Quo vadis? Indian theatre studies at the crossroads

Abstract

Twenty years ago, Erika Fischer-Lichte in “Quo Vadis? Theatre Studies at the Crossroads” described the necessity of an appraisal of the difficulties and possibilities, conundrums and risks facing theatre studies in the new millennium. Referring to Scylla and Charybdis, the two immortal, inescapable monsters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she noted twin dangers: on the one hand an excessive broadening of the field (and a concomitant collapse of distinctions between theatre, cultural and media studies) and on the other an extremely narrow focus on genre-study. While theatre studies has avoided being shipwrecked by the particular pair of perils of a too broad or too narrow focus, has a new Scylla and Charybdis emerged since 2001 in the wake of changed socio-political developments, a rapidly shifting academic climate, and a transformed global order? What is the new risk-filled route that the discipline has to navigate today, the revised “borderlines, frameworks, and rules” that reorient our frames of inquiry? In order to begin to answer these questions, I first briefly summarize the problems recently raised by cultural and theatre historians on the decolonization of the university. I then outline the issues surrounding the ubiquity of state-centric discourse in Indian theatre historiography. Finally, I analyse the difficult and precarious balance between the normative and the fractured, canonicity and deconstruction, practicality and idealism; and the obligation of self-reflexivity in decentring theatre and performance studies.