Our representations of human social life are designed for river-dwellers, fruit farmers, builders of vehicles and uptumers of society, whom we invite into our theatres and beg not to forget their cheerful occupations while we hand the world over to their minds and hearts, for them to change as they think fit.6 Nearer our times Augusto Boal raises the stage/spectator contradiction to an ideological level, of one between authority and people. To him all theatre is political for all activities of man are political. A rguing forcefully he shows how theatre in the West has been used by the dominant classes to project their own norms and values, their ideology (which, I presume, does not necessarily mean only an organized set of beliefs). His own Latin American Forum Theatre and the Joker system not only surmount the stage/spectator contradictions but through the conquest of'the means of theatrical production, become a weapon of liberation'.7 The key concepts in the above statements are quite clear. The growing power of workers' movements in the nineteenth century, their struggle against repressive forces, the articulation and consciousness of that struggle into a theoretical framework, a greater sharpening of contradictions between authoritative forces and the people, between bourgeoisie and workers, between the landlord and the landless have necessitated—in Europe, particularly after World War I and in our worlds more recently—the search for another kind of theatre which will express these ideas. Further, the Russian Revolution of 1917 presented the possibility of an alternate society. This theatre that we term as political is by its nature one of confrontation and is subversive. It is immediate. Its contextual framework is here and now. In our own context, that urgency was felt through the nineteen thirties: 'With the growth of Kisan and working class movements, writers and artists from among the submerged masses began to be stirred by the new hope and faith engendered by these movements',8 so in 1943, the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) was formed to organize a people's theatre movement. The immediate problems facing the people are external aggression by the Fascist hordes...; internal repression by an alien government.... It is, therefore, the task of the Indian People's Theatre Movement at present to portray vividly and memorably through ihe medium of the stage and other traditional arts the human details of these important facts of our people's rights... and the nature and solution of the problems facing them.9 The IPTA as a force hardly exists now. In Bengal, after Independence, its fragmentation resulted in group theatres which are non-commercial and carry within them some of the seeds of their inheritance. But the Group Theatre Movement functions primarily in Calcutta, so I presume on can hardly blame Rustom Bharucha, that though he subtitles his book as The Political Theatre of Bengal, it is not Bengal but Calcutta that figures. Anyone knows that Calcutta's relation to rural Bengal is pretty tenuous except.that with the physical contiguity 36 Number 9