Epilogue: Indian Theatre: What Are We Talking About?

Abstract

How perfect can the I be? An I that enunciates an origin; an I that, in the very act of being said, exists; and an I that is overpoweringly dominant over all other ‘I’s. It leaves one without existence if one does not belong in the I. I does not exist without being acknowledged by an ‘I’. I is what has been written before and after it. I aims at perfection. I is a political being in this assertion. I is watched as I walks by an empty stage. I and its partner who have been watching I—we a ‘group’, we are together in our will; our choice to be within the same spatio-temporal reality. We have created that which is called theatre (should we say for a lack of a better word). But you want to know if we exists? Then ‘you’ must as well exist! But we’s political assertion is in the fact that we is better than you—or does we need not qualify? I belongs with its partner in an empty space as much as you does with its. And their existences could also be parallelly run, as they remain alienated—in this case in a positive way. Can there be one more game this time—of not becoming the Weltmeister? For say, Carl Schmitt, such a game is not possible. He would prefer that the political ‘enemy’—the other group—be ‘the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case, conflicts with him are possible’. Hence the political lies in the realm of a distinction and comprehension of friend-enemy. But then, have we still not seen enough animosity? Like we discussed earlier, a ‘group’ and its origin in the sense of Sartre are the effort of assembled individuals to dissolve the seriality which to Sartre is a negation of praxis that exercises its own counter-finality through inertia without as such having an author but however given that it was produced by man, it creates its own rationality, who then is alienated within it, theoretically free and sovereign but in reality ‘powerless’. Here I would argue that this is what encompasses the colonial mind to break out and create its own logic. Therefore to see any anticolonial struggle not as emancipatory by itself would be wrong—however the question could be for whom? We have tried to discuss certain such coagulations that tried to break off. Now coming back to Mr. Schmitt, if a ‘group’ essentially suggests a certain enmity for the sake of its own survival, for there could be x number of ‘groups’ which are not necessarily the ‘State’ unlike in case of Schmitt, then coercion becomes inevitable. Or to go by Schmitt, within the State, any other force, to put in his words ‘the political power of a class or of some other group’, if that hinders the State’s activities, then the political entity is destroyed. But in such cases, he gives the power to the ‘decisive entity’ that can take control over the critical situation – the ‘exception’. So by Schmitt’s definition, a state by definition must be coercive if it has to be so. Now here comes our proposition. In case of theatre, which we have already decided to call thus for the lack of a better word, a ‘group’ in the Sartrean sense gets coagulated. But how does such a group exist under the panorama term State? Will the State not be a decisive break from the liminal path that the theatre treads? For the State must be decisive, but can the theatre be so? Would that not be contrary to theatre’s basic instinct of conjoining and constituting freely? The story of IPTA CS, I think, tells us of such a fate. For the Vitruvian Man, the obsession with perfection and keeping proportion of even diversity can be the work of the State but not of theatre. It cannot afford to be proportionate for the sake of its own freedom—its liberality.