ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the speech and the space articulated by professional stage actresses and the event in which they spoke as a collective – a smriti sabha or memorial meeting at the Star Theatre, Calcutta, in 1912. The speeches, subsequently published in a theatre magazine, were made by four actresses prior to the performance of a regular show in the theatre in commemoration of their recently deceased guru, Girishchandra Ghosh. Rather than simply looking back into theatre history, this exercise presents us with a framework to explore the construction, slippage and negotiations by the doubly dispossessed seeking a voice in the participatory process of civil society – albeit within the promises of colonial rule. It is a meeting in more ways than one: mourning is articulated in a language of bhava that is at once specific to Gaudiya Vaishnavism and also inflected by the performance practices of proscenium theatre – itself a product of the colonial encounter. Mourning the guru includes self-fashioning in articulating grief and, arguably, for participation in a secular ritual. It is also a prelude to the exclusion and excision of the actress from formal public institutions in the following decade.
