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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.