The concept of the Western-style proscenium stage was absorbed into Bengali culture, as a way of imitating the colonial English theatres of Calcutta, very early. In 1795, Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedeff, a Russian visitor had made the first attempt to produce plays in Bengali that, however, failed to create a tradition of Western-style Bengali theatre. After a few more tentative breaks the impulse solidified into an organized mode of theatrical representation towards the middle of the century. The first patrons of this kind of theatre were the moneyed members of the Bengali intelligentsia, thebabu class. Under their patronage Bengali theatre was entertainment, usually of a loftier high-brow variety--celebrating the cultural heritage of India--as opposed to the popular indigenous entertainments that abounded in Calcutta. Initially, the babu theatre produced Bengali (and English) versions of Sanskrit classics and popular as well as classical English plays with native actors. The traditional viewing habit of the Bengali audience (sitting all around or, at least, on three sides of the performance space) was challenged and discarded by the babus in favor of the frontal view of the Western proscenium stage. By the late 1850's things began to change. Bengali theatre started responding to the growing middle-class audience of Calcutta that finally led to the birth of two ticketed theatres in 1872, one of which was launched in a newly constructed auditorium modeled on the European proscenium theatres of Calcutta. The architectural design of this theatre--loftily named, the Great National--was based on the Lyceum Theatre located in the "white" quarters of Calcutta where the English colonial officers went for entertainment. The Lyceum of Calcutta was modeled on the Lyceum of London, which, in turn, was supposed to reflect the Hellenic Lyceum, the Lukeion, where Aristotle is fabled to have taught his gathering of students. The neo-Hellenic architecture of the Bengali Great National theatre, twice removed from its source, had very little to do with the kind of plays that were produced within its premises--Bengali plays dealing primarily with social issues and mythological or mythologized historical stories. And although the architecture of the theatre seems literally to be at war with the content of its productions it was, nevertheless, dubbed the "Great National Theatre"! This begs a few basic questions: what is the connection between the Byzantine architecture of the British built Lyceum Theatre and the Bengali built Great National Theatre? What has this European construction--and architecture is, indeed, construction--got to do with Bengali cultural construction? Why did the Calcutta babus who built the theatre feel the urge to imitate their Western cohabitants, while being so intent on having their own "national" theatre? How could a theatre identifying itself as the "national" be engaged simultaneously in an emulation (even adoration) of the "other" as well as a proclamation (even celebration) of the "self"? And--since architecture is not what this essay is about--we will ask, more specifically, how can "self" e-merge by sub-merging its own identity? In this essay we shall look at a few paradigms in the history of nineteenth century Bengali theatre to analyze the colonial native's construction of "selfhood", vis-a-vis, the notion of "nation".

A sense of a glorious past, a celebrated heritage had started to inform the mind of the Hindu literati of Calcutta, who had become the vanguards of Bengali culture, from the beginning of the nineteenth century. High caliber British Orientalist scholars were "re-discovering" and "re-inscribing" Indian literatures and languages, preparing it to tell a story that they, as part of the great colonial machine, wanted to present and the native to re-present. This Orientalist re-inscription of the Indian identity involved, on the one hand, reverence for the colonial subject's past, and, on the other, disdain for its present state. But the Bengali Hindu literati of early nineteenth century Bengal generally failed not only to read the paradoxical character of this double postulation, they endorsed it and, set on to celebrate their proud cultural heritage that Orientalist research was discovering for them. This new fabulous Hindu identity that linked them with their colonial overlords by racial origin came as compensatory justification for the ignominy of being ruled by foreigners. The British were now a kindred race. Their "otherness" had, to a large extent, been transferred over to the Muslims who were now looked upon as invaders of the land (jaban) and corrupters of the Hindu heritage (mleccha). This transference tacitly palliated the power relationship between the Bengali Hindus and the English while, at the same stroke, successfully disconnecting the Muslim from the mainstream of Bengali culture. With the Hindus thus stuck between the double identity--as (1) inheritors of a rich past, and, (2) colonial subjects--the British colonial administration had subjectified the native and his culture into a frame that would at one and the same time be native and foreign. But the frame would, nonetheless, be comfortable, acceptable and, all too desirable for the Hindu babu. It would be formally and externally native, bearing bodily marks of the indigenous culture, but all its internal orientation would be determined by the colonial structure. The intention of the colonial government became clearer when--at the end of a protarcted Anglicist-Orientalist debate in the highest ranks of the British East India Company--English was finally adopted as the official language of India, in 1835. This history of the relationship between the British and the Bengali Hindu plays out most intricately in the theatre--speaking out in a hybrid voice, spelling out the "desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite." (Bhabha: 86)

