Reimagining Community

Abstract

This article offers an ethnographic exploration of a grassroots cultural organization called Jana Sanskriti (People’s Culture) working in rural Bengal, India. This political theatre and activist work offstage is oppositional practice that presents participants with a significant space for self-organization. Jana Sanskriti’s work enables the author to engage and push the boundaries of symbolic interactionism because their performances, role-playing, and rehearsals are more than metaphors for social construction, identity formation, and subjective transformation. For eighteen years, Jana Sanskriti’s theatre has offered a significant opportunity for people to script power relations onstage and live new commitments offstage. The author shows how people learn from, make sense of, and live the consequences of immediate, onstage interactions and experiences in their offstage lives. This story traces people’s experience with and commitment to particular practices of interactions unique to the Jana Sanskriti community as evidence that representations can be an engine of transformation.