of the suburbs, trainloads of workers come every day, and the culturally-hungry come over the weekends, mainly to watch the commercial theatre in the North. The participants of and the audience for, the theatre are therefore, mainly urban. No doubt Calcutta reflects the turmoil and turbulence of political upheavals anywhere in the world or in the state. Possibly, it is only in that city that the police shooting at a cultural meeting on Vietnam in 1974, which killed a young poet Prabir Datta, will still be remembered by various (even erstwhile) street theatre groups, and these groups will still perform at the same site on the last Saturday of July every year. This supports what Bharucha says of the intense political consciousness of the people of Calcutta and of the Bengali theatre which has established a deep connection with the political and social fabric of life in Bengal". However, it is not that Bharucha is unaware of this lacuna... It was IPTA's dream to take theatre to the rural areas and he quotes Bijon Bhattacharya's anguished statement to pin point one aspect of the failure of the political theatre: I feel frustrated and insecure when I realise that I have not been able to take my work to the masses in the rural areas, and that I have not been able to involve them in my work.... As long as we do not realise that dream, we can only play with faint shadows of life and reality. (p. 231) Bharucha's prescription for this is something like BoaFs Forum Theatre in rural Latin America, a theatre in which everyone in the group.tries enacting different aspects of the seed of a problem presented by one member. It can work, provided first, that the initiative comes from among the people; and second, that the urban politically conscious are devoted enough to take it upon themselves to help initiate such a project Bharucha mentions Aranyak's experiments in Bangladesh's rural areas. Much has been written about them, particularly in foreign journals. Having met them personally, I found that theirs is not a continuing experiment Besides, they draw funds for their work from sources which ultimately defeat the aim of political theatre. The crux of the problem, I think, lies in the understanding of, and thereby dealing with, the'language' of theatre—but of that later. Bharucha's book can be divided into two parts. The first deals with the received context which is a chronology of theatre personalities and their work against the backdrop of political facts. But chronology cannot remain just chronology—it is history, which shapes the present. In the context of the nineteenth and early twentieth century political background, the Dramatic Performances Act of 1986, the social satires of Madhusudhan Dutt, the historical plays ofGirish Ghosh and D.L. Roy, had significance in articulating a certain kind of critical or national consciousness. Otherwise, why were plays like GhoshsMirKasim andSirujadaullah banned by the government in 1911? This consciousness also gave rise to Journal of Arts and Ideas 37