PERFORMANCES AS PROTEST 31
I shall end with one last point. While in the world of Indian films, rich traditions of regional specificity have been marginalised by the synthetic Indianness propagated by the film-market, the performative arts, of necessity, still retain that specificity of form. They are, by nature, much more localised, being based on regional languages. The weakening of the nation-state has been accompanied by increase in animosity not only between communities, but also between regions. But at the same time, similar predicaments are being experienced by people in different regions as a result of globalisation. The endemic undernutrition in Kalahandi in Orissa is now also to be found in tribal areas in Maharashtra. Factories are being closed down and workers made redundant, in Maharashtra as well as West Bengal. These common experiences make communication between regional performative forms more possible and provide a real basis of Indianness when the dynamics of regional specificity are explored. As Safdar said 'The stark poverty of the overwhelming numbers of our people, the glaring social and economijc disparities... the unboly alliance between state power and big money,... the systematic communalisation of the social fabric, the large scale injection of imperialist culture etc., are all as palpably present in our society as our traditional songs and dances and rites. What about this India? Can our theatre claim to have become Indian without taking up these for scrutiny, examination, analysis, artistic creation? The quest for this 'Indianness' may constitute the bulwark of resistance to the hegemony of global capital.
NOTES
1. Theatre and the People: A Broken Relationship-, 1985
2. Bharucha, Rehearsals of Revolution, The Political Theatre ofBengal, p. 44, p. 231.
3. Burbach, Nemez, Kagarlistsly, Globalization and its Discontents