step out of the house in the village after dark because of all the rakshasas in
the fields. The demons started attacking in broad daylight as well and got so
violent that her family stopped tending the fields altogether. The landlord got
angry about this and threw the family out.
As a community theatre practitioner, I am less interested in the veracity or even
the symbolism of this story than in the authenticity of its origin. This story is
an authentic personal history.
Imagined Very often, the lies people tell and the yarns they spin are more
Reality telling than the truth. What was it Oscar Wilde said, “Give a
man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth”? Imagined realities
can also be wishful stories, hopes for the future or downright
fabrications created as a result of a story-­making process.
The key point here is that the narrator, community and
practitioner know that this is a fantasy.
Here is a piece of imagined reality created as a result of a community theatre
process with a group of young women:
Mary loved her feet. At times, she felt like they were all she had. Born with no
arms, she had to learn to live her life on her two feet. But she’d taught them
well. There was very little she couldn’t do with them. Of course, life would
be easier if she had hands but she knew she’d never have feet as beautiful
as they were if she were ‘whole’. She loved her feet.
She’d shave, scrub and moisturize each leg including the toes, heels and soles of
her feet. She knew hers were the best feet in the world. She loved wearing
accessories. But all she could afford were toe rings. She enjoyed playing
games, but her options were few and friends none. She could run, but she
had no one to race with; she could skip, but no one to hold the rope. The one
game she knew she could play forever and more was hopscotch. Before she
learnt to write, holding a pen between her toes, she’d learnt to draw rows of
mismatched squares on the ground so she could play her favourite game. No
one could ever beat her at it, it was the only game she’d ever played.
One night, she woke up in a dream. She knew it couldn’t be real. She was at
the gates of heaven. She entered, timidly at first, but not being able to find
anyone around, she started hopping about, exploring this magical land. She
found what looked like a temple. She entered and laid eyes on the most
beautiful creature, dancing to her own tune with abandon. Mary knew she
was a Goddess the moment she saw her feet. She’d never seen feet more
beautiful than her own, until that moment.
Microculture The specific traditions, religious practices, group behaviours and
beliefs present in a community. Sometimes these microcultures
are very unique and can become a source for excavating
shared personal and communal histories. You can also have
various microcultures within a single community.
The residents of my society chant a hymn to Jhulelal after the Ganesh Aarti
The Muslim and Sikh groups in a neighbourhood where I work both sacrifice
goats when their children reach puberty. But they never speak to each other or
invite the other to their children’s celebrations.
 Narratives of Existence 153
Begin Here…
Oftentimes, the artistic impulse originates in personal experience. When I
was disturbed by episodes of domestic violence in my vicinity, I started
work with a women’s group that provided legal representation for women
looking for counselling or to get out of violent situations at home. I scanned
reports, sat in on interviews and collected stories – some gory, some absurd,
some lacking common sense to an extent that made one wish it was legal to
clank the heads of couples together and point them to the door. I wrote a
play with all these ideas and images – it had armies fighting and children
crying and some poignant poetry, and it never saw the light of day.
Much later, when I ran a theatre workshop for women – innovatively
called Girls, Get Onstage – because I was hard-­pressed to find places where
my experiences as a woman could be shared, much less understood, the line
from stories of domestic abuse to stories of women was so straight that I
think I missed it altogether. The result was 14 women, who had never done
theatre before, leading a small audience on a journey of them. The stories
they shared were about sleepovers where someone thought the house was
haunted, of their first-­time teaching in a class, a first date and the desire to
sleep with men with impunity. I remember after someone in the audience
asked me why the women wore black and red during the immersive show-
case. It represents our menstrual blood, I said. Of course it didn’t, red and
black was simply the most vivid combination all of us had in our ward-
robes. But the deep expressions that greeted my sarcasm were an important
reminder of how rarely people saw women’s stories outside narratives of
blood and darkness.
My discomfort with ideals of beauty and the painful dread of going to a
beauty parlour to be tweezed, plucked and waxed every two weeks led me
to explore the lives of people working in parlours. Though the process itself
involved artists and actors, they worked with and documented the lives of
beauticians, hajam-­champi men and even a few high-­end hairdressers. It
was around this project that the continuous line of people’s narratives
framed in performance began to become more apparent. The pure value in
staging unadulterated stories of people began to make more sense to me
than working with scripts. The idea of an aesthetic framework for real
experiences began to emerge.

Aesthetic Framework
Famous Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami said, “We are not able to
look at what we have in front of us, unless it’s inside a frame”. I believe that
the corollary to that is, to put a frame around something in front of us
makes it visible.
My understanding of an aesthetic framework is best explained through a
very significant project in my practice. I had always been interested in peo-
ple’s stories. What they had to say about themselves was and is, in my
154 Hina Siddiqui
opinion, the most important truth one can encounter – a truth that is purer
than facts or credulous evidentiary support, a truth that is – like the ones
who speak it and the ones who listen – human. To deny this truth is to deny
someone’s humanness. You don’t need to believe it; you simply need to lis-
ten. As storytellers and collectors, I firmly believe, we have the liberty, the
privilege and the responsibility to attract and magnify this truth.
The first time I committed to this idea was when we staged Coming Out
– stories collected from individuals who identified, in one way or the other, as
queer. It was eight months of gruelling work – mainly because it was very
difficult to gather queer voices in a single space and have them commit to a
process. The laws of the nation and stigma perpetuated by the people who
live in it mean queer existence is hard to make visible, Pride Marches not-
withstanding. There is very little anonymity in a theatre process, and a lot of
the people we connected with were not in a position to engage with a room
full of ‘actors’ practicing monologues and movement work. Nonetheless, we
were able to collect over 20 narratives from various spaces and stage 9. Here
are a few excerpts from those, shared with the permission of the tellers. I wish
sorely that we had perfected the technology of adding video content to print
media (like some of those Black Mirror episodes) so I could show as well as
tell, but I have done my best to explain the performance context in words:
Coming Out: A Community Theatre Project of Queer Experience
Coming Out was designed to be a performance exhibition, a tactile expe-
rience of stories told against specifically chosen and visually prepared
spaces. The performance on its own is not enough context, of course,
because it took six months to get there, but the important point to note here
is that the context, like the text, was created in conversation with the nar-
rative’s owner. Sessions in movement, staging and visual art informed those
conversations.

the story
i wasn’t interested.
i wasn’t willing to enter your room.
and yet i trusted, bare conversations and ideas, the legacy
of people’s struggles who died asserting differences, asserting
colours.
i disregarded instincts which came one after another
through experiences of betrayal and yet opened to the idea
of helping you facilitate your own truth.
– Coming Out, Narrative 5

The Framework
The narrator hangs from a window while speaking, well, actually yelling at
the assembled audience about childhood abuse they had experienced. They
fumble the lines, but the rigid risk their body takes to hang on to the iron
framework is half the point anyway.
 Narratives of Existence 155
our conversations were very general:
what he did, what i did; how his day was, how my day was, etc.
however all these conversations would always end with these queer
questions:
what you doing now? where are you? are you alone in your room?
what you wearing? what’s the color of your lingerie?
i didn’t know how to react to these questions!
…
i was trying to absorb just this.
when he took my top off.
i was shocked…
is this right?
did i sign up for this?
it didn’t seem right to me.
…
he continued kissing me, forcefully.
i resisted.
he undid my skirt.
and started touching me between my legs.
while i just lay there waiting for things to get done.
– Coming Out, Narrative 13

It’s dark, the storyteller sits in a small, cramped corner of the building.
A boatload of beer bottles are strewn about. It’s difficult for the audi-
ence to move without stepping on or more likely falling over one. The
performer speaks softly, the audience has to lean in and be quiet if they
want to listen. They miss some of the words. But they are too afraid to
turn to a neighbour and ask what was said.
i sit down and take my pencil out. as i am about to write something,
a friend of mine comes up to me, takes my pencil and breaks it. he says,
“hey you have a pink pencil! gay hai kya?” all i could do was say some-
thing as little as “tu hi rahega woh”. but the damage had already been
done. the whole class burst out laughing and chanting gaytam! gaytam!
gaytam! gaytam! i started paying attention to what the english teacher
was saying because…i didn’t want to cry.
– Coming Out, Narrative 19

The narrator has a superhero mask painted on in glittery pink. Glass covers
one side of the gallery. You can see the street outside. And on the glass hang
stringed cut-­outs of pink figures. And immediately behind hang comments
thrown at queer bodies all the time.

Love’s eyes
were sad
love could sing
love wrote
156 Hina Siddiqui
love was struggling with depression and anxiety
all love wished for
was to get through an hour without tripping over their own feet.
love was the definition of perfection
nor was love the definition of happiness…
love speaks,
dresses,
walks,
and looks
a little bit
like,
me.
– Coming Out, Narrative 8

There is a wistful look on the face of the performer. They stare at the ceiling
and smile. Behind them hangs a purple flag lit by fairy lights.
These stories were linked to experiences of coming out, in some cases
being forced out of the closet and became a small archive of lived experi-
ence among individuals who participated in and came to watch the process.
The methodology, of course, is nothing new; however, the idea was not just
to stage personal stories but to come together to witness them as well. It is
in having your truth witnessed that you at some level come to accept it and
thereby deal with it. This principle is in fact the basis of group therapy and
support group sessions. We simply added theatre to the mix to make the
entire experience – of recounting personal history, developing narratives,
sharing and witnessing– more aesthetic and interesting.
We sold out shows; we sold out workshops after that – which for an art-
ist is a very good thing; we attracted backlash from the prominent queer
activists of the city, which is always a great indicator of the impact your
work is having, and we moved forward in the process, working with a team
that now not only enacts stories but also witnesses them and gathers them
from their own circles.
The reason I segued into this description of what was officially
Orchestrated Q’s (OQ) first community theatre project is twofold – one
because this chapter is the story of my lived experience and as such need not
conform to any linearity, and secondly, the difficulty we faced gathering
people to stage these stories made me question the role of theatre in build-
ing community. Two other things happened in that phase.
First, I moved into a place of my own in a residential society in the middle
of the city. I had friends in the neighbourhood; my workplace was just
around the corner, as was the cool sector of the city – all in all, it was a very
convenient location. And as I adjusted to a new lifestyle of self-­care, I
couldn’t help but notice that no one from this society of hundreds came to
talk to me, much less walk through the doors with the proverbial casserole.
Of course, there were the curious ones who came to ascertain whether the
single, working woman living in E2 was a hazard to the decorum of the
 Narratives of Existence 157
society with oblique questions about my profession and family; there were
the mandatory visits from do-­gooders intent on letting me know the right
place to dispose of garbage (because obviously, I had been doing it wrong),
and once or twice, loan sharks came by to make absolutely sure that I
wasn’t a front for the defaulter who lived here before me, and the wargani
collectors visited – because, of course.
But none of them came to meet me – stop by for a cup of chai, talk about
the weather, you know, that sort of thing? In short, as juvenile as it sounds,
none of them wanted to make friends.
The second thing was that I started working in a basti. I grew up in one,
so my privilege was not rocked too hard, but it was a question – in these
close confines, what value did the practice of process work and story-­
collection truly represent? And questions larger than that even. How can
the storyteller-­ witness space pave the path for long-­ term inter-­
connectedness and communal care? And yes, there are papers a plenty
that talk about the health and psychological benefits of theatre in com-
munal spaces, and I read some of them, but I was looking more for a sense
of how can community theatre help build an economy of care – the only
kind of economy that works for the people in this neo-­capitalist dawn of
civilization?

Questions:
What role do artists play in building community?
How much of the artist do you see in the final product or production?
Does there need to be a final product or production?
What value do the personal histories and cultural events hold for the people
they belong to?
How can an artist instigate a storyteller-­witness space that perpetuates ad
infinitum?
How can a community frame its own narratives of existence and
microculture?
How do we look at these narratives in the context of the larger society, city,
nation they are part of?
Can we take responsibility for our stories and stop trying to tell everyone
else’s?
Can this become our new way of looking at history, anthropology and
maybe even archives?

I have a growing list of questions, some of which are listed above. The
search for answers is an inevitable descent down a rabbit hole of research,
trial-­and-­error, assessments and redefinitions. Maybe it need not necessarily
be an uncontrolled descent. Maybe it is a freefall that goes on forever.
Maybe the search is the answer. These are a few other organizations that
work with communities, whose work I follow closely.
Jagran, founded by Aloke Roy, teaches mime to young people from low-­
income neighbourhoods and migrant communities in Delhi.
158 Hina Siddiqui
Katkatha Puppetry, run by Anurupa Roy and based in Delhi, regularly
does work in conflict zones and with at-­risk children.
Centre for Community Dialogue and Change, run by Radha Ramaswamy
and based in Bangalore, works with senior citizens and mental health.
Dharavi Art Room, founded by Aqui and Himanshu, uses art-­based pro-
cesses to work with children and women in the infamous neighbourhood of
Dharavi.
Aagaaz Theatre Trust, founded by Sanyukta Saha, is based in Delhi’s
notorious Nizamuddin Basti.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but even a cursory reading of
the work of these organizations gives a certain context in which community
theatre operates in India. It also speaks about how we choose to define
individual, community and even theatre and most importantly gives insight
into the socio-­economic and class politics at work.
Thus, community theatre as a practice is about presenting the everyday
because that’s where we live, but the very act of presenting makes the every-
day valuable – not just as a narrative but as everyday. The focus of our
current projects is to look at ways of doing so – of making the community
itself a material archive of people who live within it, a document commu-
nity members consistently rewrite. The approaches to this are multi-­
disciplinary, drawing on the expertise and experience within the community
but also introducing the artistic process from outside if necessary. The two
projects we are currently undertaking – with a group of older women deal-
ing with mental health issues and in a low-­income neighbourhood – should
yield rich data and examples on exactly how one can weave personal histo-
ries and microcultures into a long-­term narrative of existence for a com-
munity. We want to create an archive of lived and imagined realities in a
community for the community to witness and thereby process, draw
strength and pride from and be motivated to preserve, nurture and develop.
From the personal to the communal through theatre.
Though I can’t yet share examples from the work we are doing as of now,
I want to leave the reader – who has stuck around till the end as well as the
one who has skipped straight to it, with another list of questions, a practical
one this time – to ask/seek answers to in order to begin thinking of activat-
ing their own community and communal archiving process. I’ve already
made some headway applying this to where I live, and if nothing else, at
least I know a few people here on a first-­name basis, which for someone like
me, is unimaginable progress.
For more details, discussions and debates, as well as critiques, additions
and corrections, please do get in touch with me at hinaqui@gmail.com. I
don’t claim to know everything (or indeed anything), but we could take this
leap together.

Begin here…for real this time

(In no specific order of importance)

 Narratives of Existence 159
Who are the people?
Where are they from?
How did they get here?

What do the children do?

Do they go to school and then stay indoors?
Do they get into fights?
Can you make friends with them without being a creep?

What animals do you see?

How are they treated?
Why?

Where does the money in the community come from?

How far do people travel to make it?
What do they wish they were doing instead?

Where do the daughters-­in-­law come from?

How is the housework divided?
Who makes the money in a house?
Who spends it?

What do the old people do?

Are they ignored? If they are, talk to them, they’ll have wild tales,
trust me.
Are they well-­looked after? Still talk to them.

Who do the people gossip about?

What do they say?
What do the people who are gossiped about say?

Who are the artists, artisans and craftsmen?

Can you involve them in making something?
Can you find some money for them to make that something?

Who visits the neighbourhood?

What for?

And most importantly,

How can you ask these questions without seeming like the nosiest busy-
body ever to grace the planet?
Part III

Design and Directorial

Methods of Creation
13 C’est la CEPT
Archiving the Archive
Ishita Jain, Harsh Bhavsar and Gavin Keeney

Introduction

If I speak in the spirit of this time, I must say: no one and nothing can
justify what I must proclaim to you. […] I have learned that in addition
to the spirit of this time, there is still another spirit at work, namely that
which rules the depths of everything contemporary. The spirit of this
time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and
my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces neverthe-
less to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning. […] The spirit of
the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed
them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical.
– C. G. Jung, Red Book

1 We shall now tune into the frequencies along which the temporal scale
operates. We shall reach into the space that is called the ‘Past’. It might
be found along the horizontal time axis and can be located by following
more of the same. To the keen observer, sometimes an arch may be vis-
ible, that reaches into the future. To the believer, the arch shall present
itself, into the ‘Now’.
2 Under this arch, is the space of the ‘Present’, or we may choose to call
it the ‘Archive’. We will stop to look at a locked closet called ‘Evidence’.
We will reach into our dark pockets and change the lock. Let the lock
now read, ‘Chance’. The changing of the lock will lead to a change in
the closet itself. It shall no longer be a wooden closet, opaque, filled to
the brink with documents – historical detritus. We will see its transfor-
mation into constellations, knitted like the verses of a poem and not
tied like the beads of a rosary. We shall, now, be able to weave ourselves
within the Evidence. The Present shall be freed, slowly becoming the
here and now. The Archive shall no longer be bound to the past.
3 A winged angel guards the gates of Now. We shall pay our respects to
the angel before passing through. The angel shall appear to be a holo-
gram. The points of input to generate the forms of the outline of the
angel shall not be visible. A debate will ensue over the identity of the

DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-16
164 Ishita Jain et al.
angel. Few will refuse to recognize it. As we stand there, we shall bear
witness to its changing forms from Klee’s Angelus Novus to Benjamin’s
Angel of History, to Gershom Scholem’s Angelus Satanus. Nonetheless,
its wings shall seem inadequate for flight of any kind. It shall appear
suspended, like a marionette. Many of us may decide to turn back due
to this encounter with uncertainty. They shall call it ‘Chaos’. The few
who decide to stay shall witness the angel changing form again, con-
tinuously, no longer recognizable. We may decide to put some distance
between the angel and ourselves. One of us shall decide to stay a
moment longer. At that moment, we discover the controls for the form
of the angel. We shall be able to see through the one who had allowed
himself a moment longer with the angel. They now looked the same,
except for the small microchip that we all might be able to see in the
transparent outline of the man’s body. We shall all huddle closer, and
become outlines. The gates open.
4 We shall endeavour to occupy the Now. Standing at its gates, we will
see that shadows, silhouettes and reflections populate it. The shadows
from beyond the gates might tell us that the ‘Now’ is the densest in the
time scale. Bachelard calls it the ‘poetic instant’, from where the vertical
time shoots off, releasing the occupants from the chronological move-
ment along the time axis. Free of causation, we shall start becoming
aware of ‘irruptions’ – solar flares. One shall become many, and many
shall be compressed into one. We shall catch a glimpse into the nature
of generative narratives, narrativity itself. Tales shall be born of the
same womb, but become very different animals. Man and animal shall
become one, as in archaic illuminated manuscripts of Paradise. In the
‘Now’, we may find ourselves becoming limbs of these beasts, enabling
them to walk or fly, or we may sometimes become the bigger beasts and
full of ourselves, consuming the narratives to satiate our hunger. In the
‘Now’, we shall discover the lives of these narratives when they live in
us. Perhaps, we may fill the voids in the wings of the angel at the gate.
Perhaps, it may fly again and with it, so shall we.
5 Inside the ‘Now’, we shall experience simultaneity. We will have been
enabled to experience the chronological horizontal time while crossing
over into a vertical, non-causal time. We will ascribe it to the spatial
experience of being in the collective landscape called Archive. We will
use a shadowy medium to register the various agencies that make visit-
ing the Archive a type of séance – the source, the space, the extensions;
all incomplete without the lost subjective states of those who created
the record, with their internal landscapes, activating presences with
their being present in the ‘poetic instant’ and creating it, simultane-
ously; the rupture of the screen between the individual and collective
landscape. The medium shall be transmedia. The rupture shall be trans-
media. We shall be transmedia.
6 This transmediatic Archive shall create a bequest of agencies, and not
just artefacts. Its collective landscape will be made internal, emotional
and intellectual, not just historical. The spectral agency of transmedia
 C’est la CEPT 165
shall transform the performance into an activation process. It shall
make the invisible visible, by being aware. Transmedia shall transform
the bequest into an active, yet shadowy agency – a living bequest. We
shall bow to it to curate ‘it’ perpetually. Transmedia shall ask a ques-
tion, “What is ‘It’”? We shall hope to answer, “‘It’ is the angel’s wings.”

Being Doshi

The Glass Bead Game, formerly the specialized entertainment of math-

ematicians in one era, philologists or musicians in another era, now
more and more cast its spell upon all true intellectuals. […] After
Joculator Basiliensis’ grand accomplishment, the game rapidly evolved
into what it is today: the quintessence of intellectuality and art, the
sublime cult, the unio mystica of all separate members of the Universitas
Litterarum. In our lives it has partially taken over the role of art, par-
tially that of speculative philosophy.
– Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

When we started the Badminton Building project, we had no idea what we

were in for, probably just like B.V. Doshi and Bernard Kohn, who had
started the “School of Architecture” there in the early 1960s, later to become
CEPT University.1 Doshi has often stated, whenever he has the opportunity,
that in those days, “We were all Gandhians”. “We were concerned.” No
degrees, no salaries, no real plan.2
The Badminton Building project, dubbed C’est la CEPT, was prepared in
association with Archiprix International 2017, a Netherlands-based ‘space-
ship’ that drops out of the sky every year to unpack its wares of design
competition, workshops, lectures, exhibitions and graduate architecture
awards. Archiprix hit CEPT in February 2017 and C’est la CEPT was borne
aloft as a ‘fringe’ festival – caught in a cyclone of sorts.3
The theatrical-cinematic events of this fringe were modestly mapped out,
and then typical Indian chaos set in. Students received no academic credit
for participation, and there was zero budget. All equipment was borrowed,
as was the Badminton Building, the latter from M. G. Science Institute.
Events unfolded like clockwork, 6:30 to 9:30 pm the designated time-
frame, albeit a demented clock that started ticking in late January and con-
tinued through mid-February. Eight sessions occurred, with “Emptiness
within Emptiness”, as an archival record – i.e., a 9-minute, 22-second video
of the key sessions and a submission to “Empty Pr(oe)mises”, a design com-
petition for an empty new museum in Athens, Greece, never opened because
of the Eurozone financial crisis. “Emptiness within Emptiness” was orches-
trated to Brian Eno’s Lux (2012) – ambient music that perfectly matched
the ambient conditions of the semi-abandoned Badminton Building just off
the current CEPT campus.
“Being B. V. Doshi” suggests turning on a dime and invoking past and
future through a dynamic present that also never quite exists – it is all
Kahnian. It is also all very spectral in nature – preternatural or
166 Ishita Jain et al.
preter-utopian. C’est la CEPT started with 18 images from the 1960s exper-
iment in architectural longing, images borrowed from CEPT Archives. It
then flew towards the stars and landed squarely back on Earth as a cine-
matic record to be archived, at CEPT Archives, but also to be shown wher-
ever and whenever time permits.

Decoupage Integrale

All black-and-white images courtesy of Harsh Bhavsar.

 C’est la CEPT 167
Cleaning the Badminton Building

Figure 13.1 The dance begins….

Figure 13.2 On 30 January 2017, standard A1 foam-core boards intercept pro-

jected images from the 1960s.
168 Ishita Jain et al.

Figure 13.3 A badminton game and the cleaning of the Badminton Building pro-
ceed on parallel planes.

Figure 13.4 A ballet of boards ensues.

 C’est la CEPT 169

Figure 13.5 Students engaged in the badminton game and cleaning intercept their
own images.

Figure 13.6 Ghosts of CEPT’s past emerge from the shadows.

170 Ishita Jain et al.

Figure 13.7 The dean of architecture rides through on a broom.

Figure 13.8 Death pays a visit and then departs.

 C’est la CEPT 171

Figure 13.9 The session ends with his departure.

Gurus, Gopis and Celebrity Architects

Figure 13.10 Moses intercedes on Doshi’s behalf.

172 Ishita Jain et al.

Figure 13.11 On 3 February 2017, a banned image of B. V. Doshi (“Moses”) is

projected.

Figure 13.12 The image sponsors a reading with accompaniment by classical guitar.
 C’est la CEPT 173

Figure 13.13 The text read concerns ‘gurus and gopis’, adoration and institutional
memory.

Figure 13.14 Institutional memory in this case includes repressions (the banned

image).
174 Ishita Jain et al.

Figure 13.15 The reading is punctuated by two interludes on guitar.

Figure 13.16 Students in the audience have no clue what is taking place.
 C’est la CEPT 175

Figure 13.17 The reading continues with an interpretation as to why Michelangelo

gave Moses horns.

Figure 13.18 The reading closes with comments from a Greek chorus of two.
176 Ishita Jain et al.
Silent Lecture

Figure 13.19 A wordless lecture on classical Indian architecture is staged….

Figure 13.20 On 4 February 2017, a lecture without words is performed.

 C’est la CEPT 177

Figure 13.21 Music includes Dido, A. R. Rahman, and Sigur Rós.

Figure 13.22 Images of historic Indian architecture serve as the backdrop for a rit-
ual dance of hands and bodies.
178 Ishita Jain et al.

Figure 13.23 Gestures comprise an elaborate secret language of assignation and

affiliation.

Figure 13.24 The images are intercepted with a lace curtain found on the streets of
Ahmedabad.
 C’est la CEPT 179

Figure 13.25 Perspective, parallax and anamorphism hold sway.

The King’s Judgement

Figure 13.26 Relics from the past sponsor a kite-flying contest….

180 Ishita Jain et al.

Figure 13.27 On 5 February 2017, an indoor kite flying contest is staged.

Music by Dirty Three, Ocean Songs (1998), echoes within the

Figure 13.28 
Badminton Building.
 C’est la CEPT 181

Figure 13.29 Archival images from the 1960s of faculty and students playing games
of chance form a backdrop.

Figure 13.30 The tournament is judged by King Sachin Soni, his throne an heirloom
wooden stool from the 1960s.
182 Ishita Jain et al.
Waiting for Doshi

Figure 13.31 The word “SILENCE” is written with yellow plastic tape on the floor….

Figure 13.32 On 7 February 2017, a rumour that Doshi will stop by spreads like
wildfire.
 C’est la CEPT 183

Figure 13.33 Students arrive at the Badminton Building around 6:30 pm and await
his appearance.

Figure 13.34 And wait.

184 Ishita Jain et al.

Figure 13.35 And wait.

Figure 13.36 And wait.

 C’est la CEPT 185

Figure 13.37 And wait.

Figure 13.38 The Badminton Building resembles a temple or a mausoleum.

186 Ishita Jain et al.

Figure 13.39 A young lady performs a dance between candles set between the let-
ters S I L E N C E.

Figure 13.40 The hall and the mood darkens.

 C’est la CEPT 187

Figure 13.41 Boredom and impatience set in.

Figure 13.42 Several students, pacing, decide to leave.

188 Ishita Jain et al.

Figure 13.43 Others are hanging on, catnapping, awaiting Doshi’s arrival.

Figure 13.44 It becomes unbearably tedious and pointless.

 C’est la CEPT 189

Figure 13.45 A feeling of expulsion from the Garden of Eden sets in.

Credits
Perpetual Curation and Direction: Gavin Keeney, with Owen O’Carroll,
Harsh Bhavsar and Ishita Jain
Production and Permissions: Gauri Wagenaar, Mihir Jagdish, Minal
Marathe and Anne Feenstra
Technical Support: Ahmedabad Education Society, M.G. Science Institute,
L.D. Arts College, NID, CEPT Campus Office and CEPT IT
Set Design: B. V. Doshi, Gavin Keeney and Marta Agueda Carlero
C’est la CEPT Troupe: Antonin Lenglen, Juan Gutierrez Sanchez, Marta
Agueda Carlero, Alexandre Guerin, Matteo Farina
Guest Appearances: Mansi Shah, Harshal Maheshkumar Kandoi, Mihir
Jagdish, Sachin Soni, Tulsi Patra Theatre Group, Aditya Gandhi, Ishaan
Dixit, Darshita Jain, Priyal Thakkar, Anne Feenstra, Ajit Desai, “B.V.
Doshi”, Sri Dadadadadada et al.
Principal Photography: Harsh Bhavsar, Ishita Jain, Priyanka Kumari,
Aniket Ahuja, Rajkumar Dindor and Elsa Thomas
Archival Photographs: CEPT Outreach, CEPT Archives
Improvisational, Ambient, Post-Rock, and World Music: Courtesy of
Aditya Gandhi, Brian Eno, Dirty Three, Sólstafir, Dido and A. R. Rahman,
and Sigur Rós
Audio Recording: “Interview with Mademoiselle ‘X’” (Gavin Keeney and
Krishna Shastri)
Public Relations: Danaë Consultancy; CEPT Outreach
190 Ishita Jain et al.
Technical Specifications
Badminton Building/L.D. Arts College Gymkhana Hall (courtesy of
Ahmedabad Education Society, M.G. Science Institute, and L.D. Arts
College, designed by B.V. Doshi c. 1962, semi-ruined c. 2017); a murder of
crows (outside); one eagle (outside); circling hawks (outside); roosting
pigeons and one feral cat (inside); nocturnal ants (inside); protesting rats
(inside a carpet); one Epson 3LDC projector (courtesy of CEPT IT); one
junk HP laptop computer with viruses (courtesy of CEPT Faculty of
Planning, subsequently “lost”); one junk sound box with wireless micro-
phone (courtesy of CEPT IT); SONY ICD handheld voice recorder (cour-
tesy of CEPT IT); three state-of-the-art MacBook laptop computers and
two flat-screen monitors (courtesy of Owen O’Carroll, Mansi Shah, and
Harsh Bhavsar); one 50-metre extension box and miscellaneous extension
boxes, lamps and fluorescent tubes with fixtures (courtesy of CEPT Campus
Office); one found sheet of white canvas (in situ); two ancient wooden
doors (courtesy of CEPT Archives, removed from CEPT administration
block c. 2013); several found ancient wooden tables (in situ, including one
massive table utilized for the stage); two ancient wood and cast-iron school
desks (courtesy of CEPT Campus Office); one ancient painted wooden
stool (courtesy of Shree Siddhi Copiers); a dozen or so modern metal stools
(courtesy of CEPT Campus Office); several dozen white plastic chairs
(courtesy of M.G. Science Institute); several found white lace curtains
(streets of Navrangpura, Ahmedabad); one carmine head scarf (streets of
Navrangpura, Ahmedabad); one dozen paper kites and spool of coloured
string (purchased); four A1 foam-core boards (purchased); yellow plastic
tape and exacto knife (purchased); one badminton net (in situ); two bad-
minton racquets (in situ); four “Harry Potter” brooms (courtesy of CEPT
Campus Office); two glow-in -the-dark skeletons (courtesy of Gauri
Wagenaar); numerous tea candles (courtesy of Gauri Wagenaar); found
diye (in situ).

