Nandi Bhatia

Fashioning Women in Colonial India

Nandi Bhatia is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature and Theory in the English Department, University of Western Ontario. She has a forthcoming book from the University of Michigan Press titled Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theatre and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Her work has also appeared in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Centennial Review, Alif and in a number of edited collections. Fashioning Women in Colonial India

Censorship, Social Reform, and Mythological Drama in Colonial India

In 1876, the British India government passed the Dramatic Performances Act to “prohibit dramatic performances” that were “seditious or obscene, or otherwise prejudicial to the public interests,” “likely to excite feelings of disaffection to the Government established by law in British India” or “likely to deprave and corrupt persons present at the performance “According to the Act, which applied to all of British India, the director, actors, and theatre owner and even those in attendance at a play that authorities viewed as subversive were liable to punishment through fine or imprisonment or both. A “public place” constituted any building or space to which the public was “admitted to witness a performance on payment of money.”1 If the censorship records are any indication, the censors carefully policed performances by recording summaries of the plays, names of playwright/director, venues of performance, and whether the play deserved to be censored, producing, in the process, a detailed record that makes the story of censorship and its implementation in India both tangible and insidious.2 Despite such attempts at silencing its colonized populace, ongoing theatrical activity that flourished in the late-nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth century, as anticolonial nationalist activity intensified, shows that the suppression of theatre was a battle that the colonial government never fully won.3