Volume 12

Classroom as the 'Third Theatre': Engaging with Badal Sircar's Theory and Praxis of Drama

Nabanita Chakraborty

UNIVERSITY OF DELHI

The playwright, therefore, has to think of the final event, the performance, right from the beginning. He has to deal with two art forms simultaneously: literature and theatre. His language has to be a special language, different from that in other branches of literature, for it must be translatable into audio-visual scenes which a group of performers can project to a group of spectators. (Sircar, 1982, p. 15)

INTRODUCTION

Theatre refers to the complex and dynamic interaction, through verbal and non-verbal communication, between the stage performers and the audience. Etymologically, the term theatre originates from the Greek word 'theatron', which means 'a place of seeing'. The meaning produced and communicated in a play depends on the performative rhetoric, style of production, and, more importantly, the space (amphitheatre, opera house, auditorium, street) in which the play is performed. Teaching a dramatic text can be challenging because it is difficult to approximate and recreate the theatrical visual experience in a classroom. Scholars and educators often resort to screening videos and films of dramatic performances to elucidate the performative rhetoric and spatial dynamics of the stage, but the approach has its limitations. A series of questions may arise: Can the visual language of a staged play be translated into the verbal medium of the dramatic text and still retain its revolutionary potential? Can a play be performed successfully without the theatrical paraphernalia and appendages of costume, stage designs, props and a curtained stage? Can such a play be considered an aesthetic art form?

Badal Sircar (1925-2011), one of the pioneers of post-Independence Indian theatre, definitely made it possible to move beyond the proscenium stage and perform without theatrical accoutrements. He was influenced by the avant-garde European playwrights like Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner, Julian Beck and Judith Malina.[1] Sircar, however, believed that the city theatre was imported from the West, while rural theatre was in touch with its indigenous folk culture. Like his Marxist contemporary, Habib Tanvir, Badal Sircar felt that rural theatre was more vibrant and popular.[2] Sircar, however, went a step forward to propose a third kind of theatre, a 'theatre of synthesis', where he 'wanted to break down the barriers and come closer to the spectators' and share with audience 'a joint human action' (Sircar, 1982, p. 56). He admitted that the third theatre was roughly modelled on the folk art form of Bengal' Jatra'[3] which communicated a social 'message' to the audience in the "clearest, strongest terms possible, so that the viewer may undergo a change of consciousness or arrive at some stage of action" (Sircar, 2022, p. 291). The third theatre was, at the same time, influenced by the Russian dramatist Grotowski's concept of the 'Poor Theatre'. Sircar proposed the idea of a third theatre where performances would take place among the spectators, with simple mobile sets. His theatre group Satabdi, based in Calcutta in the 1970s, abandoned the proscenium stage, advocated free shows and reduced the use of sets, props, and costumes. His non-commercial theatre was performed in an 'Anganmanch' (courtyard stage) or 'Muktomanch' (open-air theatre), an intimate, flexible theatre, where the distance between performers and spectators was removed. Sircar explained that due to its suppleness and flexibility, "it may be transported and accessed… it may be staged in villages and marketplaces, in slums, schools and gardens" (Sircar, 2022, p. 298). The third theatre was similar to the already prevalent Marxist street theatre of protest, except that Sircar never imposed his views on his audience but appealed to their judgements (Sarkar, 2010, pp. xxxv—xxxvi). The "transition from the director-formulated rehearsal method to a workshop-based trial-and-error rehearsal model" (Debnath, 2023) was a crucial development towards the Third Theatre. Through games, mental mapping, sound and movement mirroring and other activities, the workshop participants experienced and embodied various emotions. He continued to experiment with "language, mode of presentation, prop, venue, technical innovation and theatrical skill" over the years (Khanna, 2011, p. 26). Sircar's Third Theatre offered a place for collective experience and articulation of social resistance. 

