Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India PDF Download

Author: Sharmistha Saha
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789350025239
Category : Theater
Languages : en
Pages : 255

View

Book Description

Author: Sharmistha Saha
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811311773
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 175

View

Book Description
This book critically engages with the study of theatre and performance in colonial India, and relates it with colonial (and postcolonial) discussions on experience, freedom, institution-building, modernity, nation/subject not only as concepts but also as philosophical queries. It opens up with the discourse around ‘Indian theatre’ that was started by the orientalists in the late 18th century, and which continued till much later. The study specifically focuses on the two major urban centres of colonial India: Bombay and Calcutta of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It discusses different cultural practices in colonial India, including the initiation of ‘Indian theatre’ practices, which resulted in many forms of colonial-native ‘theatre’ by the 19th century; the challenges to this dominant discourse from the ‘swadeshi jatra’ (national jatra/theatre) in Bengal, which drew upon earlier folk and religious traditions and was used as a tool by the nationalist movement; and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) that functioned from Bombay around the 1940s, which focused on the creation of one national subject – that of the ‘Indian’. The author contextualizes the relevance of the concept of ‘Indian theatre’ in today’s political atmosphere. She also critically analyses the post-Independence Drama Seminar organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1956 and its relevance to the subsequent organization of ‘Indian theatre’. Many theatre personalities who emerged as faces of smaller theatre committees were part of the seminar which envisioned a national cultural body. This book is an important contribution to the field and is of interest to researchers and students of cultural studies, especially Theatre and Performance Studies, and South Asian Studies.

Author: Diana Dimitrova
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019286906X
Category : Group identity in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 209

View

Book Description
This book deals with the interface between identity, culture and literature. It aims at studying questions of cultural identity and gender in Hindi plays of the 19th- and 20th- centuries and the interplay of poetics and politics, as revealed in the work of several influential playwrights. The book explores questions related to the ways in which seven representative playwrights imagine India and its identity and the ways, in which this concept is revealed in the "narratives of the nation", its postcolonial contentions and the politics of identity, as revealed in the production of various cultural discourses. The chapters explore various aspects of the ongoing process of constructing and narrating culture, gender, the nation and identity. There has been no monograph on the questions of cultural identity in Hindi drama. This is a pioneering project and a desideratum in the field of Hindi literature, South Asian Studies, and broadly, in the study of theatre of India and of South Asian cultures and literatures.

Author: Prem Chowdhry
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719057922
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

View

Book Description
"This book is an empirico-historical enquiry into the empire cinema made in Hollywood and Britain during the turbulent 1930s and 1940s. It shows how empire cinema constructed the colonial world, its rationale for doing so, and the manner in which such constructions were received by the colonised people".--Back cover.

Author: Sitara Thobani
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315387328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

View

Book Description
Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities explores what happens when a national-cultural production is reproduced outside the immediate social, political and cultural context of its origin. Whereas most previous studies have analysed Indian classical dance in the context of Indian history and culture, this volume situates this dance practice in the longstanding trasnational linkages between India and the UK. What is the relation between the contemporary performance of Indian classical dance and the constitution of national, diasporic and multicultural identity? Where and how does Indian dance derive its productive power in the postcolonial moment? How do diasporic and nationalist representations of Indian culture intersect with depictions of British culture and politics? It is argued that classical Indian dance has become a key aspect of not only postcolonial South Asian diasporic identities, but also of British multicultural and transnational identity. Based on an extensive ethnographic study of performances of Indian classical dance in the UK, this book will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, sociology, South Asian studies, Postcolonial, Transnational and Cultural studies, and Theatre and Performance studies.

