ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence of Brechtian theatre in India. To problematise this new and radical performance tradition, I read this emergence against the backdrop of “influence for” – that is, how Indian playwrights deployed Brechtian aesthetics – and offer three arguments. First, I argue that there was an urgent need to create a performance tradition that was anti-imperialist and a constant challenge to the Parsi theatre’s commercial and spectacle formation model, which was responsible for introducing Western theatrical practices in India. Second, the country needed a theatre that could articulate postcolonial political identity rather than the fourth-wall illusionism of the Indian naturalistic theatre of the 1930s. Finally, a theatre was needed that was continuously in dialogue with the diverse performance traditions of India and that celebrated diversity rather than remaining fixed to one performance tradition embodied by the Indian poetics, Natyasastra and represented by the Roots movement in the 1950s. I argue that the entwined strands of Indian theatrical and cultural history present a starting point to understand the characteristics of Brechtian theatre in the context of performance.