Performances/Events
Session One – Off schedule (C’est la CEPT) – C’est la CEPT Troupe,
“Cleaning the Badminton
Building” (looped projection, multimedia performance/slow-motion bal-
let with Brian Eno, Lux, 2012); and C’est la CEPT Troupe, with Anne
Feenstra (on broom) et al., “Adoration” (looped projection, performance,
with Brian Eno, Lux, 2012) – 6:30–7:30 pm, 30 January 2017,
Session Two, Part One – Off schedule (C’est la CEPT) – Tulsi Patra
Theatre Group, “Parakh” (theatrical performance with harmonium) –
4:30–5:30 pm, 3 February 2017
Session Two, Part Two – On schedule (Archiprix+++/C’est la CEPT) –
Gavin Keeney and Krishna Shastri, “Interview with Mademoiselle ‘X’”
(looped projection and 38:45 audio recording); and Gavin Keeney and
 C’est la CEPT 191
Aditya Gandhi, with Greek chorus and Alexandre Guerin, “Gurus, Gopis,
and Celebrity Architects” (projection, reading for three voices, one guitar,
and Greek Chorus) – 6:30–7:30 pm, 3 February 2017
Session Three – On schedule (Archiprix+++/C’est la CEPT) – Ishita Jain
and C’est la CEPT Troupe, with Niraj Chokshi, “Silent Lecture” (looped
projection, performance, with Dido and A. R. Rahman, “If I Rise”, 2010,
looped with Sigur Rós, “Dauðalagið”, 2002), images by Ishita Jain and
Harsh Bhavsar – 6:30–7:30 pm, 4 February 2017
Session Four, Part One – On schedule (Archiprix+++ / C’est la CEPT +
NID) – Mihir Jagdish with Ajit Desai, “Kisse Kahaniya” (alumni tales with
archival photographs); and Ishaan Dixit, “Kahaniyan – The Design Diaries”
(conversation with multiple projections) – 8:30–9:30 pm, 5 February 2017
Session Four, Part Two – On schedule (Archiprix+++ / C’est la CEPT +
NID) – King Sachin Soni et al., “Kite Flying Tournament” (multimedia spec-
tacle/indoor kite flying contest, with Dirty Three, Ocean Songs, 1998) –
9:30–10:30 pm, 5 February 2017
Session Five – Off schedule (C’est la CEPT) – C’est la CEPT Troupe, with
Harsh Parmar, Sarah Iris Drouet et al., “Waiting for Doshi” (multimedia
performance with Dirty Three, Ocean Songs, 1998); and Mansi Shah, with
Vishal Mehta, “Silence” (floor installation, performance) – 6:30–8:30 pm, 7
February 2017

Screenings
“Four Experimental Design Seminars: Seattle, New York, Athens, Venice”
(multimedia presentation), Gavin Keeney, Owen O’Carroll, with Ishita Jain
and Palak Shah – Archiprix 2017, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India – 9
February 2017
“Three Experimental Design Seminars: New York, Athens, Venice” (con-
ference presentation), Gavin
Keeney – “Creative Encounters with Science and Technology: Legacies,
Imaginaries and Futures”, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India – 18
February 2017
“Seeing and Hearing Things Again” (three-screen presentation/perfor-
mance of “Library of Tears”, “Will It Cry?”, “Emptiness within Emptiness”,
and “The End of CEPT as Viewed by Archangel St. Michael”), Gavin
Keeney with C’est la CEPT Troupe – GIDC Bhavan, CEPT University,
Ahmedabad, India – 12 April 2017
“The Moral Rights of Authors in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism” (pub-
lic seminar), Gavin Keeney – Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities,
Birkbeck, University of London, London, England – 14–15 June 2017
“Out of India: Experiments in Transmedia” (conference presentation),
Ishita Jain and Gavin Keeney – “Performance Making and the Archive”,
Inlaks-AAA, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute
of Technology, Mumbai, India – 16–17 March 2018
192 Ishita Jain et al.
Nota Bene
For the full C’est la CEPT media dossier, please visit CEPT Archives,
Navrangpura, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

Notes
1 “Emptiness within Emptiness,” or the Badminton Building project, was a perfor-
mance-based cinematic project grounded in ambient architectural and sceno-
graphic utility. It appropriated a semi-abandoned building, the badminton
building at M.G. Science College, Ahmedabad – a point of origin of the School
of Architecture, now CEPT University, for a polemical and tragic-comic investi-
gation of the vagaries of institutional memory, inclusive of intentional repres-
sions. The project began with 18 black-and-white archival photographs. The
photographs, in turn, generated stories, which then generated theatrical events.
These events were primarily spontaneous acts of theatre that were meant to
restore the dynamic principles of the first school versus actual circumstances or
concrete practices. As spectacle, the overall C’est la CEPT project, of which
“Emptiness within Emptiness” is a part, was also a mnemonic apparatus for
focusing attention on the vanishing past of CEPT University as it becomes neo-
liberalized in line with the globalization of academia.
2 For example, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India, February 2017.
3 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/cest-la-ceptnid-aims-to-
recreate-historic-building/articleshow/56942873.cms
14 Inside Out
Aram Lee, Anais Borie and Ottonie von Roeder

We are a designer group for artistic research and experiments with a pro-
fessional background in art and design. We consider our artistic practice in
museums as a way of engaging with the world we live in. The aim of our
work is to reconcile the encyclopaedic archive in the museum with its
changing context by rearranging it. Our activities not only encompass
exhibitions but also research, production, debates, publishing and
performances.
Instead of alienation, accumulation, isolation and conservation in muse-
ums, our principle with the mass of the museum archive is breaking, distrib-
uting, disturbing, speculating, reactivating, sharing and working together.
By applying our principle to the museum archive, we attempt to stimulate
the trajectory of the museum. We met during our master’s studies at the
Design Academy Eindhoven and have collaborated since then on different
projects and exhibitions together.
With the Inside Out project, we aim to mediate between artefacts in
depots of design-related museums and the outside reality. Our goal is to
take objects that usually wait in the darkness of storage facilities out into
the contemporary context. Like this, new stories could be told and brought
back to the museum, forming a new archive. For the special day of each
individual object, an activity and a secure and story-related way is designed
to carry the object physically out of the safe environment of the museum to
a specific destination, according to the character of each museum.
Our first collaborative project was Zuiderzeemuseum – Inside Out that
we finished in 2016. Our starting point for the project was a collaboration
with the Zuiderzeemuseum, which is situated in Enkhuizen, in the north of
the Netherlands, in the region of the former Zuiderzee.
In order to prevent the Zuiderzee, a shallow bay of the North Sea, from
flooding more and more land, the Dutch built two dikes between 1918 and
1933 that closed the connection between the North Sea and the Zuiderzee
and turned it into a lake, called Ijsselmeer (Figure 14.1).
At the same time, they created 1,650 km2 of land by building polders that
turned former territory of the sea into land for agriculture and living. The
towns in that region benefited historically from colonialism and interna-
tional trade, and the people in villages on the coastline and on islands lived
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-17
194 Aram Lee et al.

Figure 14.1 A map of the Zuiderzee region. On the map, the two dikes, separating
the North Sea from the Ijsselmeer, and the drained land are highlighted.
Source: http://www.visitholland.nl/index.php/flevoland/flevoland-places-to-visit/335-zuiderzee

from fishing and related work, like shipbuilding and rope making. Through
the closure of the sea and the new polders, the salt water turned into fresh
water, places that used to be right next to the sea were suddenly in the
middle of dry land and some former islands were not islands anymore.
Former fishermen now started to fish fresh-water fish or had to go by boat
out of the Ijsselmeer to the North Sea in order to continue fishing salt-water
fish. They also started to perform other kinds of work, or they migrated out.
Similarly, the culture and economy of the former Zuiderzee region changed
due to the immense impact of the built dikes and polders.
Between the 1940s and 1980s, the Zuiderzeemuseum was developed in
order to preserve the cultural heritage and maritime history of the old
Zuiderzee region. The institution consists of an outdoor and an indoor
museum and depot with the museum’s collection.
The outdoor museum (Figures 14.2 and 14.3) is an artificial village from
the turn of the century. Its aim is to provide an image of how people used to
live and work between 1880 and 1930 in the Zuiderzee region. Therefore,
different houses from the region were either physically brought to Enkhuizen
 Inside Out 195

Figure 14.2 The outdoor museum of the Zuiderzeemuseum with historic Dutch

buildings creating a village setting situated next to the water.
Source: https://www.zuiderzeemuseum.nl/en/page/357/museum

Figure 14.3 Two elderly women wearing traditional Dutch clothes. They are sitting
underneath hung laundry stitching or sewing some textiles with their hands.
Source: https://en.tripadvisor.com.hk/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g188592-d266763-i28960380-
Zuiderzeemuseum-Enkhuizen_North_Holland_Province.html

(Figure 14.4) or copied in order to create an artificial, historical village in

which actors play citizens from that era. Visitors can walk through the vil-
lage, eat freshly cooked food or have a chat with the role players and learn
something about traditional craftsmanship from the area visiting the rebuilt
workshops.
196 Aram Lee et al.

Figure 14.4 A historic black-and-white photograph from 1980 in which a historic

wooden cheese warehouse gets transported with a truck through a con-
temporary neighbourhood. People are standing around and watching.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Transport_van_kaaspakhuis_uit_Landsmeer_
naar_het_Zuiderzeemuseum_in_Enkhuizen_v,_Bestanddeelnr_930-8780.jpg

The focus of the indoor museum (Figure 14.5) lies on the history and
culture of the Zuiderzee region and shows exhibitions with artefacts from
the museum’s collection with an emphasis on craftsmanship and tradition,
as well as the contemporary perspective on the region’s history with a col-
lection of contemporary Dutch design.

Figure 14.5 An exhibition setting of the Zuiderzeemuseum with a painting and

objects related to the fishing culture in the region.
Source: https://www.zuiderzeemuseum.nl/nl/page/357/museum
 Inside Out 197
The depot (Figures 14.6 and 14.7) of the Zuiderzeemuseum holds 29.386
artefacts, such as paintings, textiles, costumes, ceramics and much more,
that were collected from the region to conserve the cultural heritage from
the period between 1880 and 1930. Due to the huge amount of artefacts,
most of these objects are rarely used for exhibitions in the inside museum
and spend most of their time in the depot.
We decided to work with the museum’s depot as it reflects on the current
state of the Zuiderzeemuseum and its relation to the region. The archive is
a collection of a huge amount of objects that were pulled out of their natu-
ral surrounding where they were probably in daily use. They were all
brought to one spot where they are now hidden in the dark and frozen in
time. It is not open to the public and has hardly any connection to our
contemporary reality.
The outside museum is a re-enactment of a fictional village from the area
at the turn of the century, isolated in its own historical fiction and discon-
nected from today’s time. Through all the structural and cultural transfor-
mations in the past, the region has changed completely and the cultural
heritage – preserved in the Zuiderzeemuseum – feels detached from its own
regional origin.
Geographically, the museum is separated from the region and the rest of
the Netherlands as it is up north or on the other side of the big water and

Figure 14.6 Oil paintings hanging in the depot of the Zuiderzeemuseum. The theme
of the oil paintings is the building of the dikes and the transformation
of the sea into an inland lake.
Source: http://moving-targets.blogspot.com/2012/08/artist-in-residency-karin-bos-erik.html)
198 Aram Lee et al.

Figure 14.7 A set of traditional porcelain, ceramic and wooden daily objects posi-
tioned on a shelf in the depot of the Zuiderzeemuseum.
Source: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2009/01/30/depot-zuiderzeemuseum-open-11676168-a139
3292#photo

difficult to reach. When the Zuiderzee used to be a sea, Enkhuizen was an

important port and connected to the other towns through trade and mari-
time traffic.
That is why we developed a concept of a programme to highlight the
artefacts of the museum’s archive through performances and to take them
on a one-day trip to their places of origin in the contemporary context. As
part of the programme each year, four artefacts will be highlighted, which
means it will take 7.346 years to celebrate 29.386 artefacts. All artworks
are equal and have the chance to be liberated and taken on an adventure
outside of the walls of the museum. Each object can be related to a specific
place in the Zuiderzee region and a specific date by its historical back-
ground. Choosing a destination and specific date for each artefact allows a
new way of organizing the museum’s archive.
In order to visualize this speculative programme, we created one perfor-
mance with the first object, the Draineerbuizen, in 2016. Besides this, the
concept of a calendar was created. It lasts 7.346 years, starting in 2016 and
ending in 9362, when every object has been celebrated once. The celebra-
tion of the artefacts would follow this newly created calendar. For the spe-
cial day of the artefact, a performance is created. This shapes the design of
a vehicle that carries the artefact out of the archive into the outside world.
The conducted performances and built vehicles create a new growing
archive that tells a new story about the artefacts and their connection to the
area and the contemporary time (Figures 14.8–14.13).
Figures 14.8–14.13, see project video: https://vimeo.com/178053445.
The project questions how the museum conventionally collects artefacts
and brings them all to one spot, where they are usually waiting in the dark to
be chosen one day to be exhibited. It connects the artefacts of the depot to
the outside reality and liberates them from the safe context of the museum.
The project challenges the artefacts physically and mentally by confronting
them with the banality of everyday life. The project seeks to open the content
of the museum’s collection to a new audience and to question the prevailing
hierarchies, relationships and methodologies within museums by liberating
 Inside Out 199

Figure 14.8 One of the artists holding a vehicle which transports one of the muse-
um’s objects on a pillow inside of a glass box. The artist and the vehicle
are standing in one corridor of the depot of the Zuiderzeemuseum, left
and right surrounded by shelves filled with preserved historic objects.
Courtesy of the authors/artists

Figure 14.9 Two members of the artist group with the vehicle transporting the
museum’s object on a boat.
Courtesy of the authors/artists
200 Aram Lee et al.

Figure 14.10 The vehicle with the museum’s object on a promenade with the scen-
ery of the Ijsselmeer in the background.
Courtesy of the authors/artists

Figure 14.11 A small model of a flag attached to a vehicle. The graphic shows a
calendar page with a photo of the historic flag from the depot of the
Zuiderzeemuseum, a short description text about the object, an illus-
tration of the flag attached to a vehicle and a date.
Courtesy of the authors/artists
 Inside Out 201

Figure 14.12 A small model of a coin presented on a vehicle. The graphic shows a
calendar page with a photo of the historic coin from the depot of the
Zuiderzeemuseum, a short description text about the object, an illus-
tration of the coin presented on a vehicle and a date.
Courtesy of the authors/artists

Figure 14.13 A small model of a book presented in a glass box on a vehicle. The
graphic shows a calendar page with a photo of the historic coin from
the depot of the Zuiderzeemuseum, a short description text about the
object, an illustration of the presentation of the book and a date.
Courtesy of the authors/artists
202 Aram Lee et al.
the collected artefacts, bringing them to the outside world and giving every-
one – artefacts and audience – the opportunity to meet unexpectedly. Using
the archive as a material, we are creating a new kind of archive out of the
new narratives and adventures happening during the project.
During our collaboration with the Zuiderzeemuseum, we concentrated
on the place of origin of each object and the history of the Zuiderzee region.
Because the critical points we touched in this first project are not only inter-
esting for the Zuiderzeemuseum, we decided to continue the project. In
2016, we worked on the project mainly at a conceptual level in a histori-
cally and geographically limited context. By continuing the project in Berlin
in 2018, we brought the project to the next level and met new challenges by
collaborating with a broader variety of museums and their archives.
In May 2018, we participated with the Inside Out project in the Invasive
Design programme, mentored by Tulga Beyerle, at that time director of the
Museum of Applied Arts in Dresden, Germany, during the Forecast Forum
at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The Forecast Forum was a one-
week competition in which we were asked to visualize concepts that use
design to invade museums with the possibility of realization, financial sup-
port and mentorship.
We used this as an opportunity to show how our concept could work in
the context of different design-related museums, using the collaboration
with the Zuiderzeemuseum as a starting point but leaving the very specific,
before mentioned character behind and analyzing the identities of design-re-
lated museums in Berlin in order to develop our proposal further. We
decided to work with the collections of the Bröhanmuseum, the Museum
der Dinge and the Kunstgewerbemuseum, focusing on each character, pro-
posing different actions with the same aim to open up their collection to the
outside reality.
During the preparations, we had the chance to talk with staff from the
museum and visit partly their depots. Even though two of three museums
wanted to actively support our project, our actions stayed partly fictional,
as our ideas and goals were too contradictory to one of the museums’
responsibilities to preserve their public collection and the institutional pace
which didn’t allow us to borrow artefacts from their collection with only a
few weeks of lead time to arrange contracts, insurance and agreements.
To visualize our proposal, we created three small, partly fictional actions
for the three museums that we documented using film and photography.
The film together with the liberated artefacts was shown at Haus der
Kulturen der Welt at the end of the Forecast Forum (see video: https://
vimeo.com/284148695).
Dealing with the collection of the Kunstgewerbemuseum, a museum of
applied arts, we concentrated on past and future production. Therefore the
selected object was taken out of the museum and brought to a body 3D
scanner. The digital version of the object is meant to be spread online, con-
sists of all necessary information about the production of the object and
will deliver this knowledge to future craftsmen to enable endless future
 Inside Out 203
re-production, re-interpretation of ancient skills and sharing of know-how
(Figures 14.14 and 14.15).
In order to create a tension between the public (original private) collection
of Bröhanmuseum, a museum with a focus on art deco, art nouveau and

Figure 14.14 A bar chair made out of bended steel tubes standing in a 3D scanner.
Courtesy of the authors/artists

Figure 14.15 A 3D model of a new interpretation of the bar chair which got modi-
fied with different 3D elements.
Courtesy of the authors/artists
204 Aram Lee et al.
functionalism and private and intimate space of an individual, we offered the
possibility to host one (fictional) artefact of the museum’s collection at one’s
home for one day. Therefore, we spread “Looking for Host” posters through-
out the city. We were curious to see who would react and be up to hosting a
museum’s object, how the host would carry the object, prepare the home for
the special guest and take care of the object (Figures 14.16 and 14.17).
For the Museum der Dinge, we related the chosen object to its original
cultural context, origin story and today’s visible relicts of this history to
react on one focus of the collection related to German (product) culture of
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We brought the object – a yellow
ring from Istanbul with very little information – to different spots in the
area of Kreuzberg, tried to discover new stories for this unknown object
and took pictures of the object and the contemporary surrounding telling
different stories related to Turkish migration in Germany and Turkish-
German culture today (Figures 14.18 and 14.19).
With the ongoing Inside Out project, we aim to develop a methodology
that can reach out to different species of museums and is at the same time
specifically developed for each collaboration partner depending on the
character of the archive and its surrounding context. We research the arte-
facts of the depot but use naivety, intuition and playfulness at the same time
as a method to create new stories and bring the artefacts to a new context.
As a collective, we enjoy researching intensively but also transform our
findings into a critical and artistic action. Like this we want to attract a
wider audience, let many people join this adventure and provoke the com-
mon language used in museums. With the Inside Out project, we want to

Figure 14.16 A video capture which shows a person carrying a box out of the
entrance door of the Bröhanmuseum.
Courtesy of the authors/artists
 Inside Out 205

Figure 14.17 An art nouveau bowl placed on a commode surrounded by a lamp,

a textile and two small boxes with a copperplate engraving in the
background.
Courtesy of the authors/artists

Figure 14.18 One member of the artist group standing behind a vehicle carrying a
yellow plastic object that looks like a sun. The artist and the vehicle
are standing in a corridor of the depot of the Museum der Dinge
surrounded by cabinets filled with preserved objects.
Courtesy of the authors/artists
206 Aram Lee et al.

Figure 14.19 The yellow plastic object from the depot of the Museum der Dinge
outside. In the background, you can see social housing with many
satellite dishes attached to the balconies. The yellow object and the
background both relate to the German-Turkish culture in Berlin.
Courtesy of the authors/artists

contribute to the ongoing discussion around the role of the museum and its
collection. We believe that the current comfortable space for debate in the
museum can be even more challenged and disturbed. We are aiming to do
so by liberating and taking the collection out on an adventure, not only
physically but also intellectually.
During the projects, we could feel the created friction between the pre-
served historical artefact carried out to the outside world and the new audi-
ence that we met very unexpectedly, which showed a lot of interest in the
artefact and our performance, even though, or maybe especially because,
some of them usually don’t visit museums.
For now, all projects remain prototypical in the way that our perfor-
mances weren’t public; we were not allowed to promote our actions by
mentioning publicly the museums as institutions that would allow us to
borrow objects out of the collections owned by the public and were – if we
didn’t have to copy objects from the collection – given objects which were
either not included in the official archive or had a very low insurance value.
The project stayed very much speculative, whereas we intend to create real
and implemented activities and programmes with the collaboration part-
ners. We are aware of the difficulties and contradictions between our
approach and the careful way artefacts are preserved in museums archives,
but we believe that this is at the same time the strength of the project which
becomes clear when looking at the difficulties in the negotiation and organ-
ization with the partners and the speculative character of the project.
15 When I Performed as a Worker as an
Artist
Amitesh Grover

In the summer of 1996, weeks before I turned 16, I was asked to go learn
how to earn for myself. An uncle of mine had recently acquired a job at the
Human Resource Department at Bank of America (BOA). The company
had inaugurated a swanky branch at Barakhamba Road in Delhi. The eco-
nomic liberalization in India had been set in motion in 1991, providing
middle-class homes reason for spontaneous urban-wide celebrations. A new
world order was on the horizon – the opening of the nation to private and
foreign investment. Only a few had lamented publicly, even fewer privately,
against the fact that these changes were dictated by the World Bank and the
IMF (International Monetary Fund) as a condition for a $500 million bail-
out to the Indian government to deal with the utter mismanagement of the
Indian economy since independence. Nehru’s nation-building project, one
anchored in an original adaptation of socialism, had been finally aborted.
Our lives have been a seismometer since, absorbing, recording, articulating
the intensity of this seismic shift till today.
I had seen the consequences of the preceding disorder up-close in the
strife-ridden professional career of my father. He had had to pull the shutter
on every endeavour he put his resources into one after another: from shoe-
making to pharmaceuticals, from completing a PhD in zoology to setting up
a garments’ factory, to becoming a businessman. His life in the prime of his
youth was a frustrating script penned by the nation’s tryst with collective
failures and economic catastrophes. I cannot forget the stench of disillusion-
ment that his soiled and sweaty shirt carried when he returned home every
evening. As we, his two children, grew up, he groomed us to embrace the new
nation - neoliberal but lost - early and without doubt. In this new country,
how to become (filthy) rich was the new aspiration. The dollar, films, compa-
nies, visa: Everything American flooded Indian society and its dreams in the
mid-1990s. I, too, began my internship at BOA in May 1996 and went on to
learn to perform back-end jobs at the lowest rung of the company – filing
documents, cataloguing forms, digitising information and running errands
between the office and the vault – with the dream of making it ‘big’ one day.
The word ‘intern’ is linked to internment, implying detention or confine-
ment, mostly voluntary. Although, in corporate-speak, this is a trainee who
works, sometime without pay, in order to gain work experience, the original
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-18
208 Amitesh Grover
meaning of the word is not entirely absent in corporate work. I turned 16
with my first paycheck and a strange disillusionment about the activity that
we call ‘work’ – what might qualify as work; what keeps people occupied in
their occupation; what are is its discontents; how might the figure of the new-
age worker be expressed; and, from an artist’s perspective, what is work.

The Pianist and the Waiter

In 2016, I was offered an open-ended commission by the Kiran Nadar
Museum of Art (KNMA). KNMA is the first private museum of art exhib-
iting modern and contemporary works from India and the sub-continent,
sponsored by the Shiv Nadar Foundation. Mr. Shiv Nadar is an Indian bil-
lionaire industrialist and philanthropist, the founder and chairman of HCL
Tech Pvt Ltd., the biggest information technology (IT) company in India.
The museum was planning to curate an exhibition in 2017 titled Hangar for
the Passerby, through which it sought to revisit certain historical moments
to speculate upon and re-enact the spatial dynamics of collectivity. The
exhibition intended to present instances of formal and informal pedagogical
exercises, workshops and participatory acts facilitated by multiple artists in
institutional spaces. Interestingly, the curation focussed on interrogating
ideas of and around ‘work’; in particular, the nature of artistic work. KNMA
decided to host the exhibition not in its regular building at Saket, but in the
museum housed in the largest office campuses of HCL Tech Pvt Ltd. in
Noida. Their intention was to mobilize the enormous workforce at the com-
pany towards art – workers needed to become viewers, they needed to
appreciate art, engage with and participate in an art exhibition.
I had witnessed the rise of an entirely new demographic of people erupting
country country-wide, ones who go by the title computer engineers. Millions
of young Indians graduate in computer sciences every year in the hope that
they are able to land a job in the booming tech economy of India. As some-
one who belonged to that demographic -– urban male, in my thirties, having
completed certificate courses in computers at college -– I knew this aspira-
tion first-hand. Taken together, the workers at the HCL campus constitute
one of the largest collectives as a community –all carrying company ID cards,
and all who identify with the company. Their total employee strength is
210,966 (as of 30 June 2022) with operations in over 52 countries; in the
Noida campus alone, the workforce stands at a staggering 22,000.
Scathing critique has been produced about the circular and circumspect
relation between surplus capital and the art market in the twenty-first cen-
tury, but not nearly enough has been written about the overlapping contours
of the labouring body and the making of art. According to theorist Paolo
Virno, artistic performance (which in broad Marxist understanding is the
‘other’ of work, one that does not produce an output, the opposite of dead-
ening wage labour) is no longer unique to performers, dancers, musicians,
but now dovetails the general condition of waged work. Virno writes, “The
affinity between the pianist and a waiter, which Marx had foreseen, finds an
 When I Performed as a Worker as an Artist 209
unexpected confirmation in the epoch in which all wage labour has some-
thing in common with the ‘performing artist’”.1 My lingering questions
around performance as an occupation, work as art, the act of occupying as
performance, became urgent, crucial to be explored now. What could be the
entries, interventions, acts and exits? Will it be possible to respond to the
experience of having felt alienated, mechanized, dehumanized by work that
I felt as a young intern? Will it be possible to introduce a different torque in
the system, to communize it, all of which I was ill-equipped to do as a teen-
age worker? More crucially, I wanted to use the opportunity of an art com-
mission to produce an encounter with the abundant capital that sustains it.
So, two decades after my first stint with “work” in a corporate company,
I decided to seek placement in another one – HCL Tech Pvt Ltd. KNMA
museum curator Akansha Rastogi aided greatly in setting up the initial
meetings, and I invited my studio collaborator at the time, Arnika Ahldag,
to participate in the project with me. I proposed an employment contract in
which I declared the request for a job as an art project. I conceived of this
art project as an exercise in occupational realism,2 an embedded series of
performance acts that somehow allowed me to highlight the structure of
social and political relations with all its ambiguities. I was hoping to offer
proposals, which might have a transformative impact upon the world of
work. I wanted my art to be socially useful in very real ways, and to develop
new ways of working as a result of my experiences.
I decided to adorn the artifice of the worker, dress as a subject of the
company, work for the company and yet somehow continue to pursue it as
an artist. My intent was to appear as a worker, to learn the work of com-
puter engineers, to go to the office every day, to get wages, to perform.
Inhabiting this dual role of the artist and the worker needed rehearsal, but
there wasn’t an opportunity. Occupying the position of an employee, but
self-identifying as an outsider, imbuing actions with a ‘hidden’ value, exe-
cuting the job in the name of the company and in the name of art had to be
learnt on the job. This chapter is a collage of my personal thoughts, ques-
tions and learnings, an artist’s diary if you will, of performing at work and
the work of performance in our times.
In Figures 15.1 and 15.2, I am seen wearing the corporate outfit to blend
in, adorning an employee ID card, a camouflage I grew increasingly into as
time passed, an identity which I nearly chose as a career in my early 20s.
Growing up around family members who aspired to a role in the private
service sector gave me the imaginary reserves to construct the body of the
corporate worker. Unlike the usual buzz at show openings, no welcome recep-
tion was planned on the opening day – joining day – of this performance. Still,
my performance was now open to the public: the 22,000-strong workforce
employed at the company site. The intent was to become indistinguishable
from others among whom I would train and work for a period of six months.
(Figures 15.3, 15.4 and 15.5 – surveillance being surveyed – drone foot-
age of indoors and outdoors captured at the sprawling work campus at
Sector 126, HCL Tech Pvt Ltd., Noida, Uttar Pradesh)
210 Amitesh Grover

Figure 15.1 Artist Amitesh Grover in an IT worker outfit at the company workplace.

Figure 15.2 Artist Amitesh Grover working at an assigned company desk. The laptop
issued by the company comes installed with worker surveillance software.
 When I Performed as a Worker as an Artist 211

Figure 15.3 Indoor view a multi-storeyed IT Company tower where Grover devel-

oped his project.

Figure 15.4 Top view of the landscaping outside IT company.

Counter/Contracts
A contract is a document of relations between free people. For a contract to
be formed, we must reach mutual assent, a meeting of the minds. Above is
the ‘regular’ contract of the company (15 pages in total), which outlines an
all-encompassing corporeal and temporal ownership of bodies, production
and data. Point Number 1 states, “All notes, data, tapes, reference items,
sketches, drawings, memoranda, records and other materials, in any way
relating to confidential information or otherwise to the company business
shall belong exclusively to the company. I shall return to the company all
copies of such materials in my possession or under my control at the request
212 Amitesh Grover

Figure 15.5 City of Noida as seen from the company’s terrace.

of the company or in the absence of such a request upon the termination of

my employment or cessation of my association with the company. This sec-
tion is enforceable against my heirs, successors and assigns”.
Open-Desk hour to encourage their regular/irregular employees to book
an ‘engagement’ with the Acting-Employees in a manner that is discussed
mutually beforehand, using notice board/newsletters/online booking.

