ABSTRACT
Interculturalism has been the key issue in performance studies during the last decade, coming into vogue after the success of Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine and Eugenio Barba. Viewed as a progressive cultural exchange, an answer to the failures of 'multiculturalism' and the 'meltingpot' ideals, 1 which will revitalize/explode the 'self protective huddling' of western theatre practice/ it has largely remained a metropolitan discourse, a product of the Euro-American postmodernism, which has sanctioned a dislocating and abstracting experimentalism with eastern theatre forms. Rarely has attention been paid to the view from the margins as it were, of how the east perceives and performs the western canon. Rustom Bharucha's critique of the current interculturalism as an exploitative 'cultural tourism'3 is well known, but it does not confront a longer history of the western penetration and eastern resistance in the processes of colonization and modernization. This paper seeks to redress this balance by investigating the history and the modes of exchange between east and west as exemplified in the performance of the one 'global' author, William Shakespeare, in India. For it is not merely a coincidence that 'India', its image, culture, history and theatrical traditions were and continue to be located centrally in the rise of interculturalism. The name and label of India has in the past decade acquired a new kind of consumerist currency: it authenticates, it sells, it stimulates creativity. It thus becomes imperative to look at the flip side of interculturalism, not just to expose the appropriations of the other, but also to face ourselves in the image of the other.
