Indian Folk Theatres and the Indigenization of Shakespeare: Some Observations

Abstract

Indian folk theatres have since long been seen as ‘rural’ alternatives to mainstream urban and suburban theatre. Once a very popular form of entertainment, folk theatrical performances have been steadily overtaken in popularity, even in rural India, by more easily accessible forms of entertainment, largely due to invasions by the electronic media, and, more specifically, in recent decades by the internet. These folk theatres form the cultural ‘womb’ of numerous ethnic communities in India; nevertheless, the purity of their form now appears threatened as they steadily disintegrate in the face of economic and commercial imperatives. Although a complete extinction of these art forms seems distant at the present moment, such an eventuality is not entirely unlikely. Ironically, the dilution of the ‘purity’ of folk theatres by applying their conventions of staging and performance to canonical plays may not only stem the erosion of traditions of folk performance, but also revitalize them and reorient the axis of their marginality. This paper looks at the multiple ways in which the traditions of Indian folk theatrical performance have helped appropriate Shakespeare’s plays, liberating them, in the process, from the formal conventions of the proscenium theatre and recovering, for audiences in India, several of the exciting practices prevalent in the public theatres in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The paper acknowledges the evolution of a distinctive ‘folk’ Shakespeare, that, while still peripheral and often ignored in academia and in theatre criticism, possesses the vitality and the quality of the ‘popular voice’ that we associate with the public theatres of Shakespeare’s time. Finally, the paper examines Indian ‘folk’ Shakespeare as a form of postcolonial indigenization whose final effect is often severely subversive.