ABSTRACT
The scene is a gathering of about two hundred students seated in tiered rows in an open-air auditorium. There is a hushed silence as the performers dressed in black shirts circle the stage chanting rhythmically. The performance is by Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theatre Forum), a street theatre group invited to perform in a women’s college at the University of Delhi, India. The play, Hinsa Parmo Dharm (Violence as Supreme Religion), based on a short story by India’s foremost progressive writer, Munshi Premchand, depicts economic and gendered violence perpetrated by the nexus between religious fundamentalism and capitalism. I remember walking away amid groups of excited students animatedly discussing the performance wondering if classroom teaching ever generated such a response. Much like the play I saw performed that day, postcolonial Indian drama takes the social as the primary reason for its existence. This is evident not only in the themes central to contemporary drama written in various Indian languages but also in the goals of the state-funded National School of Drama, the country’s premier institute of theatre training and performance studies.1