This paper advances the argument that Sircar's third theatre model offers a transformative approach to drama education when adapted to the classroom. A classroom is a space without props, lighting, or costumes, often with an elevated stage; yet a play reading (not an enactment) with active student participation is conceivable. By adopting a workshop model that connects teachers and students as co-learners, the classroom can bridge the gap between the teacher and students, between the stage and the page, and between theatre and drama. This pedagogical stance does not undermine the value of theatrical performance, but enables teachers to utilise the radical and collective spirit of third theatre in everyday education. The teacher-centric reading of the text in a classroom may be replaced by a workshop model in which all students actively engage with a dramatic text, editing it, experiencing it, challenging it, and inculcating a collective desire for social change. Free-flowing communication, without the teacher-student hierarchy, is a key to radicalising the classroom. Drawing inspiration from Sircar's group Satabdi and their innovative, mobile, and non-commercial performances in everyday spaces, the paper argues that replicating the principles of third theatre in classroom settings can radically shift drama reading into a collaborative, purposeful, and socially engaged practice.

Educators across the globe have discovered that dramatic activities are powerful teaching and learning mediums for fostering critical thinking and communication among students.[4] Recent scholars have underlined the need of incorporating drama in teaching and learning to enhance cognitive and affective faculties (Belliveau, 2007). Integrating short skits or improvisation in school education is , however, different from critically engaging with classic dramas in literature classrooms of college and university students. Educators and teachers have focused on the primacy of cognition rather than the expression of feelings while teaching drama in a classroom. Drama, however, is a unique literary genre because it is mediated by theatre, with its narrative interspersed with stage directions. If theatre can transform its audience, purge emotions (catharsis) and bring about social reform, then can a dramatic text inspire activism in its readers as well? One is confronted with the problem of whether to treat drama as an aesthetic category or a political tool of social reform. Sircar enquired:

What is theatre, for that matter? How does one communicate through theatre? How much of the theatre is entertainment, how much is aesthetics, and how much is a means of communicating messages? (1982, p. 14) 

Badal Sircar's plays raised social issues of exploitation, unemployment and injustice. However, does that take away the aesthetic appeal of his theatre by making it simply a tool of social reform? Besides provoking thought and cognition, this kind of theatre also appealed to the audience's emotions and sentiments.

POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIAN THEATRE AND BADAL SIRCAR

Major theatrical practitioners writing in regional Indian languages since the 1960s, namely Girish Karnad, Badal Sircar, Mohan Rakesh, Utpal Dutt, Vijay Tendulkar, Habib Tanvir, and a few others, have produced political and experimental drama to shock the audience's sensibilities and bring about social reform. The emergence of modern Indian theatre in metropolitan cities in the late 1970s and 1980s carried the essence of intercultural interaction. There were two parallel though contradictory trends evident in the plays of modern Indian playwrights, firstly, an intercultural exchange, that was, the influence of avant-garde theatre of Europe and secondly, an intercultural mediation by discovering and appropriating myriad folk traditions of India.[5] These theatrical practitioners in postcolonial India did not simply borrow Western cultural tropes or adapt European plays; they simultaneously resisted Western cultural dominance in Indian theatre. Intercultural theatre was popularised in the West around the same time by Ariane Mnouchkine, Jerzy Grotowski, and Peter Brook, introducing elements or styles of Asian drama into Western performance scripts.[6]

Badal Sircar was a Western-educated, middle-class Bengali playwright who was influenced by Grotowski's 'Poor Theatre', which used minimal props and non-traditional performance spaces. Sircar, however, admitted that while Grotowski's theatre worked with full-time, skilled, and trained actors, he did not have the money to pay his group members, who worked only in their free time. Manujendra Kundu in So Near Yet So Far posits that Sircar did not directly admit, but his theatre was strikingly similar to the 'Environmental Theatre' of Schechner or Grotowski's 'Poor Theatre' rather than the rural art forms like Jatra, Tamasha, Bhawai, Nautanki, Kathakali, Chhou, and Manipuri dances (Kundu, 2016, p. 180). Critics have often found Sircar's third theatre synonymous with the street theatre led by IPTA in the 1960s and 1970s. However, Sircar explained that street theatre was a short performance of topical value; so all street theatre may be third theatre but not vice versa (Sircar, 1993, p. 64) It is true that Sircar's plays assimilated and interacted with other cultures, art forms, techniques and artists but he never lost his individuality and his belief in bringing about a social change through theatre. He was a theatre practitioner, and his plays were a concerted effort to bring actors and audience onto the same platform, building a community that could think and act together to lead social reform. Rustom Bharucha described Sircar's third theatre as the 'most rigorously non-commercial political theatre in India' (Bharucha, 1983, p. 127).

