A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1850 to the Present provides its reader a remarkable archive of primary texts on theatrical theory in India spanning ten languages, colonial and postcolonial epochs, and national and regional histories of class, caste, gender, sexuality, and tradition. Situating theatrical modernity as a syncretic web of urban theatre and performance genres, institutions, and practices that emerged in the post-1850 period, the volume is nothing less than the inaugural composition of a multilingual archive. It exhibits a broad range of theoretical positions on theatre by seventy-six authors, twenty-five of whom are translated into English for the first time. Intervening in a long-standing disinterest in the category of the modern in Indian theatre on the part of Western and Indian performance scholars alike, Dharwadker succeeds in providing a systemic overview of a startlingly diverse and geographically varied landscape of theatre, while alerting the reader to the politics of translation inherent in such an understanding and launching a compelling case for future archival retrievals.

Scholarly attention to theatre in the modern Indian context, as Dharwadker contends in the book's comprehensive “General Introduction,” has tended to fall into two camps. Orientalist and neo-orientalist scholarship on Indian theatre in the West has notoriously treated classical Sanskrit drama as demonstrative of the entirety of Indian theatre, a genealogy that arguably accounts for an ongoing apathy toward modern Indian theatre in Western theatre studies. Indeed, while Kalidasa's Sanskrit drama Shakuntala and Bharata's third-century treatise the Natyashastra appear under the global theatre section on many a theatre history syllabus in the United States, attention to modern Indian theatre as a site to probe the imbrication of theatrical theory and practice with formations such as the rise of print culture, the relationship between textuality and performance, and intercultural adaptation and transculturation (to name only a few) is lacking. Dharwadker's introduction intervenes in this field by outlining an extensive conceptual grid by which we can parse the “multilayered interplay of continuities and disjunctions” that encapsulate modern Indian theatre stretching from 1790 to the present (xxvii).

A second camp in which historians and critics of Indian theatre belong refers to what Dharwadker calls the “cultural-relativist” camp, in which scholars focus their analysis on a specific region in India and largely produce works in the language of that region (xlii). While such a positioning offers a legitimatized way to encapsulate the specificities of India's regional performance cultures, it hinges the value of scholarship on a presumed “insider knowledge” that discounts the profound ways in which processes of colonialism and decolonization get refracted across India's heterogeneous regions, languages, and sociopolitical formations (xlii). Refraction, recursion, and the thorny politics of cultural synthesis are thus central themes in the book, and lie at the heart of Dharwadker's overarching argument that the modern period in Indian theatre is marked by a “central generative paradox”:

As Dharwadker argues, the situated landscape of India's theatrical modernity as marked by multicultural literacy and the persistent collision of Western and Indian dramatic systems of representation is also what makes Indian theatre a “unique postcolonial field” (xl) among other, primarily Anglophone postcolonial literatures.

The book's assembly of excerpted writings from a wide-ranging collection of materials—including journals, newspapers, manifestos, treatises, diaries, conference presentations, letters, and lectures originally published in such languages as Bengali, English, Hindi, and Marathi—further invites scholars to reassess a tendency to associate colonial-era theatre as the straightforward distribution of imperial cultural dynamics. As Dharwadker demonstrates through the work of figures such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jaishankar Prasad, even before independence there existed an overwhelming impulse on behalf of Indian theatre makers to accommodate, critique, and indigenize Western performance models in ways that continuously reconfigured the landscape of aesthetics and politics across colonial and postcolonial divides. The structure of the book chronicles the diverse forms of representation these impulses took by dividing modern Indian theatre into four phases: Inception, Consolidation, Revision, and Post-Independence Expansion. Notable in the first half of the book are the play advertisements of Michael Madhusudan Dutt and essays of Girish Chandra Ghosh, which advocate for a fusion of Western dramatic structures with classical Sanskrit storytelling and bilingualism. Notable in the second half are essays from dramatists Habib Tanvir and Utpal Dutt, whose respective texts “The Indian Experiment” and “Theatre as a Weapon” negotiate hotly contested ideological claims regarding urban and folk audience cultures, the impact of imperial education on Indian playwriting, and the role of popular drama as a nontheatrical literary genre. Prefacing each extract is a short blurb from Dharwadker herself that helpfully situates each author in relation to the wider economic, historical, and cultural landscape of Indian theatre and provides a brief summary of each work's interventions and significance.

Alongside its significant historical and theoretical contributions, A Poetics of Modernity places Indian theatre at the heart of some of the most pressing debates in contemporary theatre studies. The book's emphasis on anticolonial and activist theatre (ranging from excerpts from the Dramatic Performances Control Act of 1876 to writing from the left-wing Indian People's Theatre Association and work on contemporary women's, Dalit, and transgender theatre) yields insightful commentary into the role of theatre as a form of resistance to capital, technology, and majoritarian politics. Amid the ongoing crisis of the humanities and the global COVID-19 pandemic, scholars and practitioners can also turn to the book's emphasis on historical and contemporary figures who devised innovative ways both to detach from and to embrace commercialism as useful models for survival in the present. A Poetics of Modernity will thus be of interest to general theatre practitioners, as well as to scholars and students in modern drama, intercultural performance, national and postcolonial literatures, translation studies, women's studies, and theatre history.