Work-Production
In addition to staging the Open-Desk for one hour each day, and adhering
to the task- sheets given by HCL (if any), the Acting-Employee will retain
all right, title, interest, intellectual property to any work or work product
developed by them during the Work Periods or thereafter in relation to the
Project, irrespective of the fact that some or all of such work/work product
may have been developed at the campus. HCL agrees that no work/work
product from the Project or otherwise developed by any Acting-Employee
shall be considered as work-for-hire or work developed for HCL.
The Acting-Employee will not welcome any direct form of communication
with anybody in their work-environment outside the Open-Desk hour. They
will not be obliged to explain, announce, communicate, signal, or otherwise
convey any part of their actions/gestures to anybody in their work environ-
ment. The Acting-Employee may produce different kinds of ‘data’ from their
presence inside the work premises – performance gestures, dialogues and an
array of electronic and digital footprints for archive purposes.

E-Presence
All electronic footprints of the Acting-Employees, including CCTV imagery,
biometric identification, entry and exit electronic logs, employment/­performance
 When I Performed as a Worker as an Artist 213

Figure 15.6 From the actual 15-page-long document outlining the company-em-

ployee contract, with this specific page describing the company owner-
ship of all digital data produced by the employee.
214 Amitesh Grover

Figure 15.7 Scan of a page from the employee contract authored by Grover.

logs, and any other electronic traces maintained by the Acting-Employer must
be handed out to the Acting- Employees at the termination of the contract.

Confidentiality Agreement
Acting-Employees herewith declare that they will not share any information on
the Acting-Employer’s working operations, development of software, etc. with
any other entity inside or outside the company. The Acting-Employees will not
 When I Performed as a Worker as an Artist 215
actively or intentionally disturb the work atmosphere. Acting-Employees shall
follow the rules and regulations employees follow. To perform the role of ‘A
Good Employee’ in their best possible capacity, the Acting-Employees request
to be handed out an ‘Employee-Manual’ or any other booklet/documentation/
presentation that is necessary to access the working protocols. Further, the
Acting- Employees shall not bring any data carrier, or any other electronic
device that may not be usually allowed inside the work premises.

Termination of Employment
The Acting-Employees and/or the Acting-Employer may decide to termi-
nate the employment contract before its stipulated time (four weeks each
for the two Acting-Employees). In this case, the terminating party shall pro-
vide a termination notice, stating reasons for the termination, to the other
party at least three days in advance.
Publicity material generated in this employment (including photos, and
other print material)
After the period of four weeks, no further benefits will be claimed. The
contract cannot be extended for another specified period.
The Acting-Employer and the Acting-Employee hereby declare that they
understand thoroughly the above provisions and agree to sign to abide by such
provisions. They shall each retain a copy of this contract for future reference.

Acting-Employer HCL Technologies Ltd. Greater Noida, U.P

Acting-Employees Amitesh Grover Arnika Ahldag
It was imperative to reject the original contract and instead offer a coun-
ter-contact in return:

“We propose an exchange – We follow the working routine suggested by

the company, in terms of the expected working hours, working protocol,
access to canteen, biometric identification, maintenance of employee
logs, etc. and promise to perform the role of ‘A Good Employee’ in their
best possible capacity (following the working protocols as contained in
the ‘Employee Manual’). In exchange, we will produce different kinds of
‘data’ from our presence inside the work premises – performance ges-
tures, dialogues and an array of electronic and digital footprint for artis-
tic purposes. We will not be obliged to explain, announce, communicate,
signal, or otherwise describe any part of our actions/gestures to anybody
in our work environment in the production of this ‘artistic’ data. This
‘artistic’ data shall not be considered the property of the company, and
shall be exclusively produced for artistic purposes only”.
216 Amitesh Grover

Figure 15.8 Screen grab from Grover’s Data Messiahs (single-channel film) showing
a real-life company employee laden with thousands of empty employee
IDs.

The Hidden
The day of joining was, ironically for me, akin to being back in the theatre. The
induction day is held in a proxy theatre hall, with a stage, theatre lights and
employee (audience) seating. The show’s protagonist is an induction day exec-
utive, who comes on stage with a well-rehearsed script, split into neat scenes,
and presents a glorious narrative about the company, and the dream journey
ahead. I am equipped with ID cards and, along with 80 other new recruits,
introduced to the marvellous opportunities that the company offers to the new
aspirants. I am offered a new bank account, a new car loan, a housing loan for
an apartment and options for schools for children. The induction executive is
eager to be seen as a maker of my future. Induction day executives are regu-
larly exposed to ‘personality training’ through theatre workshops, to aid them
in these performances. Performing (for) the company is serious business. An
ordinary induction day executive inducts around 80–100 new employees in a
day. Four induction days take place in the company every week, bringing in
400 new employees every week, 1,600 every month, 19,000 employees a year.
I ask the executive if he ever experiences face-fatigue. He laughs it off and tells
me that this is his dream job; he always wanted to be an actor, and this role
offers him the glamour he desired. We look at each other: a performer acting
like an employee, an employee acting like a performer.
I cast the induction day executives in a film. This single-channel film
became the first indication of the ‘hidden’ value that marks the worker and
the performer of our time. The executives present themselves as Beckettian
 When I Performed as a Worker as an Artist 217
characters, who re-enact the performance of inducting and training hundreds
of workers every month for digital tech companies. They share their methods
of profiling personalities, engaging them with attention techniques and veri-
fying their information. But they are seen alone in the film, speaking to empty
chairs and vacant halls. At one moment in the film, they begin to dance – their
twisting, gambolling, purposeful bodies are seen alongside the architecture of
dreams they inhabit, a site of abundant capital built on data trade. The com-
pany building and its gatekeepers seem engaged in a pas de deux, staging
their spectacular theatre of the absurd, till exhaustion interrupts and brings
them to a suicidal halt. The film, titled Data Messiahs, highlights the unprec-
edented volume of labour-intensive digital service industries in South Asia.

A Performer’s Manual
Every performance needs a manual, so I decided to write one. In the third
month of my apprenticeship, I begin writing, designing and distributing
among fellow employees a manual. I want to explore how a set of simple,
but unfamiliar, instructions would be read, discussed, circulated and carried
out. Pamphlets and targeted broadcasts in print work surprisingly well in
sealed, cordoned off, hyper-digitized spaces. Some instructions on it are
vague on purpose, others are unexpectedly precise:

• Collapse, become indistinct or intentionally inverted.

• Oscillate between visibility and invisibility. Choose your moments, tim-
ing is of the essence here.
• Persevere with useless tasks – dig a hole and then cover it. Walk in
purposeful circularity. Stare into your cubicle, into your laptop screen,
indefinitely. Take the elevator up, then down, for your entire work shift.
• Shift incessantly, in your chair, in a meeting, at lunch. Look nervous.
• Ask questions. Inquire, needlessly. Pick out a detail; obsess over it.
• Make duplicates when you can. As many as you can. Duplicate files,
folders, parts of code, error reports, emails, texts. Encourage others
around to duplicate all they can.
• Make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.
Illustrate through abstraction.

Would this lead to a spontaneous ‘choreography of sabotage’, or to destabi-

lising the working of one afternoon, or to performing disruptive action per-
haps? I am called-in for a meeting with the senior management, who think
that my manual is useless, because it does not serve any purpose. “The
company’s purpose?” I inquire. I keep developing the manual into an
ever-growing itinerary of simple acts, in the hope that it might restore the
subjectivities under perennial threat from the tyranny of productivity and
order. I distribute hundreds of copies across the company, but nobody takes
the manual seriously enough to perform it with me. I perform it alone. I call
the manual How To Perform Like A Good Employee.
218 Amitesh Grover

Figure 15.9 Image from Grover’s photoseries Kafka’s Castle showing a real-life

employee holding a placard with the word ‘data’ seen through the
CCTV surveillance network installed inside the high-security work
areas.

Kafka’s Castle
A dense network of surveillance comprising biometric identification (finger-
print and retina scans), digital chip in the ID card, login notifications on the
company laptop and an employee log of completed tasks keeps me visible to
the company always. The company’s tracking software logs, with timestamp,
the traces of my ‘employed’ body. I am not expected to work only during my
work-shift (the norm for an assembly line worker of the Fordist factory), but
instead, in this new age of work, the time and space of my labour are
extended indefinitely. I am expected to be online – sometimes on-site, other
times off-site – at all times of the day and night. Thousands of servers in
server farms across the world are managed, repaired and maintained by my
department. As the servers oscillate between uptime and downtime, I vacil-
late between SLAs (service level agreements)3 and escalation. If I cannot
serve in the stipulated amount of time mentioned in my SLA, the issue gets
escalated to the next level, adversely affecting my performance score of the
day. I fill my performance log at the end of the day, a detailed log of tasks
completed and unfinished, corroborated by my manager. I need to give
myself a performance score too; I perform and assess myself without inter-
ruption. And, I am required to rate myself on a happiness index while doing
so. I am visible at all times. I need to learn to be invisible.
In this densely surveilled workplace, where not only my physical presence
but also my feelings are to be offered for assessment – what is invisibility?
In the continuous hum of computer servers, keyboard clicks and flashing
‘tickets’, how does silence occupy pixels at work? Could stillness build a
 When I Performed as a Worker as an Artist 219

Figure 15.10 Image from Grover’s photoseries Kafka’s Castle, showing a real-life

employee holding a placard with the word ‘delete’ seen through the
CCTV surveillance network installed inside the high-security server
room at the IT company (one of 65 low-resolution photography
prints on sunboard).

palace of place, a fort of sorts in this cosmos of hyper-circulation? Silence

might become a potent non-action, inertia that stays beyond manipulation,
beyond influence, beyond desire, beyond control, beyond comprehension
by the algorithms attempting to exercise sovereignty over us.
An uneventful day is set into motion when my password is not accepted
–this is a welcome glitch in the system. The close encounters and observa-
tions help me understand what I am dealing with. Despite being surrounded
by motivation posters, statistics of targets, list of objectives, I experience
boredom in excess, needless clicking on keyboards, and notice a stray
employee sitting idle in an empty and dark meeting room. But, I also am a
part of an ever-eager workforce ever ready to declare loyalty for the com-
pany. Despite the threatening precarity of work, everybody feels safe. Mr
Singh, senior manager in the Infrastructure Department, confides in me,
“We are protected inside the company; it is the outside world that we fear
– the chaos, the unpredictability, the mob”.
The company seems to have brought to a stubbornly varying and dusty
land the promised disposition of a neat and tidy utopia. Powered by tech
capital, this company is the new country, with an employment base as large
as the population of small nations, with lifelong bindings, with contracts of
allegiances and identity (we were encouraged to identify ourselves as HCLites),
with a company anthem and a family health insurance. The twenty-first cen-
tury company worker has unreservedly replaced the nation-citizen.
220 Amitesh Grover
Double Bind
As part of its HR policy, the company organizes Passion Clubs, hosting a
range of non-work activities to boost the morale of the workforce. Employee
participation in these leisure activities are given a performance score as
well. Employees are encouraged to maintain a good ‘passion’ score. Here,
leisure becomes work too because the company attaches a quantifiable
value to it. The score aggregates help the company to produce, what it calls,
a Happiness index, or an overall score of how happy their employees are.
This quantification, that extends from work to leisure, from tasks to feel-
ings, from the tangible to the intangible, produces a delirious body that is
always performing happiness, because it is always in use, it is useful.
Modelled on the idea of the early 20th century lector in a cigar factory, who
used to be seated on a raised platform platform reading aloud to workers from
newspapers and novels as they worked, I, along with Arnika, locate myself in
unlikely places around the campus to read aloud to the employees. I read a
manifesto – A Hacker Manifesto.4 Hack the work, hack the place. Is there a
need for a manifesto, a public declaration of an idea, intentions or motives,
political or artistic? Is there a need to form a community, to find consensus, to
oppose, to define your needs? One evening, an employee approaches aggres-
sively and interrupts the reading. He says that he cannot understand the pur-
pose of our staged-reading, that activities like these should state their objectives
clearly, that employees be informed about them in advance.
My spontaneous readings in the aisles of cubicles produce for them a
profound dilemma: is it appropriate for the employees to seem disinter-
ested, keep working, and run the risk of not participating in a non-work

Figure 15.11 Future is Abolished – A spontaneous Must-Help-Desk set up by the

artist for HCL employees.
 When I Performed as a Worker as an Artist 221
activity (therefore score low on ‘passion’) or, to engage with the readings,
enjoy and appreciate it, but become distracted at work? Ambiguity strug-
gles to claim attention in this resolute place, even as other colleagues toler-
ate my staged readings, raising and turning their heads ever so slightly from
their cubicles, just enough to keep working, just enough to keep wondering.
Here, work and leisure fold into an unsettling performance.

Perform or Else
At the end of six months, I performed well; I did not get fired. But I also
performed well; I failed to produce a single moment of productive labour. I
was there, every day for six months, performing to know, for knowability
needed to be unmeasured, through occupying the company with a soft
wear: an outfit, posture and ID card that beeped open doors and computers.
The employees and I met every day were not at the worksite, but on the
battleground that is performance today. Performance has become an urgent
claim – Capital claims it as a resource for extraction; technology enables
frameworks within which it can be quantified and valued and art curates it
to critique the system that enables it.
In the end, my artistic performance occurred at various locations across
the company’s campus – at doorways and in elevators, in fire exits and at
secure access points, during night shifts and as shadows of colleagues. I
encountered narratives of data secrecy, offshore sites and recurring crises as
I learnt to perform digital service work. The disruptions I performed within
the workplace – exercises in abstraction, uselessness and worklessness – can
be read as a comment on the spreadability of digital capital, obsession with
logistics and automation and the messy reality of a postcolonial world.
Here I would like to introduce a new relationship between performance
and the archive – performapedia. A self-coined word, an idea, a proposition,

Figure 15.12 Screen grab from Grover’s Data Messiahs (single- channel film) show-
ing a real-life company employee dancing for the camera.
222 Amitesh Grover

Figure 15.13 From the Grover’s business card series, where cards carry cryptic
information about the nature of service provided. In this image, a
business card carries the sentence, “Something is missing here”.

performapedia is the idea of exploring the meaning and threshold of perfor-

mance in ‘doing as a mode for knowing’. The idea of a performapedia
entails mobilizing performativities through curatorial moments to better
access areas of experience that remain relatively opaque within traditional,
social and critical theory. Performapedia assembles interactivity through
objects, bodies, technologies and environments. It invites into play the his-
tories of exhibition-making, live art, interactive systems and the staging of
documents. Performapedia allows activating multi-sensorial epistemologies
within act(s) of the everyday and storing some of the residues of those epis-
temologies. How can we attempt to create, convene and grasp this endemi-
cally mutating archive?
In the final display and exhibition of this project, performapedia is an
approach: curatorial, artistic and interdisciplinary. In narrativizing and pre-
senting the project, performapedia is an event: multimedia, multi-spatial,
participatory, live. Performapedia is an archival impulse, assembling, acti-
vating, manufacturing documents as hyper-texts which remain ‘live’.
Performapedia is born out of the need for an aesthetic condition that
responds to the magnitude of a site, of a voluminous immensity without
precedence. For instance in my project, 50GB of data was produced by a
constellation of performative events, which produced an archive. All of the
data – the extensive paperwork and correspondence accumulated in the
process of applying to the corporation to initiate artistic placement, to pho-
tographs, films, videos, sound recordings, photomontages, appropriation of
found objects, reports and documentation of my time – has been uploaded
on PAD.MA.5 This extremity, the condition of work, is the defining charac-
teristic of human history. It manufactures meaning, community, identity. But
 When I Performed as a Worker as an Artist 223
what does it mean to emotionally, physically, mentally be ‘occupied’ by one’s
work? And what did I produce when I recast myself as a worker as an artist?
Did I turn art into a form of toil that seems to offer no emotive or aesthetic
surplus, no moral lesson? Or, did I contaminate the site of work with ‘use-
less’ artistic preoccupations? Under precarious conditions, the worker, the
performer, switches between radically different positions and/or occupa-
tions, performing differently according to shifting circumstances. Is my per-
formance a performable ‘employment-art’ project then an archive of the
prevailing precariat? Is this a proxy archive, a ‘mirror’ in internet protocol
terms, intending to camouflage its source, the presence of a performing/
working body?
In and through this performance, I ask, What is the work here, where is
it manifested, how does it become legible and what are the mechanisms of
its materialization? I insist upon the non-identity between the worker and
the job, opening up a space between being and doing. For the idea of pro-
fession presumes one stable identity, permanency or authenticity against
which life is thrown into relief. We all are employed within the discourses
of state-enforced, economically prescribed self-identifications, in which
everything from census forms to visa applications asks us to name our
occupation (meaning business, or legitimate wage work) with a singular
word or phrase. What position do you fill? What space do you regularly
occupy?
Occupational acts become suffused with potential irony. In the interest of
the imminent automated future, perhaps we need to question the idea of
work as unmediated access to anything that might be called ‘real’ – work
itself is always fugitive, phantasmic and illusory.
(The project was originally commissioned for the exhibition Hangar for
the Passerby, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.)

Acknowledgements
• Akansha Rastogi, curator at KNMA, for inviting and guiding the pro-
ject with enthusiasm, warmth, sincerity and an unparalleled vision.
• Arnika Ahldag, artist and researcher, for her research and collaboration
on several materials that shaped the project.
• Shaunak Sen, filmmaker, for his keen sense of the image and the politics
of optics in making the film.
• Several employees at HCL Tech, Sector 126 Noida, who helped us tre-
mendously in providing timely access and support: Gyanendra Sinha,
Hendry Peter Hunt, Sanjay, Roshan Negi, Karthick Palanivel, Subrat
Charavarty and many more whom I met during the six-month-long
journey.
(Future is Abolished –- A spontaneous Must Help- Desk set up
by the artist for the company employees)
224 Amitesh Grover
Notes
1 Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of
Contemporary Forms of Life. Trans. Isabella Bertolett, James Cascaito and
Andrea Casson. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
2 Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2012. Occupational Realism. TDR: The Drama Review,
Volume 56.4, (pp. 32–48). According to Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Occupational
realism, which began in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with postindus-
trial economic changes, is the artistic practice of revealing ambiguous, difficult,
and unresolvable conflicts about class, including professionalization, waged
work, and volition”.
3 An SLA is a contract between a service provider and its internal or external
customers that documents what services the provider will furnish and defines
the service standards the provider is obligated to meet. SLAs are instruments of
maintaining precarity in the employment system, a complex grid of performance
and assessment scores of employees that are updated every minute of each day,
closely monitoring the employee and their efficiency at performing the job.
4 Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press.
5 Pad.ma – short for Public Access Digital Media Archive – is an online archive of
densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films.
The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download
for non-commercial use.
16 On Aaydaan
Sushama Deshpande

Aaydaan is the autobiography of Dalit writer Urmila Pawar. Aaydaan was

published in 2003. When I read the book, I felt Urmila had an amazing
sense of humour when she looked at herself, and at the same time, she is
very true to her life when it comes to writing about it. It is quite a big book.
I never thought of doing a play on the book, but Ramu Ramanathan made
me do it. He was literally after me. Ramu expressed, “[T]his is an important
book and you should do a play on this”. I didn’t say ‘no’ directly but for a
long time never gave it serious thought. He kept asking me at regular inter-
vals if I’d read the book again. So finally, I asked Urmila about doing a play
on Aaydaan. She was, of course, not ready for it, and I was happy about her
“Nakaar, No”. I conveyed to Ramu that Urmila was not ready. But Ramu
being Ramu kept insisting and pushing me about the play. He used different
styles of asking this question. Whenever Ramu used to ask me, I used to tell
myself, “Not me”. And Ramu started asking, “Who else other than you!”
Ramu has his own way of pushing you to do such work. I think around four
to five years he kept asking this, which finally made me think about it seri-
ously and do a play on Aaydaan.
One day, one of my artists, Shubhangi Bhujbal, came and told me that
someone was doing a play on Aaydaan, and she felt that I should direct it.
What happened that day, I don’t know but I called up Urmila and asked her
for permission to do Aaydaan on stage. And coincidentally, Urmila also
said, “Yes” that day. And I finally took the book in my hand for doing a play
on it.
The first thing I decided was that we would be presenting the book on
stage. I will not rewrite the script but edit the book. I was not ready to
compromise on Urmila’s flavour of language. Secondly, what should be the
form of the play? I was not able to decide on that. So, we decided to read
Aaydaan together. It was also very helpful for the purpose of editing the
book.
Aaydaan means articles made out of very thin strips of cane or bamboo
which are woven together in different forms and sizes – namely, sup, topali,
rovali, etc. (different types of baskets, as you may call them). Aaydaan is
used for household purposes, as well as on farms. Urmila’s mother, ‘Aaye’ as
she used to call her, was an excellent weaver of Aaydaan. She used to earn
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-19
226 Sushama Deshpande
her daily living out of this activity, and at the same time, it was a great stress
buster for her. On the other hand, in the later stages of her life, Urmila
started weaving words together; she started writing. For Urmila, this weav-
ing of words was her stress buster in life. Urmila feels that her mother’s
weaving and her weaving of words, her writing is the common thread that
connects both of them so closely. She feels a deep connection in both these
activities. Reading this again and again, I felt that there should be weaving
in the play – weaving of characters, moments and memories would be the
right expression. When you go deep into the subject you want to work on,
the subject itself gives you the form of expression. The book gave me the
form of the play.
I decided to have three female artists perform in Aaydaan. These three
artists would be playing multiple roles as Urmila and other characters in
Urmila’s life (mother, father, teacher, friends, etc.). I felt weaving their stage
movements was an innovative and interesting challenge. So, in this way, the
form of Aaydaan came to mind. With three artists, weaving is possible, so
three girls became the basic need of the play. Reciting the book was, of
course, not an easy job. But it was not just reciting; it was also performing
different characters at the same time, which was challenging, so I decided
that experienced theatre artists would be the actors of this play.
Aaydaan’s writing is not the language of theatre. Without disturbing the
original writing, editing this book was truly a challenging task. So, I strongly
felt that the girls (artists) should be a part of the whole process. The most
important factor was that it should be Urmila’s story, other parts of relatives,
etc., would be edited. Editing was the most crucial part of this process.
After many drafts of editing, I felt I should read the decided portion of
Aaydaan in front of Urmila. Urmila came home with Usha Ambore, and I
read the script. She remembered many other things also while reading,
things that she had not even written in the book. At times, she was laughing;
at other times, she felt low. I will never forget that evening. After the read-
ing, Urmila gave a green signal to the editing, and I was relaxed.
Ramu was supposed to come on the same day and same time, but he
could not or did not make it. However, now my next listener of the script
obviously had to be Ramu. Ramu always gives you his true opinion, so
what Ramu feels was very important. Ramu’s reaction was very positive.
He said, “You actually get the experience of the whole book after listening
to this edited version”. He was very happy and kept sending me text mes-
sages as per his style. I was on top of the world. “The script still needed
editing,” Ramu said, but I decided to start the rehearsals.
Urmila’s story is a representative story of a rural girl. So, all the three girls
would be Urmila and at the same time also keep changing the other charac-
ters. That was the weaving of characters on stage. According to the struc-
ture and need of the scene, I started allotting lines to the artists. And finally,
the book got distributed among the three girls. Now it was Nandita,
Shubhangi and Shilpa’s script. It was three girls reciting and performing the
book as if it was their story.
 On Aaydaan 227
Since our play was a presentation of a book, I told them that every line
spoken, whether it is descriptive or informative, needs to be expressed and
delivered with proper emotions just like a dialogue. It can’t be just plainly
read. Secondly, I told them while performing one character, if there is a
switch on/switch off between character and narrator, just leave the charac-
ter as and where it is, do not think of completion of moments, etc. With this,
I knew I would be able to weave the script on stage. So, the reading of lines
started.
Now for standing rehearsals, a ‘set’ was needed. To create the texture and
feel of Aaydaan, I thought of having a set made of bamboo. Urmila’s mother
used to make Aaydaan day and night since that was her source of liveli-
hood. I spoke to Ramu about this, and he took me to the Indian Institue of
Technologies, Powai’s Industrial Design Centre (IDC). With the help of Prof
Raja Mohanty, I got to see the objects made there and I got the idea for my
design of the set. I explained it to Prof Raja and he explained it to Niranjan
Rudrapal who works there. Prof Dr Rao gave permission, and Niranjan
created/built the set. I could use the set in different ways to express the
weave of the play.
Rehearsals started in Awishkar. I didn’t call Urmila for the rehearsals for
a long time because for her it was her life being performed. I felt it would
be difficult to take her suggestions at this level. And she didn’t insist as well.
My artists were contributing a lot. Initially, they would find it difficult to
deliver the descriptive part in an interesting way but gradually, they found
ways and methods of doing it. The girls slowly started developing the man-
nerisms of different characters they had to perform. All three of them are
good actors, so working with them was really fun. These girls are doing
theatre professionally so they are good at reciting or performing. But they
are not connected to any movement directly, so a lot of discussions kept
happening. Understanding movement was a bit tough (Nandita, Shubhangi
and Shilpa are from the theatre). They do not know much about social
movements. What is the Dalit movement, and why is the women’s move-
ment needed? Why is food so important in the cast system? These were their
questions. To understand Urmila’s life, they needed answers to those ques-
tions. So gender, cast and related issues were discussed, and slowly they
started relating their lives with the gender issues) Shilpa and Shubhangi
merged in the process, but the third girl, Nandita used to feel, “Why am
I here! I don’t understand this. I should leave the play”. She could not
relate to Urmila’s life, to the movement, for a long time. But the rehearsals
went on.
The language used in Aaydaan is from the Ratnagiri and Malvan area in
Konkan. The women there used a lot of abusive words in their day-to-day
conversations, which Urmila has expressed in a very interesting manner.
Her mother also used a lot of abusive words. These words add a special
flavour to the local language there. So, to understand this better and to
learn the rhythm of the language, I took my artists to Urmila’s place. Urmila
read those portions of the script with the typical ‘laheja’ or rhythm/the local
228 Sushama Deshpande
accent. We asked her to say those abusive words also. Urmila laughed and
said, “People will criticize you if you keep those words”. But I felt it was
important since it was not just her mother’s expression but the expression
of every woman from Konkan. I refused to delete that portion.
On another level, we realized we still needed to edit a lot, so editing was
going on. There’s a particular part in the script that describes the food and
eating habits of the Dalits. It was an important section. But for the girls,
with this life being unknown, they kept asking me to edit it. I refused to do
that and explained to them how it was an inseparable part of their lives.
And after the performance, they understood what I actually meant.
Ramu also introduced me to Narayan Karadiji from IIT when we were
visiting IDC. I talked to him about the music of Aaydaan. He expressed that
he would have used flute (Bansuri) and ‘Thapvadya’ for such a play. When
Nitin Kayarkar was doing the music, he also thought along the same lines.
We used very little music and a few sound effects to create the
atmosphere.
Ravi Sawant and Rasik did the lighting design.
When it came to costumes, being able to move easily and comfortably
was the most important criterion. There were a lot of movements and quick
changes of characters, so I decided to keep it simple and we did what we
used to do in my other play ‘Bayaa Daar Ughad’. With the help of odhani
or dupatta, the girls would change characters. So, we just decided the col-
ours, and simple ‘salvar khamiz and dupatta’ became the costume.
The play was taking shape, and the date of our first performance was
coming closer. Would the audience understand what was happening and
who was playing which character? Would it be confusing, or would it flow
meaningfully? So many questions, so many doubts. I was really tense. I
called Ramu to see the rehearsal. He was very happy, but I thought, Ramu
is part of the team, why would he say, “This is not good” at this point. I was
very tense till the first performance. Ramu was thinking of not coming for
the first performance. But I told him, “You have to be there”. I was proba-
bly thinking, if people don’t accept the performance, I would need Ramu’s
shoulder to cry on. I even told my artists, “This could be our first and last
performance. Be prepared”.
But the performance went well. The play was really appreciated; the girls
were praised for their performance, and we received a standing ovation. I
was happy and finally relaxed. It was worth all the efforts.
Thanks to Ramu; he made me do this play.
We got a lot of appreciation but not the number of performances in that
way. Maybe I am not good at publicity. I can’t sell my plays well. Maybe
because of the response to my play Savitri, my expectations were high. I feel
Aaydaan is an extension of Savitri’s performance. (Savitri paved the path of
education for girls. Savitri is the representation of rural Maharashtra.
Aaydaan is the story of a girl from rural Maharashtra who started learning
and got attached to the Dalit movement and then the women’s movement.
So the girl who walked on the path which Savitri paved is an important
 On Aaydaan 229
point. In the form of the Savitri performance, I talk to today’s audience.
Here Urmila is a representation of a rural girl, so three girls are Urmila. So
it is an extension of the Savitri performance). It is the life of a Dalit girl from
a rural area. Sometimes, I feel getting performances is also a gender issue.
(The world is male-dominated. So, most of the public relations carries in the
evening over a drink. Men who saw the performance of Aaydaan talked to
me about organizing the shows, and I know they could, never did this. I
asked them but they never did. All-women organizations organized the per-
formance. Even those men said to me, “Please don’t say this openly”). The
process of the play is always interesting, enriching but not the distribution
of the play.
Urmila came for the first five performances. She was content with what
she saw. She understands that even if it is her life being portrayed, Aaydaan
is a representative story of a rural girl. I will always be thankful to Urmila
for giving us her life story to work on.
I was talking to a dear friend of mine Aditi Desai from Ahmedabad about
Aaydaan. Aditi asked me if we could perform this in Hindi! The girls were
excited about this new development. And we started the process for the
Hindi performance. Again, translation was a big job. Aaydaan is available
in Hindi. But I did not like it much; the flavour of Urmila’s language was
lost in translation. I used my Savitri experience and maintained a mix of
Hindi-Marathi as I tried to retain the original flavour of the book. The
artists were close to the rhythm of the original language. Again, they started
working on the lines. Hats off to my artists. We did the first show at IIT and
then at Ahmedabad.
Then we did the Hindi performances in Chhattisgarh. Azim Premji
Foundation and Azim Premji University organized the performances. In
Chhattisgarh, people loved the play but some found it difficult to sustain for
two hours continuously due to a lack of theatre culture there. So, we did
some more editing and performed a one-and-a-half-hour play without
intervals.
The entire journey with Aaydaan was truly an enriching and fulfilling
experience that also helped us explore and understand ourselves better
along the way.
We still do performances, and we will keep doing them.
17 Conversation with Sunil Shanbag
Sunil Shanbag

(Held at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay on 24 September 2018)

SHARMISTHA: Sunil Shanbag has been working for more than forty years in
the field of theatre. He started his journey long back, as a teenager with
Satyadev Dubey. Mr. Shanbag is recently awarded Sangeet Natak
Akademy Award for his work. Without much ado, over to Sunil.
SUNIL SHANBAG: Thank you, Sharmistha, for giving me this opportunity. To
come to the point, as Sharmistha said, I started very young as an actor.
I was just out of school and I was fortunate… just one of those strange
coincidences and accidents that take place. … Dubey was looking for
someone very young to play a part in a play, and he asked, “Would you
like to do it?” And I said, of course, I would do it. At that point, I didn’t
know that I would do it for the rest of my life.