Badal Sircar began his dramatic career with a few comedies, including Solution X, Boropishima, Sanibar, Ballavpurer Rupkatha, and others. He then went to Nigeria in 1964, where he began writing serious plays such as Evam Indrajit (1962), Baki Itihas (That Other History, 1964), Trinsho Satabdi (30th Century, 1966), and Pagla Ghora (Mad Horse, 1967). These plays, performed on the proscenium stage, highlighted the political, social and existential crises of a commoner. He met a few avant-garde playwrights, such as Richard Schechner and Julian Beck, during his visit to the USA, who greatly influenced him. His theatre group, Satabdi, founded in 1967, made a radical departure from conventional theatre. In his Bengali essay 'Theatre er Bhasha'[7] (Sircar, 1983, p. 25), he argued that naturalistic theatre, using a proscenium stage, sought to create an illusion of reality on stage for the audience, a goal that succeeded until the advent of motion pictures (cinema). Drama could not compete with films in depicting an illusion of life (Sircar, 1983, p. 40). The strength of drama, however, lay in direct communication. Sircar explained how the idea of a play germinated and took shape. He cited a hypothetical instance in which an actor, a city dweller with limited knowledge of rural poverty and exploitation, gained knowledge by reading or discussing the dismal condition of landless labourers and felt guilty about his ignorance. He decided that "only further questioning will give him the answers he sought". He realised that we were aware of everything—hunger, injustice, oppression, war, killing and atomic destruction—but "we have awareness without empathy" (Critical Discourse, 293). Thus, his play Bhoma was designed to spread the message and elicit responses from the audience. Badal Sircar did not limit his plays to middle-class intelligentsia but brought them closer to the rustic, uneducated working-class audience, too. Sircar's main aim was to present a flexible, portable and inexpensive theatre. The Third Theatre was free in three ways: first, it offered uninhibited communication; second, it was free of the paraphernalia of proscenium theatre; and third, it offered the audience free shows without entry tickets (Mitra, 2004, p. 65).

Spartacus, though a play about a Roman slave revolt, was not focused on ancient Roman history. For Sircar, the play conveyed a clarion call against any exploitation. It was performed for the first time in an Anganmanch, where the audience surrounded the actors in a circle and became active participants in the play. This radical move was influenced by a production which he witnessed in Paris. His landmark play in the third theatre format was Michiil (Procession, 1972). He performed this play outdoors in a rural setting in West Bengal. His other non-proscenium plays include Bhoma, Basi Khobor (Stale News), Scandal in Fairy Land and Beyond the Land of Hattamala. Engaged in a continuous dialogue with his audience about social issues like social injustice, poverty, dehumanisation of man and the effect of atom bombs, his plays were no less than social activism. His interest in carrying on a conversation with the rural people instigated his annual village tours, for three days in a row, to interact with the villagers. However, as an urban, Western-educated man, he was more prone to romanticising the countryside. Scholars have also criticised him for taking middle-class subjects like unemployment, processions, existential crisis, and ennui to the rural populace. His priority, however, remained direct communication with the audience, influenced in part by the Bengali rural form, the Jatra. He was fascinated by the spontaneity and palpability of human bodies on stage (a common trope in his plays was a human chain). 

SIRCAR’S THEATRE WORKSHOPS 

For Sircar, communication was the key to theatre, whether communication with the fellow members of his theatre group or with the audience. Sircar observed how his theatre group confronted the script, tried it, tested it, accepted it, enriched it, and rejected it, gradually building a structure that was much more than the written script. Through the process, the group was transformed into a workshop in the true sense of the term.... The whole process was necessarily slow; the group was not just rehearsing a play set down in definite terms by the playwright but confronting a script to create live theatre out of it (Sircar, 2009, pp. 24- 25).