The earmarks of colonial hybridity are to be most clearly noted in Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-73), who wrote some of the earliest original plays in Bengali and also gave Bengali literature its own blank verse, sonnet and epic. In 1858, when Datta returned to Calcutta after a protracted period of self-imposed exile in England and subsequently Madras, the intellectual scene in the colonial city was agog with great enthusiasm for creating an indigenous Bengali theatre, as part of a larger enterprise of inventing an indigenous literature. In 1859 he translated Ramnarayan Tarkaratna's Bengali translation of the Sanskrit Ratnavali, (by Sriharsa) into English. But Datta was, very soon, expressing the need for original plays in Bengali:

The friends who wish that our countrymen should possess a literature of their own, a vigorous and independent literature, and not a feeble echo of everything Sanskrit [sic], will rejoice to hear that a taste for the Drama is beginning to develop itself rapidly among the highest classes of Hindu Society. I am fully convinced that the day is not far distant, when the princely munificence of such patrons as the Rajahs of Paikparah will call onto the field a host of writers who will discard Sanskrit [sic] models and look to far higher sources for inspiration. (Datta: xxvii)

Datta's "far higher sources" comprised of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, the classical dramatic theories from the ancient Greeks down to the English Augustan Dryden and the French neo-classicist Racine. But Datta was not ready to discard all that was Indian in him either. Speaking the seared mind of the colonial artist--wilting and basking, at the same time, under colonial glory--and legitimizing hybridity as a valid process of artistic creation he wrote a friend:

In matters literary, old boy, I am too proud to stand before the world in borrowed clothes. I may borrow a neck-tie, or even a waist coat, but not the whole suit. (Datta: 541)

Datta was acutely aware of the differences between the culture he tried all his life to make his own and the one that he was born into. But how would the "neck-tie" and "waist coat" go with the native Bengali dhuti-panjabi? In Sarmista, his first original play, one can see Datta struggling to strike a mean between his dual cultural propensities. He wrote about the problem in a letter to an actor-director friend:

In the great European Drama you have the stern realities of life, lofty passion, and heroism of sentiment. With us it is all softness, all romance. We forget the world of reality and dream of Fairylands. (Datta: 571)

Why did Datta "forget the world of reality?" Also, why does he deem the native writer's forgetfulness of "the world of reality" reprehensible? Does he "forget" because that "world" is reprehensible or because the reprehensibility is suggested to him by his adopted culture and he is stranded in a liminal area between the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized? This dilemma is clearly readable in Sarmista, The cardinal rules of Sanskrit drama he had broken in the play were all too superficial since in storyline and aesthetic choices he was not anywhere close to the freedom he cherished from the Bengali babu's "servile admiration of everything" Sanskrit.

But whatever be the case, Michael Madhusudan Datta had proven that a Western-style Bengali drama could not only be thought of but also be written and produced. His writings stand as the best paradigm of the kind of hybridity that British colonialism in India generated. Creativity in a colonial set-up permits--perhaps even entertains--a certain political ambiguity and ambivalence. It resists and allows at the same time, causing a tension between form and content--of the kind that the architecture of the Great National theatre came to physicalize. This ambivalence of colonial discourse assumed different shapes in playwrights who came after Datta.

