ABSTRACT
FORMS OF ~TEXT' AND APPROACHES Where are the 'origins' of Indian theatre: in performance or in 'text'; and if: in part at least, in the latter, what kindes) of text are we talking about? Common-sense suggests that performing and recording of performance in some form, for example as cavepaintings of ritual relationships to the world around, develop together. But most theatre criticism has tended to start from the primacy of text, and this has until fairly recently been true of India as much as of the West, though in a slightly different sense: where in western approaches the written play-text was seen as the starting point, in India critical work more commonly took the form of revaluations or reinterpretations of aspects of the 'classical' theoretical text on how to perform, the Natya Sastra. The written text however is on one hand a stimulus to performance, and on the other, what is crystallised out of performance; in other words it rarely presents, even as 'stage directions' or performance indications, anything approaching the range of effects and procedures which occur in the performance itself Indian and other 'plural' performance forms make this particularly clear.