All his plays were thus a product of long, arduous workshops and rehearsals with his fellow artists, who devoted their free time to theatre. His long journey as a theatre practitioner led him to conduct other workshops to engage people. In the 1970s, he travelled across the country, conducting workshops, performing plays and communicating with other regional theatre practitioners. He conducted workshops with the Kannada left-wing theatre group Samudaya, run by Prasanna and in Manipur in collaboration with H. Kanhailal. Jo Trowsdale recounts Sircar's week-long theatre workshop with undergraduate and postgraduate students and teachers at the University of Warwick in 1992. Trowsdale observes that 'both in rehearsal and workshop, Badal described his role as that of a catalyst agent; the work was generated by the performers/participants themselves' (1997, p. 53). Badal Sircar did not expect his performers to be professional artists but participants in a workshop who were learning and communicating together. The workshop mode allowed performers to become aware of their consciousness, feelings and inhibitions. The training was to unveil the facades people put on to live in society and to expose their feelings and thoughts to their fellow team members. For the dramatist, the spectators were equal participants in the action of the play. He posited:

This is intimate theatre. The performers can see the spectator clearly, can approach him individually, can whisper in his ears, and can even touch him if he wants. (Sircar, 1982, p. 25)

According to Trowsdale, the training session began with participants sitting in a circle, holding hands and passing on nonverbal cues, such as a gentle squeeze of the hand from one to the other. The training fostered team spirit, equality, intimacy, and a sense of community. Some other playful experiments focused on the concept of space, in which all participants were asked to move or dance in slow motion with their eyes closed within the given space. These psychophysical exercises, borrowed in part from Grotowski, helped the participants build awareness of themselves and the surrounding noises. Such activities were imperative for building coordination between the body and the mind. 

DRAMA, SCRIPT, THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE

Drama, theatre and performance are often used synonymously in literature classrooms, though there is only a symbiotic relationship between them. Drama is a printed text, while theatre is an embodied performance. With the increased literacy rate and the introduction of written drama into the school and university curricula, the playwright's text, with its elaborate stage directions, was given primacy.[8] In the twentieth century, avant-garde theatre directors in the West redirected their attention beyond the script to theatre and performance. Schechner, the American theorist, explained the difference between drama, script, theatre and performance with concentric overlapping circles where drama, the well-structured narrative form, is represented in the innermost circle, followed by script and theatre. Performance is relegated to the outermost big circle since it is the most ill-defined and takes the maximum time/space. For him, while theatre is the event enacted by the performers in response to the drama or script, performance is:

the whole constellation of events…that takes place in both performers and audience from the time the first spectator enters the field of performance…to the time the last spectator leaves. (Schechner, 1973, p. 8)

Badal Sircar defined a play as the written text; dramatisation as the enactment of the play, while theatre was "a sum total of the written play, its dramatic form, its dramatic enactment and its performance" (2022, p. 289). He was more invested in the performance than the dramatic text. 'I prefer doing theatre to writing theatre' (Dutta, 2009, p. 2).[9] The partially unscripted and improvised performance of the Satabdi group was its forte. There was a palpable human energy and communication in his group's performances, as they did not follow a fixed, text-based approach. Sircar and his group sought the audience's active participation as they performed among them. Active participation does not mean the audience is expected to act or speak; rather, it heightens the audience's emotional response to the actions unfolding before their eyes. 

In his 1981 letter to Schechner, he explained his motivation for freeing theatre from its moorings. Sircar discussed how he realised, while performing Bashi Khobor (Stale News), a play about the Santhal tribal revolt during the colonial period, that the atrocities and exploitation of the subalterns continued to the present day. So the play was not about the historical Santhal revolt per se, but about a contemporary man reading about such incidents of brutality and responding to them. For Sircar:

It is not a theatre one can perform by "enacting". It can only be performed by "state of being". The performer acts out his feelings, his own concerns and questions and contradictions and guilt. Through the play, our protagonist changed a little, we changed a little, and we hoped that our spectators, some of them, would change a little. (Sircar, 1982, p. 55)

CLASSROOM AS THE THIRD THEATRE

Sircar's performance-based approach to drama can guide teachers in teaching literary drama in the classroom. The classroom can resemble a third theatre workshop where students have to be active participants. Given the limited timeframe of the teaching semester and the strict examination pattern, it is not possible to dramatise the play in the classroom or to spend time on role playing. My submission is to develop a pedagogical strategy that emphasises communication. In a conventional literature classroom, teachers usually approach a drama as literary critics: engaging in close reading and using the text to advance scholarly discourses such as Marxism, Cultural Materialism, Post-colonialism, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. This approach or practice, though very beneficial, limits drama to a literary text, excluding its performative and emotional aspects. There is often no difference between a close contextual reading of a novel and that of a drama. Moreover, political and deconstructive discourses often fail to address the democratic potential of an aesthetic category like drama.

