Cosmo-Modernism and Theater in India: Writing and Staging Multilingual Modernisms

Urban theater took shape in postindependence India as a large and complex field produced in more than sixteen major languages, including Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, and Kannada. The cosmopolitan engagement of leading playwrights with modernist and postcolonial literary movements around the world created distinctly new aesthetic and political approaches to Indian myth, history, and sociocultural experience, which had become the most prominent subjects in modern Indian drama. Yet even as critics and scholars of global modernism have increasingly turned their attention beyond North America and Europe, they continue to focus on dominant world languages at the expense of multilingual cultures such as India’s. Despite their originality and significance, modernist works written in Indian languages other than English remain neglected.

In Cosmo-Modernism and Theater in India, Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker develops a new framework for understanding non-Anglophone Indian modernisms by recovering crucial theoretical concepts and using them to analyze the writing, staging, and reception of major plays in multiple languages. She argues that the output of prominent mid- to late-twentieth-century playwrights such as Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad, and Habib Tanvir registers a decisive rupture from nineteenth-century forms of colonial modernity. In representing the ancient Indian past, the postcolonial urban present, and the rich repertoire of precolonial performance traditions, these authors’ works became highly inventive expressions of modernist classicism, realism, and traditionalism. Dharwadker shows how a decommercialized performance economy and the incessant activity of translation further enhanced modernist production, and she connects Indian modernisms to regional, national, and transnational networks. Offering bold new insights into the theory and practice of modernist drama, this book delivers a radical remapping of global modernisms.

Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker is professor of English and interdisciplinary theater studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her books include Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 (2005) and A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1850 to the Present (2019), both of which received the biannual Joe A. Callaway Prize for the best book on theater.