In the years between the mid-1850s through 1872 a minor literary tradition had developed of original Bengali drama. Ramnarayan Tarkaratna's Kulinkulasarvasva, a protest play on the polygamous practices of the kulin sect of brahmins, the first original Bengali play to have been staged, had actually been produced in 1857, two years before Datta arrived on the scene. Kulinkulasarvasva, albeit its strong adherence to tents of Sanskrit theatre, launched a strong trend of social drama and a host of playwrights appeared on the scene with plays on social issues. This predilection for social plays gradually slipped into making political statements through theatrical means. In 1860, Dinabandhu Mitra, a Bengali Civil servant, wrote Nidarpan, (The Indigo Mirror), a political play that exposed the exploitative conditions of indigo plantations of Bengal and the British planters. When the democratized ticketed theatre came into being, in 1872, one of the first productions was Nildarpan. But Nildarpan, contrary to popular belief, is hardly the revolutionary "protest" play it is championed to be. And although its invective is ostensibly directed against British indigo-plantation owners, the political schema of the plot owes more to middle-class conceptions of rebellious behavior rather than the organized, though unsuccessful, subaltern uprising that the indigo movement of 1860 actually had been. The peasant characters of the play display more urban babu-like behavioral attributes than anything else. The babu characters in the play, on the contrary, are much more convincingly portrayed. The play on the whole acts out a middle-class fantasy of rebellion (that can only be realized on stage) and the babu's social anxiety. Nildarpan set a precedent. More plays of so-called social protest, a large number of them in the darpan (or mirror-)style, began to follow suit; plays that purported to hold up a mirror, as it were, to the ills of society. Most notable among them were Mir Masarraf Hossain's Jamida-darpan (The Mirror of the Landowner, 1873), which was about a peasant rebellion against the land-owning babus, Ca-Kar-Darpan (The Tea-Planter's Mirror, 1875), by Daksinaranjan Cattopadhyay, that dealt with the poor working conditions at the British tea-estates in North Bengal and Jel-darpan (The Mirror of the Prison, 1876) that dealt with the terrible life of prisoners in the jail houses of Bengal, also by Daksinaranjan Cattopadhyay. All three plays protested the atrocities meted out by colonial agencies of domination, not to the urban middle class, but to the subaltern of subalterns--the rural working class majority of Bengal. Obviously, all of the plays raked the ire of the British and even some prominent members of the Bengali intellectual elite, including the well-known novelist Bankim Candra Cattopadhyay. However, one cannot help but note with consternation that almost all of these plays were written well after the political crises or insurgencies causing them to be written had been dealt with by the administration. Moreover, these plays were all written in the safety of the cities, by writers who did not belong to the classes that were the immediate subject of the plays. The objectives of the play were not at par with their contents either. As a result they read more like patronizing strokes the urban writer was giving to the socio-political contradictions of his own privileged class by a theatrically projected protest against the atrocities the colonial rulers performed on the lower classes, to whose exploitation, ironically, the the writer's own class, the native bourgeoisie also contributed quite directly. One can feel in the dialogue and scene construction of all three plays the nervous excitement of seditious writing, laced, however, more with political adrenaline than ideological commitment.

Mir Masarraf Hossain introduced Jamidar-darpan in the following words:

You cannot decide what is good or bad from looking at other people's faces the way you can by impartially viewing your own reflection in the mirror. I was myself born in a jamidar's (land-owner's) family, which is why it was not difficult for me to paint his portrait. You, too, can get it all by simply looking at your own face. It is with that belief that I present before you Jamidar-darpan (The Mirror of Landowner), and, if it please you, look at the image and decide what is good or bad for yourself. (Goswami: 86)

In the same year, 1876, the Great National Theatre came up with a play, Gajadananda O Jubaraj, by Amritalal Basu. This play was a satirical account of one Jagadananda, a barrister, who had entertained the visiting Prince of Wales in his house and allowed the womenfolk of his family to meet him. This was regarded a tremendous violation of native practices who, albeit their conformity to colonial rule, believed in keeping the British away from the inner sanctums of their households, the world of women. In the play Jagadananda became, by a simple twist of syllables, Gajadananda, the native-supplicant boot-licker. This play was promptly closed down by the government after the second night. The Great National Theatre, in protest, launched a new production overnight, a skit--The Police of Pig and Sheep--ridiculing Mr. Hogg and Mr. Lamb, two high ranking British Police Officials. That same night Basu and seven others were arrested from the premises of the theatre, not for the satirical piece but the apolitical featured production of the night on account of obscenity. The charge was challenged in the court and the theatre won the case, but not before the Dramatic Performances Control Act had been passed.

The Act effectively marked the end of direct political activism, what little had been demonstrated, in the Bengali public theatre, although some plays continued to be proscribed at the slightest hint of any seditious intent. Thereafter, most plays produced by the commercial companies looked mainly at making money. Garrulous advertisements to attract bigger audiences, became commonplace. Making plays commercially viable became the biggest concern for even director-producers like Giris Candra Ghos. Ghos was one of the leading dramatists and director-actor-trainers of the Bengali public theatre in its first phase. Here is an excerpt from an advertisement published in 1881, in English, for Ananda Raho, a play by Ghos, on the life and times of the Mughal Emperor Akbar:

This drama is not a stale story, told in monotonous dialogue, nor is the work crammed with tremendous tiring octavo speeches and soliloquies. The greatest statesman and mightiest monarch Akbar is portrayed with a truly historic pen.
[....] Betal--A quite original and strictly national character, sublime and magnanimous will be played by Girish Chandra Ghosh [sic].
[....] Please note--This is that well received play in the finale of which marble statues are transformed into living beauties. (Guha-Thakurta: 121)

