Introduction

The Indian subcontinent possesses a rich theatrical history spanning many centuries. As in other parts of Asia, theatre here brings together storytelling, mime, poetry, song, and dance in a multifaceted spectacle. Many of the premodern forms of Indian theatre have religious roots, and earlier scholarship has focused on these genres, stressing the function of theatre as sacred ritual or doctrinal instruction. Less known are the secular stages such as Nautanki, although their folkloric interest and musical complexity arguably surpass those of sectarian theatre. Previous oversight of these forms may owe something to the prejudice against profane amusements held in certain sectors of precolonial Hindu and Muslim society, as well as among British officials and Indian elites schooled in Victorian taste. Political authorities, orthodox believers, and aspirants to respectability have tried to suppress popular cultural practices in many places and times. Nonetheless, secular theatre has enjoyed great renown in India, particularly during the last two hundred years, and forms like Nautanki have played a significant role in the cultural and social processes of the period.

Although clowning, melodrama, and ribaldry are certainly not absent from the staging of devotional dramas in India, Nautanki and other secular theatres are unabashedly concerned with entertainment. Performances of Nautanki provide pretexts for fun, grounds for play in the workaday lives of ordinary people. Play, or "ludic behavior" in the eyes of anthropologists, is a deeply creative activity. Just as it gives the grow-

ing child an opportunity to experiment and learn new ways of being, play at the societal level allows the exploration of new models and symbols. Cultural forms of play possess the potential to regenerate and change society. As Victor Turner has proposed, they may reveal structures, "social dramas," that are universal to human experience.^[1] But even if the cross-cultural study of play had not established its "human seriousness," we would still wish to know more about the traditional modes of recreation among Indians, if only to counterbalance the still-prevalent image of the subcontinent as pious and otherworldly.

Even as they entertain, the traditional Indian theatres such as Nautanki supply "pictures of the world, "selections of things worth attending to," just as newspapers, cinema, and television do.^[2] Theatrical shows, together with epic recitations, ballads, songs, folktales, and so on, comprise the principal media of communication in societies characterized by limited literacy and technology. In premodern India, these traditional media were at the core of communication.^[3] In the broadest sense then, this book is an inquiry into communication, specifically into a medium of communication that has today been displaced by the more powerful mass media. How did beliefs, values, and knowledge of events flow from one group to another before radio, films, and TV? The study of Nautanki cannot fully answer this question, but it can point to interesting information from an overlooked source. Through the frame of the Nautanki theatre, we gain access to a particular set of scenes that people in North India regularly encountered. We find enmeshed in their vivid details certain shared understandings of the world—and certain recurring puzzlements. We learn how some important ideas circulated and how they fared in new circumstances.

In addition to transmitting ideas and pictures of the world, communication—whether traditional or modern—serves a vital function in the construction of an ordered, meaningful cultural world. An anthropologically based definition of communication understands it as "a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed."^[4] This implies that the media of communication not only reflect social reality; they also bring it into existence. To study communication is therefore to "examine the actual social process wherein significant symbolic forms are created, apprehended, and used."^[5] It follows that Nautanki has contributed to the formation of North Indian culture. Together with other cultural practices, it has generated a set of meanings that render the experience of its society comprehensible to its own members. Communication cannot be separated from its interactive

relationship with community. The shared perceptions that make communities possible, the experience of a common life, are unimaginable without communication. Communities create their distinctive forms of communication, and they are produced and reproduced by them. Through media such as theatre, people work their common experience into understanding and then disseminate and celebrate it with others.^[6]

Since these processes occur in historical time, the task of understanding communication entails attention to historical conditions and the experience of particular peoples. This book attempts to weave Nautanki into a well-defined historical fabric, using both documents and oral accounts from a variety of sources. My discussions of texts, themes, schools, music, and meter are organized into chronological narratives, not because I insist on a linear model of evolution but because it is a convenient way to relate these materials to the context of social and political change. Few South Asian folklore and performance studies have explored the historical resources that allow us to gain interpretive nuance. This study moves beyond speculation to comment on specific connections between cultural representations and social structures as they shift over time.

