Rabindranath Tagore's Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre

Description

A critical study of Rabindranath Tagore’s plays in the backdrop of Indian dramatic/performance traditions

‘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.

Editors’ Foreword; Section I: The Dramatic Tradition; 1. Rabindranath Tagore: Imagining Nation, Imagining Theatre, Abhijit Sen; 2. Rabindrik-Nritya, Tagore’s New Technique for Indian Dramatic Art: Discourse and Practice, Deepshikha Ghosh; 3. Place and Space in Tagore’s ‘Raktakarabi’ and ‘Muktadhara’, Chandrava Chakravarty; 4. Tagore’s Artistic Rendering of Spiritual Realism in ‘Dak Ghar’, Papiya Lahiri; 5. Tagore and the Indian Tradition of Hasyarasa: A Study in Tagore’s Shorter Humorous Plays, Arnab Bhattacharya; 6. The Comic Genius of Tagore: Interplay of Humour and Reality in ‘Chirakumar Sabha’, Deboshree Bhattacharjee; Section II: Theatre/Performance Tradition; 7. The Unrealized Theatre of Tagore, Dattatreya Dutt; 8. Encounters and Exchanges: An Intercultural Interrogation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Dramaturgy in ‘Muktadhara’, Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam; 9. Performing Chitrangada: From Tagore to Rituparno Ghosh, Debopriya Bannerjee; 10. Visarjan as Performance: A Road towards Ritual Healing, Seetha Vijaykumar; 11. ‘Valmiki Pratibha’ and Its Afterlife, Sharmila Majumdar; 12. Postmodern Subversion and the Aesthetics of Film Adaptation: The Example of ‘Tasher Desh’, Sneha Kar Chaudhuri; Index.

Sujets

• Theatre
• Literary criticism
• Performing arts
• Drama

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 03 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785273964
• Langue: English

