Globalization, Nationalism and the Text of 'Kichaka-Vadha': The First English Translation of the Marathi Anticolonial Classic, with a Historical Analysis of Theatre in British India
178
Globalization, Nationalism and the Text of 'Kichaka-Vadha': The First English Translation of the Marathi Anticolonial Classic, with a Historical Analysis of Theatre in British India
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783082650 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2014 |
| Series: | Anthem South Asian Studies , #2 |
| Pages: | 178 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Globalization, Nationalism and the Text of Kichaka-Vadha
The First English Translation of the Marathi Anticolonial Classic, with a Historical Analysis of Theatre in British India
By Rakesh H. Solomon
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2014 Rakesh H. SolomonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-266-7
CHAPTER 1
Part I.
Globalization, Nationalism and Theatre in British India
THE HISTORICAL TERRAIN OF KICHAKA-VADHA
K. P. Khadilkar: Life in Theatre and History
Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar was born on 25 November 1872 in the small Indian principality of Sangli that boasted a rich cultural history and a claim as the birthplace of modern Marathi drama. Following high school Khadilkar studied at the Deccan College in Poona, one of the oldest institutions of modern Western education in India founded in 1821 by the liberal Orientalist and education reformer Mountstuart Elphinstone. At this distinguished college in the huge colonial administrative unit known as the Bombay Presidency, Khadilkar combined familiarity with ancient Sanskrit literature and culture with proficiency in English, European literary traditions and modern political ideas. Soon after his graduation in 1892 he wrote his first play, Sawai Mahavraowancha Mrityu (The Death of Sawai Madhavrao, 1893) that dramatized events from Maratha history but drew imaginatively on several Shakespearean models. Eventually over a career of forty-two years Khadilkar authored a total of fifteen dramatic works – six plays and nine sangeet nataks or musical dramas – many of which, but especially Kichaka-Vadha (The Slaying of Kichaka, 1907), Manapman (Honor and Dishonor,1911) and Swayamvara (1916) fused great theatrical entertainment with covert calls for nationalist resistance and enjoyed extraordinary popular success as well as high critical acclaim. Together with his main actor- singer Bal Gandharva, Khadilkar became the principal force in shaping a period now regarded by common consent as the golden age of Marathi theatre.
Khadilkar also studied law and pursued a parallel career as a journalist, political activist and associate of Bal GangadharTilak, the dynamic leader of the radical wing of the Indian National Congress – the chief political organization fighting British rule. Tilak was a scholar, philosopher, mathematician, and, above all, a towering nationalist leader who laid the groundwork for India's independence and whose strategies inspired Mahatma Gandhi. Popularly called Lokamanya, or Revered by the People, Tilak was acknowledged as "the Father of the Indian Revolution" by Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister. Tilak picked Khadilkar to serve as an editor at two weekly newspapers he owned, the Marathi-language Kesari (The Lion) and the English-language Mahratta. In 1892 Kesari enjoyed the largest circulation among vernacular newspapers in India. Both these publications were geared to rally mass political opposition against colonial rule, and for their pronouncements in these newspapers Tilak and Khadilkar were at different times imprisoned on charges of sedition and conspiracy against the state.
Khadilkar went on to serve as the chief editor of Mahratta from 1908 to 1910. After 1910, however, he withdrew from both newspapers. In 1917 he returned to edit the Kesari for three more years, and upon Tilak's death in 1920 he took over the editorship of the Lokamanya until 1923.That year he founded and edited a new daily called Navakal– a newspaper that is still published in Bombay and that still gets embroiled in skirmishes with political personalities and government authorities from time to time, as happened recently when its editorial against a state politician led to an attack on its offices.
Given his close and longstanding association with Tilak, the most frequent epithet for Khadilkar today in both popular as well as scholarly writing is "Tilak's lieutenant." It was a label that colonial authorities themselves had pinned on him as early as 1917: a biographical sketch prepared for the Government of Bombay lists him prominently – right behind the leader's main relatives – as one of Tilak's principal "lieutenants." Given this connection, it is no surprise that most Khadilkar plays – whether set in historical, contemporary, or mythical locales – grapple directly or indirectly with his era's political or social issues. In A History of Marathi Literature Kusumawati Deshpande and M.V. Rajadhyaksha suggest that for Khadilkar "writing for the stage was a part of his larger mission: to teach the people, and the teaching was moral as well as political [...] He was, in a sense, a journalist first, and everything else afterwards." Although this might overstate the case somewhat, their assessment of the source of his rhetorical power is quite accurate: "The telling prose of his plays came from the journalist in him – as also, if a little, from the public speaker in him."
