Introduction

The poet-playwright Narayan Prasad “Betab” lived through an extraordinary time. During the course of his days, modernity seeped into the fabric of small-town society through the channels of religious reform, caste mobilization, and public entertainment. The movement for India's independence drew diverse sectors into a common anti-colonial struggle, and increasingly Hindi, not Hindustani or Urdu, became its mouthpiece. Betab's career was punctuated by the large shifts occurring around him. After a brief period composing folk verse, he sought training as a poet of Urdu ghazals. He used that language to compose social melodramas, Shakespearean adaptations, and Indo-Islamic romances in his first decade as a playwright. Coming under the influence of the Arya Samaj, his orientation then switched toward Hindi and the Hindu mythological genre, which culminated in his influential version of the Mahabharat. While interpreting the epic within the frames of nationalism and reformist Hinduism, in this drama he also articulated the strivings of low-caste groups and championed untouchables.

Betab's rags-to-riches tale, The Deeds of Betab, voices the restless yearning for opportunity that must have seized many a youth from his bleak background. Not only is his the earliest autobiography we have from the Parsi theatre, it sketches the starkest scenes of deprivation. His memoir also documents clearly the rising fortunes of a pushy, provincial writer. Betab's mythological dramas earned huge profits for his employers, the Bombay Parsi theatre's Alfred Company and Madan Theatres of Calcutta.

Science was international in ancient times as now but while in modern times the transmission of knowledge from one part of the world to the other is quick, in ancient times it was a slow process. Nevertheless the progress of knowledge depended then as now on the co-operation of diverse nations. It is well known that scientific notions in astronomy and medicine were developed by the ancient Egyptians and the Chaldeans but with the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C. it was the Greeks and not the Persians who took up the tradition. The Greeks henceforth went on perfecting the knowledge and building up what is known as the Greek science.

In India the Vedic Aryans had developed a scientific knowledge in identical branches (astronomy, mathematics and medicine) between 2000 and 600 B.C., the period during which the Babylonian science was also developed. The Vedic literature mentions the star-gazers (nakṣatradarśa), calculators (gaṇaka) etc. Already in the period of the Ṛgveda, the year was a solar year of 360 days and a quinquennial cycle with an intercalary month had been elaborated. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight lunar zodiacs (nakṣatras) and the phases of the moon also were known. The planets came to be discovered slightly later in the Āraṇyaka period about the 8th century B.C.

Forgetfulness would have been a bliss, if the subconscious had not retained the memories of the past to unloose them at the crucial moments. Past would have been a dead past, if the earth had not preserved in its bosom the ancient foot-marks to help its recovery. The desire of the modern scholar to dig out these marks has been as insatiable as that of the treasure-hunter of the olden days and there has often been an unprecedented competition among different nationalities in this search. This competition among scholars and archaeologists of various European countries led to the discovery of an enormous mass of materials from the deserts of Eastern Turkestan and within a short period of less than 25 years brought into focus lights from different quarters on the past history of this arid land.

The ancient Chinese records as well as the archaeological discoveries made in different places in Eastern Turkestan have unmistakably shown that the small kingdoms and principalities in this region had adopted Indian culture and preserved it as their own for about one thousand years. Buddhism was the accepted religion of the local people and script, literature, art and all other elements of culture had been mostly borrowed from India.

Introduction

In just the last few years, scholarly attention to the subject of Dalit literature in India has increased almost as dramatically as the recent surge in the production of Dalit literature across India. The first significant example of Dalit writing in English translation appeared in Orient Longman's anthology of the literature of the Dalit Panthers, Poisoned Bread (Dangle 1992), and though for almost a decade afterwards there was no significant publication of Dalit literary texts outside of India, save for the lifelong work of scholars such as Eleanor Zelliot and Gail Omvedt, the dearth of Western access to Dalit texts and scholarly attention paid to them has recently turned around. English translations of Dalit literature now abound, thanks to a surge in interest by academic publishing houses in India and abroad as well as the rise of specialty publishing houses such as Navayana whose entire catalog focuses on matters of caste in literature and society.