On the other hand, some new pedagogical methodologies have been explored by educators as part of the project of ‘Drama in Education’. Dorothy Heathcote’s ‘Mantle of the Expert’ (Heathcote & Bolton, 1995) promoted the concept of a ‘teacher-in-role’ to divest the teacher of her authority, while Augusto Boal’s radical approach of ‘SpectActor’, in which the actor and spectator may come together to act, spectate, or communicate, also aimed to challenge traditional educational roles. Boal worked with the Brazilian peasant community and his techniques of Forum Theatre were highly influenced by Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2005), which advocates a community-based education. Their classroom activities encouraged ‘thought tracking’, ‘freeze frames’ and ‘sharing stories’, building up egalitarian classroom spaces and emphasising collective engagement and social action. However, most of these educators worked on spontaneous improvisations, rather than a fixed curriculum. Most often, their pedagogy did not include any particular dramatic script or text in the classroom and avoided discussion of the drama’s history.

My attempt to examine Sircar’s third theatre as a model for teaching drama in class is to examine both the process and the product. I understand that simply raising critical questions in the text isn't sufficient; it’s equally important to engage the feelings and emotions of the students. We want our students to connect deeply and reflect on their own thoughts and experiences as they engage with the work. This paper argues that the teacher or educator must approach the dramatic text as a 'radical aesthete' (to use Isobel Armstrong's term)[10] to conjoin theory and praxis, thinking with affect. 

There are three ways in which Badal Sircar's experimentation might be a model for teaching drama in a lively way, especially in a public funded university classroom in India, where students belong to diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. Sircar, like many of his radical contemporaries, was practising intercultural drama where he adapted plots (Gondi was an adaptation of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle), themes (Spartacus was borrowed from Howard Fast's novel), methods (both Grotowski's 'Poor Theatre' and Schechner's 'Environmental theatre') and styles (Jatra from Bengal) and yet was able to make it socially relevant in the Indian postcolonial context. Firstly, teachers and students, confronted with plays from different social and historical settings in their syllabi, need not only to contextualise/ historicise the plays, but also to find their relevance in their contemporary world. An example will be helpful. The play Bashi Khobor is a collage of various news items related to the exploitation of the indigenous tribal groups by the British Raj, poor bonded labourers in liberated India and the general apathy of the Indian government towards the marginalised. It highlights how urban middle-class individuals, bombarded with a barrage of information, past and present, react to it and whether, and how, their lives are affected by it. It is a play where "spectators and actors intermingle, and the entire space of the room becomes a swirling mass of humanity. It is one of those moments in the theatre when one becomes acutely aware of the possibilities of life and the essential brotherhood of man' (Dass, 1988, p. 24). So Sircar, through his collage, illustrated how to move beyond a singular historical situation and understand how the themes resurface repeatedly in different spatio-temporal settings. 

 Secondly, for Badal Sircar, no text is the final product. Like the actors of Satabdi, students can confront a dramatic text, edit it, accept it, reject it and move beyond it. A play is meant to be interactive, setting up a dialectic between knowledge and activity. Students may be able to learn and communicate together (as in Sircar's workshop), and analyse their fears, insecurities, inhibitions, and aspirations. In other words, drama as a literary genre, sharing a dyadic relationship with theatre and performance, having access to different cultures and productions, is emancipatory. Finally, theatre has always been a tool for social reform. The reading of a play ought to transform our thoughts and beliefs. It can build a community of students and teachers to think and act together to bring about social change, in whatever little way possible. 

 As teachers of literature, how can we incorporate Sircar's ideas and methodology into our diverse classrooms? The classroom space can resemble a theatre stage. Teaching a play requires performative rhetoric—such as modulation of voice, tone, gestures, eye contact, and pregnant pauses—to convey the text's dynamism and vibrancy. This approach, however, tends to be limited because it is teacher-centric and unidimensional; it does not allow students to freely express their emotions, feelings, or thoughts while engaging with the text alongside the teacher.