So I started working with him, and I spent about ten years with him. This
was around ’74, ’75. Dubey knew when people were done with him. So in
1984, he threw us out of his company. “So now off you go…do your own
work. You can’t work with me anymore.” It was quite a sudden moment,
and so we set up our own company. I started directing independently then.
And for the next three years, this theatre company, which still exists, called
Arpana grew and developed a certain style of theatre – partly out of the lack
of resources – which was minimalistic, but that’s also a style we enjoyed and
got to develop. We worked with contemporary texts from the Marathi the-
atre because of our close connection through the Chabildas period when we
were very much part of the resurgence of Marathi experimental theatre.
Around this time, doing theatre meant finding a script that spoke to you.
So sometimes you worked with a play a senior writer like Vijay Tendulkar
had written, or we worked with a text written by much younger writers like
Rajeev Naik or Shafaat Khan.
But over time, two things happened. I was getting uncomfortable with a
lot of the theatre we were doing. Much of Mumbai’s theatre was, and still
is, bourgeois and also not a theatre which responds often to the world
around it. For instance, Mumbai has a strong working-class presence and
history, but we rarely see it reflected in our work. When I was a student, I
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-20
 Conversation with Sunil Shanbag 231
often travelled by bus through Parel and Lalbag late in the night, and it
always struck me how busy and full of energy these areas were 24/7. It was
only later that I realized that it was because of the textile mills. Thousands
of workers came out of the mills, and thousands of workers in the next shift
went in.
There was a failed attempt by some of us to write and do a play that dealt
with the working-class experience, but a few years later, I came to know
that playwright Ramu Ramanathan was actually researching something
like this. So, I called him and found out that he was interested in recreating
the history of Mumbai’s textile mills, and the process that he was using was
fascinating. He had spent months walking around in the mill areas, talking
to people, and he was also inspired by a very important oral history of the
mills titled, “One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices”.
Those who have a working knowledge of the history of Mumbai know
that the prosperity of the city revolved around the textile industry. Large
textile mills were set up. Thousands of migrants came to work. Many were
from the Konkan coast. Some came from the north. It was mostly from
Maharashtra, but some did come from other parts of the country. The chim-
neys of the mills dominated the landscape of the city at one time. This par-
ticular part of the city, which is Parel, Lalbag, Byculla, was also called
Girangaon, which literally means “Village of Mills”.
A lot of women also worked here. In spite of this poor picture, you get a
sense of rural women who have just been transferred from the village to the
mills. And their housing was in what was known as chawls. They are little
rooms with a running veranda outside. It was just a single room. It could be
large or small. Most of life happens outside the room. The chawls in
Mumbai are a very well-known institution, and there is a lot of literature
written around experiences of living in a chawl. You have mixed cultures
happening there. People from different parts of Maharashtra would come.
They celebrated festivals together; they shared music, different types of
practices. At one point, it was called the Girangaon culture. Because the
textile mills had communist unions, you find the influence of this Girangaon
culture on progressive writers whether they were writing in Urdu or other
languages.
Ramu finished writing the play, and when it came to us to make into a
stage production, the first question was language since Ramu writes in
English. The natural language of the play was Marathi, but I was concerned
that if we did the play in Marathi, it would restrict the reach of the play. So
we asked Chetan Datar, a playwright himself, fluent in Hindi, to translate
the play using Marathi syntax. He went further and turned the entire script
into verse, which did very interesting things to it! But the translation was an
interesting experiment. Years later, people would remember the play as
being in Marathi, and not in Hindi!
When we started production, we began thinking of how to make the
actors get a sense of the world their characters were a part of. Usually what
happens is that the actors read the script, learn the lines and perform their
232 Sunil Shanbag
parts. Here we felt a greater sense of responsibility. We were talking about
a living institution. We were talking about a large number of people who
have been through the experience at a very important moment of the his-
tory of the city and as well as of the country.
While we were planning the production there were cases in the Labour
Court that were looking at how mill workers were being denied large
amounts of back pay after mill owners had shut down the mills. It was a
hugely unequal battle between the workers and the mill owners who had
hired a battery of top lawyers to make sure the cases went in their favour.
Our actors spent some time at the Labour Court in Mumbai getting a sense
of the hopelessness of the situation, and how workers had to spend days
waiting for the outcome of the cases despite knowing that the entire system
was working against them.
This was also the time when we were thinking of the design for the play.
I normally like working with minimalist design elements – a throwback to
the time when we worked with very limited resources and couldn’t really
afford elaborate design. But I did want a sense of Girangaon looming over
the performance space, like a continuing presence. During discussions with
the designer, Vivek Jadhav, we decided to explore the idea of a large painted
backdrop which would create a frame for the play, and we began looking
for inspiration for the backdrop design. This brought us to the work of
painter Sudhir Patwardhan who has consistently worked with working-
class urban landscapes, faces and situations. Of his many paintings, one
appealed to us the most. A kind of vertical landscape with an old suburban
railway station at the bottom and behind it the top of a cotton mill with its
chimneys, and then above it all, the new skyscrapers which were transform-
ing the skyline of the old mill district (Figure 17.1).
So this is the backdrop that we came up with.
So if you can see it here, left there is a chawl, you have a mill gate here,
then you have this flyover. You can just “fly over” the whole working-class
area without having to engage with it in any way.
In Cotton 56, Polyester 84, the story of the mills is told by two mill work-
ers who have lost their jobs. They spend their days at a community newspa-
per stand which typically also serves as a meeting place for friends over tea,
to exchange news, gossip and to argue. This is where [we] recount their

Figure 17.1 Backdrop of Cotton 56, Polyester 84.

 Conversation with Sunil Shanbag 233
times in the mills. So you hear in a sense the history of the mills through
their personal experiences and observations against the larger canvas of
how, with active political connivance, mill owners siphoned money out of
the mills into other businesses, driving them into the ground and then
declaring them sick, imposing lock outs when workers protested. Eventually,
the land on which the mills stand becomes more valuable than the mills
themselves, and then the mafia steps in, and murders and killings begin. The
communist unions are crushed by the state actively using criminal lumpen,
and this is also the time when the Shiv Sena is founded by Bal Thackeray
and a new politics begins. When you talk about subjects like this, you are
going to face resistance.
I don’t know if you are aware, we have a Stage Scrutiny Board. It is a
nicer way of saying censor board. Actually, the last remaining states to have
this are Gujarat and Maharashtra. All scripts go to the board for approvals,
and over time, many plays have faced resistance. We had some trouble with
Cotton 56, Polyester 84 too because they said we could not make references
to living politicians, and when we opened the play, Bal Thackeray was very
much alive, and the censor board members were probably afraid the play
would create controversy. But we were too small to be attacked, and we
seem to have stayed below the radar, at least in Mumbai! We had a difficult
experience though when we were on tour to the coal-mine town of Rajura
in Chandrapur (Maharashtra) and Nagpur. The mine union had invited us
to perform for their workers, and no one knew that the police had got wind
of the performance and probably sent someone in to see the show. The next
day we had two performances in Nagpur, and when we were setting up in
the auditorium, the management cut the power and asked us to stop work.
Police orders they said. Our hosts informed us that the police had refused
permission for the shows on some technicality, and the real reason was its
politics. About 600 people showed up for the show and had to be told it
was cancelled. Very disappointing for all of us. Our hosts suggested we walk
down to a small community hall close by and invite those who had come to
see the play for a conversation about the play. We agreed, and about 150
people showed up. On an impulse, we decided to perform the play for them
– without anything like costumes, or lights or anything and in the tiny space
available to us. But the audience loved it! It was an emotional moment for
all of us. At the end of the day, you don’t really need much to do theatre!
So after Cotton 56, Polyester 84, I was excited about working with real
people, with history, dramatic events. In a sense, it was a coming together of
all my interests. I was making documentary films and working with brilliant
filmmakers from whom I learned how to construct an argument out of non-
fiction material, and exploring fundamental societal issues.
A couple of years after Cotton 56, Polyester 84, the curators of Prithvi’s
annual theatre festival decided that the 2008 festival would honour theatre
director Satyadev Dubey. Dubey was not too well, but still a constant pres-
ence at Prithvi. They asked me to do a two-hour show that introduced
Dubey’s work of almost 50 years, and his role in Mumbai’s theatre. I got very
excited with this and I asked playwright, historian Shanta Gokhale if she
234 Sunil Shanbag
would help. She readily agreed and created a script which traced a fascinating
parallel trajectory of Dubey’s work from the early 1960s until the present and
a parallel trajectory of Mumbai’s experimental theatre. We used a variety of
narratives. We used live performances from Dubey’s own work, documentary
footage, we had actors who worked with him in his early days talking about
their experience, music and lots of archival material. Dubey sat through it all,
occasionally instructing an actor to “speak louder”! It was all very emotional.
But for me what was interesting is that several young actors came to me after
the evening and said, “Now we know where we fit into theatre history and
tradition in Mumbai”. And I think it’s unfortunate that we haven’t done
enough documentation of contemporary theatre, or written about it in a sys-
tematic way. Every generation views its own work in isolation.
This was also the time the first BJP government was at the centre and
already we could see the growing number of attacks on minorities and art-
ists. Censorship was very much an everyday reality for a lot of people who
didn’t necessarily agree with the mainstream narrative. I remember one eve-
ning about 40 to 50 of us were screening a documentary on Kashmir at
Vikalp, a platform for independent documentary cinema, and the venue
was literally overrun by what seemed the entire Dadar police station. They
had come to stop the screening and seize the film because of a complaint
that the film was not sympathetic to the Indian state, and the screening
would lead to a “law and order” problem.
And I thought, could we look at the idea of censorship in the same way
we had looked at the history of an individual in the case of Dubey? Could
we explore an idea this time, and not an individual? And because we are
from the theatre, can we frame this argument within the history of censor-
ship in the theatre? Turn the gaze upon our own world?
When you talk about censorship in theatre in Maharashtra, the most
significant example of a contemporary play that comes to mind is Vijay
Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder which was staged in 1972 and attacked by
both the state and civil society.
More importantly was how the producer/director of the play had
responded to censorship. Kamlakar Sarang was a young director doing his
first major full-length play. That it was written by Tendulkar, by then already
the most well-known playwright of his times, made the task on hand even
more daunting. And then came the resistance to the play. Kamlakar fought
the censor board, and everyone else who opposed the play, for several years.
He was supported by many liberal theatre practitioners, lawyers, writers
and journalists and eventually emerged victorious. The law courts ruled in
favour of the play, but then extra-legal forces like the Shiv Sena attacked the
play and prevented performances. Eventually, the play prevailed and went
on to become a part of theatre history!
Through the period of this struggle, Kamlakar meticulously maintained a
diary, making note not just of every twist and turn in the struggle but also
his own response to the crisis, his discussions with Tendulkar and other
theatre personalities. This diary was later published as a book, Bindeche
Divas (The Binder Days). This was a hugely valuable resource.
 Conversation with Sunil Shanbag 235
Apart from this, several key players of the time were available to tap
into…Kamlakar Sarang had passed on, but for instance, his wife, Lalan,
who played the role of Champa in the play, and was witness to everything
that happened, was keen to share her memories, and all this seemed a great
opportunity to create the play we had in mind. The lawyer who fought the
case was also very helpful.
Once again, I turned to Shanta Gokhale, and she was enthusiastic as
always and very generous with her time. She brought in an additional layer
to the idea. Her contention was that urban theatre people had access to
resources, and the law, to fight their case against censorship, but there were
examples of “little” performing arts traditions which had been sanitized, or
informally censored, by society itself and had no such support system. She
felt juxtaposing the Sakharam case with what happened to Tamasha, a
popular folk performance form in Maharashtra would allow us to look at
other dimensions of censorship as well. I was also very happy with this idea
because it immediately added very strong performative possibilities to the
play.
Research for the play, which we eventually titled S*X, M*RALITY, and
CENS*RSHIP, was at two levels. On one hand, we were looking for archi-
val material on the 1972 production, which was quite a straightforward
exercise. On the other, I was keen to build the cultural and political context
within which Sakharam happened. I wanted to know what was going on in
cinema, advertising…what images audiences were seeing…what were other
Marathi plays like at that time, how were women being depicted in the
mainstream, and so on. Also, if you remember, the ’70s was an exciting time
all over the world. All this took a little more work, and if I remember right,
Irawati Karnik, who also co-wrote the text with Shanta, spent almost six to
eight months reading, in newspaper archives, interviewing people and so
on. I knew filmmakers who made advertising films in the ’70s, and from
them, I was able to get some amazing footage which never failed to delight
the audience at our shows, and so clearly indicates why Tendulkar’s
Sakharam Binder caused such an uproar by challenging the hypocrisy and
sentimentality in society. We used images of anti-Vietnam protests in the US,
Bob Dylan’s music, the whole hippie movement as part of our contextual-
izing Sakharam, and for theatre audiences, it was very exciting to see the
linkages.
In 2010, I was asked by Happenings’ Tagore Utsav in Kolkata to produce
and direct a play by Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore’s work had come out of
copyright, and the festival was keen that musicians, theatre directors, danc-
ers from other parts of the country do contemporary interpretations of his
plays, his music and so on.
When I was young, I had acted in a school production of Tagore’s play
Dakghar. Without too much thought, I said I would do Dakghar for the
festival, and I forgot about it. So when the time came to start working on it,
I began to think about what I could. The translation of the play I had was
archaic, and on reading it I found the play romantic and…well, it wasn’t
kind of a play I would normally do.
236 Sunil Shanbag
Dakghar is a beautiful allegory of the human spirit and its search for
spirituality. Briefly, Dakghar is the story of Amal, a young orphan being
fostered by his uncle. Amal is a sickly child, and the old-fashioned family
physician insists he be confined to a dark room so that he is not exposed to
natural elements. But Amal is a bright child, full of curiosity and an interest
in the world outside. He engages in conversations with a stream of colour-
ful characters who walk past his window everyday – the pretty flower seller,
the milkman, the guard who rings the town bell every hour and so on. One
of them, the headman, is a bit of a bully, and he teases Amal saying the king
will come one day with a letter for him. Amal waits in vain and finally suc-
cumbs to his illness, still waiting for the magical moment when the king
would come to him.
I start reading around Dakghar to figure out something about the play in
a larger context. After a few days of reading, I stumbled upon a historical
event that took place in Poland that shook me completely – the story of
Janusz Korczak. Korczak was a paediatrician in Poland between the two
world wars. He was well-known as a strong advocate of the rights of chil-
dren, and his views seemed even more radical at a time when among Polish
elites children were brought up by wet nurses and nannies ( “your breast
belongs to your child”, Korczak told Polish women), and the children of the
lower classes experienced violence and a difficult life on the streets of Poland.
Korczak founded an orphanage for Jewish children and put into practice
many of his ideas. The children ran the orphanage through a parliament,
and Korczak himself was accountable to it. They ran a children’s newspaper
which became so popular that a local newspaper carried it as a supplement
once a month. The open and democratic atmosphere allowed the children
to flourish.
Then in 1942, the Nazis invaded Poland and rounded up all the Jews,
including Korczak and his children. They were transferred to the infamous
Warsaw ghetto. Korczak’s children began to wilt in the very difficult condi-
tions in the ghetto – not enough food, poor sanitary conditions and, most
important, nothing to stimulate their bright minds. Soon word got around
that the Germans were sending Jews from the ghettos to undisclosed desti-
nations in cattle trains, and they were never seen again. Death was in the air.
Korczak believed strongly that children should always be prepared for any
eventuality, and he wanted to prepare them for possible death, horrible as it
sounds. One day he had an idea. He rushed to his little room in the loft,
picked up a book from his shelves and ran down to announce that they would
do a play with the children. The play he had chosen was Dakghar by Tagore!
He had a Polish translation and felt it was the ideal play for his children.
Tagore had written Dakghar in 1912 I think, and by the 1940s, Korczak
had a translation in Poland! Isn’t that amazing? So as I read further, I found
a wealth of information, including eyewitness accounts of the single perfor-
mance of Dakghar by Korczak’s children in the ghetto. Amal’s dying at the
end was a poignant moment for everyone. Little did they know that a few
days later, all of them would be rounded up by the Nazis and walked
 Conversation with Sunil Shanbag 237
through the streets of Warsaw to the trains that would carry them to the
Treblinka concentration camp. Again, eyewitness accounts of that day talk
of how the orphans walked in a neat formation, led by Korczak, with heads
held high. Quite in contrast to the scenes of hysteria and panic among the
many other Jews also being led away. That was the last the world saw of
Korczak or the children. Reportedly, they were gassed to death in the camp.
I felt I had found a way into the play. I could understand the meaning of
Dakghar through the story of Korczak and his orphans. The story also spoke
strongly of amazing cross-cultural connections across continents. I thought
we could run Korzcak’s story parallel to Dakghar, and over the course of the
play, you see the two stories, one fictional and the other historical, coming
together, each adding so much meaning to the other (Figure 17.2).
What followed was an interesting series of collaborations. I shared my
idea with Vivek Venkatram to write the script because I knew he has a deep
interest in history, is a writer and theatre director himself and an academic.
In fact, he is at the final stage of his PhD at Stanford at this moment. I also
knew that Vivek would research rigorously and would have a good under-
standing of the political and social implications of Korczak’s ideas. I was
thrilled when Moushumi Bhowmik from Kolkata agreed to work on the
music which I wanted as a strong element. We listened to music from Bengal
and also western compositions inspired by the holocaust. Moushumi asked
a fellow musician and composer from the UK, Oliver Weeks, to compose
the western music, and he was so amazingly generous. As usual, there was
no real budget, so he wrote the score, invited a bunch of musician friends
for lunch, asking them to bring their instruments and set up a make-shift
studio in his home, using mattresses as acoustic material! The outcome of

Figure 17.2 Scene from Dakghar.

238 Sunil Shanbag
this exercise was some beautiful music which added such a strong emo-
tional core to the production.
[The session ends with a round of applause.]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Questions related to the talk on 24 August 2018 at Indian Institute of
Technology (IIT) Bombay and to the performance of Words Have Been
Uttered in IDC on 17 March 2018,

The story of how you began to work with a certain production seems
to be quite interesting. Sometimes it’s sheer chance, and sometimes it’s
your own willingness to deal with a certain subject like in case of
Cotton 56, Polyester 84. Can you tell us how your recent performance
that you also performed at the conference “Performance Making and
the Archive”, Words Have Been Uttered happened?
Words Have Been Uttered came out of two things actually. Four years
ago, Sapan Saran and I founded Tamaasha Theatre, where we wanted to
make theatre pieces for intimate spaces focusing sharply on an idea,
trying to find a new language, without worrying about scale and hence
able to take risks. We were also looking for new ways to engage with
audiences. The space for intellectual engagement is virtually non-exis-
tent in Mumbai given the aggressive dumbing down imposed by main-
stream culture. Tamaasha Theatre was meant to allow for all this. One
of our first pieces was an exploration of contemporary Indian poetry,
titled Blank Page. The structure of the piece was held together by four
themes, and one of the themes was poetry of resistance. It seemed natu-
ral to progress from there to look at the idea of dissent in more depth.
Why dissent? Well, given the political climate in the country over the
last decade or so, there is an increasing refusal by the state, and larger
society too, to accept ideas that run counter to those held and perpetu-
ated by the mainstream. The response is so hostile and aggressive that
no conversation is even possible. We thought a nuanced exploration of
powerful expressions of dissent through time, and across cultures,
would present a perspective which could make a conversation possible.
So Irawati Karnik, Sapan Saran and I spent time reading widely – poetry,
iconic songs, theatre texts, letters, satire and so on, coming out [of]
many different countries and historical periods. The range was quite
amazing. We collaborated with visual artist and animator Afrah Shafiq
to create videos, and with musician Rohit Das, and all these elements
suggested a form that emphasized a spirit of sharing and constant
acknowledgement of the authors of these texts. There is minimal inter-
vention on our part as theatre makers. The texts occupy centre stage.
You have used various texts, sometimes fictional and other times his-
torical, can you tell us a little bit about the dramaturgical intention
behind your selection and how you wove them into a narrative?
 Conversation with Sunil Shanbag 239
We allowed ourselves to look at a wide range of forms used to express
ideas of dissent and resistance, keeping Indian expression at the centre,
knowing that the ideas would inevitably blur boundaries of time, geog-
raphy and cultures. The title of the show came from Lal Singh Dil’s
poem, which eloquently suggested what we were trying to do…pluck
words that had been uttered across the world and still floated around
us, reminding us, provoking us and inspiring us!
I was very conscious of the need for the work to be performative and that
was also one of the things we kept in mind. Again, over time, I have been
interested in theatre texts that are political and argumentative, and so that
was something else we looked for. In fact, we open with a brilliant scene
from Brecht’s Galileo, which really sets up the premise in such a spectacu-
lar fashion. We also looked at themes and how we could construct an argu-
ment, punctuating each theme with a dramatic transition so that the whole
piece flows seamlessly. But I think we examined each text to understand its
power and ability to make an impact with minimal intervention by us.
Very early into the process, we felt that we must always acknowledge the
writers of the texts we were dealing with, that the words were theirs. This
is the reason why we often just read texts, and even when we perform, we
often hold books in our hands. Offering a copy of the texts to the audience
after the show is also our way of acknowledging the writers.
You seem to be collaborating with artists of varied political inclinations
and given your own work has political intent at least in terms of their
subtext, can you tell us a little bit about your collaborative work with
other artists?
Most of my key collaborators like writers, designers or musicians/com-
posers have been broadly progressive in their ideology. It’s really not pos-
sible to work with someone who has a radically different ideology. It did
happen in one instance, but we were fortunate that we were able to find
common ground on key ideas, and the writer in question was just bril-
liant, so was able to rise above prejudices when it mattered most! That
much give and take was sufficient, and I was happy with the outcome.
The recurrent trope that you have used is to historically position your
work, either historicizing a fictional work like Dakghar or fictionaliz-
ing historical material like the narratives of the mill workers in Mumbai.
Any specific reason for this fascination with history?
I have always been fascinated by history. I was fortunate to be in a
school that encouraged me to do my own reading in history even in
class 12. Over time, I also have come to understand that history often
has the key to understanding the present, and this tension between the
past and the present grips me. This engagement has coloured my choice
of plays and ideas very strongly.
Part IV

Many Methods, Multiple

Archives
18 Archiving Performing Arts in India
An Overview
Shubha Chaudhuri

I would like to start with perhaps a very personal statement. My increasing

sense of discomfort in the last few years is hearing the word “archive” being
bandied around. Everything is an archive. And we use it so loosely, that
people like me who have worked in an archive for 35 years as a kind of
vocation or a passion or a career or whatever, find it very hard to justify our
space in the middle of this kind of discourse if one can call it that. So…you
may hear “my grandmother is an archive. I am an archive; this seminar is
an archive”. Hence, also our discussion around it has got very loose and
perhaps generalized. It’s a shifting ground, which of course, I feel it has to
be. How we archive has changed, and we will keep changing how we look
at it. So that’s where I am coming from – a very nuts and bolts archive
person trying to address some wider concerns that have been put to me.

Archives: Multiple Perspectives

Definitions
An archive is an accumulation of historical records or the physical place
they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have
accumulated over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime,
and are kept to show the function of that person or organization.
(Wikipedia)

Institution
Preservation as a fundamental principle
Infrastructure for preservation and access
Policies
Acquisition
Processing, cataloguing metadata
Outreach
Dissemination

DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-22
244 Shubha Chaudhuri
Situating Archives
So as I said, we have multiple perspectives. Here is the definition from
Wikipedia.

An archive is an accumulation of historical records or the physical place

they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have
accumulated over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime,
and are kept to show the function of that person or organization.

Perhaps bringing in the Wikipedia definition is not what one should do. I
am always telling students who come to the archive that Wikipedia and
YouTube are not research. But here I am using it. I am going to talk about
archives as they initially were – a collection of primary source documents,
as opposed to other kinds of collections that you may find.
Essentially, then, I am talking about archives as institutions. I am talking
about archives where preservation is a fundamental principle. And that an
archive should have an infrastructure for its preservation and access. For
instance, many of our archives in India don’t have infrastructure for access. It
also has to be governed by a set of policies. The archive that I talk about essen-
tially is a structured entity. I think many things that we call archives are collec-
tions. They could even be private collections. A library – how is a library
different from an archive? Or a museum? Now, all of these share a lot with
what archives are, and to keep time short, I have put up bubbles that they share.

Collection
Repository Preservation
Access
Library
Museum

Posterity
Documentation Learning
Collecting

Teaching
Research

I think what separates archives from the other kind of entities that we are
talking about is this preoccupation with posterity. And that is something those
of us who work every day with archives find very difficult. It is very hard in
your day-to-day life to keep thinking, “What I am doing has implications for
posterity. This may be useful 100 years from now”. There may be those who
say, “What is this plethora of documents or recordings that we are dealing
with? Who knows how this may be used later. I don’t know. Should we toss it
 Archiving Performing Arts in India 245
out? Should we keep it? How do we handle it?” Posterity! It is a bit of a preoc-
cupation with the archive because it’s about physically preserving things. Now
in the digital world, it has totally changed its meaning. Though we still have
to deal with preserving, collecting and documenting, as activities.

Why Archive ?
“Archiving impulse”
Creating memory
Access to memory
Creating knowledge
Access to knowledge
Creating identity

What then is this archiving impulse? I think archives really are about
creating memory. And then you are trying to access this memory, you are
creating knowledge, and then trying to access it (again). You are also creat-
ing identity. So issues of representation and all of it come in because what
you choose to archive and how you do it also creates identities.

The Archival Record

The archive of the state
Archives and Inclusion
The past for the future
The ongoing present

So when we talk about the archival record, the archive initially was a
state institution. That’s where the history of archives is from. It is what the
state decided how it would represent itself. What it chose to put in or didn’t
in some cases. Original documents of the state and what you included in
them were what the archive was about. I think a very dramatic revelation
of this for me was looking at South African State archives and how that
excluded the black and coloured population from the state archive. The
Truth and Reconciliation Mission attempted to deal with that. So yes, very
dull things like archives can have very bloody and interesting pasts!
The thing about archives that we keep harping on is that this is for the
future. We are collecting these documents or whatever, for the future. And so
it’s the past that is going to inform the future. I think there is a preoccupa-
tion with the past here in the world of archives or the perception of archives.
For example, 70–80 percent of the visitors to our archive will always ask,
“What is your oldest recording?” But the present is ongoing, as what is the
present today immediately becomes the past tomorrow. It’s a moving wall.
When I joined The Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology
(ARCE), the archive that I work for, in 1982, it was a different present than
the present today. So the problem is, and I see this as my underlying theme,
we do not know what our present is, ever. It’s moving all the time. So we have
246 Shubha Chaudhuri
to deal with the same materials in ways that we may not have ever thought
of. Who thought in 1982 there would be something like the internet? We were
not prepared in terms of agreement forms, in terms of our structuring of what
we call cataloging, which we call metadata now. We could not have imagined
that someday the equivalent of publication or dissemination would mean a
not-for-profit sharing on an international level that took you only two min-
utes to put up! Who could have ever thought of that? So we were not ready
for it. But today, I have to take that same material which was sitting on index
cards and make it relevant to a different generation of people who are want-
ing to access this in very different ways, who are putting it to the kind of
usage that I would have never dreamt of. So this is where the crux of the
archiving challenge is. You are dealing with the same material, and you may
look at it in a lot of ways. We try to document it the best we can, but the way
we document, the way we process, will have to be constantly changing, as
does the technology that we use. The whole idea of preserving the original has
really changed, at least in the world of audio-visual archives. Many people are
not looking so much at preserving the original as preserving the content.
Nobody wants to look at an original document if they can’t see a scan of it
across the world. So, the whole importance of what is valuable, how an
archive needs to function, is changing. So the present is ongoing. We know
this, but it’s constantly shifting the goalpost, constantly moving.

Archives and Accommodating Change

Selection
Representation
Who and what we choose to archive
How we archive ?
For whom ? Target audience
By whom ?

So how do we accommodate change? It’s by really thinking constantly

about what we are selecting, how we are representing, who we are repre-
senting. I think the museum world has been more conscious than the archive
world in talking about representation, political representation, socio-cul-
tural perspectives and so on. Who and what do we choose to archive, how
do we actually do it, for whom and by whom? To give you an example, the
archive I work for – as I have mentioned is the ARCE. As you can imagine
from the name, it started with the scholarly world as its target audience. It
was an archive created by collections from scholars, largely for use by
scholars. As we moved through the years with our own fieldwork, and other
interventions, we became much more conscious of community archives
which we now support in various ways. Access to communities and per-
formers is a major part of who we think now should be our audience and
our collaborators. So when we talk about the community archives, it’s also
changing who is doing the archiving when you are doing your own (auto-
ethnography or archive). Compared to international archives and those set
 Archiving Performing Arts in India 247
up in colonial times, our archives are more local. We are based in India
where our collections are from, as opposed to archives in Austria or England.
However, we are removed in many ways from the communities or people
whose recordings we archive. We have to be conscious of this in our work.

The Curatorial impulse

Defining subjectivity Documentation
Expertise Standards
Control Cataloguing
Interpretation Metadata
Intervention Policies and Systems
Access and
Dissemination

Now looking at the curatorial impulse as opposed to the archival impulse.

