Ananda Lal / Photo by Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0

Whereas fiction in Indian English literature enjoys a lion’s share of attention, drama occupies a secondary or even a tertiary place. Comparatively speaking, the bulk of drama or dramatic literature produced by writers in India is very little and rare. But the theatrical study of drama is perhaps the rarest in India. It is unfortunate that several important plays written and performed in the regional languages in India have not been translated into English. 

I felt this problem acutely when, as chairman of the Board of Studies of Karnatak University, Dharwad, I was hectically searching for good English translations of regional Indian plays from different languages. The translated plays are not subjected to rigorous critical analyses, nor are they staged widely in English. Even if and when, by a miracle, they are staged, their theatrical history is never recorded prominently by any theater critic in any media channel. Theater study and history are unknown to or neglected by the educational institutes like universities. There are no books dealing with the entire gamut of Indian theater written by Indian scholars, as it happens to be a much neglected area. But The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre (2004), edited by Ananda Lal, happens to be an excellent reference volume on Indian theater described as “something fantastic” by Girish Karnad in his review of it in the Deccan Herald.

Ananda Lal’s excellent book Centrestage: Essays on Theatre, India and Intercultural (Seagull Books, 2025) fills in this lacuna to some extent. That is because it contains many essays dealing with the theater history of Indian regional plays and Indian English plays not attempted by many critics of India. Although there may be performances of several regional plays in different cities of India, their performances are commented upon by the local critics in their own regional languages, but it never gets publicized in English for a national readership. Therefore the information about their theater history remains unknown and not accessible to national and international scholars. Lal’s book does this adventurous task of presenting the theater history of Indian drama, mainly centered on West Bengal but peripherally touching on the other regions of the vast subcontinent called India. The main handicap is the deplorable absence of critical books in English on Indian drama and theater. 

Centrestage contains many essays dealing with the theater history of Indian regional plays and Indian English plays not attempted by many critics of India.

There are two parts in the present book. The first part deals with Indian English drama in brief and offers a brief historiography of modern Indian theater. Dal rightly opines how the early Indian English drama, though written by some Indians like M. M. Dutt and others (The Persecuted, Rizia, Kaminee …), was primarily meant for the English people of the Raj and not meant for the wider Indian public for the natural reason of the language barrier. He meticulously records the details of their performances, their successes and failures, and the response of the audiences in a typically research-oriented manner. 

Then he discusses some important theatrical performances of plays in Kolkata, from which he himself hails (he happens to be a professor of English at Jadavpur University). His method is quite different from that of a literary critic on drama. Far from offering an elaborate analysis of the thematic concerns of the plays, he, like a typical theater critic and historian, begins with a brief mention of the central theme of the play and the playwright and then moves on to discussing the directors and actors and actresses and their professional qualifications, theatrical aspects like the manuscript, stage properties like costumes, curtains, light and sound arrangements, choreography, audience responses, and the brief theater history reported in the newspapers of the local areas. This kind of discussion will be very useful to the directors, actors, and actresses of drama all over India, though it may not interest the literary critic of drama. 

Lal marshals his profound theater scholarship backed up by his training in dramatics abroad and his firsthand knowledge and experience in directing many plays at Jadavpur University. He meticulously offers all the details like facts and dates by dipping into the archives, thereby setting a model for other scholars of India to accomplish a similar job. Being a Bangla scholar, he has concentrated on Bangla drama including Tagore’s. 

Lal marshals his profound theater scholarship backed up by his training in dramatics abroad and his firsthand knowledge and experience in directing many plays.

Such excellent books have not come from any scholar from Mumbai, New Delhi, or Bengaluru, where theatrical activities are quite alive. Random newspaper reports about dramatic performances in different cities of India are not enough for a systematic study of the whole gamut of Indian theater. Most Indian newspaper reporters happen to be confined to their regional languages, as they do not have the necessary scholarship in English and experience of theater on a national and international level. That is why even the international publishers like Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press feel handicapped and fail to get the total picture of Indian theater activities through English publications. There are several difficulties like this in this virgin field.