The "third theatre" concept removes the barrier between the performer and the audience. One practical exercise is to rearrange classroom benches so that the teacher is among the students, rather than positioned on a podium above them. This new spatial arrangement fosters equality and allows for greater freedom of expression. It also raises students' awareness about the power dynamics and disparities related to caste, class, gender, and race in society. By sitting in a circle, students are no longer mere recipients of information from the teacher. The goal is to "nurture imaginative and affective selves" (Debnath, 'Internal Workshop'). This approach serves as a first step towards emancipating young minds and inviting them to explore and embody unexpressed emotions, ultimately creating a transformative experience for both the teacher and the students. Theatre, according to Badal Sircar, cannot be 'enacted' but performed by 'state of being'.

After a group reading of the play, the following exercise can involve opening the play for editing, revision, comparison, and rejection in light of contemporary ethical and aesthetic concerns. For example, Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677) rewrites Thomas Killigrew's play Thomaso, or The Wanderer (1664) through a gendered lens. Behn critiques the misogynistic and rakish cavalier hero's bawdy humour and sexual profligacy. However, contemporary postcolonial readers may also criticise or reject Behn's women-centric play for its racist language. As a result, students can learn to adapt, revise, enrich, and rewrite the play. The polyphonic quality of a play encourages a free flow of ideas and emotions, making the dramatic text a site of both resistance and emancipation.

In conclusion, this methodology is not intended to undermine traditional literary analysis; rather, it supplements contextual and historical paradigms of literary criticism. Badal Sircar played a pivotal role in transforming Bengali theatre, and modern Indian theatre from mere illusionistic stage entertainment into what is referred to as 'postdramatic theatre' (Lehmann's term),[11] serving as a community-building exercise to combat social evils. This paper argues that some of Sircar's radical methodologies can be valuable in building a discourse on action in the classroom.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Chakraborty, N. (2025). Classroom as the 'third theatre': Engaging with Badal Sircar's theory and praxis of drama. ArtsPraxis, 12 (2), pp. 138-153.

REFERENCES

Armstrong, I. (2000). The radical aesthetic. Blackwell.

Bharucha, R. (1983). Rehearsals of revolution: The political theatre of Bengal. University of Hawaii Press.

Boal, A. (1985). Theatre of the oppressed. Charles McBride (Trans). Theatre Communications Group.

Belliveau, G. (2007). An alternative practicum model for teaching and learning. Canadian Journal of Education Revue Canadienne De l’éducation, 30 (1), pp. 47‐67.

Bowell, P. & Heap, B. S. (2013). Planning process drama: Enriching teaching and learning. Routledge.

Dass, V. N. (1988). Modern Indian drama in English translation. V. N. Dass.

Debnath, S. (2023). Internal workshop: The third theatre methodology of embodying hunger. Global Performance Studies, 6 (1-2). 

Dutta, E. (2009). Introduction. Three plays by Badal Sircar. Seagull. 

Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin. Myra Bergman Ramos (trans). Continuum. (originally published in 1970).

Heathcote, D. & Bolton, G. (1995). Drama for learning: Dorothy Heathcote’s mantle of the expert approach to education. Heinemann.

Khanna, A. (2011). Theatre of Badal Sircar: Pedagogy and praxis. Indian Literature 55 (5), pp. 24-34.

Kundu, M. (2016). So near yet so far: Badal Sircar's third theatre. Oxford University Press.

Lehmann, H.-T. (2006). Postdramatic theatre. Karen Jürs-Munby (trans.). Routledge.

Malik, J. (2021). Diverse pursuits: Essays on drama and theatre. Routledge.

Mitra, S. (2004). Badal Sircar: Scripting a movement. The Drama Review: TDR, 48 (3), pp. 59-78.

North, J. (2017). Literary criticism: A concise political history. Harvard University Press.

Sarkar, S. (2010). Introduction. In Badal Sircar, Two plays: Indian History Made Easy, Life of Bagala, OUP.

Sircar, B. (2022). The language of theatre. Paromita Chaudhuri (trans.). In Critical Discourse, Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta and Subrata Sinha (Eds). Routledge.

Sircar, B. (2009). On theatre. Seagull.

