Actress Stories: Binodini and Amal Allana

Abstract

In Calcutta, the actress made her entrance on the stage 50 years before she did in any other presidency in colonial India. For the last 30 years, a by-product of the colonialist imagination has been the popular performance genre the ‘actress story’, performed in numerous versions in Calcutta and in the jatra (repertory theatre), which tours the surrounding countryside of Bengal. The ‘actress stories’ present a moralistic and didactic treatment of the actresses who appeared on the Calcutta stage in the nineteenth century. The performances actually serve to sanctify both the moral role of the actress and that of the nineteenth-century colonial theatre model which grew up under the aegis of an intelligentsia trained in the English colonial system. The genre, which once performed the roles of several actresses, finally came to focus on the central actress figure of the nineteenth century: Binodini Dasi (1863–1941). Though not the first actress on the colonial stage, she belonged 4to the first generation of actresses1 and in that sense became the first female star and a cult figure in Indian theatre.