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Contemporary Theatre of India: An Overview
In his three-decade long tenure as a teacher/researcher at the Department of English, Panjab University, he wrote extensively on drama/theatre of his times. For close to two decades, he earned plaudits as the drama critic for The Tribune. His major publications include, among others, Tragedy, Modern Temper and O’Neill (1984), Reinterpreting Beckett (1996), The Mystique of Tragedy: Exploring East and West (1996). In fact, he was among those from his generation of teachers at the department, who made valuable and durable contribution to new knowledge. After his retirement, Chaman Ahuja threw himself wholeheartedly into his passion. In order to do field work for his ambitious UGC project, he travelled extensively across the length and breadth of the country, watching theatre productions, meeting directors/actors, interviewing some of the well-known theatre personalities, documenting trends, styles and movements in Contemporary Theatre of India, in the process. The book under review is the result of his life-long engagement with drama/theatre and his painstaking research on contemporary theatre, spread over more than a decade and a half. Contemporary Theatre of India: An Overview is not an ordinary book, it is virtually a compendium of knowledge on contemporary Indian theatre. It has the potential to answer all our queries on what and who is in and what and who is out in the arena of theatre. It is perhaps the only book of its kind, as no other theatre critic has, in the recent times, put together so much of archival material from the fast-vanishing cultural scene in so succinct and creative a manner, that too, within as limited a space as the writer has managed to do it in. While reading Chaman Ahuja’s book, one was reminded of the redoubtable Richard Schechner’s stupendous work, Performance Theory, which remains a classic of our times. I have no hesitation in saying that Chaman Ahuja has done for Indian Theatre what Richard Schechner did for the Western theatre. It goes to the author’s credit that he has managed to cover theatre in as many as 18 different languages, as diverse as Sanskrit, Hindi, English, Manipuri, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali, thus giving a pan-Indian identity to contemporary theatre. Within each language, he has created enough space for men and women directors, amateurs and professionals, individuals and repertories, political and non-political theatre, conventional and experimental styles, regional, folk indigenous and Western forms et al. And yet, his treatment is happily free of philistinism, as it shows meticulous and sustained penchant for research, abiding critical rigour and a finely honed understanding of history, even theoretical issues. Most of the theatre critics in India tend to valourise Bharat Muni’s Natya Shastra as the only theoretical text that provides an overarching, definitive critical framework. With this book, I think, this is bound to change in more ways than one. Not only shall this book open up new vistas of research in the areas of performance studies, but also throw up new and exciting ideas, even the context, for the new generation of theatre lovers. Written in an unencumbered, easy and informal style, the book has its distinctive appeal for the lay readers, theatre lovers, and serious students interested in researching contemporary Indian theatre. Now, a word about the quality of production. We often expect a poor quality of production from the government-sponsored publication houses. In this case, however, NBT has redeemed itself by bringing out a first-rate book that easily meets with the international standards. The quality of paper, printing and pictures is truly impressive. The book is, indeed, a classic of our modern times that deserves to be read, debated and discussed extensively. It is a collector’s item, a pride of every theatre lover’s bookshelf.
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