It is this rhetorical power to move an audience in the cause of a radical nationalist program, a program deemed terrorism by colonial authorities, that makes his best known play Kichaka-Vadha so successful as a piece of political theatre – and that once rendered it so dangerous to the British. Coupled with the rhetorical prowess is his dramaturgy that crafts characters and events that emerge from considered and volitional action – not from accidents of fate, history or convention. By portraying human beings and situations in this manner, he demonstrates to the audience the possibility and efficacy of political action. "The audience, therefore," as distinguished Marathi fiction writer and critic Gangadhar Gadgil points out, "comes away with the conviction that [...] they themselves could mould and shape their own lives, and their future too, whichever way they wished." Audience reaction, in fact, was specifically cited by the government as a justification for banning Kichaka-Vadha, a topic discussed at greater length in the subsequent paragraphs. Quoting from a Secret Police Abstract, dated 13 November 1909, a police commissioner makes his case, "There is no doubt that a Deccan audience takes [the play] as a cleverly-veiled incitement to murder European officials."
As nationalist ideologies and practices evolved in the 1920s, the independence movement turned away from advocating a violent overthrow of the government in favor of Mahatma Gandhi's call for Satyagraha, that is, peaceful non-cooperation with the institutions and laws of the British Raj. Khadilkar now harnessed his rhetorical and dramaturgic craft to advocate the new agenda in plays like Menaka(1926) and Savitri(1933) that virtually embody the tenets of Satyagraha. He also used his newspaper Navakal to rally public opinion behind Gandhi's movement. Despite this commitment to non-violent action, he was imprisoned on charges of sedition in 1927 and again in 1929.
Khadilkar's achievement as a playwright and journalist were marked by many public honors. He was fêted by prestigious theatrical and literary organizations with invitations to preside over gatherings like the Natya Sammelan (Theatre Symposium) in 1907, the Sangeet Parishad (Music Drama Council) in 1921, and Sahitya Sammelan (Literary Symposium) in 1933. He withdrew from politics in 1936 and devoted himself to meditation and philosophical writings that included several commentaries on Hindu religious texts. Khadilkar savored, albeit briefly, the success of his lifelong devotion to the nationalist cause when India secured independence in 1947, a year before his death in Poona at the age of seventy-six.
Historical and Theatrical Topography
Extending the perspective considerably beyond that provided by the crucial but necessarily circumscribed particulars of a personal history and career, I will in the following section situate Kichaka-Vadha within the historical contours of the formation of a new genre called the modern Indian theatre that first emerged in the eighteenth century. This genre was urban and elite, interwove European and indigenous theatre practices and focused frequently on current social and political issues through a lens of contemporary global developments and ideologies. I will next locate the play within the stream of nationalist resistance that soon began to course within this new genre and that by the late decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became decisively militant in the theatre of the Marathi- speaking Deccan region of western and central India. I will further underscore Kichaka-Vadha's historical foundation by placing it within a matrix of dramatic works that were considered so subversive that their publication or production was prohibited or their playwrights, actors or publishers prosecuted in the courts or punished with various administrative sanctions by the government of the Bombay Presidency. I will conclude with an analysis of how Khadilkar transformed Book IV of the Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu epic, into one of the most explosive works of political theatre staged during the British Raj. Such an overview of Kichaka-Vadha's historical and theatrical terrain will have the added advantage of offering a glimpse of the salient features of the pre-independence modern Indian theatre, its influential role in the resistance against imperial rule, and, above all, the considerable artistic achievement of the group of playwrights who created the early twentieth-century efflorescence of modern Marathi drama – subjects that, compared to the relatively well known traditional genres of Indian theatre, deserve to be more widely known not only in the West but also in India.