Author: Paolo Bertella Farnetti
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443881260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

View

Book Description
Until the latter part of the twentieth century, Italy’s colonial past was a largely neglected topic in historical studies. Before then, only a handful of historians had shown any inclination for rescuing it from the dusty shelves of history, to which it had been relegated. With a few exceptions – most notably Angelo Del Boca – not many had the courage to venture into such treacherous territory. Colonial studies experienced a resurgence at the start of the new millennium, with remarkable progress in the quantity and quality of research, along with the wider public’s newfound interest, as evidenced by an important conference held in Milan in 2006 and the large audience it attracted. This book addresses the relationship between national identity and colonial culture in Italy. The centrality of the construction of Otherness in the identity formation of the colonizer has been extensively reported, both in Europe and elsewhere, and the relevance of colonial heritage has also been attested. In Italy, however, this relationship has been neglected in existing historiography, and the colonial experience has traditionally been side-lined and marginalized. This volume is divided into several sections, each organized around an underlying theme. Within each theme, a broad array of topics and methodologies reflect the authors’ approach in analysing the role of colonialism in the process of Italian identity formation. The rather heterogeneous works contained in this book, which attest the vitality and complexity of the debate on Italian colonialism, are clustered around one central theme: the reconstruction of un-comfortable memories, and a past that will not pass – which overlap the challenging present circumstances of rigidity, racism and rejection. As such, this book is a work of critical reflection, assembled using varied resources and scientific tools in order to shed light on a common past that is still so near and vivid in the minds of Italians, but at the same time so denied, distorted and forgotten in the collective memory.

Author: Partha Mitter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521443548
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 538

View

Book Description
Partha Mitter's book is a pioneering study of the history of modern art on the Indian subcontinent from 1850 to 1922. The author tells the story of Indian art during the Raj, set against the interplay of colonialism and nationalism. The work addresses the tensions and contradictions that attended the advent of European naturalism in India, as part of the imperial design for the westernisation of the elite, and traces the artistic evolution from unquestioning westernisation to the construction of Hindu national identity. Through a wide range of literary and pictorial sources, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India balances the study of colonial cultural institutions and networks with the ideologies of the nationalist and intellectual movements which followed. The result is a book of immense significance, both in the context of South Asian history and in the wider context of art history.

Author: Vikram Singh Thakur
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9389812658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

View

Book Description
This book looks at adaptations, translations and performance of Shakespeare's productions in India from the mid-18th century, when British officers in India staged Shakespeare's plays along with other English playwrights for entertainment, through various Indian adaptations of his plays during the colonial period to post-Independence period. It studies Shakespeare in Bengali and Parsi theatre at length. Other theatre traditions, such as Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi, have been included. The book dwells on the fascinating story of the languages of India that have absorbed Shakespeare's work and have transformed the original educated Indian's Shakespeare into the popular Shakespeare practice of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the unique urban-folkish tradition in postcolonial India.

Author: Elisa deCourcy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000209873
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 174

View

Book Description
James William Newland’s (1810–1857) career as a showman daguerreotypist began in the United States but expanded into Central and South America, across the Pacific to New Zealand and colonial Australia and onto India. Newland used the latest developments in photography, theatre and spectacle to create powerful new visual experiences for audiences in each of these volatile colonial societies. This book assesses his surviving, vivid portraits against other visual ephemera and archival records of his time. Newland’s magic lantern and theatre shows are imaginatively reconstructed from textual sources and analysed, with his short, rich career casting a new light on the complex worlds of the mid-nineteenth century. It provides a revealing case study of someone brokering new experiences with optical technologies for varied audiences at the forefront of the age of modern vision. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and visual culture, photography, the history of photography and Victorian history.

Author: Ashutosh Potdar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000785777
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 405

View

Book Description
This book investigates theories and practices shaped by a performance’s relationship to the archive. The contributions in the volume examine how the changing nature of performance practices has made it imperative to understand how the archive and archival practices could add to the performance work. They explore a variety of themes, including artistic engagement with the archive in both conceptual and material terms; physical, virtual and digital forms; publicly and privately collected; oral, written and digital ways; or organized and unorganized collections. Finally, the volume examines how archives are modelled on existing structure and the ways in which they can be brought into discourses and practices of performance making through engagement and contestation. A novel approach to performance theory, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of performance studies, media and culture studies, studies of technology and art as also literature and literary criticism.