ABSTRACT
To speak about an Indian "actor text" presupposes some cultural understanding of the concepts of "acting" and performance especially in the domain of drama. The dramatic tradition in India is vast and heterogeneous, the commentaries on it equally large and complex. An important North Indian dramatic presentation with a wide currency in North India at least is Rāmlīlā, a folk theater based on the Rāmāyaṇa. In her study of an important Rāmlīlā in performance—the Rāmlīlā at Ramnagar—Anuradha Kapur (1988) sets up three key modes of representation with which one can begin to theorize the idea of actor as parallel text. The first may be called the redundant gesture where an actor would repeat "insistently, illogically, passionately, a single gesture" (7). The aim here is to draw attention (diegetically) and spectatorially to an important emblem through which he/she has been marked. It could be the long hair of Sita, a widow's insistence on applying sindūr or vermilion to the hair-parting (although for the rest of the world her husband is dead) or simply a wisp of gray hair. The second is the way in which "spectators collaborate with the actors" in creating intersubjective meanings since the "līlā [play] in performance says something to us about ourselves" (5). Finally, character in a līlā is only a pātra (vessel). In this definition a character is like a vessel that contains "qualities of a character" being portrayed; the actor, in the words of Geeta Kapur, conveys "the attributes and emotion of a 'character' to the viewer while himself remaining intact" (1987: 89). Although cinema is not a līlā, the spectator comes to cinema with a critical vocabulary that grew out of a pre-cinematic experience. The father of Indian cinema, Phalke, was certainly conscious of that tradition of audience participation in a performance. From the second half of the nineteenth century especially, Parsi theater fused folk dramas like the Rāmlīlā with Western dramatic forms and created a relatively fixed form that was more centrally controlled by the colonial space of the proscenium arch theaters (Anuradha Kapur 1993). We have already seen the ways in which many aspects of Bombay Cinema—frontality, thematic and semiotic eclecticism, the fusion of the realistic with the fabulist, the persistence of the song and music texts, acting as display, and so on—have had a significant impact on the thematics and materiality of this cinema. In isolating the role of the actor as parallel text, one needs to keep these varied indices of theatrical production in mind.
