Canonising impulses, cartographic desires, and the legibility of history: Why speak of/for 'Indian' theatrical pasts?

Abstract

Nicholson interrogates the premise that Performance Studies, through its emphasis on non-Western, non-elite areas of cultural inquiry, resulted in a democratisation of the theatre canon. The chapter traces the occlusion of post-independence Parsi drama in South Asian theatre history by analysing the strategic impact of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations on India’s cultural sector after 1947. By building international, national, and regional networks of expertise in the performing arts through institution building, artistic exchanges, and cultural fellowship programmes, American foundations assumed a legitimising function for academic and artistic recognition, a phantom presence that shaped the meaning of theatre. As a result, performance forms sustained through informal, communal methods of sponsorship gradually fell under the historiographic radar, thereby marking the vanishing point of canonical legibility.