It is challenging as well as gratifying to write a review for a book that I have eagerly waited to read for a long time. Trina Nileena Banerjee’s pathbreaking book Performing Silence : Women in Group Theatre Movement in Bengal reminded me of Sheila Rowbotham’s pertinent phrase ‘hidden from history’ in the way it made me listen to the silences of  women in group theatre movement in Bengal since the 1950s. Performing Silence ruptures the official histories of nationalism, revolutionary class consciousness and ideas of comradeship fostered by left progressive movements. It essays a nuanced journey of women in group theatres in Bengal through memoirs, interviews, rare recordings, auto / biographies and multiple other sources to recoup the presence of these women and to critically situate the subjectivities of these women in a historical continuum. In this review of the book, I will try to pick up some threads – themes and issues – to point to some critically academic directions and acutely sensitive reading of a ‘hidden history’ that Performing Silence presents its readers with. Banerjee’s approach does not merely ‘restore’ women to the roles from which they have been written off in the history of group theatre – that of a producer, organizer, director, thinker – but aligns these fragmented narratives with other histories of our times and enables to think about the nature of women’s autonomy, creativity and organizational vision in theatre as distinct from that of men.

Feminist debates since the 1970s have addressed two major strands of women’s groups and their concerns. On one hand, we witnessed the emergence of women’s groups in cities and towns and on the other, women activists who worked with mass organizations, trade unions, peasants, land and environment. Since the late 1940s there has been a traffic between these groups, but they differed on the question of who and what constituted the feminist subject of politics – the articulate, emancipated woman who could speak her own word around personal, sexual, familial matters or the marginal, peasant, Dalit, Adivasi, rural woman who laboured, struggled for her living, livelihood practices and dignity. Urban feminist debates marked their ‘difference’ by stating that patriarchy is as oppressive as feudalism or capitalism. Activists working with mass movements argued whether the issues of sexuality, family, culture, religion are relevant to all women. V. Geetha writes that Stree Shakti Shangha’s text (SSS) We Were Making History (1989) stands at a crucial juncture of feminist discourse in positing its attempt to understand a progressive socialist past from the point of view of women’s experiences and in acknowledging a feminist standpoint of the present that links itself with the broad framework of leftist politics yet claims its own space and autonomy (Geetha, xi). As we explore the spectrum of scholarship from the 1970s onwards that sought to recover women’s experiences from the past and link these experiences with contemporary discourses of liberation, progressivism and emancipation, we may notice an aporia. None of these works analyses the ambiguous positionality of urban, middle class educated women in the context of the group theatre movement in Bengal. There have been surveys and documentation of the nature, practice and ideological framework of the group theatre movement in Bengal. However, the ethics and politics of cultural production and representation needed to be addressed alongside the aesthetic and ideological principle of the movement. Partha Chatterjee, in his writings, has foregrounded the insightful understanding of the construction of the category of a new progressive woman, the ‘bhadramahila’ who in reality was made to fit into the demands of a new kind of bourgeoisie, middle class patriarchy. Neloufer De Mel in the essay ‘Setting the Stage, Gendering the Nation’ discusses how in John DeSilva’s plays the women characters essentially portrayed an ideal Sinhalese virtuosity in keeping with the moral demands of an emerging nationalistic patriarchy. These discourses, as discussed above, significantly address women’s question but do not explore the active role that women played in group theatre movements and how they present an alternative to patriarchal frameworks. Trina Banerjee’s book makes a critical intervention to explain how women artistes have left fragmented imprints of subversions, negotiations and aspirations through their participation in the group theatre movement in Bengal that puncture the newly formed nationalistic idea of progressive patriarchy.

 Performing Silence unpacks the ‘role of gender’ in the cultural practices and representation of women in group theatre in Bengal and questions the revolutionary claim of this movement that does not prioritize women’s agency, desire and autonomous voices. Interestingly, the work does not stop at foregrounding the contradictions of the patriarchal ideology but examines the complex reasons behind such a blind spot and the historical silence, over all these years, around this gap. Banerjee, felicitously quotes Janelle Reinelt who had written “Performance is perhaps an event in which the possibilities of history that were not realized are remembered as conjectural possibilities for a future as yet unmade” (Banerjee,15). Performing Silence reveals that fragmented moments of autonomy of women in the space of group theatre or their irreconcilable silences evoke a ‘conjectural possibility for the future yet unmade’ and carry the possibility of mobilizing an alternative history of women in contemporary Indian theatre. Trina Banerjee stitches the isolated voices and fragmented narratives of women involved in the group theatre movement into a seamless narrative spanning a history of almost three decades. She achieves the daunting task of merging a lucid writing style, anecdotal telling and close-text readings with her acutely theoretical exploration. In her ground-breaking work, Banerjee constructs an alternative history of women’s participation in the group theatre movement that has the capability to subvert the totalizing claims of the cultural left that framed the group theatre movement in Bengal since the 1940s. The narratives in Banerjee’s book remind readers of the solitary voice of Ismat Chugtai, as Chugtai writes in her essay ‘Aurat: Aadhi Aurat, Aadha Khvaab’ (Woman: Half Woman, Half Dream), “If a woman shows her womanhood at the right opportunity, it befits her. But what is this that she goes on gathering the basket of femininity in colleges, offices and departments”¹ .