Sircar, B. (1983). Theatre er Bhasha. Kali, Kolom O Ijel.

Sircar, B. (1982). The changing language of theatre. Indian Council for Cultural Relations.

Sircar, B. (1981). A letter from Badal Sircar. Intercultural Performance, The Drama Review: TDR, 26 (2), pp. 51-58

Sircar, B. (1967). Bideshe Amar Dekha Natak. Badal Sircar Papers, School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. 

Sharma, C. (2015). Drama and theatre with children: International perspectives. Routledge.

Schechner, R. (1973). Drama, script, theatre and performance. The Drama Review: TDR, 17 (3), pp. 5-36. 

Tanvir, H. (1974). Theatre is in the villages. Social Scientist, 2 (10).

Trowsdale, J. (1997). Sitting in Badal's circle: Artist and pedagogue; The theatre of Badal Sircar. RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2 (1), pp. 43-54.

Wadikar, S. B. (2018). Badal Sircar: People's playwright. Atlantik.

NOTES

[1] Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) was a Polish theatre director and theorist who wrote ‘Towards a Poor Theatre’ which rejected spectacle driven theatre; Richard Schechner is known as a theorist of performance studies who popularised Environmental Theatre; Julian Beck and Judith Malina were American actors and an avant garde theatre directors who revolutionised theatre in 1950s and 1960s.

[2] Tanvir, Habib. Theatre is in the Villages, 1974.

[3] Jatra was a rural form of open air theatre focusing on music, dance and melodrama during festivals in Bengal and Orissa. Jatra with its absence of scenery, use of live music and high pitched dramatisation influenced Sircar.

[4] Bowell & Heap, 2013; Sharma, 2015

[5] Refer to Ralph Yarrow, Indian Theatre: Theatre of Origin, Theatre of Freedom (2001); Vasudha Dalmia, Poetics, Plays and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian Theatre (2008).

[6] Ariane Mnouchkine was an avantgarde theatre director of Theatre du Soleil in Paris. Her Greek tetralogy Les Atrides (1990-1993) was an intercultural performance. Peter Brook’s first major intercultural work has been The Mahabharata. Grotowski was a Polish director of the 1960s who travelled and worked with different performance cultures. He produced classical Western plays with non-Western theatre conventions. His best experimental play has been Akropolis.

[7] Sircar's 'Theatre er Bhasha' was published in Bengali in 1983.  It was delivered as a lecture at a conference at the University of Calcutta in 1981. 

[8] Javed Malik, Diverse Pursuits, p 210.

[9] Peter Szondi in Theory of Modern Drama argued for metamorphosis of drama as epicization; Andrzej Wirth posits that a theatre is a speaking stage where the dramatist can freely share his/her concerns with the audience.

[10] Isobel Armstrong in The Radical Aesthetic responds to the Marxists, cultural materialists and poststructuralists, who are skeptical of the category of aesthetics. She argues that aesthetics is emancipatory and can lead to change. Art has to evoke both thought and feeling.

[11] Lehmann explains that postdramatic theatre does not mean ‘beyond’ drama. It challenges mimetic production and has the potential to dismantle and deconstruct drama itself.

Nabanita Chakraborty is an Associate Professor of English at Hansraj College, University of Delhi. Her PhD was awarded in April 2018 by the University of Delhi. She has been a Charles Wallace fellow from the British Council in 2013-2014. A few of her publications include The Uncanny in Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand: Subverting the Reality, in Critical South Asian Studies (Transnational Press, London, Aug. 2024), Performative Rhetoric and Spatial Dynamics in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: A Case Study of Pedagogical Practices in a Literature Classroom, in Fortell , 48 (Jan. 2024), Writing the ‘Stigmatext’ of Indenture: A Reading of Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman, in Indentured and Post-Indentured Experiences of Women in the Indian Diasporas (Springer, 2020), The Rhetoric of Deliberation and the Space of the Hyphen: Identity Politics of the Indian Women Diaspora in the Fictions of Jhumpa Lahiri, in Women in Indian Diaspora: Historical Narratives and Contemporary Challenges (Springer, October 2017), and Politics of Equivocation and Deferral: Queen Elizabeth I and the Execution of Queen Mary of Scotland, in Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 8 (4) (2017).

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