No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Forgotten History of Our Times: Revisiting Utpal Dutt's Titu Mir in Contemporary India
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2023
Abstract
This paper is an exploration of the most recent revival of Utpal Dutt's play Titu Mir in 2019 by the ensemble group Theatre Formation Paribartak in India. Islamic religious reformer Titu Mir led a peasant rebellion from 1827 to 1831 in the Barasat region of Bengal and the play focuses on a narrative of revolutionary resistance to colonialism. Titu Mir becomes an articulation of political theatre against the Hindu right-wing agenda of expunging Muslim national heroes from Indian history. This essay seeks Titu Mir's relevance as a site and theory of materializing historical contradictions, and as part of a ‘gestic’ feminist criticism of theatre. The essay attempts to understand how critique of patriarchal ideology is enmeshed in critique of colonialism in Titu Mir, especially in those moments where the play addresses complexities of political violence, interracial romance, martyrdom, alienation in the colony and deep-rooted misogyny in the project of colonialism.
- Type
- Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2023
References
Notes
1 Dasgupta, Atis, ‘Titu Meer's Rebellion: A Profile’, Social Scientist, 11, 10 (1983), pp. 39–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Utpal Dutt, Titu Mir, in Utpal Dutta Natok Samagra, Vol. VI (Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh, 2017), pp. 295–362, here p. 310.
3 Habshi is derived from ‘Abyssinian’. Abyssinians in India have historically been referred to as Habshi.
4 Utpal Dutt, Titu Mir, p. 329.
5 Engineer, Asghor Ali, Communal Riots after Independence (Delhi: Shipra Publications, 2009)Google Scholar; Brass, Paul R., The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Prathama Banerjee, ‘Are Communal Riots a New Thing in India? Yes, and it Started with the British’, ThePrint, 3 March 2020, at https://theprint.in/opinion/are-communal-riots-a-new-thing-in-india-yes-and-it-started-with-the-british/374458 (accessed 17 February 2022).
6 See www.facebook.com/Titumir.collective/posts/160238771980605 (accessed 17 February 2022).
7 Dinabandhu Mitra (1830–73) was a Bengali playwright who worked as an administrative official in the postal department and later on the railways. His best-known play, Neel Darpan (1860), is a scathing criticism of exploitative indigo plantations in Bengal, also depicting the Indigo Revolt of 1856. Utpal Dutt (1929–93) was one of the most significant playwrights and theatre-makers of post-colonial India. Dutt envisaged political theatre as part of the Marxist movement for his entire career. His works remain testament to his artistic imagination in forging ‘people's theatre’ through a politicized mass of audience.
8 Diamond, Elin, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 3–42Google Scholar.
9 Ibid., p. 45.
10 The field of study of gender and imperial formations is an important aspect of feminist history. See, for example, McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar; Sarkar, Tanika, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003)Google Scholar; Stoler, Anne Laura, Along the Archival Grain: Thinking through Colonial Ontologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
11 Utpal Dutt, ‘Jopenda Jopen Ja’ and ‘Brecht O Marxbad’, in Utpal Dutta Godyo Sangraha, Vol. I (Kolkata: KP Bagchi, 1998), pp. 125–236, here pp. 283–348.
12 Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. 54.
13 Interview with Utpal Dutt, first published in Bangladesh, December 1977.
14 For Dutt's views on jatra and its connection with theatre see his Towards a Revolutionary Theatre (Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar and Sons, 1995).
15 Ibid., p. 170.
16 Conversations with Bishnupriya Dutt, co-creator of this revival, who also played a principal character.
17 Wahhabi Islam is a conservative orthodox sect and its association with militarized activism in the recent past has been rendered almost a ‘terror’ threat. However, the history of Arabian followers of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab (1703–92), who put greater emphasis on consulting directly the Quran and the Hadith in the everyday religious life of Muslims, and the ways in which Wahhabism spread in South Asia following Syed Ahmed Barelwi (1786–1831) is much more complex than a simplistic history of Islamic fanaticism. Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
18 Roy, Suprakash, Bharate Krishak Bidroha O Ganatantrik Sangram (Kolkata: Radical Impression, 2012; first published 1966)Google Scholar.
19 Colvin's Report to the Judicial Department in 1832 and the Dampier Report, which was Proceedings of the Judicial Department, 1847. W. W Hunter's The Indian Mussalmans (1876) and O'Kinealy's The Wahabis in India (1870). Utpal Dutta Natok Samagra, Vol. VI, pp. 299–304.
20 The Great Wahhabi Case (1869–71) in India, Julia Stephens has argued, almost invented the figure of the Wahhabi religious fanatic in the 1860s and 1870s to establish British authoritarian governance in the colonies. This ‘phantom Wahhabi’, Stephens explains, was in part real, as conservative Islamic religious reform was prevalent in India from the North-West Frontier to Bengal from the 1820s, but not entirely so. Islamic religious reform was met with repressive measures, especially in Bengal by Hindu landlords, turning it into more a contradiction between the poor peasantry and landlords. Stephens, Julia, ‘The Phantom Wahhabi: Liberalism and the Muslim Fanatic in Mid-Victorian India’, Modern Asian Studies, 47, 1 (2013), pp. 22–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Biharilal Sarkar's biography of Titu Mir (1897) and Kumudnath Mallik's history of Nadia district (Nadia-Kahini (1911)) branded the Barasat rebellion an anti-Hindu communal riot. Even Bhupendranath Dutta, an early socialist activist and thinker, described Titu Mir's rebellion as an instance of Islamic religious fanaticism irredeemable as a peasant rebellion.
22 Karl Marx, Notes on Indian History (664–1858) (Moscow: Foreign Language Press, 1947), p. 129.
23 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGouWn1fJcU (accessed 17 February 2022).
24 Interview with Joyraj Bhattacharya, 16 August 2022, Kolkata.
25 Samik Bandyopadhyay, ‘Theatre: From Metropolis to Wasteland’ in Hiranmay Karlekar, ed., Independent India: The First Fifty Years (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 417–428, here p. 420.
26 The artist Hiran Mitra designed the scenography.
27 Interview with Joyraj Bhattacharya.
28 A fifteenth-century Bengali text written by Bipradas.
29 Dutt, Titu Mir, p. 310.
30 Ibid., p. 311.
31 Ibid., p. 311.
32 Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
33 Joyraj Bhattacharya has argued that such a characterization depended on the subtext of the character as a lover of coquettish dances popular among the absentee landlords typical of the period.
34 Dutt, Titu Mir, pp. 335–6.
35 Walter Benjamin, Towards a Critique of Violence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021).
36 Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. 5.
37 Ibid., p. 9, emphasis mine.
38 Dutt, ‘Brecht O Marxbad’, pp. 306–11.
39 Dutt, Titu Mir, p. 337.
40 Ibid., p. 355.
41 Ibid., p. 359.
42 Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, Citizenship in Postcolonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Richa Nagar, ‘Mapping Feminisms and Difference’, in L. A. Staeheli, E. Kofman and L. J. Peake, eds., Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 31–48; Ania Loomba and Ritty Lukose, eds., South Asian Feminism (Delhi: Zubaan, 2011).
43 Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, pp. 45–7; Janelle Reinelt, After Brecht: British Epic Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 8–12.
44 Conversation with Bishnupriya Dutt.
45 Yasmin Khan, India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 175–200.