China came in contact with the Iranian world for the first time towards the end of the 2nd century before Christ when Chang Kien, the famous Chinese explorer came back to China (126 B.C.) after a long absence of twelve years. Chang Kien was sent to negotiate with the western powers, especially with the Scythians, established at that time in the valley of the Oxus, in view of forming an alliance against the Huns who were a formidable menace to empire. Though the political mission of Chang Kien did not immediately succeed he brought definite information about the kingdoms which were flourishing at that time in the western region – especially Ta-yuan (Ferganah), K'ang Kiu (Sogdiana), Ngan-si (Parthia), etc.

Subsequently when the first official embassy of China was sent to Parthia under the reign of Emperor Wu-ti (140–86 B.C.), the King of the country ordered twenty thousand cavalry to meet them on the eastern frontier and entertained them well. All the Chinese annals trace their relation with Parthia from this date. Parthia came to be known to the Chinese as Ngan-si through the name of the dynasty ruling over Parthia in that period namely the Arsacidan. Ngan-si (An-si) in ancient Chinese pronunciation would give as Ar-śak (Arsak). The description of the country, as given by the Chinese historians of that period answer very well to the empire of the Arsacides.

The first contact of China with India goes back to the second century B.C. when certain scientific and cosmological notions infiltrated into China probably through the nomadic agencies of Eastern Turkestan. One of the most renowned Taoists of this period, Prince Lieu-ngan (Huai Nan-tseu), introduced for the first time a cosmology according to which the universe is divided into nine regions spread around a central mountain upon which are arranged the heavenly-worlds. This cosmology is of Indian origin and specially developed in the Buddhist literature.

China received Buddhism from the same nomadic sources, towards the end of the first century B.C. and within a century it was officially recognized as a religion worthy of toleration. Buddhist scholars began coming to China from the end of the first century after Christ and their activities were more and more intensified. But throughout the Han period (65–220), although a number of scholars had come to China, worked among the Chinese and translated a fairly large number of texts into Chinese, Buddhism had a hard struggle with the indigenous systems. Confucianism with its traditional prestige in the court and its hold on the nobility looked down on Buddhism as a barbarian religion. The Chinese, like the Greeks, looked upon all foreigners as barbarians and Indians were no exception to the rule. In the Han period attempts were made to transform Confucianism into a religion but its religious character was much less developed than Buddhism.

Janie grows up with her ex-slave grandmother in the yard-room of a kindly, wealthy white family in rural western Florida. She plays all the time with the four white children. One day a roving photographer takes a picture of the five children:

Rereading Body Parts on Planet Slum brought to mind this icon of Janie in Hurston's novel of more than fifty years earlier. The impoverished women of the bairros of Salvador with whom Beljuli Brown lived and worked are also the descendants of African slaves. I want to ask: how similarly and how differently from Janie do these women find themselves, mirrored in the white, middleclass heroines of the soap operas that play day in, day out on broken-down televisions in overcrowded shacks?

Becoming ‘Mais Nada’ (Nothing Anymore)

The majority of the bairro women report that their first sexual experience was shrouded in ignorance. This holds across generations. For instance, in the case of 36-year-old Nilzete and 18-year-old Francisca, their first experiences of sexuality did not involve sexual contact but rather an accusation of illicit sexual activity. For both women, it was their first knowledge of themselves in terms of a particular body part. In this case it was the vagina. As the following accounts illustrate, this recognition of themselves as a gendered body was characterized by feelings of shame and loss. It was when they learned that they were ‘mais nada’ (nothing anymore). Nilzete provides the first account, where she talks about her experiences from almost 27 years ago, and Francisca the second, where she describes what happened to her five years ago.

Autobiographical accounts by people in the theatrical profession began to appear in India in the early twentieth century. Binodini Dasi, the well-known actress from Calcutta, published Abhinetri Atmakatha (Autobiography of an Actress) in a magazine in 1910, and hers is likely the first of such writings. In the decades that followed, men and women of the Indian theatre—actors, actresses, playwrights, managers, and directors—recounted their lives in print for public consumption. Writing in Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, and other languages of the professional stage, they created a unique type of autobiography and a distinct category of literature.

