Dr. phil. Gautam Chakrabarti

Dr. phil. Gautam Chakrabarti

Familiarising the Exotic: Introducing European Drama in Early Modern India

The project investigates the transcultural “floating of Early Modern European drama material to the non-occidental East” featuring the persona of late-eighteenth-century Russian musician, theatre-director, traveler, linguist, Indologist and spy, Gerasim Lebedev (1749-1818) as a sample case model. In 1795, he directed The Disguise (a comedy by R. P. Jodrell) „in Bengalee style“, making it the first “modern” play to be staged on the Indian Subcontinent. The evolving process of the hybridization of Anglo-European drama is studied through the prisms of India's own hoary dramaturgical and poetical traditions: primarily Bharata Muni's Nātyaśāstra ancient India's foremost academic treatise on drama, dramaturgy and related themes, and Stephen Greenblatt's theoretical formulation of New Historicism.

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