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ABSTRACT
The Nautanki Theatre Company (Nautanki) has been actively performing drama in Sydney since 2012, and it has been organising the South Asian Theatre Festival since 2016. We study their discourses, cultural politics, and practices; conduct an ethnographic observation of performances; and interview performers, organisers, and survey audiences of the 2019 theatre festival in-depth. We contend that by hosting performances and events, Nautanki creates a space for amicable, intercultural dwellings in which collective identity is forged through cross-cultural dialogue, deliberation, embodied aesthetics, and bottom-up intercultural ethics that shift state-promoted top-down multicultural ideas and policies. Nautanki also instils a sense of longing for cultural novelty, authenticity, and participation, and creates a hybrid cultural ‘South Asian’ community identity, in Sydney.
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Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 The enabling space surrounding the stage or an event, including the social-cultural and political space.
2 ‘Multiculturalism’ has site-specific, contextual renditions where the state promotes the official policy, such as in Australia or Canada. In this rendition, the state adopts a top–down form of Multiculturalism (with a capital M) to include ethnic minorities. The Indigenous peoples are part of the ‘Multicultural model’ in Canada; in Australia, immigrants, posited as ethnic minorities, dominate the model, and Indigenous concerns are pushed outside the Multicultural paradigm and ‘racialised’ (Ang and Stratton Citation1994: 126).
3 The Anglo-American classical stage arrangement and the metaphorical space dividing the actor and the spectator.
4 Other diaspora theatre groups are not registered as a theatre company. Nautanki aims to do professional theatre.
5 This Bengali poet and writer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911 for his contribution to world literature.
6 A well-known Bengali theatre actor and director.
7 Late in 1999, the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts of the Commonwealth of Australia released Securing the Future, the final Report of the Major Performing Arts Enquiry chaired by Helen Nugent. Nugent requested $50 million, and the government committed to $70 million and various subsidies (Kelly Citation2001). However, the benefit and effect of this fund on migrant theatre, particularly for the South Asian one, is still limited.
8 Interview with Reema Gilani 23 October 2019, Sydney.
9 An Indian filmmaker and theatre director.
10 An Indian actor, poet, storyteller, and theatre director.
11 Riverside Theatres Parramatta levied a nominal tax, but the tickets were free, showing the inclusive dimension of the Festival.
12 Interview with Neel Banerjee, 19 October 2019, Sydney.
13 Interview with Andrew, 2 June 2023 (over the Zoom from Sydney).
14 Interview with Sebastian, 29 May 2023 (over the Zoom from Sydney).
15 Interview with Aangik team, 15 October 2019, Sydney.
16 Interview with N. K. Srini, 15 December 2019, Sydney.
17 Interview with Kolam Maduwa team, 12 October 2019, Sydney.
18 Sic Neel Banerjee interview.
19 Sic Reema Gilani interview.
20 Sic Neel Banerjee interview.
21 Interestingly, the postcolonial curriculum in the North American academy remains reflexively indifferent to South Asian ‘desi’ drama culture (Kruger Citation2003). In the US there was a somewhat naïve racist tendency of representing South Asian theatre in a ‘time warp’ and orientalising the racial and cultural ‘other’ – by representing the grandeur of ‘the mysterious East’ (Chatterjee Citation2008) – and multicultural art forms emerged bottom–up, through grassroots effort. In A Little Clay Cart in New York, a play staged from 1924 to 1926, all the actors (though not the musicians) wore ‘brown face’. Contemporary South Asian theatre companies in the US themselves often end up ‘regurgitating and reinforcing Orientalist stereotypes’ (Citation2008: 112).
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Arnab Roy Chowdhury
Arnab Roy Chowdhury is an Assistant Professor in the school of sociology at the HSE University, Moscow, in the Russian Federation. Prior to this he was an Assistant Professor in the Public Policy and Management Group at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC). He received his PhD in Sociology from the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research and teaching interests include Postcolonial & Subaltern Studies, Cultural Sociology, Forced Migration and Refugee Studies, Social Movements Studies, Ethnicity and Nationalism, and Natural Resources Extraction and Labour.
Ahmed Abidur Razzaque Khan
Ahmed Abidur Razzaque Khan, alias Ahmed Abid is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of General Education Department (GED) at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). He did his Ph.D. in Human Rights, Society, and Multi–level Governance from the Western Sydney University, Australia. He has more than fifteen years' experience in academic and development work around Asia and the Pacific. His research disciplines focus on – Cultural Studies, Documentary Film, New and Alternative Media, Migration, Refugees and Labour Trafficking and Subaltern Narrative, and Postcolonial Studies email: [email protected].