This chapter situates the four narratives in this volume within this newly created class of theatrical memoirs. To understand its evolution, I backtrack in the first section to consider the development of autobiography in India and debates about the definition of the genre. In the second section, I describe the emergence of theatrical reminiscences within print journalism and introduce several leading memoirs. Lastly, I characterize this class of texts as important to three historical archives: the archive of India's cultural formation in the nationalist era, the archive of dramatic practice and theatre as an institution, and the archive of oral performance and performers.

Autobiography in India

Autobiography as a separate literary genre came into being and acquired a following in a number of Indian languages in the second half of the nineteenth century.

As Classes Dominantes (The Dominant Classes)

There were eight of us reading a book about ideology. We didn't get very far because of the constant interruptions, and because nobody had time beforehand to read the ten-or-so pages to be discussed. So we read it out loud, and followed it with animated, undisciplined discussion. On the chapter ‘Ideology in the Positive Sense’, Tania commented, ‘It's like the song by Cazuza’, and she sang, ‘Everybody needs an ideology to live’. Everybody in the reading group agreed and sang the words with Tania. Helena said, ‘That's right, we all have to have something to believe in to enable us to carry on’. The reading group was made up of women from Santa Cruz, a favela in Salvador, the capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia. Santa Cruz is classified as an invasion (invasão) – in other words, it is characterized by irregular occupation of the land, together with precarious social and economic conditions.

The first residents moved to Santa Cruz during the 1960s either to escape drought and unemployment in the rural interior or because they had been evicted from another area of unofficial settlement in Salvador. In 1970, there were just under 23,000 people living in the census area of which Santa Cruz forms a part.

Introduction

In the next two autobiographies, the memoirs of poet-playwrights give way to those of actors. Both Jayshankar Sundari and Fida Husain enjoyed sustained, successful careers on the professional stage. Sundari entertained fans for over three decades, while Fida Husain performed and directed plays for half a century. Sundari was formally attached to the Parsi theatre for only a few years. His apprenticeship with the Calcutta-based company of Dadabhai Thunthi created the foundation for his meteoric success once he began to perform in Bombay. The close connections between the worlds of Parsi theatre and Gujarati theatre toward the end of the nineteenth century make it logical to include Sundari's autobiography in this volume. The two theatres shared a pool of actors and musicians, and worked in the same playhouses. They both employed the Gujarati language, although by Sundari's time plays in Urdu dominated the Parsi theatre. The chief difference was in the owners, who tended to be Parsi merchants on the one hand and Gujarati Hindu merchants on the other.

In the early twentieth century, leading Parsi and Gujarati companies still hired men to perform women's roles. All the autobiographies mention this practice as routine, just as they refer to the employment of women as actresses, which had begun in some companies, as problematic. None of the other autobiographies, however, describes how it felt for a man to play a woman's role.

The problem of the corporate identities of medieval Sufi communities in the eastern Islamic world, from the Mongol conquest through the Timurid era, is a central issue for understanding the emergence of important Sufi ‘orders’ that dominated Sufi thought and organization in subsequent times. As such, this problem is of significance for the history of Sufism in general, and for the social history of the Muslim world since the 15th century, but the problem has not received sufficient attention.

It has often been customary to assume that the labels we attach to particular Sufi lineages and ‘orders,’ such as Naqshbandī, Kubravī, Chishtī, Qādirī, and so forth, apply historically to discrete communities identifiable from the time of each ‘order's’ eponym. In the case of the Kubravī tradition, for instance, we often speak of the “Kubravīya” as having been in existence from the time of Najm al-Dīn Kubrā himself, in the early 13th century. We do this (1) even though we know that Najm al-Dīn did not set about to establish a ‘path’ or an ‘order’ named for himself; (2) even though we know that among the many figures identified as disciples or associates of Najm al-Dīn, there is a great diversity of activity and affiliation in their later lives, and only one or two can be reliably linked with a subsequent lineage that came to be characterized as “Kubravī;” and (3) even though we know that the very term “Kubravī” never appears in our sources until the 15th century (or the late 14th, at the earliest).