It is important to recognize that nothing we do is purely “objective”. We
think that documentation is an objective exercise as opposed to research, or
that archiving is an objective activity. It is not because the archivist is mak-
ing choices, decisions that impact what is finally archived, how it is archived
and how it is represented. It is difficult for us as archivists or curators to
realize that everything could be useful to somebody. Everything might be
useful at some point in some way that I haven’t thought of. Silences, for
instance. People are talking a lot about gaps and silences in the recordings
which could be telling you something which at some point someone would
have edited out as a waste of space. So I think the best that we can do is to
be conscious of our subjectivity and try to define it.
So the curatorial impulse makes itself felt through various ways. As Samik
Bandopadhyay said, we need expertise to work with the archival material.
Obviously, if experts work with them, it’s going to be different from the
way a librarian would. But there is also control in a curatorial impulse,
there is interpretation, there is intervention, all of these things happen
whether we like it or not. They happen in the way we document, in the kind
of standards we have set up. I think the best that we can do is to be con-
scious of our subjectivity and try to define it.
Now all of these things – catalog, and create metadata and having poli-
cies, creating access and dissemination – are always through the lens of
curatorial impulses as I am trying to call it. And the more we define and the
more conscious we are of it, the better it’s going to be for this posterity
principle. So if we at least try to define how our intervention is or what our
documentation is trying to achieve the better it is, because the same piece of
recording or a document is going to be looked at so differently depending
on who is looking at it. To me, that is what is very fulfilling in working for
an archive – where somebody created a recording of a performance for
themselves or for research. But that doesn’t limit how it will get used. There
is a moment where an event gets captured in a recording. It is captured
through the lens of whoever is capturing it, whoever is directing it, but that
248 Shubha Chaudhuri
doesn’t limit how it will be seen. It can be seen in a lot of different ways. So
I think we also need to examine this curatorial impulse.

Situating Performing Arts Archives

Content Contexts
Music Culture Entertainment
Theater Ritual
Intangible
Dance Ceremony Cultural
Puppetry Heritage
Recitation
State Community

Now, looking at performing arts archives a little closer. So just to put myself
on the same page – here is what I think the content of performing arts
archives are – it is music, dance theatre, puppetry and so on, and on the
other side the context in which they occur, maybe entertainment, ritual,
ceremony, etc. And then we see the other spaces that performing arts
archives inhabit – the world of culture, the state, definitely in communities
and more recently the concept of intangible cultural heritage (as propagated
by the 2003 UNESCO Convention).
To situate performing arts archives in a wider context of archives we can
look at the various kinds or categories of archives that are there.

National Archives (State)

Broadcasting Archives (State / Private / Public)
Research Archives (State / Institutional)
Music Industry archives (Commercial)

Community archives

We have national archives, broadcasting archives. Now, these could also

be state archives, as in the case of AIR.1 They could be private radio-televi-
sion, or they could be public. So broadcasting archives are again largely a
commercial entity because they exist for commercial reasons. There are
research archives. Now the first three are categories under the International
Association of Sound and Audio-Visual Archives – national archives, broad-
casting archives and research archives. Research archives again could be
state owned, if they are national research organizations, or they could be
just institutions; they could be non-governmental organisations; they could
be whatever. So they are by researchers, for researchers.
 Archiving Performing Arts in India 249
The music industry has some of the largest archives in the world of
performing arts. In music especially the His Master’s Voice (HMV)
archives are legendary. And much more recently, a movement of commu-
nity archives, which are very different. The whole idea here is that the
members of the community create archives for themselves as they want to
represent themselves or as they want to use. And I should say, before we
look at them with very rose-tinted glasses, they can have the same prob-
lem of privileging authority (a phrase I was trying to avoid until now!). We
are talking identity and representation, but the term ‘archives’ also brings
with it a sense of authority. So where do performing arts fit in all of this?
The performing arts archives are present in all these different kinds of
archives.
So what could performing arts archives contain? What is the kind of
material we are talking about here? They could have manuscripts; they
could have documents; they could have photographs and images. But really
what I am focusing on are the audio-visual recordings, the area I work in.
The connection between performance and recording is an obvious one, as
far as such archives go, as it is the form in which performance is perhaps
captured most directly. Recording becomes important because of the
ephemeral nature of the performance and because the only place it survives
is memory. The minute it’s over, it’s just a memory in the mind of the per-
son who performed it and the people who saw it. And that’s all we had
until we started recording it. So something is better than nothing principle
is absolutely true because there is something of the moment that is cap-
tured. I have already mentioned the implications of objectivity and percep-
tion of the recordist – so you know what you think, your perception of the
moment is very often different from the reality. We can only capture the
moment. It becomes our only access to the past, no matter how imperfect
it is. And because we are largely an oral tradition, recordings have become
very important in the performing arts world because they provide a record
of the oral tradition, increasingly providing a means of transmission and
teaching.

India and Archives of Performance

The archival record
No AV national archive
National archive
Audio visual record
Performing arts and folklore
archives in India
AIR
Emphasis on the National
Programs
Harmonium ban
Sangeet Natak Akademi
AV archives as part of
documentation of
performing arts and folklore
in India
250 Shubha Chaudhuri
Just to slip some information here of the early history of the archives
before we come to our situation in India.2

A History of Sound Archives

1899
Weiner Archiv Phonogramarchiv
The Weiner Archiv-Phonograph
was developed and used in 1901
for field research

1900
Berlin Phonogrammarchiv
Carl Stumpf
Erich Moritz Van Hornbostel
Wax cylinders

Archive of Folk Culture

1916
Francis Densmore
plays a recording for
Mountain Chief
Blackfoot

We have no audio-visual national archive in India. The national archive

that we have doesn’t include audio-visual recordings. Many countries
do. We have documents as records. So India still doesn’t recognize an
audio-visual record as an official record up until now. The archives of the
AIR played a major role in music, and there are others like the archives
of the Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA). However, this was not set up as a
national performing arts archive but was in a way a by-product of the
work that the SNA was doing and thus preserving its recordings. But the
big development of audio-visual archives as a part of documenting per-
forming arts and folklore was around the 1980s. A lot of institutions
started then. I think there were a lot of spontaneous movements. The
Ford Foundation had a big role to play there. They funded a lot of
archives and archival kind of impulses, if you would like to put it that
way. Because I don’t think they just created them but supported archival
initiatives.
I think they came from a concern of change. I think very often, perform-
ing arts archives were created because of a fear of change. We saw things
changing, our traditions changing at a rapid pace. Technology, television,
radio – all had their impact on music and other oral traditions. The media
was also bringing in international influences. There was a feeling of urgency,
 Archiving Performing Arts in India 251
that we need to preserve what we have. I think that was the impulse behind
a lot of the performing arts archives.

The Semantic Web

One aspect of dealing with recordings in this very changing world that I wanted
to propose is talking about one possible approach towards metadata. If we had
to talk of issues of cataloging, metadata and access it would take a whole work-
shop. Something I did want to put forward is a concept of the Semantic Web.
For example, if you were to hear the recording of Dhola Maru from our archive,
you would hear this beautiful recording, and you would say, “What is it?” Now
in our standard way of cataloging, we would say it is an epic and ballad tradi-
tion from Western Rajasthan, sung by Sakar Khan, place and date.

Oral
Tradition
Government of Ballad
India Rag Maru
Dhola Dhola
Maru
Padma Sakar
Shri Khan
Manganiar Marwar
Rajasthan

kamaicha Jajmani system

String
instrument

But what we do with this Semantic Web approach is actually take every-
thing apart. So you also say it’s a ballad, but the ballad goes on to be a part
of oral tradition. And there could be other oral traditions that go on to the
square on the right which was meant to be a related epic in western Uttar
Pradesh called the Dhola which has Nala and Damayanti as the major char-
acters as opposed to Dhola and Maru here. Then we go off into “Marwar”,
sung by Manganiars, a hereditary caste here. Then the Kamaicha that you
have heard, which is a musical instrument, it’s a string instrument, the name
relates to Middle Eastern instruments like Kamanche, and so on, so that
goes on somewhere else. We have Sakar Khan, the major performer on the
Kamaicha in the recording of Dhola Maru, who, if it were a state represen-
tation, would say that he was a Padmashri, but in the community, he is seen
252 Shubha Chaudhuri
as the iconic musician, the best ever Kamaicha player that has ever been. So
we go onto a hereditary caste here; we were going onto patronage, to the
Jajmani system. Coming to the track that is being sung, to the Dhola Maru
which gives us the Raag Maru, which also finds its way into classical music.
The full Semantic Web thing is to take everything apart and each of them to
open up to something else totally. So it allows us to actually contextualize,
which is what I have kept aside from wanting to say that word, in as many
ways as you can think of, in as flexible as ways you can think of. So that no
matter where your shifting goalposts are, you have some places to peg your-
self to, to add and amend. To be successful then we need to create ontolo-
gies. This, though complex, is an alternative to the standard catalog, or even
current methods of meta tagging.

Intellectual Property Rights and Archiving

Intellectual Property Rights

IPR Law

Ethics

The issues of intellectual property rights are linked not only to the law but
to ethics. These are issues that are essential in running an archive and, most
importantly, for access and dissemination.
A lot of what performing arts archives contain are what is called
Traditional Cultural Expression – (according to WIPO – the World
Intellectual Property Organization).

Traditional Cultural Expression (WIPO)

verbal expressions such as folk tales, folk poetry and riddles, signs,
words, symbols and indications;
musical expressions such as folk songs and instrumental music;
expressions by actions such as folk dances, plays and artistic forms or
rituals; whether or not reduced to a material form; and,
tangible expressions such as: productions of folk art, in particular,
drawings, paintings, carvings, sculptures, pottery, terracotta, mosaic,
woodwork, metalware, jewelry, basket weaving, needlework, textiles,
carpets, costumes; crafts; musical instruments; architectural forms.

The following are extracts from the Indian Copyright Act which pertain
most to performing arts. However as will be seen, they are most defined for
music.
 Archiving Performing Arts in India 253

Indian Copyright Act and Music

What is a musical work?
"Musical work" means a work consisting of music and includes any
graphical notation of such work but does not include any words or any
action intended to be sung, spoken or performed with the music. A
musical work need not be written down to enjoy copyright protection.
What is a sound recording?
"Sound recording" means a recording of sounds from which sounds may
be produced regardless of the medium on which such recording is made
or the method by which the sounds are produced. A phonogram and a
CD-ROM are sound recordings.

Indian Copyright Act

Who has rights in a musical sound recording?
There are many right holders in a musical sound recording.
For example, the lyricist who wrote the lyrics, the composer
who set the music, the singer who sang the song, the
musician (s) who performed the background music, and the
person or company who produced the sound recording

What are the rights in a musical work?

In the case of a musical work, copyright means the exclusive right
To reproduce the work
To issue copies of the work to the public
To perform the work in public
To communicate the work to the public
To make cinematograph film or sound recording in respect of the
work
To make any translation of the work
To make any adaptation of the work.

Performer’s Right
What is a performance?
"Performance" in relation to performer’s
right, means any visual or acoustic
presentation made live by one or more
performers.
254 Shubha Chaudhuri
What are the rights of a performer?
A performer has the following rights in his/her performance:
Right to make a sound recording or visual recording of the performance;
Right to reproduce the sound recording or visual recording of the
performance;
Right to broadcast the performance;
Right to communicate the performance to the public otherwise than by
broadcast.

Moral Rights
What are the moral rights of an author?
The author of a work has the right to claim authorship of the work
and to restrain or claim damages in respect of any distortion, mutilation,
modification or other acts in relation to the said work which is done
before the expiration of the term of copyright if such distortion,
mutilation, modification or other act would be prejudicial to his honour
or reputation. Moral rights are available to the authors even after the
economic rights are assigned.
Do the author’s moral rights remain after assignment of copyright?
Yes. The moral rights are independent of the author’s copyright and
remains with him even after assignment of the copyright.

There are many issues of rights such as community rights which are not
covered by the Copyright Act as has been seen. However, there is in the case
of performing arts, repertoire and compositions which are specific to com-
munities which entail certain levels of ownership. However, copyright
works only for individuals. The concept of Free Prior Informed Consent is
one that is gaining currency where such consent from a community is to be
sought. This has ranged from forest and mining rights to the use of
recordings.
The internet and new technologies have many benefits, as listed here.

Internet, Digitisation and New Technologies - Advantages

Preserve and restore
Safeguard and promote
Educational and scholarly opportunities
Enhance cultural exchange
Reach new and niche audiences

Here are some of the problems or pitfalls of the digitization world.

 Archiving Performing Arts in India 255

Internet, Digitisation and New Technologies - Pitfalls

Unauthorised use of culturally sensitive
materials
Commercial exploitation
Violation of moral and ethical rights

Archivists or custodians of archival material have many problems when

it comes to being able to provide access as fairly and freely as should be
possible.
The following is a list of some of the issues that archivists face with legacy
collections that they inherit and are often part of archival collections.

Where access has implications for custodians..

Legacy materials
Lack of agreements
Material collected without permission
Insufficient documentation
cultural contexts
Performers and communities
Conditions under which recordings were made/collected
Changes in law
eg. India Performer Right
Political changes
Colonisation
New political boundaries

To give a small glimpse into the complexity of administering rights, this is an

example of a small list of stakeholders that are involved in recordings of music.

Music Recordings and Stakeholders

Collector/depositor/researcher
Recordist
Performer
Individual
Group
Composer
Writer/lyricist
Patron
Community

This is a list of moral and legal issues that have to be taken into consid-
eration by archivists.
256 Shubha Chaudhuri

Legal and Moral Issues

Inadequacies in copyright acts
Oral traditions not protected
Moral and ethical rights
Ethics of preservation
recording /acquisition/restoration
Access
Community rights
Local considerations
International conventions

This is an extract of data that was collected by the ARCE as part of a

survey for WIPO about how archives, libraries and museums administer
rights. It also included the perspective of the stakeholders. These are the
issues that were expressed by individuals as composers and performers and
also as community members.

Archives Survey: India

Creators and Communities
Individual and community rights
Acknowledgment and attribution
Protection of artistic integrity
Issues of revenue and profits
Access to archival materials

Notes
1 All India Radio of the Government of India.
2 http://www.phonogrammarchiv.at/wwwnew/index_e.htm
19 Filming the River
Notes and Thoughts from The Chronic
Life1 Film Edition
Chiara Crupi

A Premise

Archival documents whisper stories. We do need to put them together,

connect them, give way to interpretations and passages; within them-
selves they tell stories.2
– Mirella Schino

Some documents are born with the awareness of being such. For some
years,3 I have been working for the archives4 of Odin Teatret, the theatre
group born in Oslo in 1964 which left for Denmark in 1966, under the
direction of Eugenio Barba.5 My task, as a filmmaker for Odin Teatret
Film,6 was to realize film and video documentation. In my experience, I
understood that I was creating some hybrid productions with two sides.
One side was determined by the practical reasons I have been asked to
work for. These reasons (and the techniques) may vary, starting from the
most humble and concrete cause of shooting events, performances, confer-
ences, workshops and rehearsals for the support of external productions,
up to my personal and artistic realization of either documentation or docu-
mentary film. Sometimes these aspects were mixed together, and a technical
or practical task could be transformed into something very creative or vice
versa.
Anyway, there was also another aspect of my job. It related to the needs
of the archive, and I had to face it whenever I was going to realize a new
product: I never forgot that I was going to ‘create’ a new document.
Therefore, I worked at the same time both on the present and the past, for
the theatre group ‘in action’ (new productions and events) and for its
archive (historical events and performances). This made me maintain a
steady ‘schizophrenic gaze’ and a ‘sense of responsibility’.
The Odin Teatret Archives is a very special experiment, probably unique
in the world. Mirella Schino – who led them for seven years – writes,7

The obsession with preservation reigning supreme at the Odin Teatret

even gave us a methodological indication for theatre archiving: the
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-23
258 Chiara Crupi
need to find space for those types of documents which are about the
social life of a theatre, both internal and external, and not just for its
status as an art-maker.

This is not the time to delve into these very subtle issues. But we should at
least make mention that the multidimensional character of this set of activ-
ities and relationships, the environment that has emerged through the years,
this magma descending from it, are interesting in themselves – from the
point of view of theatre, anthropology and sociology. And they are also
something more: they are the extended image of a deep nature, not of the
Odin Teatret, but of theatre itself. They are X-rays.
This “obsession with preservation” caught me and others too I think, as
well as other people working in the archives. I often felt that I was witness-
ing extraordinary experiences that had to be captured, preserved and trans-
mitted in some way. Sometimes it was a mistake. The tendency to document
‘everything’ can be dangerous.
The Book of Odin Teatret Archives quoted earlier refers to some docu-
ments such as letters, books, handwritten notes, scenarios, scripts, technical
information, reviews, selection of photographs and so on. It presents “the
rearrangement of one section of the Odin Teatret Archives”, and “It is just one
section because the archives contain much more: photographs, films, audio
documents and posters – which are only marginally present in this book”.8
If we consider the audio-visual documents of the same archives,9 there
are some specific issues to be dealt with. I would like to briefly mention a
few of them, not in a systematic way but more according to the experience
deriving from my activity as a ‘craftswoman’ and a filmmaker. Some topics
suggest reflections and open questions.
The audio-visual theatre document has become a very common instru-
ment nowadays. In the digital era of big data, we produce daily data sets
with such a large volume and that are so complex that traditional data
processing software is not able to acquire them. To remain in what concerns
the theatre and the theatrical documentation, if a few decades ago, the
audio-visual shooting of a performance had the sense to partially preserve
its memory, today probably the first concern is the increasing number of
documents. In my work, for instance, it was difficult sometimes to keep the
‘sense’ of collecting such a large quantity of material. In addition, since the
end of the nineteenth century up to now, we have been witnessing an
increase in both historical and contemporary theatre videos online.
We produce images that multiply themselves and overlap one with the
other; they overwhelm us and are scattered all over the web. There are
many new experiments of theatre connected to the web.10 This creates a big
and chaotic virtual archive, but there is the risk of losing the primary object
of these studies nowadays.11 Potentially every spectator would be able to
record a video of a performance with his or her mobile phone, broadcast it
live and share it on social networks (rights issues apart) or cut and edit
images and create a different version in a short time.
 Filming the River 259
Can there still be any point in collecting performances and cataloguing
them? Above all, can we as interpreters decipher these documents? Can
they still reveal traces of past (or present) stories, or does the great number
of not professional material hide the traces instead of revealing them? I
would like to take a breath, stop on the cliff edge and reflect on the afore-
mentioned – this extreme but realistic scenario.
There are still other issues to be mentioned. I experienced that a wrong
belief exists in the common thought about audio-visual documents for the-
atre. The opposition between the values of ‘art’ and its ‘mechanical repro-
duction’ leads to consider ‘art’ as unique and subjective and ‘mechanical
reproduction’ as impersonal and objective. This misunderstanding creates
an impression of objectivity in filming theatre that is not correct. We often
forget what really happens ‘behind the camera’, even if the camera is the
major tool of the shooting itself. The cameraman’s involvement is neither
neutral and objective nor simply ‘technical’; the camera operator has, in
fact, a point of view and a personal perspective and/or perception of what
he or she is filming.
Also, there are clear limits and difficulties in using the camera as a tool
for documenting theatre. We know that a filmed performance has a differ-
ent impact on the audience and “does not usually work”. It goes without
saying that the audio-visual and theatre languages belong to conflicting
worlds, which do not easily interact. We are given the illusion of grasping
something objective, something that can be analyzed, but actually, it diverts
us from what we would focus our attention on. A video of a performance
gives just a particular view of what the performance can offer.
If a document in archive is an X-ray, it allows us to analyze some struc-
tural data omitting others. And in our context, like an X-ray, a film of a
performance can have potential negative outcomes. Performances, for their
intrinsic nature, should not be filmed, but we do that because we think it is
necessary and because, as we are used to saying, “something is better than
nothing”.
Maybe we need to identify or create new roles, found new possible paths
or just start thinking about how to find them, not only to select and collect
documents into the archives but also “creating” new documents. So, how to
film theatre? How to use this powerful and dangerous tool without betray-
ing the object you want to document? Are there some dramaturgical rules
of the audio-visual document about performing arts?
Theatre is still connected with human actions, human impulses, human
reactions and the human being. It is, first of all, made by the relationship
between the actor and the audience, between actor and other actors, actor
and the text, actor and the music, actor and the costumes, actor and the
objects so on and so forth.
My first personal ‘Ariadne’s thread’ is that filming theatre is not just film-
ing what happens on the stage, but it is creating different strategies to show
all these relationships in their happening on the stage, including the one
between actor and audience. But to what extent am I allowed to ‘create’?
260 Chiara Crupi
There is a double soul, in certain cases, of an audio-visual document and a
creative product in itself.
I will try to describe some moments of the special process involved in the
“translation” from theatrical performance to film language of The Chronic
Life by the Odin Teatret ensemble (Holstebro, Denmark) directed by
Eugenio Barba. As director of the performance, Barba actively contributed
to the complex process of editing the film. Our joint work sparked my
reflection on theatre filming being a means to preserve live theatrical pro-
ductions, as well as a context in which we ‘recreate’ them.

A ‘Creative’ Document

The past has a language which consists of emblematic signs alluding to

silence and introducing us to another space. A science exists to evoke
what happened in a turbulence and simultaneity of calculated deci-
sions, irrational impulses, emotional reactions, accidental coincidences,
contradictions. It is not a question of recounting, but of CREATING
through recounting.12
(Eugenio Barba)

This production had two ‘conceptions’: the first within the documentation
projects of Odin Teatret Archives, directed by Mirella Schino, for which I
was in charge of directing the film edition of The Chronic Life directed by
Eugenio Barba in order to preserve a document of the performance. I was
very happy to have this task.
The Chronic Life was filmed during more than 20 regular performances
with audiences over a period of three years in different venues in Italy and
Denmark.13 As a filmmaker affiliated with the project, I directed the filming
process of the performance.
I then worked on the film editing with Eugenio Barba, the performance
director. We began to review the film, just sketched, together: I soon realized
that he was not trying to document a show but to ‘recreate’ it. There started
a ‘second life’ of the project. We allowed ourselves a relative ‘freedom’ in
editing the scenes, rhythms, music, speech, actions of the performance. Like
poem translators, we translated the performance not exactly in a literal way
but created its ‘equivalent’ in filming language. Of course, this process was
possible thanks to the presence of the author of the performance.
There were no materials conceived with the objective to make ours faith-
ful, not literally a translation: no original screenplay that could guide us,
just a line-up of work. Very few shots taken in a real set. We just had filmed
an exceptional amount of performances, in the presence of the audience,
from different angles. I was determined to offer my skills and my enthusi-
asm for what seemed a second conception of the performance.
While I was working on editing with Eugenio, I took notes on what was
happening right away. He often asked me something I couldn’t understand
 Filming the River 261
as a filmmaker. I tried to translate his needs into film language. Often, he
didn’t recognize the rhythm of the performance watching the video, some-
times he needed to cut a song or a text, part of a scene, an actor’s move-
ment. A new workspace opened up between the need for documentation
and recreation of the performance. It suggested to me theoretical and prac-
tical questions that led to concrete consequences in my work. I can mention
here just one of many examples.

Cutting on ‘Sats’
Eugenio Barba and other scholars of the International School of Theatre
Anthropology (ISTA) developed a very well-known original version of an
intercultural theatre. Their research focuses on finding the universal princi-
ples that shape not only the theatre but also human actions in a perfor-
mance situation. The “extra-daily use of the body-mind” in performing arts,
called ‘technique’, allowed for the discovery of transcultural recurring prin-
ciples defined by theatre anthropology as the field of pre-expressivity:

Theatre Anthropology is the study of the pre-expressive scenic behaviour

upon which different genres, styles, roles and personal or collective tra-
ditions are all based. In the context of Theatre Anthropology, the word
“performer” should be taken to mean “actor and dancer”, both male
and female. “Theatre” should be taken to mean “theatre and dance”.

In an organized performance, the performer’s physical and vocal presence is

modelled according to principles which are different from those of daily
life. This extra-daily use of the body-mind is called ‘technique’.
The performer’s various techniques can be conscious and codified or
unconscious but implicit in the use and repetition of a theatre practice.
Transcultural analysis shows that it is possible to single out recurring prin-
ciples from among these techniques. These principles, when applied to cer-
tain physiological factors – weight, balance, the use of the spinal column
and the eyes – produce physical, pre-expressive tensions. These new ten-
sions generate an extra-daily energy quality which renders the body theat-
rically ‘decided’, ‘alive’, ‘believable’, thereby enabling the performer’s
‘presence’ or scenic bios to attract the spectator’s attention before any mes-
sage is transmitted. This is a logical, and not a chronological, ‘before’.
The pre-expressive base constitutes the elementary level of organization of
the theatre. The various levels of organization in the performance are, for the
spectator, inseparable and indistinguishable. They can only be separated, by
means of abstraction, in a situation of analytical research or during the tech-
nical work of composition done by the performer. The ability to focus on the
pre-expressive level makes possible an expansion of knowledge with conse-
quences both in the practical and the historical and critical fields of work.14
Can an audio-visual document ‘incorporate’ in its editing fragments from
the actor’s practical knowledge? I started to think about how to apply
262 Chiara Crupi
theatrical principles in filming, editing and cutting in order to think, to shape a
specific language for filming theatre. I found interesting points of connection,
like the principle of the ‘sats’, which was a very useful tool for my editing work:

Energy can be suspended in immobility, in motion. Above and beyond

the metaphorical uses to which it can be put, the word energy implies a
difference of potential. Geographers, for example, refer to the energy of
a region to indicate the arithmetic difference between maximum and
minimum heights. At school, we were taught that when a physical sys-
tem contains a difference of potential, it is able to carry out work, that
is, to “produce energy” (water flowing down a slope makes the mill
turn, the turbine creates electrical power). The Greek word “energeia”
means just that: to be ready for action, on the verge of producing work.
In physical behaviour, the transition from intention to action is a typi-
cal example of difference in potential. In the instant which precedes the
action, when all the necessary force is ready to be released into space
but as though suspended and still under control, the performer per-
ceives her/his energy in the form of sats, of dynamic preparation. The
sats is the moment in which the action is thought/acted by the entire
organism, which reacts with tensions, even in immobility. It is the point
at which one decides to act. There is a muscular, nervous and mental
commitment, already directed towards an objective. It is the tightening
or the gathering together of oneself from which the action departs. It is
the spring before it is sprung. It is the attitude of the feline ready for
anything: to bound forward, to withdraw, to return to a position of
rest. An athlete, a tennis player or boxer, immobile or moving, ready to
react. It is John Wayne facing an adversary. It is Buster Keaton about to
take a step. It is Maria Callas on the verge of an aria.15

In the film language, there is a particular cutting called ‘cutting on action’

or ‘matching on action’. It refers to the editor of the film cutting from one
shot to another view that matches the first shot’s action. The editor’s task
(and freedom) is to choose the moment in which the action can be cut.
It is not a ‘neutral’ choice, it changes the rhythm and contributes to the
fluidity of the film. During the editing sessions with Eugenio Barba, I could
feel that he was reacting differently depending on the kind of cut. I noticed
his natural, ‘incorporated’ propensity to consider the sats as the best
moment to cut on an action. I then followed his ‘physical’ reactions and I
started to think about how to use this particular cutting in connection with
the ‘sats’. Forgetting customary rules, experience and common sense, I
started to intensify the ‘sats cut’ into my editing timeline. In the beginning,
the results were very strange, claustrophobic sequences that did not work.
A second time, I tried to create a balance, and it gave a new rhythm to the
film. It was fascinating to understand this connection. It changed my way of
editing films. The sats cut is not an invisible cut. On the contrary, it ampli-
fies the action and the editing effect.
 Filming the River 263
The ‘cutting on action’ is a very common technique. Of course, it is an
element of particular syntactic importance in the ‘grammar’ of action films
and in the techniques of filming sportive events – video documentation and
live broadcasting about tennis, soccer and football in particular. There are
some interesting points of convergence between sportive and theatre films,
because of the strong presence of the human body in both disciplines. It
could be interesting to analyze the camera and editing choices of this mate-
rial in relation to the rhythm, the actions, the bodies, the strong connection
with the audience, the continuity of the action and so on. I am still working
on developing this argument, but my first conscious use of ‘sats’ in film
editing started with The Chronic Life.
In general, the principles of the performer’s work help me in creating
video documentation about those performances in which the body leads the
stage. I think that, in this case, a strict connection could be found – and
applied – between the two languages of bodywork and film editing.
The ‘sats’ in Barba’s research founds its equivalent in other theatrical
cultures, like the Japanese Kabuki or the biomechanics of the Russian
Theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and others. I would like to make a
brief mention of the latter as an example of the assimilation of theatrical
principles in the logic of film editing. I think it shows that it is possible to
find a clear legacy from the theatrical actor’s work to cinematic language.
We can see it in the close and clear connection between Meyerhold’s train-
ing for actors and Sergej Eisenstein’s basics of cinematic directing. The
future Russian film director and theorist was a brilliant student of theatre
directing at the school of Meyerhold before dedicating himself to cinema.
Even if this is not the place to dwell on the actor training called ‘biome-
chanics’,16 it is important to remember that it reached us through
Meyerhold’s students, in particular, Nikolaj Gheorghevic Kustov (1900?–
1976). He taught the principles to other pupils, such as Gennadi Nikolaevich
Bogdanov, who graduated as an actor from the Russian University of
Theatre Arts in 1972. Thanks to this direct tradition, from teacher to pupils,
we can clearly understand the principles of his theatrical exercises for the
actor. We have also some photographs and only a fragment of a film docu-
mentation about the biomechanics of the ’20s. The few images were filmed
by Temerin Aleksej Temerin, not only an actor but also a photographer at
Meyerhold’s theatre.17 But biomechanics also founded another original and
different way to reveal it to us: through Eisenstein’s research in cinema.
Meyerhold started to fix the series of biomechanics exercises around
1921, teaching in two laboratories18 of directing and acting, where some
common lessons were shared. There, all students and directors had to prac-
tice biomechanics.
In these laboratories, Meyerhold formed a team of seven assistants who
were responsible for the notes of his lessons.19 Among them, Korenev
drowned up the basic biomechanics principles. Also, Eisenstein worked in
the team and wrote.20 Sergei Eisenstein was immediately noticed as an
excellent student. Despite his non-athletic appearance, he became brilliant
264 Chiara Crupi
in biomechanics exercises, and he was called to teach them to younger
pupils. Two years later, leaving the laboratory of Meyerhold, he taught bio-
mechanics at the Proletkult,21 continuing his research on expressive move-
ment.22 Eisenstein noticed the definition of the action’s segmentation: (1)
intention, (2) execution and (3) reaction. The subsequent drafting of the
system will be explained as follows:

Otkaz, or ‘preparation’ (literally means ‘rejection’), which prepares the

body for action.
Posyl, the action in its full unfolding in space, called posyl (literally
‘sent’).
Tochka, ‘full stop’, the end of the action, which is also the prepara-
tion to the new action.

