Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India: Formation of a Community through Cultural Practice-Written by: Sharmistha Saha

Book: Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India: Formation of a Community through Cultural Practice
Written by: Sharmistha Saha
Published by: The Springer, 2018

In this book, Sharmistha Saha deals with formations of two thought processes – the nationalist idea giving birth to the identity of being “Indian” and the formation of understanding what the term “theatre” connotes. Saha explores the development of both these ideas in the Indian context as a result of interaction with colonising powers – primarily the British colonists. She looks at the historical processes and formation of different ‘groupuscules’ as a result of the evolving understanding of the self and the emergence of a sensibility of a nation.

“Within the temporal reality of the colonial subject, within a modernity that emerged out of interactions with the British, the colonial subject discovered itself anew — not sure of its own positioning within any linear narrative but at the same time disinclined to see itself in disappearance. Theatre that supposedly started in the mid-nineteenth century had yet to find its counterpart in the native languages and by initiatives of the natives. Hence it remained foreign or bilati but at the same time the medium of the theatre was understood as something familiar, something almost as familiar as the jatra of the natives.” (Page 32)