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Scoffing at scholarship

ON STAGE

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Kirti Jain New Delhi
For some strange reason, the theorising or conceptualising of theatre practice, history or trends is very inadequate in India. In fact, this is true of all the performing arts. Particularly, in comparison to the Western world, our scholarship or critical writing in the field of the performing arts is negligible.
 
This is surprising in a country where one of the most exhaustive treatises on theatre practice was written around 2,000 years back ""Bharat's Natyashastra. It is even more surprising given the vast range and variety of work and experiments in this multicultural country which has a complex cultural history of, at times, incorporating and, at other times, of being dominated by different ruling cultures.
 
All these provide a range of perspectives to look at all arts practices "" and are, therefore, a scholar's delight. Yet, apart from some rich critical writing within some regional languages and their theatre traditions, any all-India perspective is difficult to come by.
 
The recent World Book Fair in Delhi was testimony to this lacunae, and I am talking of work in Hindi and English, the two languages I understand. There were some plays that have been recently published, also a couple of coffee-table books on our traditional performing arts, but no fresh writing on contemporary theatre.
 
In fact, last year, one found a few good titles where one could see sound scholarship and a critical look at the work being done in Indian theatre, two of which were by Indian scholars in American universities! This is not to say that we don't have good home-grown scholars, but my complaint is that there are very few of them.
 
This, clearly, is harmful for the artistes who are working in a vacuum, with no one to contextualise existing trends or their own works. It is another matter that artistes generally show disdain towards critical works "" as, probably, artistes do all over the world. But that does not mean that such writing does not impact their practice in the long run.
 
I have often wondered about the reasons for such a gap. One of them, I think, is that we do not have a tradition of documenting the arts and the performing arts, being transitory, lose out the most in this process. In the absence of such documentation, serious scholarship or research is handicapped. Secondly, there is no formal platform or space from where such scholars can emerge.
 
The universities, by and large, do not deal with theatre or dance as serious disciplines. Literature students can only do academic research without being informed about practice. Drama departments in several Indian universities, which should have been the ideal places for initiating such scholarship, unfortunately do not have a rigorous enough regimen of dramaturgical work and critical analysis.
 
Then, practicing artistes are very resistant to the idea of writing about their work, methodology, approach and conceptual framework, which would otherwise form a very useful body of theoretical work on arts practices.
 
Lastly, a very disturbing trend is that many artistes scoff at scholarship and serious theoretical work by propagating that good art is created through intuition and spontaneity, and that those who engage in reading or serious research cannot be good artistes.
 
So, according to them, the pre-requisite for a good artist is ignorance and illiteracy! This anti-intellectualism is convenient to follow and is, therefore, rampant in the artiste community.
 
And then, this forms a vicious cycle "" few readers, few writers, few publishers ""and probably soon, fewer artistes.

                                                                               (kirtinsd@gmail.com)

 

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First Published: Feb 23 2008 | 12:00 AM IST

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