PERFORMANCES AS PROTEST 23 private ownership and public involvement creates spaces for the hegemonic struggle I spoke of. In India, the development of modern urban theatre coincided with the era of colonial domination and the resistance against it. I am going to give some examples of this development from theatre in Bengal because my experience is limited to that. Here in the second part of the 19th century, theatre outgrew amateur performances in the drawing rooms of the rich and became a public enterprise, commercially run; but this happened only with the growth of a large middle class audience, conscious of the humiliation of colonial rule, developing a separate cultural identity and with money to spend. We find at this time, the evolution of professional theatre people dreaming of setting up a 'national' theatre through their own enterprise. Theatre became the most popular vehicle of social criticism and anti-British sentiment for a while until the colonial government stepped in with the Dramatic Performances Control Act in 1876. Also the professionals were forced to hand over the ownership of the proposed 'national' theatre to rich enterpreneurs who saw theatre as a profitable proposition and would prefer to avoid the ire of the colonial masters. Subsequently for several decades, because of the constraints mentioned, above, the theatre could not act as the locus of political confrontations except in indirect and roundabout ways. It was only in the early 1940s, with the emergence of the Indian People' s Theatre movement as an alternative to commercially-run theatre that performative forms opened up again to combat the politics of the exclusion of politics from theatre. I will not go here into a discussion of IPTA, the organisation which spearheaded the movement, except in order to respond to some recent trends in IPTA scholarship since a re-emergence of interest in it in the early 1980s. I am speaking of a recent tendency to see the people' s theatre movement of the 1940s as identical with the direct activities of the central organisation and to forget that this central organisation itself reflected, in a concentrated form, a much larger creative turmoil that was going on at this time in the lives of the urban middle classes, workers and peasants. The multifarious cultural forms to which these classes had access, were many of them responding to the pressure of this turmoil; the traditional boundaries of these forms were being fractured: The presence of the IPTA had a catalytic effect on this. Rustum Bharucha, comes to the conclusion about the IPTA in Bengal that it 'failed to