Theatre Journal

Nandi Bhatia seeks to offer, via an analysis of colonial and postcolonial Indian theatre, a theoretical contribution to the world of subaltern resistance to dominant power structures. Bhatia buttresses her study with the claim that theatre should unsettle the comfortable position the novel occupies in colonial/postcolonial studies. Given the fact that colonial India's literacy rates were extremely low, Bhatia argues for the centrality of theatre in the world of resistance to colonial rule.

Bhatia begins her ambitious endeavor with a descriptive account of theatre in the nineteenth century, which sets up a lengthy discussion on censorship, Darpan protest plays, and nationalism in the second chapter. Following the rise of political plays and the resultant censorship from the colonial state, enshrined in the 1876 Dramatic Performances Censorship Act, Bhatia goes on to examine the world of Shakespeare in India, arguing that playwrights and theatre people, however politically committed, turned to Shakespeare, as well as to mythological and religious plays, because of their safety from state censors. After Shakespeare, Bhatia jumps into the mid-twentieth century with a description of the Indian People's Theatre Association, a group of theatre artists formed in the 1940s who aimed to fight imperialism and socioeconomic inequities through the theatre. She includes another chapter on the twentieth century, with a discussion of Utpall Dutt's Mahavidroha, a play that she claims disrupts colonialist renderings of the 1857 rebellion. Finally, in her epilogue on women's street theatre, she argues that, as women's images were resolutely patriarchal in each of the earlier periods she discusses, women's street theatre in postindependence India has begun tackling previously unexamined issues of domesticity, abuse, and sexuality.

Bhatia connects different episodes in South Asian theatre history that have never been put together in book-length form, especially the historical discussion of theatre's place in modern South Asian social movements across the 1947 dividing line. Also, her compilation of archival material about historically significant productions will provide a resource for scholars seeking to place South Asian theatre in broader historical and theoretical contexts. [End Page 542]

Though Bhatia claims to "advance a critical approach for a rethinking of colonial and cultural studies with particular emphasis on theater" (8), her discussion of Indian history remains simplified and under-researched. For example, Bhatia is content with dubbing plays from the Darpan phase in the 1860s and 1870s and Shakespeare adaptations in the 1880s and 1890s as nationalist. Theories of nationalism, as well as grounded studies of nationalism in the South Asian context, have spawned a large literature ready for critique. Bhatia does not attempt to engage with the complicated worlds of nationalist sentiments in the nineteenth century. She avoids any substantive discussion of how theatre is imbricated in the production and development of nationalist thought and politics, but rather simply presumes that plays in the nineteenth century are "nationalist." She also neglects any thorough examination of nations and nationalist thinking in nineteenth-century India. Bhatia misses an opportunity to enter debates about nationalism by inserting a relatively understudied subject in South Asian historiography, theatre, into a relatively overstudied topic, nationalism. Certainly the plays under question are anticolonialist, but the distance between anticolonialisms and nationalisms is a very complex terrain. Bhatia offers no insight into the links that connect the two via theatre. Even though she hints at interrogating binaries between power-hungry colonizers and the ready-to-resist colonized, her narrative does nothing to undo that relationship. Unfortunately, her discussion of Nil Darpan, the most politically powerful and well-known of nineteenth-century protest plays and her primary example of the genre, remains confusing. Though she wants to claim that the play is not loyalist, as Ranajit Guha argues in his famous 1974 essay, it is not exactly clear how her reading of the Nil Darpan scenario "opens up new ways of thinking about the relationship between colonial censorship, the law, and nationalist...