The historical experience of a particular community contributes to its self-representation in cultural performance. However, different groups within a society do not possess the same experience. They struggle over their definitions of reality, and their struggles inform the content of the traditional media. Contests between groups also partially determine the reception of the communications media and hence affect their meaning. This contentious aspect of communication directs attention to heterogeneity as a trait of cultural practices and interpretations. "Culture must first be seen as a set of practices";^[7] alternatively, it is composed as a range of meanings within a single practice. In specific terms, Nautanki is only one among many cultural forms competing among a multiplicity of social groups. Each possesses different interests and has its own ways of appropriating the information communicated in performance.^[8]

The conflictual nature of social process in India (as elsewhere), together with the multiple strands of literature, philosophy, and social thought contained in the plays themselves, suggest that any unified reading of the Nautanki cultural text may miss the mark. Instead, this study approaches its subject from several different positions. By animating diverse voices, I make audible the chorus of meanings occurring within and among texts. This chorus is a characteristically Indian one: polyphonic, improvisatory, with overlapping textures, not harmonic and

architectural. The focus on intertextual connection and contention may highlight the ways in which diverse groups receive the messages of the theatre and incorporate, modify, or subvert them. Rarely does communication simply serve the hegemonic interests of the state as described by the Frankfurt school. Nor do the traditional media of third-world countries ordinarily contain univocal expressions of popular resistance. The media of communication instead are "definite forms of life: organisms, so to say, that reproduce in miniature the contradictions in our thought, action, and social relations."^[9]

I begin with two chapters on identifications. Chapter 1 introduces Nautanki through a decentered approach, juxtaposing several narratives, and chapter 2 positions Nautanki in relation to conventional anthropological guideposts. The next two chapters trace the social history of the form, chapter 3 recalling the community of theatre and recitational practices from which Nautanki emerged and chapter 4 attending to its subsequent segmentation into lineages, authors, and texts. In chapters 5, 6, and 7, I explore the play of meanings within Nautanki narratives, searching out the contradictions in social relations lying beneath the turns of dramatic structure. Here I probe conflicted areas such as political authority, community identity, and gender difference, listening closely for resonances with historical conditions. Chapter 8 attempts to make palpable the pulse of musical life within the form. In the concluding chapter 9, I recapitulate the themes of the preceding chapters, extending the implications of this study to wider contexts.

The research project that gave rise to this book took on its own life in the eight years I worked on it. I came to the subject of Nautanki through my studies of modern Hindi literature. Trained to view a text as a composite of strategies, I had learned to gauge the artistry of Indian fiction by Western critical yardsticks. Yet the author I chose for my dissertation, the novelist Phanishwarnath Renu, was a master of regionalism. I could not understand his work without immersing myself in the folk culture and dialectal speech of rural Bihar. As I analyzed and translated Renu, I took an excursion into anthropology and folklore, where the seeds of this project germinated. Anthropology alerted me to the importance of cultural performances; folklore studies acquainted me with the large corpus of oral and written narrative in North India; Renu's fiction informed me of the existence of the Nautanki theatre.

Quite soon I realized another happy convergence. I had formed an avid interest in Indian music since my first days in India. Because tra-

ditional pedagogy depends on a close student-teacher relationship, music gave me the opportunity to participate in the culture as a partial insider, deepening my insights in many areas. Yet my musical training had little connection with my academic research or university teaching. Nautanki as a musical theatre gave me a means of bridging the gap. The sung repertoire of Nautanki, I soon learned, was rich in melodic types related to the ragas of classical Hindustani music; to describe these required formal analysis of poetic meters, a skill I had acquired from literary studies. The project thus allowed me to combine my knowledge of Indian music with my expertise in Indian literature and folklore.

In this way my training structured my orientation to the project. I approached Nautanki as a performance tradition of primarily verbal and musical dimensions, focusing on the complementarity of literary text and sung performance. Fortunately I encountered ample research materials on both counts. The collections of Darius Swann and Frances Pritchett directed me to the large repertoire of Sangit texts (Nautanki librettos) circulating in India.^[10] The first texts to come into my possession were photocopies from the filmmaker Ron Hess. Following this auspicious start, I visited Chicago in 1982 to catalogue Pritchett's collection and augment my own. During trips to India in the summer of 1982 and the winter of 1984, I purchased more Sangits in Delhi, Lucknow, Mathura, and Jaipur.

Meanwhile I learned of the old Sangits housed in the Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books division of the British Museum and in the India Office Library in London.^[11] I first visited the London libraries for three weeks in May 1983, returning for two weeks in October 1984. Working in the austere conditions of these remarkable institutions, I accumulated two copybooks of notes and entered catalogue details on hundreds of index cards. Eventually I obtained photocopies of certain texts and a number of rare photographs of illustrated Sangit covers, including those reproduced in this book.

Acquiring information about Nautanki musical performance proceeded along several lines. During three trips to India in the summer of 1982, the winter of 1984, and December 1985, I sought out live performances as well as firsthand reports of all kinds. Beginning in the capital and moving out to the hinterland, I interviewed government officials, intellectuals, theatre directors, and performers, gradually working down the hierarchical rungs from those who control cultural policy and funding to those who carry on the surviving traditions. While making my own field recordings, I also gained access to valuable tapes in the ar-

chives of the Sangeet Natak Akademi and All-India Radio. Additionally I discovered that commercial records and cassettes of Nautanki were on sale in shops; videotapes of recent Hindi films such as Tisri Kasam provided further examples of musical style.

