Culture, Imperialism, and Nationalist Resistance: Performance in Colonial India

Abstract

Orientalist refractions have often over-stressed the sacred, spectacular, and traditional aspects of Indian performance but neglected its historical engagement in the contests of power. While reinforcing orthodox values and offering diversion, Indian performance has also proven itself a significant arena for resisting ruling ideologies and power structures, whether religious or secular. The seriousness of its menace to sacred, civic, and political establishments is evident in records of denunciation, exclusion, boycott, and suppression of performance, especially of its popular folk genres. The most extensive and systematic repression of performance, not surprisingly, occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the British Raj.