This book does not attempt to map a history of group theatre movement in Bengal but rather looks at the embedded ideological structures which fuelled the growth of the movement and how the complex schisms and silences within the movement are rooted to a hierarchical and moralistic guiding principle of the movement. The group theatre movement in Bengal, as Banerjee points out, spanned between the 1950s to 1980s, and might have been inspired by the Group Theater in America that originated in New York in 1931. Unlike the Group Theatre in America, which disintegrated by the 1940s, the group theatre movement in Bengal was aligned with diverse and divergent political and economic models in the course of its journey. Banerjee makes an incisive observation related to the nomenclature of this movement, the origin of which is debatable. Quite a few names have been proposed and have functioned as an indicator of the movement such as ‘Nabanatya’ (‘the new theatre’), ‘Gananatya’ (People’s Theatre), ‘Shatnatya’ (‘the honest theatre’). However, the nomenclature ‘group theatre’ persisted through the passage of time. Contrary to the other names which suggest either the intention or the ethical standpoint of the movement, the name ‘group theatre’ directly implies the organizational structure of the movement. I would like to draw upon Banerjee’s argument to state that it is this structural impulse of the movement which found validation through its alliance with hierarchical models of other established societal institutions like that of the family, educational institutions and the nation. The organization of group theatres, in their functioning, roles and spaces allotted to women and in their practices, re-enacted the gender roles decided by patriarchy within families and nation-states. The group theatre movement which emerged in the late 1940s, primarily due to ruptures within the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), continued to reinstate similar modes of patriarchal control and identity formation as enacted in the practices and performances of group theatres in Bengal. Though the famine of 1943-44 had catalysed the formation of IPTA, Banerjee discusses how the theatre association was not persistent in its attempt to suture the class divide. Banerjee looks back at the split in IPTA to reveal that it was not the question of individual artistic impulses / egotism versus the political ideology of the collective but rather because of the repressive ideals of the Party that sought to silence the essential role of culture, desire and gendered subjectivity that led to the dissolution of the association. This contradiction is explored through relevant case studies garnered from multiple documents and testimonies related to the movement, in the book Performing Silence. Thereby, Trina Banerjee poignantly places her critique of the group theatre movement from the lens of a feminist perspective which looks at the movement as a continuity rather than as a clear disruption from the ideological structures of IPTA. She shows how some patriarchal tendencies and attitudes that shaped the stringent structure of IPTA, continued to manifest in the organization of group theatres in Bengal.

The historical temper, socio-cultural context and radical political changes in India from the 1930s onwards led to a significant shift and to the growth of a new sense of modernity in India. Global and local factors like the impact of the world war, the anti-fascist movements, anti-war sentiment, formation of the Progressive Writers Association and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), interaction between rural and urban spaces, the man made famine and its impact, the emergence of women in public domain, the growth of de-classed intellectuals and others shaped a kind of hybrid modernity. On one hand the charge of international progressivism, and on the other, resistance against the British colonizers and as well as resistance against the feudal lords and traders led to the consolidation of various ideological forums and associations. Trina Banerjee lays out a rich historical and theoretical premise which speaks to each of these complex developments and their influence on the cultural front. Her book can be read as valuable work of a cultural historian who seeks to recover how ideas, practices and contribution of women have shaped invisible contours of the group theatre movement in Bengal. She brings together voices of women from diverse accounts to conjure up the narrative of a time that does not agree with the mainstream frameworks etched by the leftist or nationalistic ideologies.

The Tebhaga movement of the 1946-47, led by peasants for a greater share of crop, almost overlapped with the growth of the group theatre movement in Bengal. The Tebhaga movement witnessed how many urban women joined the peasant movement. Kavita Panjabi makes a seminal analysis in her book Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s Movement by discussing howthewomen involved in this movement significantly forged solidarities across class, caste, ethnicity and religion. She says that the care work that middle class women provided during the famine and the role that peasant women played in sheltering and protecting communist men and women evoked a “terrain of love” that cannot be explained by totalizing claims of the communist party or leftist progressive ideals. Panjabi argues that these relationships across class, caste and faith produced a ground for “ontological bonding” and forged “startling intimacies” that chart an autonomous domain of women’s subjectivities and shared experiences. Banerjee’s argument may be read in relation to Panjabi’s, since both contemporary feminist treatises explore women’s subjectivities and agency in the context of leftist progressive politico-cultural movements that rupture the existing patriarchal frameworks that governed perceptions about these movements. Trina Banerjee makes an insightful intervention in her critique of the urban middle class woman actor’s articulation of empathy for ones who suffered the famine and how this sense of empathy for the actor translated into an almost spontaneous embodiment of characters in IPTA’s famous play Nabanna. Banerjee reads into Tripti Mitra’s interview to question what the actor meant by this transformative moment that shaped the ‘truth’ of their performance in Nabanna. While the women involved in Tebhaga movement described that time as one of ‘shanti’ (peace) and ‘ananda’ (joy) as Panjabi explores in her reading of oral narratives, Tripta Mitra articulates how the destitute people on the streets had touched their hearts and consciousness as actors. Mitra claimed that the female artists on stage also became famous women activists. Banerjee analyses Mitra’s interview to point at  how the plight of the people and experiences of dehumanization made the actors in Nabanna turn into ‘them’ on stage. At this point, it may be illuminating to consider how far this conceptual coupling of art and politics, as found in Tripti Mitra’s fragmented interviews, pronounce the possibility of an organic class bonding in relation to what Panjabi discusses as ‘ontological bonding’. Banerjee mentions that Mitra’s account of how she prepared for her role in Nabanna refers to a ‘spontaneous transformation’ in contrast to how she speaks of a laborious process of practice for her later roles. (Banerjee,66)  