Proto- and Modern Globalizations: Emergence and Expansion of the Modern Indian Theatre
Recently an influential group of Cambridge historians has offered a preliminary but persuasive taxonomy and periodization for the study of globalization in a volume entitled Globalization in World History. These scholars of globalization have suggested four principal, if overlapping and interacting, historical manifestations of the phenomenon as archaic, proto-, modern, and postcolonial globalizations. They label the period roughly between 1750 and 1850 as the era of proto-globalization. Those are precisely the years that witnessed the birth and early development of the modern Indian theatre – during the first substantial and extended phase of the historical encounter between India and Europe. The beginning of that phase can be traced to 1757 when soldiers of the world's first multinational corporation, the East India Company, defeated the ruler of Bengal, Nawab Siraj ud-daula, in the decisive Battle of Plassey that soon became the historic signpost for the establishment and expansion of British territorial power in Eastern India. The Plassey triumph also signaled the success of the East India Company over the French East India Company, which had backed Siraj-ud-daula, as the two companies had extended eighteenth-century Europe's Anglo-French conflicts into India, establishing rival settlements and impacting regional power holders as well as local cultures. The Cambridge globalization historians designate the hundred years or so that followed proto-globalization, that is, the period approximately between 1850 and 1950, as the age of modern globalization. In the case of India, this period of modern globalization coincides with the era of direct rule over the country by the British Government, an era that began in 1858 with the liquidation of the East India Company and ended in 1947 with Indian independence. It was during this period that the modern Indian theatre matured and expanded across major urban centers and regions, establishing professional theatre companies, constructing theatre buildings, and creating an array of new plays and productions for a growing and varied audience. The modern Indian theatre was thus born and raised within the crosscurrents of proto-globalization and modern globalization, which, in India, included two centuries of direct, widespread and deep influence of European governmental and civic institutions and social and cultural practices. As a result the modern Indian theatre – whether the Bengali theatre in Calcutta, the Marathi theatre in the Deccan, the Tamil theatre in Madras, or the Hindi-Urdu theatre in north India – was inevitably marked by an intermingling of European and Indian texts, techniques, and practices. Just as inevitably, given the realities of the colonial enterprise and the local resistance to it, this theatre was marked by striking signs of contestation between imperialist and nationalist agendas, which were, in turn, animated to different degrees by the growing globalization of ideologies, especially those of revolutionary nationalism, in the nineteenth century.
The first direct impact of European theatre in India occurred primarily through the theatrical activities of the resident merchants, military officers, soldiers and others employed or associated with the East India Company. These international entrepreneurs and theatrical enthusiasts built the first European-style theatre in Calcutta in 1753 and named it simply the Play House, reflecting in part the singularity of the structure. As a symbolic portent of the volatile encounter between theatrical performance and state power that would occur in the modern Indian theatre, Nawab Siraj-ud-daula used this theatre building as a prominent offensive post during his siege of Calcutta in 1756, a siege that was ended by the historic Battle of Plassey. Some years later the city saw the inauguration of its second European theatre, an event published in the London Chronicle, when Colonel Ironsides "proclaimed, 'BENGAL, to victory thus too long a prey,/At length to wit and taste ha' fought her way'" in his Prologue "at the opening of the Theatre at Calcutta, in Bengal, Dec. 21, 1773."
The architecture, machinery and staging practices of these theatres were modeled after those common in Europe at that time. The Calcutta playhouses contained a pit, gallery and boxes; proscenium stages; painted perspective scenery; shutters and wings; drop and front curtains; and chandeliers and footlights. They offered plays then popular on the London and English provincial stages; their audiences as well as casts consisted exclusively of local British residents; all parts at first were played by men; and the whole enterprise was managed by British personnel – down to ushers and doorkeepers. Within a few years, however, select members of the local Bengali elite were invited to some of these productions, initiating a contact that would eventually culminate in the formation of a new hybrid theatre genre that is now known as the modern Indian theatre. By the end of the eighteenth century, with extensive coverage of British theatre productions in local newspapers and periodicals and with an increasing perception of the importance of the English language, influential members of the Bengali elite sought to organize similar theatres and performances of their own.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Globalization, Nationalism and the Text of Kichaka-Vadha by Rakesh H. Solomon. Copyright © 2014 Rakesh H. Solomon. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Preface; Part I: Globalization, Nationalism and Theatre in British India: The Historical Terrain of ‘Kichaka-Vadha’; Part II: Kichaka–Vadha, or The Slaying of Kichaka; A Note on the Translation; List of Characters; Act One; Act Two; Act Three; Act Four; Act Five; Key Terms; IndexWhat People are Saying About This
“An extremely well-researched and highly significant contribution to the history and politics of early modern anticolonial theatre in India accompanied by a translation of the Marathi text.” —Phillip Zarrilli, University of Exeter
“This is an important and much-needed book. Beyond making a fascinating play available in English for the first time, Rakesh H. Solomon demonstrates how social unrest acted upon and helped to shape Indian theatrical production and how that production in turn helped to focus and shape the reimagining of India itself.” —John Emigh, Brown University
“‘Globalization, Nationalism and the Text of “Kichaka-Vadha”’ offers an inscape into how modern drama became a strategic tool in the struggle for Indian independence. It provides important insights into the birth of Indian modern drama by noting its hybrid roots and response to the times.” —Kathy Foley, University of California, Santa Cruz, and editor, “Asian Theatre Journal”