Center for South Asia Weekly Lecture Series: Aparna Dharwadker (Professor, Department of English and Interdisciplinary T

The secular commercial theatre that emerged in colonial cities such as Calcutta and Bombay in the later nineteenth century is said to inaugurate the “modern” period in Indian drama and theatre. My analysis thus brings the “new, really new” theoretical preoccupations, institutional structures, and artistic practices of the post-1850 period clearly into view, connecting theatre with socio-cultural and ideological formations across the colonial/postcolonial divide.