Jana Sanskriti: Performance as a New Politics by Ralph Yarrow

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jana Sanskriti: Performance as a New Politics by Ralph Yarrow David Mason JANA SANSKRITI: PERFORMANCE AS A NEW POLITICS. By Ralph Yarrow. New York: Routledge, 2022. 180 pp. Paper, $44.95. During the independence movement of the early twentieth century in India, overtly political theatre established itself as a fundamental tool of resistance and empowerment. The Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), which is certainly the most renowned of India’s political performance groups and which is perhaps among the most important such groups in the world during the last century, was formally founded in 1943, four years prior to the accomplishment of India’s separation from the British empire. Several similar groups came before IPTA, reaching back into the 1920s. For that matter, the British empire imposed the Dramatic Performances Act on areas it controlled in South Asia as far back as 1876 (on account of theatrical performance’s demonstrated ability to unify people against the empire’s authority). In spite of the 1876 act, people in India performed resistance. Traditional forms of performance, sometimes noted as “folk theatre,” were especially effective in the early decades of the twentieth [End Page 216] century (partly because these forms did not rely on written scripts that could be censored under the auspices of the 1876 act). Through the 1910s and 1920s, activist-artists communicated with and unified the masses through long-established forms of popular entertainment—nautanki in India’s west, for instance, and jatra in India’s east. In the later twentieth century, groups like IPTA, whose principal form came to be “street theatre,” relied as much on the methods of nautanki and jatra performers as they did on what they saw in performance activism away from South Asia, including Bolshevik agitprop in Russia and expressionism in Germany. Ralph Yarrow’s new book gives attention to Jana Sanskriti (hereafter JS), an activist-theatre organization that inherited this tradition. The troupe is based in India’s West Bengal state, and its principal practice is street theatre—the sort of theatrical performance that is designed to channel pointed political content into public, ad hoc, outdoor spaces. Sanjoy Ganguly founded the troupe in 1985—apparently with no prior theatre experience—as an arm of the West Bengal Agricultural Workers’ Union. By some method of creative cooperation with people of a small village south of Kolkata, Ganguly and JS’s core group developed at least four plays between 1986 and 1992, which is about the point at which experienced Theatre of the Oppressed workshoppers from France showed up in West Bengal. JS was subsequently invited to perform one of their plays in Paris. JS expressly adopted the methods of Theatre of the Oppressed in the 1990s and developed a close working relationship with Augusto Boal himself, who eventually characterized JS as “the largest Theatre of the Oppressed movement in the world,” outside of Brazil (p. 1). Yarrow’s short book offers an account of JS’s history and ongoing aims, a summary of its plays and notable performances, and a description of various practices that it deploys in its Theatre-of-the-Oppressed-style workshops. As views of what artists in India actually do are sparse—especially views of those who deliberately work away from urban centers and who eschew commercial success—any such study has value. For those who are unfamiliar with the rather robust political theatre in India over the past century—and, perhaps especially, in West Bengal—Yarrow’s book will also be instructive. And the collective Indian theatre archive benefits, generally, from the book’s reports on JS’s formal plays. Readers who have not yet been introduced to Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed will find, in the book’s fourth chapter, descriptions of activities that are representative of the Boal-like effort to bring people to a new familiarity with the political potential in their own voices and bodies through theatrical performance. [End Page 217] Yarrow relies heavily on what Sanjoy Ganguly has published about the troupe’s work. The historical sketch that Yarrow’s Jana Sanskriti offers in its third chapter begins with the disclaimer: “Ganguly’s two books . . . are the chief source for much...