The Theatre of Roots, of which Girish Karnad was a practitioner, was a type of Indian drama that flourished after independence from British rule in 1947. The dramatists wished to create works of theater that reached back to their “roots,” as opposed to highly Westernized and colonial-era drama. Thus, playwrights and directors such as Karnad, K.N. Panikkar, and Ratan Thiyam incorporated classical dance, religion, Sanskrit aesthetic theory, martial arts, and folk and myth traditions.
The resulting body of work was in a middle ground between modern European theatre and traditional Indian performance, taking care to distinguish itself from both. Director M.K. Raina explained, “We are not going back to tradition...we are in the process of creating new thinking, new sensibilities, and therefore new forms. Perhaps the fusion of some of the traditional forms and contemporary struggles may give birth to vital new forms, representative of contemporary Indian reality.” Critic Suresh Awasthi says these artists “have reversed the colonial course of contemporary theatre, putting it back on the track of the great Natyasastra tradition. It sounds paradoxical, but their theatre is both avant-garde in the context of conventional realistic theatre, and part of the 2,000-year-old Natyasastra tradition. Natyasastra's survival is strikingly marked in the art of the actor, in the use of music and dance in realizing the performance text, in a whole set of conventions for treating time and space, and in the overall design and structure of a performance.”
In the post-Independence era, theatre directors and writers were concerned that modern theatre was completely cut off from the past and from folk and traditional theatre; thus, a goal of theirs was to bridge the gap between rural areas, where such traditions remained within the arts, and urban areas, where they had largely been elided. The choice to focus on Indian literary and dramatic classics was a concerted one, for as Awasthi notes, “These classics preserve the utterances and behavior of a whole era. Their words and images strike many Indians as overwhelmingly pertinent. Their interpretations in these productions give them contemporaneity and relevance; but the pressure to be relevant does not wipe out or annul the sense of history that they preserve. There can be no such thing as relevance of classics objectively determined. Relevance is subjective; it emerges from a particular director's theatrical vision.” However, “these productions…have been greeted with suspicion by purists, literary scholars, and historians of theatre who often raise the question of ‘authenticity’ in regard to the classics. But authenticity of style is a self-defeating objective. It negates the very purpose of doing a classic, which by its very nature lends itself to different interpretations and approaches in accordance with contemporary tastes and values of theatre practice.”
Stylistically, linear narrative is complicated by multiple voices, and, as Gitanjali Bhatia explains, there was “the rejection of proscenium stage [as] one part of the overall rejection of the western idiom in favour of a native one,” “plot and characterization became secondary and the actor became more important than the character,” “the emphasis was shifted more to performance while text-based western dramaturgy took a back seat,” and “the dramatists looked for models in their cultural past.” Theatre of Roots directors were extremely concerned with form, always a part of the Indian dramatic tradition. They were also tasked with bringing out the full potential of the actor, even as their own role remained powerful.
A Swarthmore reviewer of Erin B. Mee’s renowned work, The Theatre of Roots: Redirecting the Modern Indian Stage (2008), writes of the subject, “By addressing the politics of aesthetics, and by challenging the visual practices, performer/spectator relationships, dramaturgical structures and aesthetic goals of colonial performance, the movement offered a strategy for reassessing colonial ideology and culture and for articulating and defining a newly emerging 'India.'”