Trina Banerjee, engages with a few lone voices of women in theatre from the 1940s onwards like that of Anil DeSilva, Tripta Mitra and Keya Chakraborty to understand how their active contributions were sealed off from the official history of the group theatre movement. Such a flawed history writing is also legitimized by positing these women artistes in the image of a desirous woman, a companionate / student-wife or an eccentric woman – all three deemed detrimental to the “ascetic male world of politico-cultural action” (Banerjee,136). Trina Banerjee, unearths their autonomous voices from various less privileged sources and critically analyses these records to elucidate how the intellectual, creative and organizational capabilities of these women artistes were perceived to be forms of disruptive femininity and thereby strategically dubbed as an unnecessary “excess” by the restrictive patriarchal ideology of group theatres. Interestingly, all the cultural categories activated by Marxist cultural movements to silence the women artistes draw upon tropes used by colonialism to repress the colonized, viz -the child and the adult, the student and the teacher, the shepherd and the flock, the rational and the emotional, the feminine and the masculine. Performing Silence evokes a sensitive feminist reading to significantly point out the inherent biases that informed seminal works like that of Sudhi Pradhan’s Marxist Cultural Movement in India. By unsettling Pradhan’s celebrated discourse, Banerjee’s valuable perspective hinged on practices and representation of women in performances, contributes towards expanding the scope of Marxist and Socialist politico-cultural scholarship. On one hand, while Banerjee analyses interviews, memoirs, auto / biographies, on the other she studies the representation of women through close text readings of artistic works created by men.  For instance, she foregrounds reasons behind the lack of autonomy of women characters in Ghatak’s films, the absence of an acknowledgement of women’s desire, agency and sexual pleasure in Manik Bandopadhyay’s and Utpal Dutt’s works and the erasure of women’s experiences of violence through prioritization of revolutionary organization in Sambhu Mitra’s theatre. Banerjee’s unique approach towards narrativization enables readers to access the subjectivities of women artistes which have not been foregrounded before and to also understand how the representations of women characters do not touch upon the experiences and struggles as articulated by the women artistes.

In my opinion, Performing Silence lays the theoretical and historiographical framework to arrive at two interesting questions that add layers to the existing feminist criticism from the 1970s onwards. First, what does the silence of women in group theatre movement in Bengal that pervaded across three decades, indicate about the issue of who and what constituted the feminist subject of politics – a debate on which the two groups of women differed as discussed at the beginning of this essay?  The women’s group in cities as well as the women who joined mass movements as activists since the late 1940s registered voices of their active participation, collaboration and differences. Ironically, the urban middle class educated women who were integral part of the group theatre movement occupied a relatively bordered space within their family, within the organization of the communist progressive theatre groups and in their representations on stage. Secondly, how can the issue of women’s labour, in terms of their role as caregivers in group theatre and in many cases, like that of Keya Chakraborty, as breadwinners of their family, be separated from the issues of sexuality, family, culture and subjectivity? The major feminist debate from the 1970s, as discussed at the beginning of the essay, articulated the line of ‘difference’ between two groups based on how they perceived the issues of women’s labour, struggle and that of sexuality and desire as mutually exclusive domains rooted to the class position of women. But as we begin to understand the active participation, physical labour and intellectual labour of women in group theatres, the separation of domains of women’s labour from that of sexuality and interiority needs to be rethought. Banerjee explains how women artistes worked as machineries of labour as they constantly negotiated with the overlaps between their domestic and professional spaces as mothers, daughters, wives, caregivers and breadwinners. In conclusion, Trina Banerjee analyses why this group theatre movement, infused with an intense revolutionary ideal, gradually dissolved in Bengal. This study opens up the possibility to engage with what contemporary women bring to the process of making theatre as solo performers, directors, designers, workshop facilitators or as women’s collectives. Trina Nileena Banerjee’s book Performing Silence: Women in the Group Theatre Movement in Bengal foregrounds the unresolved, unheard narratives of women in group theatres which on one hand speak of a helpless miscarriage of dreams at the personal and political levels while on the other point at the unrealized potential of women’s capabilities as thinkers, producers and theatre-makers.

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