In the fifth essay in part 1, Lal suggests that theater art in all its details should be taught in the departments of English in the courses on drama accompanied by the participation of students in reading the dialogues of a play out loud. This is a good ideal and a wishful dream of his and like scholars. But the question is, is it possible in the Indian universities where, for various reasons, specialization in teaching is not encouraged at all? A professor of American literature is made to teach Indian English literature, and a professor of Indian English literature is made to teach modern critical theories in which he is not trained or interested or has no previous teaching experience. A professor of fiction is made to teach drama under duress, although he is not qualitatively qualified to do it. Similarly, students, who come from poor educational backgrounds and are habituated to heavy spoon-feeding, hesitate to participate in readings of the dialogues lest their deficiencies in pronunciation should be exposed and laughed at. 

Such contingencies happen in Indian universities whenever some professor is transferred or retires from service and the available professors have to make do with all these inconveniences and keep the machine of teaching going in a technical sense. Nobody is bothered about the quality or high excellence of teaching or knowledge. Many professors do not have an ideal combination of academic scholarship and theater knowledge and experience like Ananda Lal. That is why his ideal remains a distant dream in the Indian academia.

In the second part, Lal discusses the problems of intercultural theater in India and also abroad. He shows briefly how the Indian dramatists plagiarized the Western plays by adapting them cleverly to Indian situations and how the Western dramatists tried to incorporate the Indian forms of kathakkali, Balinese dance, music, yoga, and myths in their experimental performances. Thus a sort of transaction of give and take happened between the West and the Orient, including India. He offers examples of August Strindberg, Jerzy Grotowski, Bertolt Brecht, and Richard Schechner, who tried to incorporate the Oriental theater element in the Western or European theater and also by shifting from monolingual dialogues to multilingual dialogues in their plays, thereby creating a new, hybrid and exotic effect on the spectators. He shows how Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was presented in an intercultural manner by Tim Supple by investing it with an Oriental dimension. 

Lal also discusses in some detail Peter Brook’s stage version of his film of the same name, Mahabharata, where he has experimented with intercultural elements like costumes of different cultures, actors and actresses of different nations, songs and music of different cultures, etc., but by removing its Indian cultural aura and highlighting only its universality of text and message. He has shown how this experiment was appreciated in the West, but it was not appreciated by the Indian spectators and theater critics equally well. Thus multicultural experimentation with theater, though bold and adventurous, creates contradictory reactions among the spectators for various reasons. But Peter Brook believed in the principle that all theater lives by surprise.

In the next section, Lal show authoritatively and meticulously how Western tomes like The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, edited by Martin Benham (Cambridge University Press); Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, edited by Farley Richmond (University of Hawaii Press); The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, edited by James R. Brandon; The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, edited by John Russell Brown; and The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, Volume V: Asia/Pacific (Routledge) contain innumerable errors of dates, facts, proper names, place-names, institutes, universities, actors and actresses, and spellings, in spite of the editors’ best intention of offering a broad perspective on Indian theater due to their lack of knowledge of Indian regional languages, which acts as a bar to their communication with the native informants and their hurried tours across India. While it is admirable that the foreign funding bodies like the British Council and others provided lavish funds for these projects, the editors, most of whom were Europeans or non-Indians, could not stay for long in India during their tours and gather the correct information from the native providers of data. 

Why do foreign scholars alone have to undertake such an adventurous task on India, and why not the Indian scholars and Indian publishing houses?

The mistake is not one-sided. Indians are also responsible for such problems. The native Indians who do not know either Hindi or English cannot communicate properly with foreign scholars and provide the right kind of information about their culture to the latter. For example, Balawant Gargi felt the same difficulty when he came to India to study the folk theater of India to write his excellent book on the topic (Washington University Press), but he could not get correct and sufficient information about some parts of India (e.g., the folk theater of North Karnataka consisting of Doddata and Sannata). Ananda Lal has to be appreciated for his courage of conviction and expert knowledge of the theater of India for finding fault with these tomes published by the Western scholars. But this raises a very relevant question as to why foreign scholars alone have to undertake such an adventurous task on India, and why not the Indian scholars and Indian publishing houses? What has happened to them? What are the five-hundred-plus universities (both state and central) of India doing? What are the so-called national publishers of India doing? Indians must answer this question satisfactorily.

On the whole, it may be said that Ananda Lal’s Centrestage is an excellent work of research on Indian theater offering a wealth of information about the various aspects of theater so criminally neglected by other scholars of India. Such works on Delhi or Madras or Mumbai or Bengaluru-based theater activities have not appeared thus far, which is unfortunate. Centrestage is excellently produced and deserves to be in every library of Indian educational institutes. Kudos to Ananda Lal.

Dharwad, India