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Item Whispers of hair: Untangling the narratives of Tenali and Bandhu in Sony SAB’s Tenali Rama(Sage, 2025-02) PrateekThe folk stories of Tenali Rama (1480-1528), believed to be a courtier and poet in Vijayanagar king Krishna Deva Raya’s court, have inspired many adaptations in India. This study examines the Sony SAB adaptation Tenali Rama (2017-2020), arguing that by dovetailing Tenali’s voice with his shikha’s (the lock of hair named Bandhu), it highlights Hinduism’s tension between ascetic self-sacrifice and the pragmatic desires of a householder’s psyche. Working with the performance studies framework, the study investigates Tenali Rama’s garhasthya or householder identity. The first part draws on the critical investigation of David Shulman’s literary adaptation of Tenali Rama’s poetry to contend that the voices of Tenali and Bandhu in SAB’s adaptation are articulated through the dramatic devices of jester and vidhushaka. The second part engages with three scenes from the series to explain how Bandhu’s privileging of himself over Tenali’s ascetic quest provides a more complex version of Hinduism.Item Towards a Definition of Performance During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Study of Ramlila in India(University of Hawai'i Press, 2023) PrateekThis article demonstrates how Covid-19 transformed the performance aesthetics of ancient theatre traditions in India. I draw primarily on the October 17, 2020 performance of the Ramlila, the folk staging of Ramayana, produced by the Shri Ram Dharmik Leela Committee, Tri Nagar, one of the most popular theatre troupes in North Delhi. In the first part of the article, I explore the metatheatricality of the production by analyzing its camera-centric aesthetic while demonstrating how the performance divested gods of their power. In the second part, I investigate how the performance’s paratextual thematic bestowed power on humans. Broadly, I show that the Covid-era performance of Ramlila marks a break from some of the traditional conventions of performance aesthetics in India.Item Many lives of queer performance in India: a deliberation with Mahesh Dattani(Taylor & Francis, 2021) PrateekMahesh Dattani took his first steps around the fire of Indian theatre in 1988 with the play Where There’s a Will. It became quite clear from the start that a new phase of Indian theatre had begun, with Indian-English as its lingua franca. This change was not only linguistic: Dattani’s thea- tre engaged with themes that were considered taboo, or too mature, for Indian audiences, and were thus often brushed under the carpet. Dattani’s celestial dance to amplify unheard voices from the margins of society – conjoined Siamese twins in Tara (1995), the third sex in Seven Steps Around the Fire (1998) – continued ever since, leaving the heteronormative Indian theatre reeling for breath. In 1998, Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters, recognized his con- tribution with the Sahitya Akademi award, making him the first playwright in English to receive the prestigious literary honor.19 In this article, which is presented in the form of a deliberation, I nudge Dattani to reflect on his theatre and to contem- plate what is queer about queer performance. I call it a deliberation rather than an interview because of the insightful and surreal quality of these reminis- cences. His reflections on queerness within the context of South Asia challenge the possibility of one absolute queer discourse. Overall, they show that the socio-linguistic conditions and theatrical traditions of India appropriate the universal con- struct of queer performance, adapting it for South Asia in general and to India in particularItem Many Rammans in Uttarakhand: Jak and Bhumyal Renditions(2024-03) PrateekThis essay is meant to serve as a compendium to my documentary, Many Rammans in Uttarakhand: Jak and Bhumyal Renditions, which can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISJ3Mnea0MU. The film highlights the diversity of the folk performance tradition of Ramman in the Indian hill state of Uttarakhand by analyzing two variants of the ritual, each dedicated to a village patron deity: one to Jak (alternatively known as Jakh) and the other to Bhumyal. Although the tradition is prevalent in many villages in the Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, the documentary focuses on the Ramman (dedicated to Jak) of Jaal Malla and Choumasa, two villages in the Rudraprayag district, and the Ramman (dedicated to Bhumyal) of Salud and Dungra, twin villages in the Chamoli district.Item Brecht in India The Poetics and Politics of Transcultural Theatre(Routledge, 2022-05) PrateekBrecht in India analyses the dramaturgy and theatrical practices of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht in post-independence India. The book explores how post-independence Indian drama is an instance of a cultural palimpsest, a site celebrating a dialogue between Western and Indian theatrical traditions, rather than a homogenous and isolated canon. Analysing the dissemination of a selection of Brecht’s plays in the Hindi belt between the 1960s and the 1990s, this study demonstrates that Brecht’s work provided aesthetic and ideological paradigms to modern Hindi playwrights, helping them develop and stage a national identity. The book also traces how the reception of Brecht was mediated in India, how it helped post-independence Indian playwrights formulate a political theatre, and how the dissemination of Brechtian aesthetics in