Rabindranath Tagore and the Indian Dramatic / Performance Tradition/s

full name / name of organization: 
Mala Renganathan, Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India
contact email: 

Names of Co-editors: Mala Renganathan & Arnab Bhattacharya
Concept Note:
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Asia's first Nobel laureate, lauded primarily for his poetry, has left a voluminous amount of dramatic literature that has gained recognition only from the recent decades. Primarily a poet, Tagore was no less a playwright than he was a poet or fiction writer --- a fact proved by his no means a scanty oeuvre comprising more than forty plays. Tagore received tutelage from his older brother Jyotirindranath, himself a leading playwright of Bengal of his time. Tagore also wrote many songs for the latter's plays and operas. Therefore Tagore's early plays like Valmiki Pratibha (Genius of Valmiki) and Kaal Mrigaya (Fatal Hunt), composed mainly as operas, bore distinct marks of his elder brother's influence. It is only later on that Tagore developed his own style and idiom of composing plays, which, like all other creative efforts of the Bard, represent a magical blend of tradition and the individual talent. The creative process of "depersonalization" that Eliot identifies as the métier of writing poetry is very similar to Tagore's view that "the most original poet is at best a second rate poet". Tagore's drama, a substantial part of which is written in verse, demonstrates his creative transformation of the Indian dramatic tradition, suffused with his unique and highly original philosophy of life and art.
The proposed book "Rabindranath Tagore and the Indian Dramatic / Performance Tradition/s" intends to explore the manner and the extent that Tagore "depersonalizes" himself in his plays. Tagore experimented with four to five different genres of plays, and deployed different techniques and styles in all these genres. His so-called symbolist plays like Raktakarabi and Muktadhara are prose plays charged with richly textured metaphors and interspersed with songs, his operatic compositions are songs strung dramatically together, his political plays like Visarjan are written in verse, his social plays like Chitrangada and Chandalika are dance dramas. The proposed volume aims to examine Tagore plays in the perspective of the Indian dramatic and performance tradition, and seeks to locate Tagore as a playwright, performer and director in the panoramic continuum of Indian dramatic performance tradition. Further the book aims to focus on Tagore's approach to translation and also strives to comprehend his plays in the backdrop of his contemporaries and the influence of Tagore on modern Indian dramatists.
Earlier critics of Tagore did not go beyond reading Tagore's plays as dramatic literature, and thereby leaving a critical vacuum on Tagore plays as performance texts. Thus the book proposed begins with a strong critical notion that Tagore's play texts are much misunderstood due to the above critical lacunae. Hence the book will look at critical perspectives such as Tagore's texts as performance texts, their exploration in multimedia such as film, television, etc; reflections of Indian culture in his plays, Tagorean theatre links to his world of music and performance genres, Tagore's plays in the context of cross-cultural, intercultural theatre, Tagore as a poet-performer-composer and their interconnections and also Tagore's drama on the Indian stage.

The Broad Thematic Orientation
The book will be divided into two broad sections, based on the book's aim to explore both dramatic as well as theatrical traditions in Tagore's plays. Each section will include about eight articles. The tentative section heads and titles of articles will be as follows:
Section I: The Dramatic Tradition
i) Politics of Absence and the Concept of Power in Rabindranath Tagore's Drama
ii) Gender Politics and Tagore's Drama
iii) Tagore and the poetic dramatic tradition
iv) Tagore and Dramatic action, time and space
v) Translation and Tagore's Plays
vi) Tagore's use of myth, humour and satire in the Indian dramatic milieu
vii) Tagore and his contemporaries
viii) Tagore and modern Indian drama

Section II: The Theatrical / Performance Tradition
i) Tagore's drama as performance
ii) Tagore's plays on films
iii) Indian cultures and traditions as reflected in Tagore's theatre
iv) Use of Humour in His Plays in Perspective of the Indian Tradition of Comedies
v) Tagore as a poet-dramatist, poet-translator, dramatist-producer, actor-singer- choreographer and dramatist- scenographer
vi) Tagore and the intercultural performance/s
vii) Tagore's use of environ, mis en scene and the theatrical milieu.
viii) Modern productions of Tagore plays.

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