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The Indigenous Theatre of Kanhailal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Rustom Bharucha
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Abstract

Our coverage of Indian theatre in NTQ, as in the original Theatre Quarterly, has been as full as opportunities allowed — notably, including a major four-part assessment by Kenneth Rea in TQ30–34 (1978–79), and a three-part personal casebook by Rustom Bharucha of his production of Kroetz's Request Concert, as adapted to the needs of different Indian cities, in NTQ11–13 (1987–88). The fact that we have never covered the theatre of the state of Manipur, which adjoins Burma and Bangladesh on India's north-eastern border, is all too symptomatic of its more general neglect – at one extreme by central government, and at the other by those who might usefully learn from and contribute to the development of its indigenous theatre. Here, Rustom Bharucha – now based once more in his home city of Calcutta, after a period of work in the United States – explains the background of exploitation and deprivation against which he proceeds to set the indigenous theatre work of the director Kanhailal. Looking in particular at Pebet, a play from the 'seventies based on folk tradition, and at the more recent Memories of Africa, Bharucha attempts to draw some conclusions about the problems and the potential of ‘seeing our cultures from below’ by means of a theatre that springs from and connects with the needs of the people.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue 29 , February 1992 , pp. 10 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

Notes and References

1. I have elaborated on this point in my essay ‘Notes on the Invention of Tradition’, included in Theatre and the World (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1990), p. 250–72.

2. For more details, see my The Theatre of Kanhailal: ‘Pebet’ and ‘Memoirs of Africa’ (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1991).

3. In his essay ‘Manipuri Theatre: a New Look upon Tradition’, in Sageet Natak, Nos. 77–8 (1985), Lokendra Arambam differentiates between 'pre-Hindu Meithei-Meithei groups and ‘Hindu-Meithei Vaishnavites’. The former continue to uphold the Meithei faith, while the latter have been converted to Hinduism since the eighteenth century.

4. For a succinct overview of these proselytizing measures, see Parratt, Saroj Nalini, The Religion of Manipur: Beliefs, Rituals, and Historical Development (Calcutta: Firmal KLM, 1980), p. 135–66Google Scholar. However, it should be pointed out that for all her seeming objectivity on the subject of Vaishnavite repression, Parratt ultimately upholds the theory of ‘cultural synthesis’, not unlike more conservative scholars such as M. Kirti Singh, in Religious Development in Manipur in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Imphal: Manipur State Kala Akademi).

5. Lokendra Arambam, ‘Meitei Culture: Its Historical Development’, unpublished manuscript, p. 19.

6. A trenchant account of the Meithei movement in the late 'sixties is provided by Constantine, R., in Manipur: Maid of the Mountains (New Delhi: Lancers Publishers, 1981)Google Scholar.

7. Ibid., p. 118.

8. For background on the plays leading to Pebet, notably Tamnalai (1972), Kabui-Keioba (1973), Khomdon Meiroubi (1973), and Imphal 1973 (1974), see The Theatre of Kanhailal, op. cit.

9. Interview with L. Samarendra, Imphal, May 1990.

10. Lokendra Arambam, ‘Manipuri Theatre: a New Look upon Tradition’, op. cit.

11. See my Rehearsals of Revolution: the Political Theatre of Bengal (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1983), p. 181–5.