‘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.

This is the first volume to focus specifically on Rabindranath Tagore’s dramatic literature, visiting translations and adaptations of Tagore’s drama, and cross-cultural encounters in his works. As Asia’s first Nobel Laureate, Tagore’s highly original plays occupy a central position in the Indian theatrescape. Tagore experimented with dance, music, dance drama, and plays, exploring concepts of environment, education, gender and women, postcolonial encounters, romantic idealism, and universality. Tagore’s drama plays a generous host to experimentations with new performance modes, like the writing and staging of an all-women play on stage for the first time, or the use of cross-cultural styles such as Manipuri dance, Thai craft in stage design, or the Baul singing styles. This book is an exciting re-exploration of Tagore’s plays, visiting issues such as his contribution to Indian drama, drama and environment, feminist readings, postcolonial engagements, cross-cultural encounters, drama as performance, translational and adaptation modes, the non-translated or the non-translatable Tagore drama, Tagore drama in the 21st century, and Indian film. The volume serves as a wide-ranging and up-to-date resource on the criticism of Tagore drama, and will appeal to a range of Theatre and Performance scholars as well as those interested in Indian theatre, literature, and film.

The Present Critical Anthology On Indian-English Drama Is A Welcome Addition To The Ever-Increasing Repertoire Of The Academic World. It Contains Some Twenty-Two Papers On Diverse Authors, Themes And Trends. The Authors Treated In It Are Girish Karnad, Mahesh Dattani, Badal Sircar, Rabindranath Tagore (Chronologically, Tagore Should Have Been Placed First), And Vijay Tendulkar. The Themes Dealt With Herein Are Myths And Folk Tales, Religious Propensity, Social Alienation, Audience Participation, Feminine Psyche, Role Of Freedom, And Man-Woman Relationship. And The Trends Touched Upon In This Anthology Are Mythic And Symbolic Interpretations, Focusing On Folklore, Experimentations In Third Theatre And Street Plays, And Feminist Approaches To Certain Plays. The Broad Spectrum Of Indian-English Drama Has Also Been Presented In A Few Papers.In Its Present Shape And Size, This Anthology Will, Hopefully, Find A Place On The Library Shelves And Enlighten The Academics On The Perspectives And Challenges Inherent In Indian-English Drama.

The three plays collected in the volume are ‘The Persecuted’ by Krishna Mohan Banerjee, ‘Rizia’ by Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and ‘Kaminee’ (anon.) From the beginning, Indian dramatists who chose to write in English made sociopolitical statements that resonate even today. The unavailability of their plays has resulted in little or no analysis other than secondary references, often inaccurate. For the first time, three of these texts have been unearthed and reprinted in this volume, enhanced by a general introduction, separate introductions to each play, and explanatory notes. Krishna Mohana Banerjea based ‘The Persecuted, or Dramatic Scenes Illustrative of the Present State of Hindoo Society in Calcutta’ (1831), the first Indian drama in English, on his own experience of ostracism after his “Young Bengal” friends flouted the conservative codes at his home. Michael Madhusudan Dutt composed in Madras his first play, ‘Rizia: Empress of Inde’ (1855), a tragedy about the 13th-century Sultana of Delhi who loved her Abyssinian slave. It has been reconstructed with the aid of a recently-discovered manuscript in Dutt’s hand. The anonymously-published ‘Kaminee: The Virgin Widow’ (1874) relates the fate of an accomplished teenage widow in Calcutta when the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act has become law yet most people pay no heed to it.

This book analyses Rabindranath Tagore’s contribution to Bengali drama and theatre. Throughout this book, Abhijit Sen locates and studies Rabindranath’s experiments with drama/theatre in the context of the theatre available in nineteenth-century Bengal, and explores the innovative strategies he adopted to promote his ‘brand’ of theatre. This approach finds validation in the fact that Rabindranath combined in himself the roles of author-actor-producer, who always felt that, without performance, his dramatic compositions fell short of the desired completeness. Various facets of his plays as theatre and his own role as a theatre-practitioner are the prime focus of this book. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in Theatre and Performance Studies and most notably, those focusing on Indian Theatre and Postcolonial Theatre.