Theatres of Independence Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947

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Theatres of Independence is the first comprehensive study of drama, theatre, and urban performance in post-independence India. Combining theatre history with theoretical analysis and literary interpretation, Aparna Dharwadker examines the unprecedented conditions of writing and performance that the experience of new nationhood created in a Dozen major Indian Languages, and offers detailed discussion of the major plays, playwrights, directors, dramatic genres, and theories of drama that have made the contemporary Indian stage a vital part of postcolonial and world theatre.

The first part of Dharwadker's study deals with the new dramatic canon that emerged after 1950 and the variety of ways in which plays are written, produced, translated, circulated, and received in a multilingual national culture. The second part traces the formation of significant postcolonial dramatic genres from their origins in myth, history, folk narrative, sociopolitical experience, and the intertextual connections between Indian, European, British, and American drama. The book's ten appendices collect extensive documentation of the work of leading playwrights and directors, as well as a record of the contemporary multilingual performance histories of major Indian, Western, and non-Western plays from all periods and genres.

Treating drama and theatre as strategically interrelated activities, the study makes post interdependence Indian theatre visible as a multifaceted critical subject to scholars of modern drama, comparative theatre, theatre history, and the new national and postcolonial literatures.

About the Author:

Aparna Dharwadker is associate professor of theatre and drama and English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work on contemporary Indian theatre and comparative postcolonial theatres has appeared in such journals as PMLA, Modern Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Journal, Theatre India, and Theatre Research International. She has held her research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Folger Library, and the Newberry Library, among others.

Experts from Review:

"This wide-ranging and authoritative study ushers in a vital new era in the study of drama and theatre of India. Dharwadker's painstakingly researched and brilliantly theorized identification of post-independence dramatic cannon on the subcontinent is an extraordinary contribution to postcolonial literary and performance theory and will shape that field in the years ahead."

- UNA CHAUDHURI, Professor of English and drama
New York University

"Comprehensive without being a survey, focused without being parochial, and passionately argued without being a polemic, Aparna Dharwadker's Theatres of Independence illuminates the great world-historic repertoire of post-independence Indian theatre and drama. ……modern Indian theatre offers an array of subtle flavors for the contemporary reader and theatergoer to savor, and Dharwadker is a fully informed guide to its most important locations and offerings. …an unrivaled book."

- JOSEPH ROACH, author of Cities of the Dead;
Circum-Atlantic Performance

"Conceptually robust, elegantly nuanced in both theoretical insights and historical scrutiny, Theatres of Independence is also a model of eloquent close reading. …Dharwadker has produced profoundly suggestive frameworks for analyzing postcolonial theatre and drama - and their multivalent context!"

- EJUMOLA OLANIYAN, author of Scars of Conquest / Masks of Resistance:
The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American and Caribbean Drama