India addressed the anxiety related to the stasis in Brechtian theatre in Europe. Tracking the dialogue between Brechtian aesthetics in India and Europe and a history of deliberate cultural resistance, Brecht in India is an invaluable resource for academics and students of theatre studies and theatre historiography, as well as scholars of post-colonial history and literature.Item Hinglish Cinema(Springer, 2014) PrateekAbout September 1994, the character of Bollywood underwent a change with a deluge of movies such as Bomgay (1996), Bombay Boys (1998), Split Wide Open (1999), Everybody Says I Am Fine (2001), Leela (2002) and Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2003). Myopically acknowledged only as a change in the linguistic character of Bollywood, as manifested in its portmanteau name ‘Hinglish’, this transfiguration was often considered lusterless and sans consequences, or another addition to the long list of names representing a blend of English and Hindi:Item Inward Bound Self-referentiality in Bombay cinema(Taylor & Francis, 2016) PrateekItem Articulating Female Angst in Manipur: A Study of Mythical Surrender(Taylor & Francis, 2017-12) PrateekIf the “unconstitutional” inclusion of Manipur in the Indian union in 1949 left the Manipuris in shock, then the implementation of the 1958 Indian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act left them speechless and traumatized. In response a new type of Manipuri theatre emerged, which we call “neues theatre.” We examine the reasons for the rise of “neues theatre.” We locate the narrative of a recent Manipuri play Mythical Surrender (2011) in a social and cultural context, explain the ontogeny of Manipuri theatre, and present a gendered analysis to support our views on the impossibility of the unification of North India and the North East.Item Naturalizing ‘Queerness’: A Study of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy(Rupkatha Journal, 2014) PrateekIf the representation of same-sex sexuality in punitive terms leaves gays in shock, then the legitimizing of Article XVI Section 377 (which bars gay sex) in India made gays all over the world, especially in South Asia speechless and traumatized. In response to this universally misconstrued image of an ‘unnatural’ man, Shyam Selvadurai, a Canadian-Sri Lankan writer creates a narrative which not only offers an ‘innocent peek’ into the biased perspectives of heterosexuals towards queers but the use of a child narrator is a deliberate ploy with which he deconstructs the craving for a so called ‘healthy’ text.’ Thus, this article, by musing on Selvadurai’s most acclaimed text Funny Boy (1994), attempts to examine how and why ‘unhealthy’ texts are constructed. Secondly, it elaborates on the subtle literary strategies used by Selvadurai to debunk pre-conceived notions of a heterosexual literary text. Finally, the article while locating a gay narrative in the social and cultural context of Sri Lanka, presents a gendered analysis of homosexuality in Sri Lanka.Item Hubble-Bubble of Transcultural Encounters: A Study of the Social Life of the Hookah.(Journal of Media & Culture, 2017-02-17) PrateekThis article traces the cultural history of the hookah in Indian culture from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, focusing on its imbrication in cultural practices and cultural narratives. In proximity with thing theory’s idea of the agency of “chance interruption” to disclose the “physicality of things” (Brown 4), I argue that chance interruptions of monetisation turned hookahs as “objects” into hookahs as “things.” In the first part of the article, I trace the origin of the hookah culture and then examine one such interruption of monetisation – the patronage system of the Nawabs – that made the hookahs’s thing status evident and recognisable. Moreover, in the first section, I further elaborate Bill Brown’s use of the term “chance interruption” and how it links to the “physicality” of the hookah in the wake of the Nawabi system. Interacting with the posthuman idea of how the material environment forms and transforms human beings, I explore the thingness of the hookah in the context of a “bazaar of thingness” (Appadurai 18) present in India. To underline this metamorphosis, in the first part of the paper, I demonstrate two things: a) an object becomes a thing through “a sequence of encapsulations” (Connor 18); that is, the production of a “thing” is directly associated with the production of a chain of significations connected to the thing itself, and b) thingness is not inherent in things but it is the effect “of recognitions and uses performed within frames of understanding (which may be markets or ad hoc negotiations of action or desire or bodily skills as much as they may be intellectual formatting or sedimented codes)” (Frow 285). To put it differently, an object evolves into a thing if it is humanly recognised. Broadly, I argue in the first section that transcultural encounters are responsible for “thingifying” hookahs. In the second part of the paper, I analyse the second interruption of monetisation, the mercantile system of the British. Furthermore, I contend that by employing the thing status of the hookah in his play, The Play of the Hookah Smoker: A Farce in Four Acts, Thakur Jagmohan Singh (1857–1899), an Indian playwright writing on the cusp of modernity, has created one of the first myths of Hindi nationalism. This myth feminises and demonises Bengalis, speakers of the Bengali language, so that Hindi can be extolled as the national language of the country