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Since the late nineteenth century, theatre has played a significant role in shaping social and political awareness in India. It has served to raise concerns in post-Independence India as well. Modern Indian Theatre: A Reader brings together writings that speak to the historical contexts from which theatrical practices emerged-colonization, socio-cultural suppression and appropriation, intercultural transformations brought about by the impact of the colonial forces, and acute critical engagement with socio-political issues brought about by the hopes and failures of Independence. The volume addresses pertinent questions like how drama influences social change, the response of drama to the emergence and domination of mass media and the proliferation and influence of western media in India, and how mediations of gender, class, and caste influence drama, its language, forms, and aesthetics. The Introduction by Nandi Bhatia provides a comprehensive understanding of the interface between Indian theatre and 'modernity'.
After Independence, in 1947, in their efforts to create an 'Indian' theatre that was different from the Westernized, colonial theatre, Indian theatre practitioners began returning to their 'roots' in classical dance, religious ritual, martial arts, popular entertainment and aesthetic theory. The Theatre of Roots - as this movement was known - was the first conscious effort at creating a body of work for urban audiences combining modern European theatre with traditional Indian performance while maintaining its distinction from both. By addressing the politics of aesthetics and by challenging the visual practices, performer/spectator relationships, dramaturgical structures and aesthetic goals of colonial performance, the movement offered a strategy for reassessing colonial ideology and culture and for articulating and defining a newly emerging 'India'. Theatre of Roots presents an in-depth analysis of this movement: its innovations, theories, goals, accomplishments, problems and legacies.
Contributed articles.
Indian Theatre expands the boundaries of what is usually regarded as theatre in order to explore the multiple dimensions of theatrical performance in India. From rural festivals to contemporary urban theatre, from dramatic rituals and devotional performances to dance-dramas and classical Sanskrit plays, this volume is a vivid introduction to the colourful and often surprising world of Indian performance. Besides mapping the vast range of performance traditions, the volume provides in-depth treatment of representative genres, including well-known forms such as Kathakali and ram lila and little-knowa performances such as tamasha. Each of these chapters explains the historical background of the theatre form under consideration and interprets its dramatic literature, probes its ritual or religious significance, and, where relevant, explores its social and political implications. Moreover, each chapter, except for those on the origins of Indian theatre, concludes with performance notes describing the actual experience of seeing a live performance in its original context. Based on extensive fieldwork, Indian Theatre is the first comprehensive account of the subject to be written by Western specialists and addressed to the needs of readers in the West. It will be a valuable resource for all students of Indian culture and a standard work in the history of theatre and performance for years to come.
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 for writing and performance that the experience of new nationhood created in a dozen major Indian languages and offers detailed discussions 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 multi-lingual 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 appendixes 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-independence Indian theatre visible as a multifaceted critical subject to scholars of modern drama, comparative theatre, theatre history, and the new national and postcolonial literatures.
This Is The First Comprehensive Anthology Of Modern Indian Drama. This Volume Includes 15 Plays By Sriranga, Badal Sircar, Girish Karnad, Satish Alekar, Utpal Dutt And Others.
Crossover of various disciplines is an inherent phenomenon of Indian theatre and performing arts. With the coming of western influence during the colonial, as well as postcolonial, periods the character of modern Indian theatre has metamorphisized, which is often reflected in the theatre. The larger sections of the Indian theatre scene belong to the experimental theatre, which derives its energy and motivation from the classical and folk/tribal theatre, and is an interdisciplinary theatre. Music, dance, acrobatic movements, and gesticulation of emotions are the integral aspects of such theatre. The idea of artistic crossovers in the performing arts does not solely refer to exchanges between artistic disciplines. Art, as a whole, can be seen as a discipline in an interdisciplinary relationship with other fields, such as education or applied sciences. There are also a lot of negotiations between art and subjects that are already interdisciplinary, such as feminism, spirituality, the environment, and more. The discourses on these subjects inspire many artists to experiment in contemporary Indian theatre by mixing forms. The collection presents a varied panoramic view of these artistic crossovers. [Subject: South Asian Studies, India Studies, Theatre Studies, Cultural Studies]
‘Rabindranath Tagore's Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre’ maps Tagore’s place in the Indian dramatic/performance traditions by examining unexplored critical perspectives on his drama such as his texts as performance texts; their exploration in multimedia; reflections of Indian culture in his plays; comparison with playwrights; theatrical links to his world of music and performance genres; his plays in the context of cross-cultural, intercultural theatre; the playwright as a poet-performer-composer and their interconnections and his drama on the Indian stage.
A Yakshagana folk theatre piece, combining music, dance and drama. Two young heroes, Devadatta, a man of the intellect, and Kapila, a man of the body, are both attracted to Padmini, who marries Devadatta. When the rivalry threatens their friendship each man commits suicide by cutting off his own head. Through the intervention of the goddess Kali the men are brought back to life but Padmini accidently mixes the heads up, attaching them to the wrong bodies. A subplot fleshes out the theme of the search for completeness: Hayavadana wants to lose his horse's head and become fully human.
Received a special citation from The de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association (2020). The book has been hailed as "an invaluable addition to the scholarship on Bharatanatyam." Celluloid Classicism provides a rich and detailed history of two important modern South Indian cultural forms: Tamil Cinema and Bharatanatyam dance. It addresses representations of dance in the cinema from an interdisciplinary, critical-historical perspective. The intertwined and symbiotic histories of these forms have never received serious scholarly attention. For the most part, historians of South Indian cinema have noted the presence of song and dance sequences in films, but have not historicized them with reference to the simultaneous revival of dance culture among the middle-class in this region. In a parallel manner, historians of dance have excluded deliberations on the influence of cinema in the making of the "classical" forms of modern India. Although the book primarily focuses on the period between the late 1920s and 1950s, it also addresses the persistence of these mid-twentieth century cultural developments into the present. The book rethinks the history of Bharatanatyam in the twentieth century from an interdisciplinary, transmedia standpoint and features 130 archival images.