1 Fisher, Tony, ‘Activist Theatre of the Conjuncture: Janam and the Politics of the Street Theatre in India’, in The Aesthetic Exception: Essays on Art, Theatre and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Mouffe, Chantal, ‘Artistic Strategies in Politics and Political Strategies in Art’, Dissidence, 10, 2 (2014), p. 6Google Scholar.

3 People's Little Theatre, which organized the festival, is one of the major Calcutta-based theatre groups that has been active since 1971, with a commitment to political theatre. The group has produced an array of different kinds of plays, revealing many dimensions of political theatre, over the years. Ahvana, one of the authors, as a member of PLT played a role in the curation and selection. The other authors, Tamalika, Shrinjita and Sumit were active volunteers in the festival.

4 The space for the festival required government permission. The first choice for space – the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata – was a public hub where people from diverse social, economic and professional backgrounds would be present. It had to be cancelled when police permission was suddenly withdrawn with the excuse that a government programme was to be conducted there on the same dates.

5 Jadavpur University is a public university located in Kolkata, West Bengal.

6 Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002)Google Scholar.

7 According to the data published by the World Health Organization, India witnessed 531,152 deaths between 3 January 2020 and 19 April 2023. However, the official numbers do not reflect the actual death toll in the country. The majority of the forty million migrant labourers across India were stranded without governmental aid, and many died during their walks back home, from the big cities to their villages. As reported by the BBC (Delhi) on 22 April 2020, ‘Authorities say they are looking after 600,000 migrants in shelters while food is being provided to 2.2 million more. But millions are yet to receive any help.’ As reported in The Hindu, an English daily, on 13 May 2020 by The Hindu Data Team, according to the Azim Premji University COVID-19 Livelihoods Survey, about 80 percent of urban workers lost their livelihood within less than two months of the nationwide lockdown.

8 Although the play itself is called Jamlo Makdam, many newspapers reported the incident with the name of the girl as ‘Jamlo Madkam’. There is a confusion and controversy about the name. While this was later brought to the attention of the group, they retained the earlier name.

9 In Bengali, hulo means male cat.

10 Odissi is a classical Indian dance form.

11 Bhattacharya performed three dances in total. The first two were revolutionary poems popularized during the National Register of Citizens–Citizenship Amendment Act (NRC-CAA) protests. A radical rupture is denoted from the traditional form, when instead of devotional hymns, considered mandatory for odissi, she dances to such poems, and instrumental pieces.

12 Love jihad is an Islamophobic conspiracy theory that Muslim men want to convert Hindu girls by seducing and marrying them. This feeds into the right-wing propaganda against Muslims and any Hindu–Muslim affair, especially where the man is Muslim, is considered social taboo

13 Tomlin, Liz, Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Street Scene: A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre’, translated by John Willet (1938), p. 4, at brecht1.dvi (icamia.s3.amazonaws.com).

15 Fisher, ‘Activist Theatre of the Conjuncture’, p. 127.