You are cordially invited to attend two lectures by Dr Abhishek Bose, from the University of Calcutta. The first event will take place on Tuesday, 13 May 2025 at 19:00, at the Faculty of Arts in Modra soba (Blue room) on the 5th floor.

The second event will take place on Tuesday, 20 May 2025, at 18:00, at Faculty of Arts in Modra soba (Blue room) on the 5th floor.

𝐑𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐁𝐡𝐚𝐤𝐭𝐢: 𝐀𝐧 𝐈𝐝𝐞𝐚 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚

The term Bhakti encompasses a wide semantic range, including notions of devotion, emotion, love, service, and ornamentation. Within the scope of this study, Bhakti is understood as both an emotive-experiential category and a socio-cultural formation within the field of Indian historiography. While the category remains contested, there is a general scholarly consensus that the phenomenon of Bhakti traverses extensive temporal and spatial boundaries – spanning over a millennium and across vast geographical terrains. The Bhakti movement comprises a diverse constellation of saints, ascetics and devotees who emerge from various regions of the Indian subcontinent, representing a plurality of linguistic, religious, social and economic contexts. Fundamentally heterogeneous in nature, Bhakti finds expression through a rich corpus of poetry, songs, narratives, and performative texts composed in multiple regional languages. Despite this diversity, these utterances frequently exhibit resonances in both aesthetic form and thematic content. This presentation seeks to examine select texts in the context of Bhakti transactions, with the aim of delineating an ideational construct that might connect the plurality of Indian literatures and cultures.

Traditional Indian Performances and the Colonial Postscript

This presentation interrogates the dominant historiography of Bangla drama that constructs a binary temporal framework: the ancient glories of the Sanskrit dramatic literature as epitomised by the authors like Kālidāsa and Bhāsa; and then a straight leap to late Eighteenth century when a Russian adventurer/musician Gerasim Lebedev presents the first Bangla proscenium theatre production in an European fashion. In colonial historiography, the moment of Lebedev’s performance is usually depicted as the start of ‘modern’ Bangla theatre, or even ‘modern’ Indian theatre. This leaves a millennium-long lacuna, ignoring the texts and practices that were, and still are, part of a vibrant and rich performative continuum in Bengal and elsewhere.

The introduction of the proscenium stage, realist dramaturgy, and the canon of English/European drama, particularly Shakespeare, catalysed the emergence of the ‘modern’ and hybridised Bangla theatre in the nineteenth century. Whereas, the theatre stage in Bengal evolved into a dynamic cultural site that both mirrored and contested colonial authority; it also meant significant transformations for the indigenous performance traditions; often relegating these as ‘folk’ or ‘pre-modern’ and hence, regressive.

Within this historical rupture, Rabindranath Tagore emerges as a critical voice. In a short essay, he criticises the mimicking of European techniques or ideologies on the colonial stage.  In his search for an ‘Indian’ way of performing, Tagore invokes the ‘rasa’ aesthetics, which serves as the basic premise of Sanskrit dramaturgy. Similarly, Tagore also draws attention to the living and popular vernacular performance practices. This paper considers Tagore’s intervention as a call for a politics of location, offering a nuanced perspective on Indian performative cultures that resists the homogenizing impulses of colonial historiography and modernist teleology. Through this lens, this presentation tries to rethink the entangled trajectories of Indian performative genres and what do that entail for the audience.

Dr Abhishek Bose teaches at the Department for Comparative Indian Language and Literature at the University of Calcutta. His work intersects poetry, translation, theatre and critical research. His primary interests engage with the fields of aesthetics, literature, history of religions, performance and orality. He is associated with several research initiatives supported by institutions such as The Asiatic Society, Kolkata, the Vrindavan Research Institute, Bhaktivedanta Research Centre and the Indian Council of Social Science Research. His most recent editorial work, Kabi Tabo Manobhumi, presents a series of interviews with Ramkatha performers from across various regions and languages of India. Dr Bose is currently a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.