ABSTRACT
Theatre and the debate about it has functioned as a highly conscious aspect of a general process of cultural and political questioning which has been going on in India since 1947. Performance has the potential to change its participants and receivers. That change is of necessity both external (operating through the network of relationships human beings engage in, including social and political structures) and internal (operating as shifts in individual consciousness and in its ways of understanding self and world). The paper looks at the practice of various Indian theatre artists and at what the artists say about it, to see whether the two poles of the transformative activity of performance can be more clearly recognised as a result.
