Performances of Posterity: Theatre, Archives and Cultural Regulation in Modern India

“Performances of Posterity: Theatre, Archives and Cultural Regulation in Modern India,” excavates processes of cultural preservation and appropriation in the context of Indian theatre and performance. This inquiry is centered in Maharashtra in Western India, and I primarily work with materials in Marathi. I argue that in the post-independence decades, theatre emerged as a crucial, but largely understudied, archival site for the preservation of subaltern art forms, specifically tamasha and lavani. Tamasha is a composite multi-part entertainment program, usually performed in towns and villages on temporary stages and tents. One of the standard elements of tamasha is lavani – a genre of (usually erotic) poetry, music and dance, mainly composed by men and performed by women. Both tamasha and lavani are popular “folk” forms local to Maharashtra, and have historically been the purview of artists from so-called lower and untouchable castes. I track how the preservation of tamasha, as a form of cultural heritage, became an increasingly contentious matter of public concern in the latter half of the 20th century, which found its most vital articulation on urban proscenium stages. I delineate how diverse discourses – ranging from modernity, heteropatriarchy, nationalism and anticolonialism, to right-wing fundamentalism, leftist mass mobilization, feminist interventions and anti-caste resistance – were marshalled within this preservatory paradigm, and the complex ways in which questions of caste, class, gender, and sexuality were negotiated in this process. From the late-1950s onwards, a whole new genre of plays emerged that were intended, performed, and received as critical interventions into the existing historiography of tamasha and lavani. I describe this genre as archival performances: these are plays that seek to undertake some kind of archival project, and where performance is both the form and the content of the work. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, I have assembled a corpus of such plays, written primarily in Marathi between 1950-2015, that I analyze in my dissertation. “Performances of Posterity” follows a chronological arc. The first chapter traces the rise of tamasha censorship in the 1940s-50s; Chapter 2 argues for the development of a new genre – the hybrid urban tamasha-play in the 1960s-70s – as a new site of hegemonic appropriation; Chapter 3 focuses on the staged resistance to such appropriation in the context of caste; Chapter 4 elucidates how questions of female desire, eroticism and sexuality are invoked in discourses of tamasha preservation, appropriation and resistance. The dissertation concludes with an epilogue reflecting on the scope and impact of such archival performances vis-à-vis institutionalized documentary practices and durable archives dedicated to performance in India today. In recent years, there has been a distinct archival turn in the study of Indian theatre and performance; “Performances of Posterity” is among the first to offer a critical historical inquiry into the co-imbrication of performance practice and archival praxis in India. In centering the archival discourse around tamasha and lavani, particularly as it manifests within a theatrical idiom, this dissertation reflects more broadly on ruptures between collaboration and appropriation, documentation and museumization, memory and records, performance and archives