The musical dimensions of Nautanki were quite adequately represented in the radio, commercial, and archival recordings I acquired. Opportunities to view and record Nautanki performances in natural situations were, by contrast, not plentiful. I repeatedly expressed my desire to witness full-length Nautanki shows, but very few came to my notice. It is perhaps significant that Nautanki singers I met all identified themselves as "former" artists who had now retired from the profession; that fairs, festivals, and municipalities have banned Nautanki performances in recent years because of communal violence and other incidents of "criminal activity"; and that troupes reportedly constitute themselves only on receiving a concrete invitation to perform. Beyond these impressions, I must disavow possessing the ethnographic evidence or authority for definitive comment on the extent of Nautanki as a living practice during the years of my research.

Instead of arranging for a commissioned performance, I used my time to view styles of theatre across a broad spectrum, ranging from modern Hindi plays to urban productions of Nautanki and other folk performances as well as to Ras Lila dramas in the pilgrimage setting. All these performances taught me a good deal not only about the specificity of particular practices but about the broad character of recitational music theatre, its communicative appeal, and its impact on audiences. From these performances I gained insights applicable to Nautanki, even analogies for a Nautanki no longer widely accessible. I count them as important sources of learning about the performative dimensions of North Indian folk theatre.

There is no need to detail the chain of evolving thoughts that intervened between the collection of data from the field and the completion of the writing of this book. Every project of similar size perhaps begins in one stage of a scholar's development and ends in another. The questions keep changing as new stances emerge from the flux of academic discourse. Recent influences on my work require little elaboration here, with one exception. During the last decade, feminist studies have compelled many of us to reconsider the boundaries between academic disciplines as well as our own categories of analysis. Feminism has reached far into the academy, in that feminist studies "have proposed new ways

of thinking about culture, language, morality, or knowledge itself."^[12] Though my project's original structure did not emerge from the presently available feminist perspectives, it bears the impress of feminist thinking and tries to open up areas of future inquiry.

Feminist theory postulates that gender differences are not inherent but are constructed by culture. The "differences" might be expanded from gender roles to include notions of sexuality, love, marriage, family, kinship, and community. Given the importance of the traditional media in the creation and maintenance of culture in societies like India, these media can be assumed to play an important role in the production of gender differences. In my view, Nautanki theatre as well as myth, epic, and popular cinema do not reflect actual social relations, gender differences, and power alignments but rather produce and perpetuate them. They frame paradigms of gendered conduct that assist both women and men in defining their identities, inculcating values to the young, and judging the actions of others. The representation of women in Nautanki is thus of interest less as a portrait of what women are than as a projection of what they should be.

In Nautanki, representations of the female body, womanly conduct, and other aspects of gender difference occur at several levels of the performance. In the dramatic texts of the genre, gender roles and relations are contained within narrative structures. The heroines of Nautanki stories are analogous to the role models from the Hindu epics, the Sitas and Savitris, in their capacity to shape behavior and serve as cultural ideals. What kinds of women do we find within the fictional realm of Nautanki? Do Nautanki heroines reiterate the Sita paradigm, or do we find alternative models? Is there any expression of resistance to patriarchal definitions of womanhood? Given the diversity of Nautanki texts, we might anticipate that the corpus of tales would encompass a range of behaviors and, further, that models of womanly conduct would vary in accordance with historical conditions.

Women are present at another level in Nautanki, conceived as the entire system of the performance, or the theatrical text. Before the main drama begins, the female performer sings and dances in a seductive manner, a role that often clashes with her later appearance as upright queen, wife, or daughter-in-law. The transactions between the actress or female impersonator (the gendered performer) and the male spectator play with the possibilities of exhibitionism and voyeurism. Here too gender roles are being reproduced, but in an arena labeled forbidden and dangerous. What meanings are attached to the performance of the

eroticized actress? How does she fit into the system of gender difference operating in society?

These questions utilize the category of gender to understand issues of textual signification. Beyond them lies a larger inquiry into gender and performance in Indian society. What is the social status of female performers? What has been their contribution to the performing traditions in music, dance, storytelling, and other media ? How does women's participation affect the prestige of a cultural performance? Are cultural forms themselves gendered, that is, identified as masculine or feminine? As we learn more about the involvement of women in the production of cultural media, we restore them to their rightful position as bearers of tradition. But we also acquire an empirical base to examine a more far-reaching hypothesis: that culture itself is structured by gender difference, and that any explanation of cultural practice must include the category of gender.