This segmentation, the closing of the ‘sentence’ between ‘points’, facilitates

the quality of precision and the awareness of the actor. The actor works
with a constant consciousness of his action.23 B. Picon-Vallin wrote that the
otkaz emphasizes the segment that follows, gives it impulse, like a trampo-
line. It can also warn the partner to be ready to move on to the next phase
of the action. “It is a very brief act in time, in contradiction, in opposition
to the direction of the movement: the recoil before moving forward, the
moment when the hand rises before hitting, the bending before rising up”.24
The Barba’s sats is connected to the ‘otkaz’. Barba writes,25

Sats is impulse and counterimpulse. In the language of Meyerhold’s

work, we find the word predigra, “pre-acting”:
Pre-acting is a trampoline, a moment of tension resulting in acting.
Acting is a coda [musical term in Italian in original text], while pre-act-
ing is the element which accumulates, develops and waits to be
resolved.

Another of Meyerhold’s terms is otkaz, ‘refusal’, or – in musical terminol-

ogy – the alteration of a note by one or two semitones which interrupts the
development of the melody:

The principle of otkaz implies the precise definition of the points at

which one movement ends and another begins, a stop and a go at the
same time. Otkaz is a clean stop which suspends the preceding move-
ment and prepares the following one. It thus makes it possible to reu-
nite dynamically two segments of an exercise; it puts the subsequent
segment into relief, and gives it a push, an impulse, like a trampoline.
The otkaz can also signal to a partner that one is ready to pass on to the
next phase of the exercise. It is a very brief act, going against, opposite
to, the overall direction of the movement: the recoil before going for-
ward, the impulse of the hand being raised before it strikes, the flexion
before standing.
 Filming the River 265
Eisenstein, later, wrote about otkaz in relationship to directing cinema. He
tried to describe it as a principle of cinematic narration and found out how
to use it. He often used to say, in his lessons, that principles of the Russian
theatrical experiments of the ’20s have been re-used by the cinema later. He
used also actors trained in biomechanics for his films. The connection
between biomechanics and Eisenstein’s theories on film have been high-
lighted in theatre studies, and I think the topic should be investigated also
in the context of cinematic syntax.

Filming the Space River

A note about the rules of the camera in relation to the space: it is not a
coincidence that often Odin’s audience would see the same performance
two, three times or more.
A typical Odin Teatret’s spatial arrangement is called ‘space river’ and it
is composed by two banks where the spectators are sitting face to face. It
means that the points of view of a spectator change completely depending
on his or her seat. The Chronic Life is performed on this kind of stage (see
Figure 19.1).26 Usually, each spectator has a different point of view, but on
this stage, the different looks can be divergent. Many actions of the actors
are simultaneous, and often they are not working on the same ‘side’ of the
stage (Figure 19.2).
For these reasons, ‘what to follow’ on the stage while watching a perfor-
mance depends on where the spectator is seated and is always a continuous
choice for the audience. As spectators, we must select and create a ‘mon-
tage’ by ourselves.
It was really challenging to film a similar space. Planning the shooting for
the performance, my main concern was if I had to respect the cinematic
180-degree rule or not. The 180-degree rule is a filmmaking guideline and
says that two characters in a scene should maintain the same left/right rela-
tionship with one another. When the camera passes over the invisible axis
connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line, and the shot
becomes what is called a reverse angle. There are some rules depending on
this one, connected to the direction of screen, the position of actors in a
dialog (Figures 19.3 and 19.4), etc.
‘Crossing the line’ is not ‘forbidden’ nowadays, but it still could create a
disorienting feeling in a spectator of a film. Barba as theatre director tries to
provoke the experience of bewilderment. He often creates disorienting feel-
ings in his performances, also in the performance space, for the spectators.
My problem was how to be faithful to the theatre director’s intentions
without sinking into complete chaos. If I had used the 180-degree rule in
each case, some scenes would not have been shown or understood. At the
same time, the choice of ‘crossing the line’ is a big responsibility, filming a
performance in which the theatrical spectator is subjected to multiple stim-
uli of ‘organized’ chaos, where the spectator is invited to edit a personal
montage of the performance from his fixed seat in the space. On the
266 Chiara Crupi

Figure 19.1 The scenic space of The Chronic Life.

contrary, the film audience experiences a fixed ‘guided tour’, even with a
multiplicity of points of view (angles of the camera), and the spectator has
not the freedom to choose.
How to respect the continuity of the film with the simultaneity of the
actions in The Chronic Life? I decided to not always follow the 180-degree
rule, even though maintaining an internal coherence in each scene. To cross
the aforementioned line, I often decided to follow the rhythm of the perfor-
mance’s scenes, changing the perspective of the camera at the moment of
the transition from one to another scene. In other cases, I used a close-up or
 Filming the River 267

Figure 19.2 One side of the audience.

Figure 19.3 The 180-degree rule in relation to the scenic space of The Chronic Life.

an overhead shot – which is usually a not available view to a theatrical

spectator – to change the side (Figure 19.5).
We must be aware of the existence of two different kinds of audiences.
Apparently, there is no relation between these ‘two’ kinds of audiences, the
theatrical and the film spectators. They watch the same performance but in
different moments and places and ways. Are they reacting to the same ‘per-
formance’? What must we preserve of the original in the film?
I think that the theatrical spectator could be an important element to
show in a film about theatre because it gives some important information
to the film audience about the particular experience of the ‘present’
spectator.
268 Chiara Crupi

Figure 19.4 Different shots, crossing the line, of the same scene.

Particular attention, for instance, should be given to the audio reception

in such a performance, which offers the audience a ‘concert’ made of music,
songs, voices, steps, rhythms and noises coming from different parts of the
stage that is impossible to translate in a video.
These questions, among many others, found practical answers during the
editing process. I’m still working on them in order to understand what is
impossible to preserve when filming theatre and the boundaries between
artistic choices, technical options and the task of providing faithful docu-
mentation (Figure 19.6).
 Filming the River 269

Figure 19.5 A close-up of the same scene (Iben Nagel Rassmussen).

Figure 19.6 A musical scene (from the left: Roberta Carreri, Tage Larsen, Sofía
Monsalve, Julia Varley).

Notes
1 The Chronic Life is a performance of the Odin Teatret’s ensemble, directed by
Eugenio Barba. It is dedicated to Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova,
Russian writers and human rights activists, murdered by anonymous thugs in
2006 and 2009 for their opposition to the Chechnyan conflict. It was presented
for the first time in 2011.
Production: Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium (Holstebro), Teatro de La Abadía
(Madrid), the Grotowski Institute (Wroclaw). Text: Ursula Andkjær Olsen and
Odin Teatret. Actors: Kai Bredholt, Roberta Carreri, Jan Ferslev, Elena Floris,
Donald Kitt, Tage Larsen, Sofía Monsalve (now Carolina Pizarro), Iben Nagel
Rasmussen, Fausto Pro, Julia Varley. Dramaturg: Thomas Bredsdorff. Literary
adviser: Nando Taviani. Lighting design: Odin Teatret. Lighting adviser: Jesper
Kongshaug. Scenic space: Odin Teatret scenic space advisers: Jan de Neergaard,
Antonella Diana. Music: Traditional and contemporary melodies. Costumes:
270 Chiara Crupi
Odin Teatret, Jan de Neergaard. Drawings: Giulia Capodieci. Cover: Peter
Bysted. Technical director: Fausto Pro. Director assistants: Raúl Iaiza, Pierangelo
Pompa, Ana Woolf. Director and dramaturgy: Eugenio Barba. The performance
is still played.
2 (Mirella Schino, The Odin Teatret Archives, transl. by Gabriella Sacco, London–
New York, Routledge 2018, p. 12)
3 From 2010 until 2019.
4 The Odin Teatret Archives collect documents, filmed materials, audio materials
and photographic materials. They were established in 2008, conceived and
designed by Mirella Schino and Francesca Romana Rietti, initially within the
Centre for Theatre Laboratory Studies, founded in 2004 in collaboration with
the University of Århus, later as an autonomous organism. Mirella Schino was
the director of the work and wrote a book about this experience: “The work
started in 2008 and was completely funded by the Odin Teatret. It ended in
February 2015 when the vast majority of the physical documents and a digital
copy of photographs and audio-visual documents were transferred to the Royal
Library in Copenhagen. All the documents are now accessible from Copenhagen
and Holstebro, the Odin home which stores a digital copy of everything that
was sent to Copenhagen and the documents still needed by the theatre – for
example, press releases. The Odin Teatret still retains the physical paper photo-
graphs, the audio files and, of course, the pending materials which are yet to be
inventoried and arranged, such as organizational and administrative binders.
The documents retained at the Odin Teatret will be placed with the other records
by 2024”. Mirella Schino, The Odin Teatret Archives, op.cit., p. 200.
5 Barba also founded the International School of Theatre Anthropology. It is a
multicultural network of performers and scholars giving life to an itinerant uni-
versity whose main field of study is theatre anthropology. Since 1979, it has been
conceived and directed by Eugenio Barba and based in Holstebro, Denmark.
ISTA researches the technical basis of the performer in a transcultural dimension.
The objective of this methodological choice, deriving from an empirical approach,
is the understanding of the fundamental principles which engender the perform-
er’s ‘presence’ or ‘scenic life’. Since its start in 1980, ISTA sessions have been held
in the following places: Bonn (Germany, 1980), Volterra and Pontedera (Italy,
1981), Blois and Malakoff (France, 1985), Holstebro (Denmark, 1986), Salento
(Italy, 1987), Bologna (Italy, 1990), Brecon and Cardiff (Great Britain, 1992),
Londrina (Brazil, 1994), Umeå (Sweden, 1995), Copenhagen (Denmark, 1996),
Montemor-o-Novo and Lisbon (Portugal, 1998), Bielefeld (Germany, 2000),
Seville (Spain, 2004), Wroclaw (Poland, 2005) and Albino (Italy 2016).
6 Odin Teatret Film started in 1971 thanks to Torgeir Wethal, one of the founders
of Odin Teatret, to produce films and documentaries such as pedagogical films
on training and work demonstrations; documentaries on Odin Teatret’s jour-
neys, barters and encounters with other cultures; films and videos of Odin
Teatret’s performances; documentaries on the work sessions of ISTA. Torgeir
Wethal was in charge of Odin Teatret Film until his death in June 2010. He
wrote, directed and edited many of its films focusing on the actor’s training
within different traditions, on Odin Teatret’s performances and other fields of
activity. Since 2000, Torgeir Wethal was backed by Claudio Coloberti, who is
today responsible for film production together with Chiara Crupi, who joined
Odin Teatret Film in 2010. Originals and masters of all the audio-visual mate-
rial are kept at Odin Teatret, Holstebro.
7 Mirella Schino, The Odin Teatret Archives, see n. 2.
8 See n. 3
9 The complete list of these audiovisuals can be found in the ‘Inventory’, made by
Francesca Romana Rietti and Pierangelo Pompa, published on the Odin Teatret
Archives website.
 Filming the River 271
10 Many theatres, for instance, are using the live-streaming tool in search of new
audience. These new live products survive after the live event. It could be inter-
esting to investigate this strange nature of video realized to be watched live, in
real time. About the live-streaming theatre documents: I myself had the chance
to experiment with a new connection live-streaming events starting on Odin
Teatret Live Streaming in 2014 for Odin Teatret’s 50th anniversary, during
which an event was organized to thank Odin Teatret’s ‘secret people’ – friends
and collaborators – who had supported the theatre throughout its existence.
Claudio Coloberti (Odin Teatret Film) and I gathered a troupe of young univer-
sity and film students to make available online an unrepeatable theatre event
while it was taking place: Clear Enigma. Despite the artisanal standard of the
experiment, numerous virtual spectators followed the streaming both during
and after the event itself. For Odin Teatret Film, this has meant contributing to
unite Odin Teatret’s ‘family’ through a channel of communication that over-
comes geographical borders so that many people could also share the atmos-
phere of the celebration. We have received many positive and generous
acknowledgements. Encouraged by this response, Odin Teatret Film continues
to develop this initiative in the same spirit. Many other live streamings have
followed.
11 “The Web 2.0 phase has opened a phase of ‘abundance’ unprecedented in the
history of the studies of the performing arts and is changing the status of the
audiovisual theatrical document. […] the digitised audiovisual material is
increasingly widespread, beyond the specialised field of the visitors of archives
and libraries of a few decades ago. […] Is a new phase opening up for the devel-
opment of the archives, intended as a physical place, or are we witnessing their
end, due to the advantages of the Web 2.0?” (Maia Giacobbe Borelli, Come
cambia la memoria del teatro nell’era digitale? Moltiplicare formati e produzi-
oni senza perdersi, Mimesis Journal, 2, 1 | 2013, 149–161).
12 Eugenio Barba, The Country of Sleep and Passion, in Mirella Schino, The Odin
Teatret Archives, trad. eng. Gabriella Sacco, London; New York, Routledge,
2018, p. 2).
13 The performances were filmed, in Rome, Teatro Vascello, Italy 2013; Aarhus,
Bora Bora Theatre, Denmark 2014; Milan, Teatro Elfo Puccini, Italy 2014;
Holstebro, Odin Teatret, Denmark 2015. Cameras: Claudio Coloberti, Chiara
Crupi.
14 Eugeniio Barba, The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, Routledge
(1994), 1st ed., Paperback, p. 9.
15 Ibidem.
16 Biomechanics is the ability of the body to incorporate the principles and will of
movement and bring them back on stage as quality of movement. Also
Meyerhold talks about a training that puts the actor ‘in relationship’. Time,
space, partner or group, objects, the public are all terms of this relationship,
which alternate or interpose each other.
The practice of the ‘biomechanics’ of Meyerhold consists of a series of exercises,
organized according to a progressive order of difficulty: from the simplest basic
positions (the upright position, the march, the race, the launch), to managing the
most complex étude, sequences of movements exactly defined in time and space,
inspired by a theme. In biomechanics exercises, all the past experiments on
movement by Meyerhold are condensed.
17 Majorie L. Hoover, The Art of Conscious Theater, Amherst, University of
Massachusetts Press, 1974, p. 103.
18 The “Laboratory of Techniques for the Actor”, which later became “Free
Theater of Mejerchol’d” and the Higher State Laboratories for Directing,
selected 80 students, among them the future film director Sergei Eisenstein
before he became a film director among them.
272 Chiara Crupi
19 According to a manuscript document from the archival material it was: Korenev,
Ejzenštejn, Urbanovič, Lojter, Kogan, Fyodorov, Ljutse and Zinajda Rajkh
added later.
20 S. M. Ejzenštenjn, Lezioni di Meyerhold dagli appunti di Ejzenštejn, 1921–1922.
In Vsevolod Meyerhold, L’Attore biomeccanico, Milano, Ubulibri, 1993.
21 Proletarian Culture Institute, an experimental Soviet artistic institution that
started with the Russian Revolution of 1917.
22 Law, A. – Gordon, M., Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics Actor Training
in Revolutionary Russia, Jefferson McFarland, North Carolina, 1996.
23 Bochov, J., Das Theater Meyerholds und die Biomechanik, Berlino, Alexander
Verlag, 1997.
24 “What one would call anti-impulse, anti–movement which Barba describes with
the Scandinavian term sats. And it is very concrete, it exists. It can occur at dif-
ferent levels, as a kind of silence before a movement, a silence filled with poten-
tial, or it can occur as the suspension of an action at a given moment.” Grotowski,
J. (1991) Sats in Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology:
The Secret Art of the Performer, Rutledge, London–New York.
25 See n. 14 (Sources: Vsevolod Meyerhold, Ecrits sur le théâtre, Tome II 1917–
1929, translation, preface and notes by Beatrice Picon-Vallin, Lausanne, La
Cité-L’Age d’Homme, 1975 and Beatrice Picon-Vallin, Meyerhold, Paris, CNRS,
‘Les voies de la creation théâtrale’, 17, 1990).
26 Image from the programme of the performance.
20 No Context
Curatorial Writing, Contemporary Dance
and the Archive
Victoria Mohr-Blakeney

In North America in the early 1960s, dance began to shift out of traditional
theatre venues into gallery, museum and site-specific locations converging
with visual arts modes of display. As a result, a tradition of curatorial prac-
tice, established in visual arts institutions, intersected with the art form of
dance to produce a new stream of curatorial practice now commonly referred
to as dance curation.1 Curatorial practice in the field of dance gave birth to
new forms of publication – namely, dance exhibition catalogues,2 which
arose first and foremost out of the intersection between these two modali-
ties. Curatorial writing3 in the context of the dance exhibition catalogue4
provided an opportunity to situate dance within a broader context in the
field of art.5 This opportunity came with a responsibility to think critically
about what it meant to produce textual curatorial discourse in/for the field
of dance, which has its own distinct origins, histories and scholarship.6
In my research, I explore the function of curatorial writing in the context
of dance and examine the complex relationship between embodied prac-
tice7 and textual discourse. I draw upon a post-structural lens8 to examine
and better understand the core structural elements at play in the interaction
between writing, embodied practice and the archive, drawing on the work
of dance scholars, performance theorists and post-structural theorists to
identify and examine this complex interaction. I then examine these find-
ings in the context of curatorial writing and the dance catalogue and apply
these theoretical considerations to the creation and production of a dance
catalogue. No Context or Studio Place or Decentralize or We Actually
Maybe Right Now Have Everything We Need is the title of a performance
co-curated by me, alongside dance scholars/curators Erin McCurdy and
Cara Spooner,9 which took place on 25 March 2015, accompanied by a
catalogue with the same title.
From this research, two central questions emerged. First, how does cura-
torial writing function in the context of dance, and what role does the
archive play? Second, how can the interaction between these elements be
reconsidered in the form of the dance catalogue to support embodied prac-
tice? The dance catalogue provides a unique opportunity to explore new
possibilities for both curatorial writing and the form of the dance catalogue
itself. I use the No Context performance, and its accompanying publication
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-24
274 Victoria Mohr-Blakeney
of the same title, as an opportunity to re-imagine the form of the dance
catalogue and the relationship between curatorial writing and live dance
performance. I posit that the No Context catalogue presents an example of
how the dance catalogue might be formulated to support10 embodied live
performance through both its writing and structure.
Dance scholars have long debated what has been perceived to be an
inherent tension between the moving body and attempts to capture embod-
ied practice in written language. The history of dance writing has been
labelled by some scholars as an attempt to codify and document embodied
performance, dating back to the enlightenment’s impulse to categorize and
codify all forms of human knowledge.11 There is a large existing body of
contemporary scholarship, which addresses the complexities of writing
about dance, including prominent dance scholars and performance theo-
rists12 who argue that due to dance’s embodied nature, interpretation via
language is problematic. Scholars such as André Lepecki have pointed to
intrinsic differences in medium (between body and text), as the source of
the problem. In his article, “Inscribing Dance,” Lepecki addresses this issue
directly and asserts, “[D]ance’s materiality as resistance to linguistic grasp-
ing: the moment dance is arrested, fixated, written down, it is no longer
dance”.13 The minute dance is written about, Lepecki argues, there is inevi-
tably a shift in materiality from movement to writing which “withdraws
dance from the flow of its own materiality”.14 The complications inherent
in this ‘translation’ have often led scholars to a discussion of how each
medium (writing and dance) is valued in the field of representation. Lepecki
argues that writing is sometimes seen as an attempt to supplement or rectify
dance’s status in the field of representation.15
Arguments that dance and writing are valued differently in the field of
representation also emerge from the field of performance theory. In her text
The Archive and the Repertoire, performance theorist Diana Taylor writes
about the relationship between text and embodied practice and asserts that
writing can often be seen as standing against ephemerality and embodiment.16
Taylor’s writing points to a hierarchy within systems of representation and
asserts that writing has become legitimized over other epistemic systems, such
as embodied performance.17 She relates this hierarchy to systems of power
and control and posits that, historically, “the space of written culture then, as
now, seemed easier to control than embodied culture”.18 While Taylor writes
specifically about language as a tool in the colonization of indigenous embod-
ied expression, she underscores the point that embodied performance, among
other forms of expression has, in many ways, not been considered a credible
source of knowledge.19 If we concur with Taylor’s position that writing is
believed to hold credibility, legitimacy and power over embodied expression,
then it is essential to carefully consider the implications of ‘translating’ or
‘interpreting’ embodied practice, such as dance, into writing.
Contemporary dance scholars have argued that dance’s resistance to lan-
guage is also linked to its agency in the field of representation. A question,
which dance scholars have addressed, is whether or not translating dance
 No Context 275
from its original materiality – the body – into writing has the potential to
strip dance of its embodied agency. Dance scholars Randy Martin and
André Lepecki agree that embodied performance holds political power.
Lepecki claims that dance holds “the potential for the dancing body to tran-
scend a narrowing aestheticization of its moving figure, and thus claim sta-
tus as political agent”.20 Lepecki, among other dance scholars, has argued
that it is not so much dance itself but the ‘presence’21 of dance, which holds
this power. He describes presence in dance as “slippery movement, presence
as that which will not be pinned down”.22 The question remains whether or
not dance’s political agency is subordinated by writing. Burt expands on
this point, clarifying that “normative historiography can sometimes con-
tribute to the process through which potentially subversive bodies are
erased”.23 Post-structural theorist, Jacques Derrida asserts that only when
dance evades documentation and written language can it be seen as a site of
agency in the field of representation.24 I disagree with Derrida’s assertion
and would counter that many seminal radical and subversive dance perfor-
mances throughout history have been documented and yet have simultane-
ously held political agency and deeply impacted the field.25 I do agree with
Lepecki and Burt however, that dance’s ability to create a disturbance in the
field of representation serves as one of its most potentially subversive
qualities.
The relationship between writing and dance cannot be properly evalu-
ated without addressing the relationship between dance and the act of doc-
umenting it. Post-structural theorist Jacques Derrida’s notion of the
archive,26 as outlined in his seminal text Archive Fever,27 can potentially
offer key insights into understanding the archival mechanism at play in the
relationship between dance and text.28 According to Derrida, the archival
drive comes from a desire to return to the origin, to a point of “absolute
commencement”.29 If we situate Derrida’s theory of the archive in the con-
text of writing and embodied practice, documenting and interpreting dance
via writing over the centuries can be seen as an ongoing iteration of the
archival impulse and a never-ending attempt to return to a state of presence.
In Archive Fever, Derrida outlines the archival impulse which always works
in tandem with what he calls the archviolithic drive or death drive, a force
which “works to destroy the archive, on the condition of effacing, but with
a view to effacing its own traces”.30 Viewed through this lens, the ephem-
eral nature of dance can potentially be understood as an iteration of
Derrida’s death drive. This can be seen in “dance’s somewhat embarrassing
predicament of always losing itself as it performs itself”.31 Examined in the
context of writing and movement, the documentation and textual analysis
of dance can read as the archival impulse and death drive perpetually at
play.32
In Archive Fever, Derrida points to the ability of textual documentation
to co-determine that which it archives.33 This assertion is important to all
those participating in the documentation of dance in any form. By examin-
ing curatorial writing in the field of dance via Derrida’s theory of the archive,
276 Victoria Mohr-Blakeney
this writing can be seen as simultaneously co-determining that which it
seeks to document. In other words, dance curators can be seen as co-deter-
mining the embodied practices about which they write. In the relationship
between embodied practice and documentation in language, the archive has
the single, clear advantage of longevity, as Taylor points out, “Insofar as it
constitutes materials that seem to endure, the archive exceeds the live”.34
Given this, the dance catalogue can be understood to function, in part, as an
archival mechanism that will not only outlive but also has the potential to
co-determine embodied practice by standing in, in part, as its legacy.
Another element to consider in the discussion of how curatorial writing
functions in the context of dance is to examine the porous and intertextual
natures of both media. Both writing and contemporary dance can be under-
stood as porous in nature, referencing and drawing on a myriad of addi-
tional ‘intertexts’. Naomi Jackson writes about intertextuality as a
by-product or companion of post-structural theory. She contends, “Within
the context of post-structural theory, the term intertextuality focuses on the
idea that no text is an untouched, unified whole, but the result of many
‘grafts’ of other texts. These grafts need to be analyzed for where they lie
comfortably together, or where their intersections create points of juncture
and stress”.35 This is an important insight, as it undercuts the idea of dance
as an expression of universal truth via a particular uniqueness or expres-
siveness of form but rather emphasizes both dance and writing as constructs
made up of a variety of cultural and artistic tools.36 Intertextual references
within a work of art can also function to provide validation or an “authen-
ticating authority”.37 Intertextual approaches to both dance and writing
also serve to situate individual works in relationship to broader discourses.
This has political connotations as well, as it relates dance to broader fields
such as cultural studies and other disciplines, which alter how artistic pro-
duction in the field of dance is both ‘read’ and understood.
While scholars have written extensively about the problem of writing
about dance in the context of both contemporary dance scholarship and
performance theory, few scholars have examined how curatorial writing
functions in the context of dance. If we view curatorial writing on dance as
an attempt to ‘legitimize’ dance into a more ‘credible’ form of knowledge,38
this view holds considerable implications for dance curators. When produc-
ing curatorial writing in the field of dance, dance curators have a responsi-
bility to remain cognizant of hierarchies operating in the field of
representation with respect to writing and embodied practice. Similarly, if
we take Ramsay Burt, André Lepecki and Jacques Derrida’s views that
dance’s political agency is intrinsically tied to its materiality and subdued by
its translation into writing, as highlighted previously, dance curators have a
responsibility to investigate possibilities for writing which do not diminish
the agency of embodied performance. Understanding the particular func-
tion of curatorial writing in the field of dance offers an opportunity for
curators using the form of the dance catalogue to reconsider the function of
writing in the field of dance.
 No Context 277
If, as Derrida posits, the archive holds the power to co-determine its con-
tent, dance curators must consider the enormity of the responsibility they
bear when producing textual discourse in relation to embodied practice.
While the archival impulse at play in this relationship creates a complex
dynamic, possibilities for destabilizing39 this relationship should be consid-
ered. Several contemporary dance scholars have considered alternative
approaches to writing in the context of dance, including Lepecki, who
describes what he calls the possibility of writing along ephemerality40 as
opposed to against it, an idea originally posited by theorists Mark Franko
and Peggy Phelan.41 Though documentation42 may be seen as standing
against the agency of embodied practice, the question remains, what would
an alternative approach to curatorial writing in the form of the dance exhi-
bition catalogue look like? Is there a possibility for writing in the context of
dance to support, rather than subdue, embodied practice?
In the summer of 2014, the Nomadic Curatorial Collective (Erin McCurdy,
Cara Spooner and I), commissioned independent dance artist Amelia
Ehrhardt to respond to archival documents from Toronto’s first artist-run
dance centre, 15 Dance Laboratorium, which acted as a hub of experimen-
tation in dance from 1974 to 1980. Co-curating this performance presented
an opportunity to put a number of the theoretical concerns, outlined in this
research, into practice. The No Context catalogue offered an opportunity to
carefully reconsider the function of curatorial writing in the context of
dance and to formulate the structure and content of the catalogue to reflect
some of the central themes and intentions behind the performance. In the
case of No Context, the premise of the performance was to open up a dia-
logue between 15 Dance Lab (and the mid-late 1970s Toronto postmodern
dance landscape)43 and the present (Toronto’s current contemporary dance
landscape). The 15 Dance Lab and the original 15 Dancers are arguably the
birthplaces of postmodern dance in Toronto. Aesthetically and politically,
this period bears similarities with the postmodern dance movement in New
York in the 1960s, which arose out of the Judson Church Theatre. Prominent
dance historian Sally Banes has dedicated a great deal of her writing to the
Judson Church Theatre and the foundational work that the group pio-
neered.44 Part of the ideology of postmodern dance, shared by dance artists
from Toronto’s 15 Dance Lab, was a commitment to the defamiliarization
of movement by way of everyday gesture and a rejection of the illusionist,
high dramatization of modern dance. Postmodern dance saw everyday
movement and gesture performed on stage alongside faults and flaws in
staging which demystified dance, intentionally inspiring the spectator to
engage critically with the work which was, at times, overtly political in
nature. Other techniques commonly used during this time to produce simi-
lar effects were improvisation, gestural movement and repetition.45 Banes
describes some essential elements of postmodern dance: “The anti-illusion-
ist stance dictates that seams can show, and that part of the aesthetic pleas-
ure in watching the dance derives from learning its structure by examining
the seams”. She goes on to clarify, “[W]atching mistakes occur in
278 Victoria Mohr-Blakeney
improvisation, witnessing fatigue, danger, awkwardness, difficulty, watching
movement being marked and learned. Watching systems being built and
dismantled. Refusing to be seduced by mere skill”.46 The minimalist, anti-il-
lusionist qualities and unenhanced physicality of postmodern dance were
essential tools in achieving its often-political purposes, one being to destabi-
lize the relationship between spectator and performance. Since No Context’s
premise is a dialogue between Toronto’s postmodern dance of the 1970s
and the present, the question arose: how might this context be reflected in
the structure and content of the No Context catalogue itself?
The No Context catalogue is devised, in terms of structure and content,
to point to the instability of writing, and the instability of interpretation (in
this case both the artist’s interpretations of archival documents and the
curators’ interpretations of Ehrhardt’s work). In the catalogue, to commu-
nicate these interpretive instabilities over an authentic or ‘true’ interpreta-
tion of either the archival documents or the live work itself, subjectivity and
positionality are accentuated in a variety of ways. There are a number of
writing forms represented in the No Context catalogue: descriptive prose,
written and oral interview excerpts, excerpts of archival reproductions and
excerpts of a transcribed three-way conversation. All written documents
(single-authored or co-authored) are written in the first-person singular ‘I’
or first-person plural ‘we’. The aim of this choice was to indicate both the
subjectivity and the multiplicity of subjectivities of all contributors.
Similarly, the full title of the live performance and catalogue, No Context or
Studio Place or Decentralize or We Actually Maybe Right Now Have
Everything We Need, does not label the work in a definitive way, but rather
points to multiple and simultaneous significations. Employing the specific
terminology of curator, curatorial and catalogue in the No Context cata-
logue, alongside trends and vocabulary in dance writing, creates a heteroge-
neous mix of terms originating from both curatorial practice and the field
of dance, which indicates that the creators of No Context are operating
between these two modes of display.
These are some of the strategies I, along with my collaborators, incorpo-
rated into the structure of the No Context catalogue in the hopes of inciting
complex interpretive strategies on the part of readers. The catalogue served
as an opportunity to examine how the unenhanced weight, mass, physical-
ity and anti-illusionist qualities of postmodern dance could be reflected in
the writing. In addition, we questioned whether or not it would be possible
to de-emphasize the structures which enable powerful illusionist narratives
in catalogue writing. Some examples of this approach include the strategies
previously mentioned: incorporating multiple authors and perspectives,
de-stabilizing traditional narrative structures by way of excerpts and inter-
rupted texts and including multiple narrative voices and a variety of written
forms to emphasize the subjectivities present in multiple perspectives.
One attempt at re-negotiating the function of writing in the context of
dance in the No Context catalogue was to reconsider the effect of textual
narratives in relation to embodied practice. Taylor addresses the reductive
 No Context 279
potential of language in this context: “Instead of focusing on patterns of
cultural expression in terms of texts and narratives, we might go about
them as scenarios that do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to
narrative description”.47 It is worthwhile to examine how narrative func-
tions in curatorial writing and whether or not non-narrative structures
impact the relationship between text and dance in new and interesting
ways. The No Context catalogue presents an opportunity to juxtapose nar-
rative voices in a fragmented, interwoven, non-hierarchical manner, as well
as to combine these textual narratives and fragments alongside archival
documents, and photographs, to create complex and non-linear narratives
and interpretive experiences on the part of the reader, allowing readers to
draw connections across narrative voices and textual, photographic and
archival media.
Another important trend in postmodern dance that serves as a key theme
in the No Context exhibition is intertextual referencing.48 This trend in
postmodern dance to cite or reference other works serves a myriad of pur-
poses. Ehrhardt’s performance of No Context references a number of works
from the 15 Dance Lab. Rather than ‘cite’ an artist directly, she draws on
trends such as simple gestural movements, improvisation and voice-over
narration common in a variety of works by different artists from the period
in order to reference the ideology of postmodern dance as a whole rather
than individual artists or works. In the case of the No Context catalogue,
intertextual referencing proves to be important on several accounts. On the
one hand, intertextual references prove to be inevitable for a catalogue
designed to open up a dialogue with a specific period in dance history. On
the other hand, these references also suggest a level of shared authorship
and recognize that No Context as a performance was built from a rich
context of previous artistic production both textual- and movement-based.
Throughout the catalogue, formal textual and aesthetic references to Spill
(the magazine/newspaper/zine of 15 Dance Lab) prevail. These references
seek to pay homage to a history of experimental dance writing in Toronto
while simultaneously disseminating and complicating ideas of creative
authorship and shared histories.
The relationship between the No Context performance and the archive is
complex. For one, the source material for the No Context performance was
drawn from archival documents relating to the 15 Dance Lab in the Dance
Collection Dance archives. In addition, after the performance, the No
Context catalogue will, in turn, become an archive of the event, standing in
as a material survivor in the face of an ephemeral experience, remaining
foremost in the minds of those who witnessed it. In her writing, dance
scholar Alexandra Carter questions the historic prevalence of drawing on
written sources as a tool for recreating past events. Carter states, “[D]
iscourse theories have exposed how knowledge is constituted not by limited
logocentric modes of engagement with the world but by a vast variety of
influences; this calls into question the reliance on written sources as privi-
leged evidence for recreating the past”.49 While Ehrhardt’s work is not a
280 Victoria Mohr-Blakeney
recreation but a response to the past, and the artist also interviewed original
dance artists who performed at 15 Dance Lab including the centre’s
co-founder Miriam Adams, it can be argued that archival documents were
privileged as source material.
In her writing, Taylor points out that the archive separates that which it
contains from those who initially knew and understood its contents: “What
changes over time is the value, relevance, or meaning of the archive, how
the items it contains get interpreted, even embodied”.50 Ehrhardt is invaria-
bly separated by space, time and context from the archival materials used
to create No Context. Does this fact complicate the validity of an artistic
response to archival materials or simply gesture towards the inevitable sub-
jectivity of a creative response? Perhaps Ehrhardt’s de-contextualized
response to these archival documents indicates a destabilization of authen-
ticity, a trend very much in line with postmodern dance ideologies. Carter
comments on this issue: “The postmodern attitude to the role of the ‘author’
has given rise to a questioning of the role of the historian, who is now seen
not as a neutral recorder of events but as a creator of them”.51 Recognizing
Ehrhardt in the role of a creator of new histories, rather than a revitalizer
of old histories, shifts the lens of how the impacts and effects of No Context
can be evaluated with regard to the relationship between performance and
the archive. Perhaps, as contemporary art theorist Boris Groys asserts,
“today’s contemporary art demonstrates the way in which contemporary
art shows itself – the act of presenting the present”.52 Ehrhardt’s work with
the archive reveals itself to be a subjective creative construct and questions
the archive as a point of access to authenticity and origin, and opens up the
question of the incompleteness of the archive as a source.53 However incom-
plete the archive may be, and however subjective and complex one’s rela-
tionship to it, Ehrhardt’s work still posits archival documents as a potential
source of liveness. This liveness is seen instantly ‘documented’ by way of the
catalogue, and the circle of liveness to documentation closes. In this way,
the dance exhibition catalogue proves to be a space to reconsider the
archive’s relationship to embodied practice.
In this research, I have sought to identify several key mechanisms in the
interaction between writing, dance and the archive and to consider how
these mechanisms might function in the context of the dance catalogue. My
research has revealed the intersections between dance and curatorial schol-
arship to be an under-examined field of research. Drawing on theoretical
ideas in the field of dance scholarship and performance theory, this research
exposes inherent differences in the medium between text and dance and
examines how this impacts their interaction. This research also addresses
the disparity between how dance and writing are valued and legitimized as
sites of knowledge in the field of representation. I examine how certain
theorists posit that writing in the field of dance has the potential to strip
embodied practice of agency and intention, a stance which has important
political implications for contemporary dance curators in their work. I
investigate how dance and writing function in relationship to the archive by
 No Context 281
way of Derrida’s theory of the archive, particularly the archive’s ability to
co-determine liveness. This research then relates these theoretical concerns
to the context of the No Context catalogue. In so doing, I have understood
that, although the mechanisms in the relationship between writing, dance
and the archive may be intrinsic to these forms, when conscious of these
concerns, the dance exhibition catalogue offers a unique space in which to
influence, manipulate and potentially subvert how dance and writing inter-
act. This intervention is achieved by creating gaps, fissures and instability
within the text, by destabilizing narrative and objectivity and using writing
to gesture towards embodied practice as a primary site of knowledge.54
Conscientious approaches to dance catalogue production provide an oppor-
tunity to allow readers and viewers to create complex and non-linear nar-
ratives and interpretive experiences, and to make new connections across
media. This offers an opportunity for practical and theoretical expansion in
both the fields of contemporary dance and curatorial practice.

