ABSTRACT
Rabindranath’s avowed preference for jatra is to be read as an attempt to move away from both the colonial and the urban nature of the contemporary Bengali theatre. He envisions a “parallel theatre” that would be free from the colonial borrowings and the urban cadences. Rabindranath’s theories of theatre generated a new theatre semiology that was able to negotiate with varied possibilities and grew increasingly more inclusive. He retained his fondness for the indigenous resources (as late as in 1929 when he is writing the preface to Tapati), but he also accommodated the actual staging conditions at hand – particularly as actor and producer. The commercial theatres hardly bothered to battle the cultural degeneration in which it was swamped, much less to construct that cultural imaginary which would nudge the audience to grow into the “sahriday darshak” (the sensitive/perceptive viewer) that Rabindranath mentions in “Rangamancha”.
