Anushka Kulkarni
PhD Candidate, Department of Music
In nineteenth-century British-colonial Calcutta a hybridized form of Bengali-language theatre emerged from the confluence of western sensibilities and Sanskrit revivalism. This style of theatre adapted stories from Hindu epics while drawing from classical, folk, and western dramaturgical forms and ideals. In this paper, I examine two musical-dramatic adaptations from the Ramayana – Harimohan Karmakar’s Janaki Bilap (Janaki’s Lament, 1867) and Rabindranath Tagore’s Balmiki Pratibha (The Genius of Valmiki, 1881). Fully through-sung dramas, both works blend folk devotional traditions, vernacular and Sanskritized registers of narrativity, and aesthetics of western opera. Doing so, the adaptations demonstrate how epic material was reconfigured and recontextualized for nineteenth-century Calcutta audiences. Foregrounding peripheral episodes of the Ramayana and interpreting them through diverse musical-dramatic idioms, Karmakar and Tagore ultimately cast Bengali theatre as a crucial site in the negotiation of cultural subjectivity and identity under British-colonial rule. 

Tuesday, November 4
912 Sproul
12:00 - 1:00 PM