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India on stage
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Theatre is a dying art. And the Government does not seem to be doing enough for its revival. Ananda Lal has done his bit by editing The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre, released in New Delhi this week. ANJANA RAJAN writes.
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Transcribing oral traditions... Ananda Lal in New Delhi. Photo: S.Subramanium.
TAKE A country like India. Multiply its billion-odd people by its 20-odd languages and 28 States. Add the varying dialects, cultures, religions and creeds. Now calculate the number of theatre traditions that have developed over a period of 5000-odd years. Divide into ancient and modern. Then make them all equal to one. It may be a crazy approach to maths, but The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre attempts to reach an equitable answer without this mad computing. Released at the British Council this Tuesday, this new Oxford University Press offering is weighty in more ways than one. Ananda Lal, on whose slim shoulders fell the editing of the publication, is cool when he admits that encompassing the multiple performance traditions of India in a single volume is a tough job.
"At one extreme you can never stop. I was looking at something handy, around 600 pages," he says, adding that doing justice to different languages does not mean equal distribution of entries, since the contribution of say, Kashmiri is not comparable to that of Tamil. And even if he had decided to do a politically correct calculation of that sort, since there are only around 750 entries in all, he would not have been able to provide more than 35 entries per language, which would not have done justice to the traditions either.
Taking suggestions
So he is content in concluding, "I knew there would be complaints that this person wasn't there or that movement is not there, but we tried our best." He also took suggestions from his contributors across India as to the significance of including or leaving out certain personalities or topics. A scholar in Bengali theatre and author of several books including "Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts" and "Rabindranath Tagore: Three Plays", he admits editing The Oxford Companion has been an education for him too.
Anyway, "This is the first book of its kind, in all modesty," he declares, and the project was initiated to fill the gap in scholarly material available. It was while researching for his earlier writings - he has contributed to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopaedia, Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre among other works - that he discovered the lack of written material on the various theatre traditions. As for the contributors, including Nemichandra Jain, V. Arasu, Shanta Gokhale, Nissar Allana, Zarin Chaudhuri and others, the editor says they "chose themselves," since there are so few of them in the field.
In India, he remarks, "Unfortunately there is not much theatre scholarship. It has sadly not developed as an academic discipline." And while there may be a gap between the scholars, especially those who write in English, and the actual practitioners, he points out, "By and large, artistes are not expected to write about their art." In his selection, he puts "scholarship ahead of everything," and while India abounds in controversies regarding the level of practical knowledge the pure academics may have, these objections are a worldwide phenomenon, he contends. `Oh, these critics, what do they know,' is a common refrain.
What Lal feels Indian performing arts' documentation really needs is a system by which an academic can transcribe the knowledge that a guru has inherited purely as an oral tradition.
Theory and practice
Being a theatre director besides a professor of English literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Lal spans the worlds of practice and theory. For the health of the performance traditions, many of which are endangered species or practically extinct as part of the price we have paid for `development', he cautions, "Don't expect too much from the scholars." It is raising social, educational and media consciousness that can help the situation.
"It is the social aspect that really bothers me. More and more you find the arts being left out of the mainstream," he says. As for the education system, "We have to incorporate theatre in schools and colleges. The emphasis is still on rote learning. There are people talented in music and dance. Where can they go? There is only one NSD in a country of one billion. And I can list the number of newspapers that over the last 10 years have done away with their arts pages. It means you are encouraging people to become unartistic."
Calling it abdication of responsibility on the part of the media, he also suggests the Government can and should create "spaces where it sponsors the arts."
His remark, "The beauty of theatre is that it is gone," is beautiful. Not literally, though.
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