Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T15:55:06.855Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Urban theatre and the turn towards ‘folk’

from Part II - Cultural forms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2012

Vasudha Dalmia
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Rashmi Sadana
Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia
Get access

Summary

The theatre of the new cities

The culture of the great metropolises of nineteenth-century India, foremost amongst them the colonial harbour cities of Calcutta and Bombay, produced a new kind of theatre which played itself out on a stage meant to replicate real life, as it claimed to present real situations, real history and even real gods. It catered to the middle classes, themselves in a formational stage, and was clearly a configuration of parts that had heterogeneous origins. But to the progenitors of this new culture, playwrights, actor-managers and critics no less than audiences, operating under colonial rule in constant interaction with a dominant, still very foreign culture with which it was also essential to establish equivalences, it was of vital importance to stress the indigenous origins of this new theatre and the classical tradition to which it declared itself heir. And if Western orientalists were most often quoted as authorities as to what constituted this classical tradition, their views were adapted by Indians to suit increasingly nationalist purposes.

William Jones, the first high-standing civil servant to write at any length on such matters, in the preface to his translation of Kalidasa's fifth-century Sanskrit drama Shakuntala (1789), had also been the first to announce the sensational new discovery of the national drama of the Hindus to the Occident. ‘Dramatic poetry must have been immemorially ancient in the Indian empire’, he had speculated.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×