Notes
1 In this research, dance curation, or curating dance, refers to instances in which
curatorial methodologies, practice and approaches are applied to the art form of
dance.
2 Based on my research, I have determined the typology of the dance catalogue to
include three major categories. First, dance exhibition catalogues, which include
critical or interpretive writings and are produced in conjunction with live per-
formances or events. Second, dance retrospective catalogues, which examine the
history of a single artist’s career or dance movement. Third, dance process cata-
logues, which document a creative process or project, performance think tank,
workshop, etc. For this research, I will be focusing on the former: dance exhibi-
tion catalogues. Unless otherwise indicated when the term dance catalogue in
this text refers to the dance exhibition catalogue.
3 In this research, I use the term ‘curatorial writing’ to describe professional writ-
ing on the part of curators and writers aimed at contextualizing artworks. Early
curatorial writing in the field of dance occurred primarily in the form of the
dance exhibition catalogue.
4 The first dance exhibition catalogue published in Toronto was titled Dance and
Film and was published in Toronto by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1977 and
edited by dance scholar and critic Selma Odom.
5 It must be considered whether or not it is of benefit to the field(s) of dance, for
dance artists and the form of dance itself to be contextualized within the greater
field of art, a field dominated by scholars and historians from the field of visual arts.
Due to the limited scope of this research, this chapter does not address the theoret-
ical effects of contextualizing dance within a larger (namely visual) arts canon.
6 It can be argued that curatorial practice presents both a risk and an opportunity
to the field of dance. On the one hand, contextualizing dance within the broader
field of contemporary art allows for new cross-disciplinary connections to be
made and broader trends in contemporary artistic thought to be identified
across various media. On the other hand, when contextualized in the wider
context of contemporary art, dance potentially risks losing the particularities of
its own histories, both written and embodied, as this embodied form becomes
re-codified in the language of curatorial practice. If curatorial discourse on
dance is in a position to impact the history, the scholarship and the archive(s) of
dance, then dance curators take on a significant responsibility.
282 Victoria Mohr-Blakeney
7 The term ‘embodied practice’ is used by a number of prominent dance scholars
and performance theorists, such as Diana Taylor, whose writing serves as an
important cornerstone in the theoretical foundations of this curatorial chapter. I
have chosen the term ‘embodied practice’ to refer to live performance through-
out this text, as opposed to other common terms, such as ‘ephemerality’ or in
some cases simply ‘dance’ to refer to the importance of physicality and embod-
ied knowledge in dance performance and also be inclusive of cross-disciplinary
performance practices emerging from the field of contemporary dance.
8 Post-structural theory informs this research in several important ways.
Throughout this chapter, I ground my arguments in the writing of post-struc-
tural theorists on the archive, dance art historians working with a post-struc-
tural approach and a post-structural approach to my own work in my research
surrounding the form of the No Context catalogue. Post-structural thought
posits the instability of objective truth and the impossibility of objective knowl-
edge, as well as the impossibility of escaping structures of knowledge. A
post-structural approach offers an attempt to acknowledge and examine the
instabilities of structures, such as writing, throughout this thesis.
9 McCurdy is currently a PhD candidate in communication and culture at Ryerson
and York Universities, while Spooner holds an MA in performance from the
University of Toronto. McCurdy, Spooner and I met in the spring of 2014 at
Envisioning the Practice, a conference on curating performance held in Montreal
at Université du Québec à Montréal.
10 When I use the word ‘support’, here I am referring to the potential for writing to
provide context for live performance while simultaneously foregrounding live
performance as opposed to determining it or replacing it.
11 In the introduction to Of the Presence of the Body, André Lepecki also classified
choreography as a form of non-textual codification and inscription.
12 Some of these scholars include Susan Leigh Foster, André Lepecki and Peggy
Phelan.
13 Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance”, 139.
14 Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance”, 133.
15 Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance”, 130.
In Of the Presence of the Body, Mark Franko disputes the perception that
ephemerality in the field of representation is lacking and in constant need of
documentation.
16 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in
the Americas (Durham, Duke University Press, 2003), 16.
Taylor is writing in the context of a primarily Latin American anti-oppressive
framework rather than in the context of contemporary dance scholarship but
her words resonate regardless. In her text, Taylor applies a post-colonial lens to
the role of writing in the context of the European conquest of the Americas and
examines how embodied practices by subjugated groups were repressed. Taylor
writes about the repression of Latin American indigenous embodied practice by
European colonizers and their use of language and text as oppressive tools of
colonization.
17 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 16.
18 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 17.
19 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 17.
20 Lepecki, Of Presence of the Body, 4
21 Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance”, 137.
In his article, Lepecki describes ‘presentness’ as a space of tension between dance
and writing that is mutable and lawless.
22 Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance”, 137.
Lepecki goes on to describe this ‘presence’ as indicating ‘ontological co-impossi-
bilities’ that transcend time: past, present and future.
 No Context 283
23 Ramsay Burt, “Genealogy and Dance History”, Of the Presence of the Body:
Essays on
Dance and Performance Theory, Ed, André Lepecki (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2004), 30.
24 In Of the Presence of the Body, Lepecki outlines Derrida’s position on dance,
highlighting one of the few moments the theorist wrote directly about the field(s)
of dance.
25 I would argue that many seminal radical dance performances throughout his-
tory have been documented yet are still understood to have agency and to have
had a subversive impact on the field(s) of dance. An example of this phenome-
non can be seen in Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, which served as a key moment in the
postmodern paradigm shift in dance but was also documented. This being said,
it can be argued that Rainer’s original performance was not documented, but
rather a subsequent performance years later.
26 In Archive Fever, Derrida describes the archive as “objectivizable storage” and
claims it is a reproducible iteration and is linked to the production of memory.
27 In Archive Fever, Derrida categorizes a series of characteristics and terms essen-
tial to understanding the complex function of the archive, including: the archi-
val impulse, archive fever and the death drive.
28 Although Derrida writes in the context of live experience and the archive, the
complex mechanisms he identifies in relationship to archival function can be
applied to the relationship between dance (embodied ephemeral practice) and
written language (documentation).
29 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, Trans, Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 2.
30 Derrida, Archive Fever, 10.
31 Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance”, 125.
32 Lepecki “Inscribing Dance”, 129.
Lepecki describes all forms of dance inscription as stemming from the ‘mourn-
ing force’ that presence (dance) proposes.
33 Derrida, Archive Fever, 11.
34 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 19.
35 Naomi, Jackson, “Dance and Intertextuality: Theoretical Reflections”. Dancing
Bodies, Living Histories: New Writings About Dance and Culture, Eds, Liza
Doolittle, Anne Flynn (Alberta, Banff Centre Press, 2000), 218–231.
Niomi Jackson, “Dance and Intertextuality”, 220.
36 As Jackson so clearly states, intertextual approaches can dismantle notions of
authenticity and universality in favour of revealing how subjectivity can support
or subvert culturally dominant views.
37 Jackson, “Dance and Intertextuality”, 221.
38 In her text, The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor uses these terms when
she compares how embodied practice is considered as a site of knowledge versus
writing.
39 Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance”, 134. Lepecki writes about the unfixed nature of
dance, going on to add not only is dance fluid and unfixed but also audiences
and writers can be thought of as being both fluid and in motion as well. Perhaps
this multi-destabilization of signification inherent in both dance and writing has
the power to destabilize the relationship between text and movement to give
way to new possibilities the re-configuring this relationship.
40 Lepecki stresses that writing in this way occurs by emphasizing the erasure at the
origin of dance discourse but gives no concrete examples of writing along ephem-
erality, leaving the reader to speculate and draw his or her own conclusions.
41 Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance”, 132.
42 Lepecki goes on to cite Franko’s argument that documentation has been used in
the service of canonization.
284 Victoria Mohr-Blakeney
43 The term ‘postmodern dance’ refers to dance created after the 1960s, which is
characterized by any or all of the above: gestural everyday movement, concep-
tual approaches, anti-illusionism, text and video media.
44 Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Postmodern Dance (Middletown, Wesleyan
University Press, 2011), 17.
Banes confirms that the Judson Church Theatre performers set the stage for the
expansion of the postmodern aesthetic in dance.
45 As Banes states, repetition was often used in postmodern dance was often used
as a tool to point out its habitualizing effect and reveal the political implications
of this technique – namely, to expose political apathy.
46 Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers, 17.
47 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 16.
48 Jackson, “Dance and Intertextuality”, 220. In her text, Naomi Jackson suc-
cinctly defines intertextuality as the ability for texts to quote or cite each other,
setting up relationships between various works. Intertextuality for Jackson ref-
erences the origins of additional works inscribing a map of dialogues and
‘intertexts.’
49 Alexandra Carter, “Destabilizing the Discipline: Critical Debates about History
and Their Impact on the Study of Dance”, Rethinking Dance History: A Reader
(New York: Routledge, 2004),10.
50 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 19.
51 Carter, “Destabilizing the Discipline”, 10.
52 Boris Groys, “The Topology of Contemporary Art”. Modernity, Postmodernity,
Contemporaneity. Ed. Terry Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 71.
53 Carter, “Destabilizing the Discipline”, 10.
Carter stresses that archival records are full of gaps and silences and must be
understood as culturally constructed based on the hierarchies of both the pres-
ent and the past.
54 This research is only a step towards a much larger field of enquiry that is inter-
disciplinary in nature. Directions for further research would include analyses of
further case studies dating back through time so as to trace the development of
this new form.

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21 30 Minutes about Mumbai’s Theatre
History
Ramu Ramanathan

Mumbai is the sum total of many languages.

Consider the stats: 1,500 shows per month. In Marathi, Gujarati, English,
Hindi, followed by Kannada and Malwani.
Kuru Kuru Swaha epitomizes this polyphony of Mumbai. Novelist
Manohar Shyam Joshi deploys a start-stop structure to tell a story which
includes how Mumbai’s underworld unleashed its c-grade italics on the
sanctity of India’s official mother tongue, Hindi. So there is a mix of Bengali-
Hindi, Sanskrit-laced Hindi as epitomized by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh and the sort of Sanskrit no one speaks today.
The book is a master class in dialogue. Joshi manages a range of lan-
guages not only between characters but also within one single character.
I have used this book as a playwriting exercise to grasp how Mumbai
shifts from one linguistic ghetto to another.
Another under-rated novelist, short story author and playwright is Bhau
Padhye who penned Vaitagwadi, a novel which established him as a star in
Marathi. He is a chronicler, and his cast of characters, brings together a
variety of Mumbai experiences. It is visceral and vulgar. But I have always
felt when Mumbai drowns in the Arabian Sea, one should place Padhye’s
jottings in the modern-day Noah’s Ark, and with the help of a bunch of
actors, the city shall be re-born.
My all-time favourite remains Namdeo Dhasal’s Gandu Bagicha. Again,
I have heard Dhasal read the poems aloud. It is an incredible feat of plot-
ting, pace and anger.
This is a question every playwright must ask. How to embrace a city
lingo with narrative power and lyricism, and highlight the phrases that are
uttered in the slums, chawls, dargahs, government offices, corporate offices,
small businesses, lower- and middle-class homes, labour unions, hospitals,
courts, college campuses and brothels.
Dhasal’s work is based in South-Central Mumbai. This is the area from
Khetwadi to Kamathipura to Falkland Road (present-day Pathe Bapurao
Marg). This became the epicentre of Bombay after the British royalty were
gifted the island city by the Portuguese. The first things to spring up were
plays in English. There were 35 make-shift theatres which featured plays
performed in English for the recreation of the British soldiers.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429281921-25
288 Ramu Ramanathan
It’s been a longish journey of English plays from the British military to
Cyrus Mistry’s delicious play about the Parsee community, Doongaji House,
which was penned in the 1970s.
Now a novelist, Cyrus Mistry, has penned what is one of the finest texts
for the Indian English stage. The play transpires in Doongaji House, an ail-
ing decrepit house. Mistry uses the house to take a hard look at the Parsi
community in a city where their revels have ended.
Mistry escaped from Mumbai and shifted his base to Kodaikanal.
Interestingly enough, many a literary great have escaped this city.
Premchand detested every day of his stay in Mumbai (then Bombay). So he
said adieu. It is true that he wagered and bagged a role in the film Majdoor,
which he penned. As did Amrutlal Nagar and Upendranath. This is a theme
that gets reflected in Mumbai. How its A-list authors (Hindi and others too)
betrayed Mumbai. They feared Mumbai. They didn’t get along with her.
And the city, like a true-blue diva, turned her back on these wordsmiths.
Even the legendary Manto (the fashionable favourite on the Mumbai
stage) never made Mumbai his centre stage. His Ganje Farishte (Bald
Angels) is a collection of his sketches and reminiscences of the Mumbai film
stars of the late 1940s to early 1950s. It is true: Mumbai lingers in the
background in most of his outspoken short stories. But it is a distant sort of
love affair.
Unknown one-act plays like Iqbal Khwaja’s Snafu (Hindi-English) in
which low-brow Raghu More from Bhandup enters St Xaviers College and
tries to become more Xavierite than a Xavierite who has tried to capture
the sense of being an eternal outsider in this city. Another piece was Zubin
Driver’s Rathod the Cockroach Killer (English), menacingly performed by
Denzil Smith, which is about a pest control agent who disrupts middle-class
gentility in suburban Mumbai.
Another uncompromising play not for the faint of heart is Mahesh
Elkunchwar’s Holi, translated into Hindi by the gang from Khalsa College
for an intercollegiate theatre competition. The production brimmed with
shocking violence, swearing, drugs and rock n roll but also, said the judges,
a lot of laughs and agit-prop resistance.
That’s the “spirit of Mumbai”.
I started this story with Manohar Shyam Joshi. Let me bring to your
attention a book called Hamzaad. It is the story of Mumbai. Bleak, sans
ideals, sans hope, zero optimism.
Joshi talks about builders, filmmakers, pimps, prostitutes, swapping part-
ners and the boils and warts, plus ugliness and vileness.
It is a belief among Muslims, that once you are born, a devil is born too.
This devil is a Hamzaad. The symbol of Hamzaad is used by Joshi to warn the
20 million citizens of Mumbai that our devils are hovering over our heads.
And this is the drama of this city. Twenty million of us. Along with 20
million Hamzaads. Living our dramatic lives together.
After the box office success of the Marathi film Natsamrat (based on the
cult play by V. V. Shirwadkar), the buzz is that the Natsamrat team will
 30 Minutes about Mumbai's Theatre History 289
present Sakharam Binder in its celluloid avatar. Once again, with Nana
Patekar in the lead.
This is truly the age of post-modernism. Everything and anything goes.
A play due to which Tendulkar became officially associated with sensa-
tionalism, sex and violence. Most of Maharashtra was stunned by the wan-
ton display of illicit sex.
Today, Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal is an official text. So is Jayant
Pawar’s Adhantar. Likewise, Mee Nathuram Godse Boltoy by Pradeep
Dalvi and Yada Kadachit by Santosh Pawar are playing to full houses now.
All taboo plays.
So? Has theatre in Maharashtra been gentrified and democratized?
No.
Scratch the surface and the old scars are visible. A case in point is the
show at the Bhagat Singh Maidan in Kala Chowkie. It was 5 October 2014.
The Lok Shahir Amar Sheikh Janmshatabdi Samaroh Samiti was keen to
host a performance in honour of the legendary people’s poet. This being the
historic maidan where Lok Shahir Amar Sheikh sang powadas during the
Samyukta Maharashtra movement. The aim: to create awareness about
labour reforms during the Mill Workers’ Movement.
But the Bombay Municipality Corporation (BMC) said no. According to
the BMC notice, only those playgrounds, which have traditionally been
used for religious functions and public meetings before March 2012, have
the approval to be used as venues for “similar activities”.
The situation wasn’t much different at the Vidrohi literary function
hosted at Siddarth College in Wadala under the eyes of the Mumbai police.
There was nothing starry-eyed about the event. More plainclothes person-
nel than a legit audience.
The few hundred who attended the two-day show of songs, performances
and plays were keenly aware that the political narrative had shifted. Utopia
and idealism are passé. The most potent literary words being touted from
the dais pointed to the sections of the Indian Penal Code:

Section 143 – Being a member of an unlawful assembly

Section 147 – Rioting
Section 149 – If an offence is committed by any member of an unlawful
assembly, every other member of such an assembly shall be guilty of
the offence
Section 323 – Voluntarily causing hurt
Section 504 – Insult intended to provoke breach of peace

The police heard the jeers, the vacuities and the high-minded theories.
They were apologetic. Their presence could be traced to the enactment of
the Dramatic Performances Act (DPA) XIX of 1876 by the British
government.
To understand the ebbs and flows of what happens in today’s India, one
has to grasp the first scene of the first act.
290 Ramu Ramanathan
In the 1870s, two plays were on the DPA radar. These were Chaka
Darpan in Bengali and Malharaoche Natak in Marathi.
The then British official who ruled against the plays said,
I do not know who was the author, or what his motives were, but the
work itself was as gross a calumny as it is possible to conceive. The object
was to exhibit as monsters of iniquity the tea planters and those who are
engaged in promoting emigration to the tea districts, – bodies of men as
well conducted as any in the empire. These gentlemen… have what is called
a Mirror held up to them in which the gratification of vile passions, cruelty,
avarice and lust, is represented as their ordinary occupation. I do not know
that this play was ever acted, but it is written, and in all respects adapted,
for the stage, and it might, for any power of prevention the Government
have, be acted at any moment.
The arguments remain the same.
The 1890s were a turning point. The polemics of patriotism was in the
air. Lokmanya Tilak had launched the Sarvajanik Ganesh Utsav (Public
Ganesh Festival) in 1893. The solidarity of Hindus during the ten-day fes-
tival became a political tool in the hands of the Indian National Congress.
Tilak introduced the melā, which entailed hundreds of singing troupes and
performances. It was Brecht before Brecht became an ism. The melā in
outdoor performance spaces provided a solid political message for the
masses.
On cue, this form of earthy theatre was under surveillance.
“During the ten days festival” wrote S M Edwards, the police commis-
sioner of Bombay in The Bombay City Police, “bands of young Hindus gave
theatrical performances and sang religious songs, in which the legends of
Hindu mythology were carefully exploited to arouse hatred of the ‘for-
eigner’, the word mlenccha or ‘foreigner’ being applied equally to Europeans
and Muhammadans”.
Lokmanya Tilak and his Ganapati melās became the bad boys of Indian
theatre.
Tilak was prosecuted. Maharashtra with its rich tradition of povādas
(ballads) was silenced. The chorus and the duffs were muted. The seven-act
plays with their allegories and delicious dialectics were imprisoned.
When the DPA XIX of 1876 proved benign, the government deployed the
Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code plus the Bombay City
Police Bill of 1898. These laws became an instrument of political coercion.
It was Tilak 100 years ago. It is Ambedkar now.
Lok Shahir and playwright, Sambhaji Bhagat says, “The government has
appropriated Babasaheb Ambedkar. But their Ambedkar is mythology. It is
the antithesis of Ambedkar”. Bhagat says, to understand Ambedkar every-
one must read Annihilation of Caste. But if artists perform pieces which
emerge from the Ambedkar ideology, they are tagged as voices of dissent
and forsaken by the state. The DPA along with the laws of sedition loom
large.
It’s the same DPA of 1876. Rebooted.
 30 Minutes about Mumbai's Theatre History 291
There are a mind-boggling 50+ licenses for a live show. This means, techni-
cally, every show in Maharashtra is ‘illegal’.
Question: What’s the way forward?

Answer: The ultimate trump card in any theatrewallah’s armoury,

budmaashi
Aravind Ganachari, historian and scholar, mentions how in the 1910s,
[t]he time between the two acts of a play was used to address the audi-
ence on the gospel of nationalism. At times, someone from the audience
spoke on the theme of national interest. For example, during the perfor-
mance of Kanchangadchi Mohana at Thane, Dhonddev Kashinath Phadke,
Narayan Atre and Diler Khan, a guard from the GIP Railways, made a
speech on the desirability of unity between Hindus and Muslims. Many
times, during the intervals, Swadeshi items, books and leaflets preaching
nationalism and photographs of Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and
Bipin Chandra Pal were sold.
There are scores and scores of anecdotes about Mumbai’s theatre
budmaashi.
There is the delightful tale of the Swajan Hiteishi Natak Mandali (1907)
who travelled to Ranibennur and Dharwar, plus Indore and Gwalior with
their plays. In addition to the plays, the ‘drop scenes’ curtains with their
coded nationalistic graffiti were “a must see”. The messages were simple:
“Be patriotic about your country”, and “Don’t import articles from foreign
countries” and “Don’t drink”. These ‘drop scene’ curtains were deployed
between two scenes or acts. The audiences loved it. The enforcement offi-
cers did not grasp the play within the play. The subterfuge continued. It was
much later that the District Magistrate of Satara confiscated the curtains
under Section 42 of the District Police Act.
G. B. Phansalkar’s credo after he lost the curtains: too bad, but we must
find another way to beat the system.
This was true a 100 years ago. More so, now.
And, finally, to conclude, a lesson I learnt pretty early in life from my
German-speaking, physics-loving father is: In maths, the symbol ‘!’ is called
a factorial.

The not-so-humble ‘!’ in mathematics has a special significance.

It makes numbers grow.
So, 2! Is 2 x 1 = 2.
5! Is 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5.
It’s the same with language!
Isn’t it?
Languages beget languages.

I met a Kutchi businessman from Mandvi. At that time, I was struck by the
multiple Kutchi dialects being used in the radius of the port area in Mumbai.
Bhatia Kutchi, Memoni Kutchi, Khoja Kutchi, Lohana Kutchi, Bania Kutchi.
292 Ramu Ramanathan
Each with regional variations. Then there were the Maplahs, the Jews, the
Nagoris, the Marathas, the Mahars, the Mathadis, the Kunbis.

That’s when I started to realize that in Mumbai, theatre is language.

And this language is shifting.
Did you know the biggest twenty-first-century crisis is half of the 6,000
languages which the planet speaks will die?
Over 50 languages have only one speaker left.
If you are reading this, you must know that one language will vanish
from this planet in the next month.
Never to be found again.
Simply because many languages have never been written down.
Many languages cannot be read.
They have never been.
This is a shame.
So many stories waiting to be told.
These languages are preserved through the theatre.
Theatre as a kind of living museum that preserves words.

Or else in this world of acronyms and abbreviations and global labels, we

hurtle towards what Brien Friel and Vaclav Havel hint about.
We will be confronted by the world in an 1830s school in Brian Friel’s
Translations. This is a fictitious village in Ireland. A platoon of English sol-
diers has been commissioned to Anglicize place names and redraw territo-
rial boundaries to the treasury’s advantage.
The play is about the struggle between England and Ireland. The play
focuses mainly on (mis)communication and language.
A character has to recite Virgil’s Aeneid, which tells of the inevitability of
conquest but also of its impermanence.
Yet, the stumbling attempts at recitation are evidence that ‘words’ are
vanishing and every word is a dead metaphor.
It is a play about words but about a man who is un-fluent (lovely word,
no?) in two dead languages.
Then there is Vaclav Havel’s The Memorandum with its uncanny similar-
ity to the TV pronouncement in English by the Most Popular Leader on
Our Land on 8 November and what followed.
A deputy manager of a large organization whose business is mysterious
(don’t forget: Havel is the child of Kafka) has introduced an artificial ‘offi-
cial’ language of gobbledygook into the office: Ptydepe (pronounced
puh-TYE-duh-pee).
There are Ptydepe classes and an in-house translation centre and, inevita-
bly, memorandums in Ptydepe that no one can understand. Ballas has a
boss, Josef Gross, who drafts a newer memorandum and wants to destroy
this new tongue.
The story is about an incomprehensible artificial language which is
‘imposed’ on the people by governments and bureaucracy and departments.
 30 Minutes about Mumbai's Theatre History 293
Prague = Delhi.
Malá Strana = North Block.
This is the brief history of how an omnipotent government manipulates.
This is the short history of words.
It is true.
Time debases history.
Time debases language.
Today, every word is a dead metaphor.
This in itself is a dead metaphor. A couple of more things.
Every time I say something.
I realise what I didn’t say.
Is a great injustice to those un-represented.