Extrait

RABINDRANATH TAGORE’S DRAMA IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF INDIAN THEATRE
RABINDRANATH TAGORE’S DRAMA IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF INDIAN THEATRE
Edited by
Mala Renganathan
and
Arnab Bhattacharya
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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© 2020 Mala Renganathan and Arnab Bhattacharya editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936295
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-394-0 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-394-9 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
In Memory of the Innumerable Victims of Covid-19
Contents
The Understudied Dramatic Aesthetics of Rabindranath Tagore
Mala Renganathan and Arnab Bhattacharya
PART I The Dramatic Tradition
Chapter 1 Rabindranath Tagore: Imagining Nation, Imagining Theatre
Abhijit Sen
Chapter 2 Rabindrik-Nritya , Tagore’s New Aesthetic for Indian Dramatic Art: Discourse and Practice
Deepshikha Ghosh
Chapter 3 Place and Space in Tagore’s Raktakarabi and Muktadhara
Chandrava Chakravarty
Chapter 4 Tagore’s Artistic Rendering of Spiritual Realism in Dak Ghar
Papiya Lahiri
Chapter 5 Tagore and the Indian Tradition of Hasyarasa : A Study in Tagore’s Shorter Humorous Plays
Arnab Bhattacharya
Chapter 6 The Comic Genius of Tagore: Interplay of Humour and Reality in Chirakumar Sabha
Deboshree Bhattacharjee
PART II Theatre/Performance Tradition
Chapter 7 The Unrealized Theatre of Tagore
Dattatreya Dutt
Chapter 8 Encounters and Exchanges: An Intercultural Interrogation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Dramaturgy in Muktadhara
Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam
Chapter 9 Performing Chitrangada : From Tagore to Rituparno Ghosh
Debopriya Banerjee
Chapter 10 Visarjan as Performance: A Road towards Ritual Healing
Seetha Vijayakumar
Chapter 11 Valmiki Pratibha and Its Afterlife
Sharmila Majumdar
Chapter 12 Postmodern Subversion and the Aesthetics of Film Adaptation: The Example of Tasher Desh
Sneha Kar Chaudhuri
Contributors
Index
THE UNDERSTUDIED DRAMATIC AESTHETICS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Mala Renganathan and Arnab Bhattacharya
I
It is indeed an honour for us, as editors of the volume titled Rabindranath Tagore’s Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre , to contribute to Tagore studies and promote/enrich scholarship on the dramatic works of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Asia’s first Nobel laureate. Tagore, lauded primarily for his poetry, has left a voluminous amount of dramatic literature that has gained recognition only from the recent decades. Primarily a poet, Tagore was no less a playwright than a poet or fiction writer, a fact proved by his reasonably vast opus comprising more than 40 plays. Tagore’s drama, a substantial part of which is written in verse, demonstrates his creative transformation of the Indian dramatic tradition, submerged in his unique and highly original philosophy of life and art. Perhaps due to inadequate translations or biased notions on his plays as not stage worthy, Tagore’s plays have not been mapped properly in the history of the Indian stage. It is only in the past two decades that Tagore’s place in the local as well as global environs has been realized in relation to his plays, which are now seen to be decisive to an understanding of his philosophy of life, his social and political consciousness and his spiritual affinities.
Similarly, while Tagore’s plays have been critiqued, they have been rarely seen in the context of his contributions to the Indian dramatic genre, particularly focusing on his cosmopolitan spirit, his classic style of blending arts, his spirit of fusion and his effort to modernize theatre. Therefore, our aim here is to map the poet-dramatist’s place in Indian drama and performance, since his plays cover a wide variety of dramatic forms from folk plays, dance dramas to operatic forms as well as from prose plays, humorous plays and children’s plays to political and social plays. Despite being a world traveller with an awareness of the Western classical dramatic styles, Tagore never compromised Indian cultures to Western dramatic forms or Western styles of staging. His plays take the dramatic sweep typical of Kalidasa and at the same time, they do situate the plays within the contemporary context of experimentation and renaissance fervour, giving his plays a new technique, a new identity, a new dramatic method. Tagore’s plays and their experimental zeal can also be seen in his dramatic characterizations of strong characters like Chandalika ( Chandalika) or Nandini ( Red Oleanders ), in his mythical retelling of stories, in his strong theatre landscape that envisages a painterly imagination and breathes a poetic delight in things that come in his way.
What has he not done to enrich Indian drama and performance? If Habib Tanvir’s experimentations with folk forms are revolutionary, has not Tagore done so much earlier with his Baul singing infused in Manipuri dance forms? If Girish Karnad, Satish Alekar, Chandrasekhar Kambar and Ratan Thiyam are well known for their individual styles of either retelling of epic stories or recreating folk narratives or historical figures, did not Tagore attempt all these much earlier in his Valmiki Pratibha (1881) or Biday Abhishaap (1894) or Chitrangada (1891)? Valmiki Pratibha , which goes back to the life of Valmiki, could be considered as a postmodern narrative that looks at the fringes and not at the centre of narrations. By choosing to narrate the roots of Valmiki and his transformation from a thief to a poet, Tagore has retold the epic in a different sense, not by narrating the narrative but by narrating the narrator. Similarly, without aping the West, he has introduced all women characters in a play like Mayar Khela (1881). Today we consider Indian dramatic experimentations as excelling in their awareness of their sociopolitical environments and eco-sensitivity. But Tagore’s plays like Raktakarabi ( Red Oleanders , 1926) and Muktadhara (1922) deal with the slow mechanization and dehumanization that technology has reduced us to, while Chandalika (1933) brings awareness into the social oppression and casteism prevalent in the Indian society.
Tagore’s dramatic/theatrical arts established the first milestone of many a dramatic/performance traditions that got forgotten due to the growing influence of Western performance style in the colonial India. Instead of the colonial style of mechanical imitation of Western styles prevalent then in Indian plays, Tagore’s art revealed the zeal of a synthetic reconciliation, a kind of unification of diverse art forms of the world into a universally integrated whole, guided by certain integrally unifying principles. Such an art form was the most suitable for expressing Tagore’s views on society, politics and the world events. Tagore brings out the unconventionality of the conventional Indian dance and dramatic traditions, in his act of fusion of the Eastern and Western performance styles into a new, flexible patterned performance.
Tagore’s dramatic tradition tells tales of an experimentation of verse plays rendered into dance dramas when we read plays such as Chitrangada (1891) and Shapmochan (1931). Even when Tagore made use of European style of staging, like the use of Card Kingdom in Tasher Desh (1933), he never displayed artificiality, but rather replayed surrealistic characters in an Indian puppet-style dramatization, thereby modernizing indigenous arts.
Tagorean dance form integrates a variety of dance styles derived from one umbrella of the mood it evokes, thereby putting an end to the long debate of abhinaya and rasa as root of nritya . Dance, as an integral part of Tagorean dramatic tradition, is akin to dance as a primordial unit in any theatrical tradition. Therefore, his use of dance as an effective component of theatrical performances is an important Tagorean theatre tradition.
Further, Tagore’s style of fusion of dances such as Kathakali, Manipuri, Odissi, Kandyan (Sri Lanka) and so on, with which he reworked his plays into musicals, dance dramas and operas, is a theatrical tradition unique to Indian performances. In such a theatre, women occupy centre stage, since women are effective vehicles of Tagore’s dance and theatre performance tradition, where they are partakers in his social revolutionary zeal rather than symbols of social victimization, the realization of which point makes us opine that his plays stage female emancipation in a nuanced aesthetic.
II
The book Rabindranath Tagore’s Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre examines Rabindranath Tagore’s plays in the perspective of the Indian dramatic/perform