The Pedagogic and the Performative in Indian Theatre

Indu Jain's book is both theoretically sophisticated and historically comprehensive in its analysis of Feminist theatre artists’ interventions into Indian theatre writing, process, and pedagogy. Focusing on four outstanding women theatre practitioners who became powerful leaders in the critique and revision of the postcolonial Indian theatre landscape, Jain stakes out a strong claim for an imaginative disruption of the hegemonic based on interconnected sets of relationships, an unsettling of semiotic certainties, an emphasis on the body as expressive polyvocality, and pedagogic collaboration with students that empowered a further younger generation to create their own theatre ecology. This book is beautifully written, intelligently argued, and well-illustrated with a wealth of research including treating former students of the main women artists as ‘informed mediators’. This book will be important and influential in shaping how other nations’ theatre histories revise and interfere with previously traditional narratives, and will inspire feminist scholars to reconsider earlier understandings of women’s interventions and disruptions of the status quo while also existing alongside them.

– Janelle Reinelt Professor Emerita, University of Warwick

This book foregrounds the realm of Contemporary Indian Feminist Theatre in order to explore the inter-relationships between feminist theatrical theory, practice and its historical antecedents. The study focuses on the performance processes, training methods and pedagogical vocabulary used by four Indian women directors: Anamika Haksar, Anuradha Kapur, Kirti Jain and Tripurari Sharma. The book interprets the feminist emphasis on process as extended into actor training and rehearsal dynamics, investigating its innovations as well as limitations, while examining how successful these director-pedagogues were in bringing gendered and radical feminist sensibilities to their work in classroom spaces.

Indu Jain is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Janki Devi Memorial College, Delhi University, India. Indu’s research interests include post-colonial theory and literature, feminist theory, and performance studies. Previous publications include several book chapters and articles published in international journals like Theatre Research International and Studies in Theatre and Performance.