Many plays from this period ended with such facile invocations of the glory of Mother India, her proud heritage and civilization of which the nineteenth century Indians (Hindus, to be more specific, since Islam does not recognize idol worship) were worthy heirs. This articulation of "nationalist" discourse is part of what Partha Chatterjee calls the thematic of a nationalist ideology: "an epistemological as well as ethical system which provides a framework of elements and rules for establishing relations between elements...." But the "framework of elements" cannot but pre-empt other elements from its agenda that it fails to reconcile with. The example, in our case, is the Muslim issue; Hindu nationalism, could not (nay, would not) make room for the Muslim in its constructed set of iconography and historiography. This brings us to the problematic of nationalist ideology, which, according to Chatterjee, "consists of concrete statements about possibilities justified by reference to the thematic." (Chatterjee: 38-39) The relationship between the thematic and problematic of nationalist discourse is such that it justifies imagined ideas as reality while pre-empting the actual socio-political situation of its problematized aspects. Nationalism, thus, necessarily bases itself on erasure of history, on the one hand, and generation of myth, on the other. Recognition of this essentially epistemic schism in nationalist ideology brings us back to the issue of Orientalism and its effects we had discussed earlier in this essay. "The problematic of nationalist thought," according to Chatterjee, "is exactly the reverse of that of Orientalism" where the passive subject of Orientalist discourse becomes active within its nationalist counterpart and begins to assimilate within itself ideas that are not inherently germane to its culture. But on the thematic side of nationalist thought lies the passive acceptance of the principles of Orientalist scholarship, which include the native's internalization of his master's voice that defined him as the subject of scientific study. And ironically, it was the same study that had, in the first place, fed and effectively produced the culture of the colonial native.

This thematic/problematic breach in Nationalist ideology and the complicated discourse of ambivalence it generates/legitimizes is clearly exemplified in Bharatiya Natya Rahasya or A Treatise on Hindu Theatre by Sourindramohan Thakur, a babu-musicologist with various Indian and international affiliations, published in 1878. Although Thakur subtitles the Bengali name of his study loosely as "A Treatise on Hindu Drama", in a closer translation the actual title could be read as "The Mystery of Indian Theatre." And mysterious it is. For one, the semantic equilvalency for "Bharatiya/Indian" in the Bengali title becomes "Hindu" in the English sub-title. But there are more noteworthy things in the text. The express intention of the treatise is to reclaim the mythic origins of Sanskrit theatre as legitimate history, thereby creating an absurd manifesto for a Sanskritic-Bengali theatre. Thakur writes in the introduction:

The sacred texts have said that it was the Creator Brahma who invented drama. Later on, the sage Bharata adopted the same means to train ascetics living in forests and even wrote a treatise to suit that purpose. There is not a speck of doubt that Bharata is the first creator of drama. [....] Not only did he impart dramatic training to ascetics living in forests, Bharata also gave acting and... dance lessons to apsaras like Urvasi and Menaka in the court of Indra, the King of the gods. (Thakur: Intro., 1-2) [Translation mine.]

Sourindramohan Thakur's Treatise on Hindu Drama, by embracing the dual tropes of Orientalism/Hindu Nationalism, on the one side, and Westernization, on the other, brings us back to the questions we had posited at the onset of this essay about the e-merging and sub-merging of colonial identity, the production of the colonial hybrid in Bengali drama and its resultant problematic. Most of the dramatic literature of the urban Bengali Hindu intelligentsia in the nineteenth century that attempted to produce the nation exemplified the always already ambivalent quality of colonial discourse; a discourse sifting constantly in the liminal terrain between the thematic and problematic of nationalist ideology; a discourse that pits the notion of the colonial self against its own frenetic attempt to produce the nation, working into and around each other in gyre-like formations--continuously, furiously, impossibly, without conclusion.

Bhabha, Homi K. 1984 "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October, No. 28 (Spring), London.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1986 Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Oxford University Press, Delhi.

Datta, Michael Madhusudan. 1982 Madhusudan Racanabali (ed. Ksetra Gupta). Sahitya Sangsad, Calcutta.

Guha, Ranajit. 1974 "Neel-Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror," The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 2 (No. 1), London.

Guha-Thakurta, Prabhucharan. 1930 The Origin and Development of Bengali Drama. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London.

Goswami, Prabhatkumar (ed.). 1978 Unis Sataker Darpan-natak. Sanskriti Parisad, Calcutta.

Said, Edward. 1979 Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York.

Thakur, Sourindramohan. 1878 Bharatiya Natya Rahasya or A Treatise on Hindu Theatre. New Bengal Press, Calcutta.