Women’s/Feminist Theatre

I happened to be reading A. Mangai’s book, Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India, 1979 Onwards’ during the run-up to what promised to be high drama at the Shani Shingnapur temple in Sonai, Ahmednagar District, Maharashtra. Trupti Desai of Pune’s Bhumata Brigade had announced her plan to storm the sanctum sanctorum of the temple, forbidden to women, with an army of 1000 women. If the police debarred them from marching in, she planned to drop down on the open sanctum from a helicopter. The question that came to mind was, would Desai have dared to imagine such a dramatic act of defiance before 1979 from where Mangai’s story of gendered theatre begins?

It was then, in the late seventies, that the second wave of feminism, which centred on sexuality, identity, equal rights and women’s control over their bodies, hit Indian shores. Theatre was one of the nascent expressions of the movement, reflecting the consciousness raised during those years. Mangai chooses 1979 as the historical moment when the groundswell of women’s theatre that she later observed began to build up. Looking back she realized that, despite the considerable body of work that women had produced, it had not been acknowledged either in feminist or theatre history. Feminism had tended to see theatre as part of the cultural programmes that came as ‘appendages to the main business of feminist politics’, whereas they were in fact sharply political in nature, as she argues in the ten chapters that make the book. Theatre history on the other hand was more concerned with the art and aesthetics of playwriting and performance, and dismissed anything that was overtly political as ‘activist’ theatre and for that reason, not to be considered worth critiquing.

Mangai concedes that there was some reason for this view. At the same time as insisting that ‘the political urgency granted to theatre by feminist activism’, she also adds a rider. ‘A well-intentioned work, badly executed, under-rehearsed and shoddy, cannot claim attention by dint of its political content.’ She identifies a second historical moment of gender and theatre intersection which addressed the problem and made a long-lasting impact on her, as it did on many of us. In 1990, Madhushree Dutta and Flavia Agnes organized a threeday conference of women performers,‘Expressions’, aimed at creating a space for dialogue between activist and art theatre, encouraging one set of participants to look at and attempt to understand what drove women on the other side.

Mangai enters this debate after clarifying that by women’s theatre she means work that is self-consciously political and also theatrically valid because it uses formal elements of traditional and modern theatre art. She also closes the gap between the work of women directors who are avowedly feminist, like the author herself, and those who may not want to be identified as such, preferring the freedom that absence of a theoretical alignment offers them. Realizing that she must devise a broader category than ‘feminist theatre’ if she is to extend her study to include these women’s work in ‘the momentous gendered upheaval’ in women’s theatre that she wishes to record, she comes up with ‘women’s/feminist’ theatre. She asserts that women’s/feminist work is distinctive for the new language it has evolved, and for that reason not to be subsumed into the category of what is called modern Indian theatre. To name and acknowledge it for its uniqueness is to ‘turn a new leaf in the history of modern Indian theatre.’