As a child, I accompanied my friends to see a play performed for the LIC

class IV union in the Community Centre in the LIC Colony. My first serious
play was a lok natya called Ramnagari by Ram Nagarkar, who was also the
songadya in the superhit lok natya, Vicha Majhi Poori Kara, alongside the
inscrutable Nilu Phule. The play begins, “Saala, Hajjam, Ahe, Hajjam”. It is
a roadside altercation. Ram Nagarkar, the son of a barber, who is watching
the entire episode, wonders, “Why do people, drag ‘our’ hajjaam profession
into their petty fights?”
That’s the day when I started to realize that in Mumbai, theatre is
language.
Also, I realized theatre is everywhere. Even today, there are more than
1,500 play performances in a month in four main languages Hindi, English,
Gujarati and Marathi (you can add Telugu and Kannada and Konkani and
Malwani and Bhojpuri and Maithili to this list). This beats the monolin-
gual, monoculture theatre of New York or London or Berlin hands down.
Plus unlike the subsidized art of Delhi or government grants, the top
Marathi and Gujarati plays net Rs 2,50,000 at the box office. This is for a
single show. All cash. No cheques.
So much to say, so much to say.
So let’s start in South-Central Bombay. This is the area from Khetwadi to
Kamatipura: the epicentre of Bombay after the British royalty were gifted
the island city by the Portuguese. The first thing to spring up was the the-
atre. There were 35 make-shift theatres which featured plays performed in
English for the recreation of the British soldiers since the 1790s.
As old timers say about the theatre of Mumbai, it has to fulfil three condi-
tions: (1) Be close to a tram stop or railway station. (2) Be in proximity to
a dingy bar. (3) Be located in a red-light area.
It’s most befitting that Falkland Road and the Golpitha chauraha are
called the Patthe Bapurao Marg. Patthe Bapurao is the doyen of tamasha.
Besides the 16,000 songs he composed, there is the legend about how he (a
novice) participated in a jugalbandi and defeated the opponent (a veteran)
in a sawaal-jawaab. A young and very pretty courtesan from the Mahar
community called Pawala was besotted by his singing and his poetry. The
294 Ramu Ramanathan
Brahmin Bapurao married the girl. On cue, the theatre performances were
banned.
But the manager of the Bangdiwala theatre, a Mohammedan, ensured
“the show must go on”.
He got the Brahmin-Mahar husband and wife to sit on the stage and
charged two annas for the tickets. The audience watched the banned wed-
ding on stage. The manager made more money at the box office from a
staged wedding than the actual show.
In the sultry days of 1944, when there were no air conditioners, there were
theatres like Baliwala Grand Theatre (Playhouse), wherein a play opened
with a loud bang of exploding potash whilst the curtain was being raised.
And even as the audience went silent and attentive, occasional shouts from
the vendors around the theatre percolated the auditorium. Pista-Badam –
Chopdi – Punkha – Uthav Jaldi and the incessant extolling of the ticket-seller
“Khel Abhi Chalu Hua”. For some of the performances in the Gothic-style
theatre like Victoria, Rippon, Baliwala, the drama companies used to bring
their own main curtain, which was operated by two men. Since the curtain
pullers often dozed off, the cue to bring down the curtain was a shrill blast
of a whistle. During one of the shows, the curtain pullers who were asleep
were awakened by a shrill whistle, and so, they hurriedly brought down the
curtain in the middle of the scene. It was only later that it was found out that
the whistle was not blown by a prompter but by a Brihanmumbai Electricity
Supply and Transport traffic conductor on the street.
I used the aforementioned scene in a play about the 1944 dock explo-
sions in Mumbai which I wrote called 3 Sakina Manzil.
I plagiarized from reality.
I borrowed from the city.
Whether 3 Sakina Manzil rediscovered the magic of theatre, I don’t know.
Whether the play is a success or not, I don’t know. Whether the play was
understood, or misunderstood, I don’t know. For me what mattered is I had
to write the play about the 1944 dock explosion which tore this city apart!
That’s the beauty of theatre in this city. It springs up in the most unlikely
of venues. From maidans like the Jambori Maidan which hosted the month-
long Kamgar Fest (the oldest theatre fest in this city with its origin in 1939)
to a cult play like Vastraharan whose 5,000 shows have been performed by
mill workers from Lower Parel and Naigaon. In “the good old days” of
working-class solidarity, the plays were performed in the compound of the
chawls or in the by-lanes. The shows were mainly mythological produc-
tions, with artificial ornaments and gaudy costumes. The performances
used to go on till the wee hours of the mornings, and the audience contrib-
uted to a noble cause.

Why is all this important?

As my Guru-ji Jorge Luis Borges asks, What is a book?
Then Guru-ji Jorge Luis Borges pauses in his public lecture (available
on YouTube).
 30 Minutes about Mumbai's Theatre History 295
It seems to be like a picture.
We ask it something, but it does NOT answer.
The book is dead.
Fortunately a man called Plato invented the Platonic Dialogue.

Plato is the dramatist

Who invented Socrates
To help us hear
The voice of the master
He wrote the Dialogue
Today, even though Socrates is dead
Having drunk the hemlock
Socrates is still with us

Like Narendra Dhabolkar

Like Govind Pansare
Like Malleshappa Kalburgi
And even the playwright from Navsari
Ram Ganesh Gadkari
Whose bust may be at the bottom of a river
But his words have resurrected
After Three Days
Because of the Dialogue

The incorrigible Talliram is back

Gadkari’s classic EKACH PYALA is back
Socrates is back
He never went away

Consider the extraordinary Kenyan playwright and novelist, Ngugi wa

Thiong’o who was visiting India a month ago.
In 1977, he wrote a play called Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I
Want).
To quote the blurb: (it is) the story of a farmer swindled out of his land
by corrupt elites, it dealt directly with the plight of ordinary Kenyans and
cast untrained villagers in starring roles.
The play was a super-duper hit. But after six weeks of a box office run,
the authorities shut it down.
On New Year’s Eve, then vice president and later dictator Daniel arap
Moi despatched Ngugi to the notorious Kamiti Maximum Security Prison.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o could not be silenced.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o penned the DEVIL ON THE CROSS.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o penned on a prison-issued toilet.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote in his own language: Kikuyu.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o preserved ideas.
296 Ramu Ramanathan
Ngugi wa Thiong’o preserved words.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o preserved Kikuyu.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? Many people mistake the buying of a book
with the buying of its content or owning the author.
There is a beautiful book called Biblomania by Gustave Flaubert in which
a fanatical bibliophile and antique bookseller lets his rival die in a fire so
that he can get his hands on a highly coveted Latin Bible.

Charged with murder, he cheerfully accepts his death sentence.

But the twist to the plot (!) is that the bookseller cannot read THE
BIBLE.
Since Bhasa, Kalidasa and the Greeks, ideas have been considered
dangerous.
There is no need to be surprised.
Which is perhaps why, the ancients had no great use of books.
Most of the great teachers – have not been writers.
But speakers.
Pythagoras.
Socrates.
Buddha.
Christ.
Ved Vyasa.
Tulsidas.
Even Tukaram sang his abhangs.
So, the Brahmin threw a bundle with Tuka’s kirtans into the
Chandrabhaga river.
Three days later.
The Pandas (priests) opened the doors of the temple.
The Pandas found a wet sack on the head of Panduranga.
This is a brief history of ideas in India
I culminate this with a reference to the Les Combustibles by Amelie
Nothomb.

The play transpires during a war, three figures are trapped in a library in
the middle of a hard winter, with only books to provide the heating. They
argue with one another about the relative merits of the books and the order
in which they should be sacrificed to the flames. The last book left comes to
symbolize beauty in the face of the horrors of war. When this last book is
thrown into the flames, the characters leave the cold library and offer them-
selves up to soldiers on the road outside.

They are shot dead.

All those books in their brain cells.
A life without books (and indeed words) seems meaningless to them.
Theatre zindabad!
Index

Pages in italics refer figures and pages followed by n refer notes.

Aaydaan: entire journey 229; female Archives and Research Centre for
artists perform 226; lighting design Ethnomusicology (ARCE) 246, 256
228; Ratnagiri and Malvan area archiving performing arts in India:
227; Savitri’s performance 228; accommodate change 246; archival
texture creation 227 record 245; archiving impulse 245;
abhijan 23 audio-visual national archive 250;
Abrams, T. 149n7 curatorial impulse 247; intellectual
Achalkhamb, R. 141, 149n10 property rights 252–256; multiple
actor as a witness 116–126 perspectives 243; performing arts
Adams, M. 280 archives 248; Semantic Web
Adhantar 289 approach 251–252; situating
Adivasi communities 46, 59 archives 244–251; Wikipedia 244;
Adiyans 49, 54 YouTube 244
Adorno, T. 5 archiving tamasha and lavani through
Aeneid 292 theatre 137–144
aesthetic framework 153–154 Artaud, A. 8, 35
Aga Je Ghadalech Nahi 141 Asian Theatre Journal 35
Ahmed, S. 113 Atre, N. 291
Aika Ho Aika 142 Auditioning the Plaintiff 113
akhyan 12 Avarta 140
Alam, S. 117 Awasthi, S. 34
Alkazi collection 106
Allana, R. 117 Babu, A. 119
Allana, Z. 102–126 Babu, N. 119
Altekar Hindoo Drama 19 Baby, K. J. 48, 52
Altekar Natak Mandali 21 Bagal, M. K. 23n10
Amar Sheikh, L. S. 289 bahujan 22–23
Ambedkar, B. R. 137, 290 bakhar 13
Anandi 132 Bakhtin, M. 4
Annihilation of Caste 290 Balme, C. 16–17, 23n16
Anti-Devadasi Act 71–72, 74–75, Bandyopadhyay, S. 83–91, 247
79–80, 82n1, 82n4 Banes, S. 277, 284n44–284n46
Appadurai, A. 37, 39 Banhatti, S. N. 16
Archaeology of Knowledge 27 Barba, E. 257, 260–261,
archival climax 10 271n12–271n14
archive and performance 3–10 Barbas, E. 39–40, 87, 264, 270n5
The Archive and the Repertoire 274 Barber, T. H. 48
Archive Fever 275 Bargir, R. 142
298 Index
Barthes, R. 41 Carter, A. 279, 284n49, 284n51,
Bayaa Daar Ughad 228 284n53
Beato, F. 102–103 C’est la CEPT: Badminton Building
Benjamin’s Arcades Project 97 project 165; chronological
Benjamin, W. 32, 37, 99–101, 164 horizontal time 164; cleaning the
Beyerle, T. 202 badminton building 167–171;
Bhagat, D. 140, 149n9 decoupage integrale 166; Glass Bead
Bhagat, S. 290 Game 165; Gurus, Gopis and
Bhagwat Mandali 21 Celebrity Architects 171–176; The
bhakts 13 King’s Judgement 179–182; silent
Bharata Muni 12 lecture 176–179; transmediatic
Bharatanatyam 74, 81 Archive 164–165; waiting for Doshi
Bharucha, R. 25, 35–40, 148n3 182–189
bhasha tradition 90 Chaka Darpan 290
Bhat, S. 20 Chatterjee, N. 117
Bhaubandaki 129 Chaudhari, Z. 108, 109
Bhave Natak Mandali 17–18 Chaudhary, A. N. 108
Bhave, R. V. D. 20 Chaudhuri, S. 90, 243–256
Bhave, R. V. G. 14, 19 Cheengalloor, V. 47–48, 50
Bhave, V. 14–15, 17–20, 23n9, 23n11, Chinna Melam 74
23n17, 24n21–24n22 Choudhury, S. 3–10
Bhavsar, H. 163–192 The Chronic Life 260, 263, 265–266,
The Bhawal Court Case: Auditioning 266, 269n1
the Plaintiff 113, 114; Dhaka Art Citizen K 98
Summit 117–125; Rehearsing the “A Collision of Cultures: Some Western
Witness 108, 108 Interpretations of the Indian
Bhowmik, M. 237 Theatre,” 35
Bhujbal, S. 225–226 colonial writings 47
Biblomania 295 Coming Out 154–156
Bilasmoni, R. 109 commodity: commodity candidacy 39;
Bilgrami, A. 113 terminal commodity 40
Bindeche Divas 234 Conversations of Refugees 99
The birth of presence (1993) 42 Coomaraswamy, A. 13, 23n5, 35
Blank Page 238 Corday, C. 8–9
Bloch, E. 38 Cotton 56, Polyester 84 145, 232,
Blouin, F. X., Jr 49 232, 233
Bochov, J. 272n23 counter/contracts: confidentiality
“The Body as Archive: Will to Re-enact agreement 214–215; e-presence
and the Afterlife of Dances,” 27 212–214; termination of
Bogdanov, G. N. 263 employment 215; work-production
Bombay Municipality Corporation 212
(BMC) 289 Cover, R. 125
Borie, A. 193–206 Craig, G. 35–36
Brecht 97–101, 290 Cramski, Y. 98–99
Bröhanmuseum 204 Crupi, C. 257–272
Brook, P. 8 cultural habituation 28
Brown P. 117
Bryan-Wilson, J. 224n2 Dakghar 235–237, 237, 239
Bryski, C. 32–33 Dalvi, P. 289
Bryski, M. C. 31 Dance and Film 281n4
Burt, R. 275–276, 283n23 Dandwate, G. 23n13
Das, D. 117
Calia, P. 107, 113 Das, O. 115
Canning, C. M. 16, 23n14 Data Messiahs 216, 217, 220
Carreri, R. 269 Datar, C. 231
 Index 299
Debi, B. 105, 107, 108, 117 musical scene 269; Odin Teatret
Debi, J. 105 archives 257–258; space river 265
de Mericourt, T. 10 Fischer-Lichte, E. 38, 43n1
Densmore, F. 250 Flaubert, G. 295
The Deputy 6 form of incantation 6
Derrida, J. 275–277, 283n24, 283n26– Forsyth, A. 136n8
283n30, 283n33 Foucault, M. 27, 66
de Sade, M. 7 The Four Demeanours (Vritti) 31
Desai, A. 229 Franko, M. 277, 282n15
de Saussure’s distinction 96 French Revolution 7, 9
Deshpande, P. 23n8 Friel, B. 292
Deshpande, S. 143–144, 149n14–
149n15, 225–229 Ganachari, A. 291
devadasi cult in Viralimalai 74–75 Gandu Bagicha 287
dharma 31–33 Ganje Farishte 288
Dharwadker, A. 34, 41, 148n3 Geertz, C. 36
Dhasal, N. 287 Ghashiram Kotwal 289
Dhola Maru 251–252 Ghosalkar, A. 127–136, 136n2
diachronic repertoire 96 Gokhale, S. 149n11, 233, 235
dialogical process 96 Gopalakrishnan, P. K. 48–49
Dil, L. S. 239 Gopalan Nair, R. B. C. 46
disciplined process 21 Gopichand, R. 18–19
Dixit, M. 144 Grotowski, J. 35–37, 272n24
Dnyanodaya 22 ground zero 28–35, 39–42
documentary theatre 3, 5, 127–136 Grover, A. 207–224, 210, 214, 216,
Doongaji House 288 218–221
Doshi, B. V. 165, 172 Groys, B. 280, 284n52
The Drama Review 34
drama stages 42 A Hacker Manifesto 220
Dramatic Performances Act (DPA) Hamlet 3–4, 36
289–290 Hamzaad 288
dramaturgy of the archive 89–101 Hangar for the Passerby 208
Driver, Z. 288 Hansen, T. B. 148n3
drummers 96 Harishchandra 19
Dubey, S. 230, 233–234 Harsh Bhavsar 166
Dylan, B. 235 Havel, V. 292
Haymann, W. 43n10
Edwards, S. M. 290 Hesse, H. 165
Ehrhardt, A. 277, 279–280 hindoo natak 19
Eisenstein, S. 263–265 Hindu dramatic Corps 18
Elkunchwar, M. 288 “History and Memory: The Problem of
Elphinstone, M. 15 the Archive,” 49
emerging disciplines 83–91 History of Marathi Theatre, Part I 16
Engineer, R. 115 Hochhuth, R. 5–6
Eno, B. 165 Holi 288
Ertür, B. 113 Honaji Bala 142
Hoover, M. L. 271n17
female performer 129–131, 133–134 How To Perform Like A Good
feudal landlords 48 Employee 217
filming the river: audience 267; Hunt, L. 61
audio-visual theatre document 258;
The Chronic Life 265, 266–267; Ijsselmeer 193, 194, 200
creative document 260–261; Indrajeet Vadh 19
crossing the line 265; cutting on Indrasabha 19
‘Sats,’ 261–265; different shots 268; Industrial Design Centre (IDC) 227
300 Index
intellectual property rights: creators Kennedy, J. 8
and communities 256; indian Kennedy’s assassination 8
copyright act and music 253; legacy Keralithile Samskarikacharitram 48
materials 255; moral and legal issues Kerserboom, S. 73, 81
255–256; moral rights 254; Khan, D. 291
performer’s right 253–254; Khwaja, I. 288
stakeholders 255; traditional Kiarostami, A. 153
cultural expression (WIPO) 252 Kichakvadh 128, 133
intercultural theatre 25 Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA)
interpreting material: administrative 208–209
policies 18; announcement 16; Kirloskar, A. 15
colonial archival material 17; Kirloskar Natak Mandali 15
disciplined process 21; dynamic of Kohn, B. 165
theatre practices 20; price of Koodiyattam 39
admission 18–20; questioning Korczak, J. 236–237
21–23; theatre historians 16; theatre Korgaonkar, B. 143–145
scholarship 15 Kosambi, M 23n12
‘Interweaving of performance Kulkarni, A. V. 21
cultures,’ 38 Kulkarni, K. A. 21
intra-scenic axis 30, 33 Kumar, A. 115
investigation 5, 7 Kunstgewerbemuseum 202
The Investigation 5–6 Kurinjimalai Kuravanji 81
invisible histories 46–62 Kuru Kuru Swaha 287
Isai Velalars 76 Kustov, N. G. 263
Kutrala Kuravanji 81
Jackson, G. 8–9, 284n48
Jackson, N. 276, 283n35–283n37 Lad, B. D. 19
Jadhav, V. 232 Lady Anandi 127–128
Jain, I. 163–192 Lajpat Rai, L. 291
jalasa 14 Larsen, T. 269
Jan Sunvai 6 Lavangi Mirchi Kolhapurchi 142
Jayaram, M. 113 lavani 14–15
Johny, O. K. 48, 61n15 Lazic, M. 64
Joji, A. J 114 Lazzarato, M. 59
Jones, W. 31 Lee, A. 193–206
Joshi, M. S. 287–288 Lehmann, H. T. 29
Jung, C. G. 163 Lepecki, A. 27–29, 32–33, 37–38, 75,
275–276, 282n13–282n15, 282n20–
Kafka’s Castle 218–219 282n22, 283n24, 283n31–283n32,
Kaifiyata 141 283n39–283n42
Kali Mala devam 57 Le Theatre Indien 31
kama 32–33 Levi, S. 31
Kanitkar, G. 17 Limbale, S. K. 43n7
Karadiji, N. 228 Lindsay, J. H. 117
Karmarkar, G. 17 Luiz, A. A. D. 48
Karnad, G. 91 Luthfa, S. 117–118
Karnik, I. 149n11, 235 Lux 165
Katha 13
Katha Akalechya Kandyachi 140 Macmillan, P. 136n5
Kathakali 39 Mahanubhavas 12
Kavi Anant Phandi 142 Maharashtra dharma 14
kavya 12 Maharashtra Natyakala va
Keeler, C. 8 Natyavangamay 15
Keeney, G. 163–192 Maharasthra Rajya Sahitya Ani
keertan 13 Sanskriti Mandal 22
 Index 301
Malharaoche Natak 290 Nagarkar, R. 293
Marathi Granthakar Sabha 22 Nagpal, K. 44n16
Marathi Rangabhumi 23n2 Nair, G. 47–48, 51
Marat, J. 9 Nala Damayanti 19
Marat/Sade 6–9 Nancy, J. L. 42
Marowitz, C. 8 Nandita, S. 226–227
Martin, C. 134, 136n5–136n6 Nanga Ippimala Makkal 47
Martin, R. 275 Narain Roy, R. R. 118
Marx, K. 127, 208 Narayan Roy, R. N. 123
Massumi, B. 27 Narayan, S. 119
materializing site: archive Naregal, V. 137, 148n2, 149n8
purpose 64–65; facts 63–64; narratives of existence 150–159
performative cartography 65–67; Nartaki 142
political practice 67–68; reflection natak 23n1
68–69 Natale Tumchya Sathi 144–145, 147
Medhatul, S. 137–149 Nāṭya Śāstra 12
Meduri, A. 73 Natsamrat 288
Mee, E. 148n3 Natyakavita Sangrah 17
Mee Nathuram Godse Boltoy 289 Natyasastra 25
Megson, C. 136n8 Nehru Centenary Theatre Festival 40
The Memorandum 292 neutral form 4
Menon, D. N. 46–62 Ngaahika Ndeenda 294
Mericourt, T. 9–10 Nityasumangali 81
Messingkauf Dialogues 97 No Context: Archive Fever 275;
Methodology of the Analysis of catalogue 274, 278–279; curatorial
Sanskrit Drama 31 writing 273; dance exhibition 273;
Meyerhold, V. 263–264, 271n16 dance materiality 274; intertextual
Milic, N. 63–69 approach 276; performance 273
Milosevic 63–65, 69 No Context or Studio Place or
Mistry, C. 288 Decentralize or We Actually Maybe
mobilities 11–12 Right Now Have Everything We
Modelbooks 98 Need 273, 278
Mohana, K. 291 Nomadic Curatorial Collective 277
Mohanty, R. 227 Nye, N. S. 136n9
Mohapatra, K. 40
Mohr-Blakeney, V. 273–284 Ocean Songs 180
moksha 31–32 Odin Teatret Archives 257–258, 260,
Monsalve, S. 269 270n2, 270n4–270n7, 270n9,
Mote, H. V. 23n15, 23n19–24n20, 271n12
24n25 O’Hanlon, R. 22, 24n28
“Moving as Thing: Choreographic Olivier, L. 3–4, 7, 36
Critiques of the Object,” 33 “One Hundred Years, One Hundred
mudras 32 Voices,” 231
Mujumdar, S. 15 Orchestrated Q’s (OQ) first
Mukherjee, A. 43n13 community 156
Mukherji, N. 31
Muktibodh 135 Padhye, B. 287
muringakutthuka 47 Paik, S. 149n16
Murthy, K. 103 Pal, B.C. 291
Museum der Dinge 205–206 Palchoudhari, A. 117
Muthukannammal 75–77; Panigrahi, S. 39–40
Bharathanatyam 81; interview of Paniyans 49, 54
77–79; representation of the art Paniyar and Adiyar communities 46
form 80–81; space and performance Panoor, K. 48
79–80 Passagenwerk 97
302 Index
Passport 98, 101 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh 287
Patil, S. 140, 142 Rassmussen, I. N. 269
Patthe Bapurao 142 Rastogi, A. 209
Patwardhan, S. 232 Rathod the Cockroach Killer 288
pauranik 21 The Reading Room 127, 132–133
Pawar, J. 289 Reddi, M. 82n1
Pawar, S. 289 Rehearsing the Witness: actor as a
Pawar, U. 226–229 witness 116–126; Auditioning the
performance: archiving tamasha and Plaintiff 114–115; audition text
lavani 137–149; cultures 38; 109–112; The Bhawal Court Case
practice 127–136; research scholar 108, 108; dhuti and coat 109; expert
74; stealing 25; theft 35, 37 witnesses 113; framing and
performing practices 12–13; within reframing discourse 113; historical
context 13–15 event 112; Mumbai Art Room 107;
Periya Melam 74 Order of Appearance 117;
perpetual process 101 re-enactment. rehearsal 106–113;
Phadke, D. K. 291 transparent performer 103–106
Phadke, Raghupati 17, 24n27, 24n29 Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal
Phansalkar, G. B. 291 Court Case 105–106, 108, 114,
Phelan, P. 149n17, 277 116–117, 123, 126
Philosophers and Thespians 97 repetition 7
Phule, J. 14, 22–23, 137, 148n1 Rietti, F. R. 270n9
Phule, M. 22–23 ritual form 8
Phule, N. 293 Rohit Das 238
Pianist 208–211 Rokem, F. 4, 95–101
Picon-Vallin, B. 264 Rós, S. 177
political intervention 28 Roy, A. 136n1, 157
Pompa, P. 270n9 Roy, R. N. 105, 107, 108, 109, 109
postcolonial criticism 41 Rudrapal, N. 227
Postdramatic Theatre 29
Postlewait, T. 16, 23n14 Sabnis, V. 138, 148n5, 149n6
Potdar, A. 11–23, 23n3 Sadir dancer, Muthukannammal
Prasad, B. 103 74, 81
prayoga sastra 29 Sahai, S. 82n5, 95
Prema, Tujhe Naav Vasana 142 Saha, S. 25–44, 158, 230
prosaic discourse 6 Sakharam Binder 141, 235, 289
Prose of history 6 Sangeet Bari 143–144, 147
Protokoll, R. 136n4 Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) 34,
Purogami Satyashodhak 22 91, 250
purvaranga 25 Sanglikar Mandali 20
Sanil, V. 41–42
Raeside, I. 23n4 Santeek Natak Akademi 40
Raghavan, V. 32 Sarang, K. 234–235
Rahman, A. R. 177 Sarpam Thullal 39
Rainer, Y. 283n25 Sarvajanik Ganesh Utsav 290
Raja, K. P. 61n8 Sastry, S. 137–149
Raja, P. 48–49 Satyabhama, R. 109
Rajaram, A. P. 71–82 Satyashodhak 22
rajkavi 15 savage tribe 48
Raj, P. 14 Savitri 228–229
Ramanathan, R. 225–226, 228, 231, Sawant, R. 228
287–296 Schechner, R. 34–37
Ramnagari 293 Schino, M. 257, 260, 270n4, 270n7
Ramnathan, R. 18, 23n18 Schneider, R. 28–29, 32, 37
Rangacharya, A. 25, 43n4–43n5 Scholem, G. 99–100, 164
 Index 303
Second World War 98–100 “Theatre of Roots: Encounter with
Seen at Secundrabagh 103, 103 Tradition,” 34
Sex, Morality and Censorship theatron axis 29–30, 33
141, 147 The Third Eye 22
Shakuntala 13, 31 30 minutes about Mumbai’s theatre
Shanbag, S. 230–239 history 287–296
Shankarshet, N. 19 Thought and Context: Philosophy on
Shankersheths Natyashakha 19 the Eve of Colonialism 41
shastriya 21 Tichya Aaichi Goshta 143, 147
Siddiqui, H. 150–159 Tilak, B. G. 291
Sieyes, E. J. 10 Tilak, L. 289–290
Sikandar Bagh Palace 102, 102 Times of India 18
Simmel, G. 39 Todorova, M. 67
Singh, B. 113 traigunya 32
Singh, N. K. 90 The Trial 98
Sircar, B. 44n14 Tribes of Kerala 48
sleeping sickness 9 Tritiya Ratna 22
Smith, D. 288 Truth and Reconciliation Mission 245
Snafu 288 Tuchmann, K. 134
The Social Life of Things: Commodities
in Cultural Perspective 37 Unfinished Gestures:Devadasis,
Soneji, D. 73, 82n2, 148n3 Memory, and Modernity in South
Soni, K. S. 181 India 82n2
source culture 40, 42
speculative exercise 29 Vaitagwadi 287
Srinivasan, A. 73, 82n3 Valliyoorkavu 56
Sunil Shanbag conversation: anti- Van Dijck, J. 66
Vietnam protests 235; Cotton 56, Varkaris 12
Polyester 84 232, 232, 233; Varley, J. 269
Dakghar 236–237, 237; idea of Vastraharan 294
censorship 234; Labour Court case Vatsayan, K. 29–31
232; political and argumentative Viccha Mazi Puri Kara 138–141, 149n6
239; working-class experience 231; Village of Mills 231
S*X, M*RALITY, and Virno, P. 208, 224n1
CENS*RSHIP 235 Viswanathan, I. 148n3
Suresh, M. 113 von Roeder, O. 193–206
Swajan Hiteishi Natak Mandali 291
Wad, R. 149n13
Tagore, R. 235 Waghmare, Y. 141
Takalkar, G. 142, 149n12 Waiter 208–211
tamasha 13–15 Waiting for Godot 95, 99
Tamasha Sudharana Samiti 137 Wark, M. 224n4
Taylor, D. 4, 7, 46, 50, 96, 274, 280, Wayanad Ramayanam 57
282n7, 282n16–282n19, 283n34, Weiss, P. 5–7, 9, 135, 136n7
283n38, 284n47, 284n50 WhatsApp 41
Temerin, T. A. 263 Winterton, J. L. 117
Tendulkar, V. 141, 230, 234–235, 289 Witte, B. 43n11
Thackeray, B. 233 Words Have Been Uttered 238
ThaiMan Meetpu thitam 75, 82n4 worker as an artist: assigned company
Tharuvana, A. 57 desk 210; business cards series 222;
Theatre and National Identity in document outlining 213; double
Colonial India 43n6 bind 220–221; employee contract
Theatre and the World: Performance 214; Grover’s Data Messiahs 216;
and the Politics of Culture 39 IT worker outfit at the company
Theatre of Cruelty 8 workplace 210; Kafka’s castle 218,
304 Index
218–219, 219; landscaping outside
IT company 211; perform/else
221–223; performer’s manual 217
Wynad: Its People and Traditions 46
Yada Kadachit 289
Zuiderzeemuseum 193–194, 195–196,
197, 197–201, 198, 202; artists
holding a vehicle 199;
black-and-white photograph 196;
ceramic and wooden daily 198; coin
model 201; collaborative project
193; cultural heritage 194; exhibi-
tion setting 196; glass box on a
vehicle 201; historic flag 200; map
of 194; museum’s object 199–200;
oil paintings hanging 197; outdoor
museum 194, 195; speculative
programme 198; 3D scanner 203