ABSTRACT
Rabindranath’s innovations in the theatre – in fact, in all his attempts to provide alternatives to colonial ventures – would also seem to be in tune with what more recent theorists have argued about reclaiming of one’s national history and culture in order to construct a nationalist/decolonized identity. Interestingly, Fanon’s opinion that political governance should be decentralized and the elite classes opposed3 may have an equivalence in Rabindranath’s advocacy of governance emerging out of the rural community (swadeshi samaj) rather than a centralized political system. In the academia, Tagore scholarship, when investigating his plays, has been largely concerned with issues like theme, characterization, philosophical message, at most of dramaturgical structure. The scenographic realism was so inscribed with overt Indian/Bengali rustic signifiers that it could hardly be dismissed as an instance of colonial mimicry but rather exuded a markedly Indian ambience.
