I have felt an affinity with Tagore's Raja (The King of the Dark Chamber) since I was very young, even before I understood its meaning. Later I read the play to many people, and I could see that it moved them too. But when I produced it with the Bohurupee Company, some remarked that it lacked the dramatic strength of my earlier production, Oedipus Rex. Oedipus has conflict, suspense, and tension; Raja hasn't.

Indian civilization is made up of many strands, woven together by the invasions, assimilations, and proselytizings which have characterized its history and prehistory. Generally, however, elements of the Sanskritic culture brought in by Aryan invaders (conjecturally from the Middle East) around 1500 B.C. are dominant, though the farther one gets from the northern regions of India, the less apparent this dominance becomes. The question whether the culture of southern India is a remnant of the pre-Aryan civilization of India or also was imported has never been resolved. However, regional differences in culture within the framework of a Sanskritic civilization are not disputed, nor is the fact that southern India is less Sanskritic in culture than northern India.

Such differences manifest themselves in a variety of customs, artifacts, arts, languages, and rituals.

Until a hundred years ago, the Tamil theatre of South India was devoted exclusively to the presentation of stories derived from Indian epics and other religious sources. The first plays focusing on contemporary social problems were written in the 1870s. Although the bulk of Tamil drama continued to be primarily religious in content, this newly articulated concern with social problems introduced a separate line of development which was to become a major factor in the political evolution of Madras in the second quarter of this century.

Starting in the twenties, the Indian independence movement began to draw the Tamil theatre into direct involvement with social and political reform. The theatre was used to propagandize the activities of the Congress party, which led the struggle against British rule. Plays were written to urge the people to unite and fight colonial oppression.

The staging of Dinabandu Mitra's Niladarpan, December 1872, marked the beginning of the modern professional Bengali theatre in Calcutta. Before this, performances of Bengali plays were given only for invited audiences in private theatres sponsored by the aristocracy. Jatra, the traditional theatre of Bengal, was of course available to everyone, but the rising middle classes of Calcutta, which had come to favor Western forms of art, regarded it as a corrupt and indecorous entertainment. Jatra, complained the middle-class audiences, followed neither the classical Sanskrit definitions of drama, nor the newly fashionable Western models. Jatra was two-thirds song; the dialogue, improvised during the performance by illiterate players, had no literary distinction; and, unlike the new drama represented by Niladarpan, Jatra used no scenery or permanent stage.

Performances of Niladarpan were open to anyone who could afford a ticket, an innovation in Bengali theatre which led to the opening of several other public theatres in the city, each with its company of players, giving regular performances.

The “modernization” of Chinese culture began with the literary revolution of 1917 and the consequent May Fourth Movement of 1919. This first great cultural revolution in modern China, aimed at making Chinese culture more international, was led by men like Hu Shi, who had studied in the United States and Japan. Traditional Chinese drama came under attack as an “entertainment” representing the conventional culture. Peking Opera in particular was regarded as a stronghold of such culture, despite the experiments of Mei Lan-fang, who tried vigorously to modernize Peking Opera un productions using modern costumes and to reevaluate the Peking Opera from a modern viewpoint.

Traditional Chinese drama, which was usually sung, was to be replaced by a “spoken drama” (Hua-chu), based on the naturalistic Western plays introduced into China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Communist China now exercises probably the most rigid form of theatre censorship in the world. Today, five years after the start of the Cultural Revolution, the traditional Chinese drama is still forbidden on the stage, as are all Western works in dance, drama, and music. Since 1966 not a single nonrevolutionary play or song has been published, and the main Chinese theatre journal, Hsi chu pao, was discontinued after the February 1966 issue. At the end of 1970, only eight stage works had been approved for presentation—five “Peking dramas with contemporary themes” (modernized Peking Operas [see T44]), two ballets, and a symphony.

Chinese Communist theatre policy has consistently reflected the principles spelled out by Mao Tse-tung at the Yenan Forum in 1942.