Educators across the globe have discovered that dramatic activities are powerful teaching and learning mediums to foster critical thinking and communication in students. Integrating short skirts or improvisation in school education is different from critically engaging with classic dramas in literature classrooms of college and university students. Drama is a very unique literary genre since it is mediated by theatre, and its narrative is interspersed with stage directions. If theatre can transform its audience and bring about social reform, then can a dramatic text inspire activism in its readers as well? We are thus confronted with the problem of whether to treat drama as an aesthetic category or a political tool of social reform. Badal Sircar, one of the pioneers of theatre in post-Independence India, enquired:

Badal Sircar wrote in 1982: “What is theatre, for that matter? How does one communicate through theatre? How much of the theatre is entertainment, how much is aesthetics, and how much is a means of communicating messages?”

Sircar’s third theatre model offers a transformative approach to drama education when adapted to the classroom. A classroom is a space without props, lighting, or costumes, often with an elevated stage, yet a play reading (not an enactment) with active student participation is conceivable. By adopting a workshop model that connects teachers and students as co-learners, the classroom can bridge the gap between the teacher and students; between the stage and the page; between theatre and drama.

Badal Sircar proposed the concept of a ‘third theatre’ in which performances would take place among the spectators, using simple mobile sets. His theatre group, Satabdi, based in Calcutta in the 1970s, abandoned the proscenium stage, advocated free shows and reduced the use of sets, props, and costumes. His non-commercial theatre was performed in an ‘Angan manch’ (courtyard stage) or ‘Mukto manch’ (open-air theatre), an intimate, flexible theatre where the distance between performers and spectators was removed. Sircar explained that due to its suppleness and flexibility, “it may be transported and accessed… it may be staged in villages and marketplaces, in slums, schools and gardens.”

The “transition from the director-formulated rehearsal method to a workshop-based trial-and-error rehearsal model” (Debnath) was a crucial development towards the Third Theatre. Through games, mental mapping, sound and movement mirroring and other activities, the workshop participants experienced and embodied various emotions. He continued to experiment with “language, mode of presentation, prop, venue, technical innovation and theatrical skill” over the years .Sircar’s Third Theatre offered a place for collective experience and articulation of social resistance.

He was a theatre practitioner, and his plays were a concerted effort to bring actors and audiences together on the same platform to build a community that could think and act together to lead social reform. Badal Sircar began his dramatic career with a few comedies, including Solution X, Boropishima, Sanibar, Ballavpurer Rupkatha, and others. He then went to Nigeria in 1964, where he began writing his serious plays, such as Evam Indrajit (1962), Baki Itihas (That Other History, 1964), Trinsho Satabdi (30th Century, 1966), and Pagla Ghora (Mad Horse, 1967). These plays, performed on the proscenium stage, highlighted the political, social and existential crises of the common man.

Sircar’s performance-based approach to drama can guide educators in teaching literary drama in the classroom. The classroom can be a third theatre or a workshop where students are made active participants. Given the limited timeframe of the teaching semester and the strict examination pattern, it is not possible to dramatise the play in the classroom or to spend time on performance-based activities. My submission is to develop a pedagogical strategy that places communication at the centre. In a conventional literature classroom, teachers usually approach a drama as a literary critic, engaging in close reading and using the text to advance scholarly discourses such as Marxism, Cultural Materialism, Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis.

This approach, though very beneficial, limits drama to the literary text, excluding its theatrical and performative aspects. There is often no difference between a close contextual reading of a novel and that of a drama. Theatre, according to Badal Sircar, cannot be ‘enacted’ but performed by ‘state of being’. It is not enough to raise a critical enquiry through the text; it must also arouse feelings, emotions, and thoughts in the audience/readers. It has been argued in this paper that the teacher or educator has to approach the dramatic text as a ‘radical aesthete’ (to use Isobel Armstrong’s term) to conjoin theory with praxis, thinking with affect.

There are three ways in which BadalSircar’s experimentation might be a model for teaching drama in a lively way. Sircar, like many of his radical contemporaries, was practising intercultural drama where he adapted plots (Gondi was an adaptation of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle), themes (Spartacus was borrowed from Howard Fast’s novel), methods (both Grotowski’s ‘Poor Theatre’ and Schechner’s ‘Environmental theatre’) and styles (Jatra from Bengal) and yet was able to make it socially relevant in the Indian postcolonial context.

Firstly, teachers and students, confronted with plays from different social and historical settings in their syllabi, need not only to contextualise/historicise the plays, but also to find their relevance in their contemporary world. An example will be helpful. The play Bashi Khobor is a collage of various news items related to the exploitation of the indigenous tribal groups by the British Raj, poor bonded labourers in liberated India and the general apathy of the Indian government towards the marginalised. It highlights how urban middle-class individuals, bombarded with a barrage of information, past and present, react to it and, if at all, how their lives are affected by it. It is a play where “spectators and actors intermingle, and the entire space of the room becomes a swirling mass of humanity. It is one of those moments in the theatre when one becomes acutely aware of the possibilities of life and the essential brotherhood of man’ So Sircar, through his collage, illustrates how to move beyond a singular historical situation and understand how the themes resurface repeatedly in different spatio-temporal settings.

Secondly, for Badal Sircar, no text is the final product. Like the actors of Satabdi, students can confront a dramatic text, edit it, accept it, reject it and move beyond it. A play is meant to be interactive, setting up a dialectic between knowledge and activity. Students may be able to learn and communicate together (as in Sircar’s workshop) and analyse their fears, insecurities, inhibitions, and aspirations. In other words, drama, as a literary genre sharing a dyadic relationship with theatre and performance, and having access to different cultures and productions, is emancipatory. Finally, theatre has always been a tool for social reform. The reading of a play ought to transform our thoughts and beliefs. It can build a community of students and teachers to think and act together to bring about social change, in whatever little way possible.

As teachers of literature, how do we incorporate Sircar’s ideas and methodology in our own classrooms? For the teacher, the classroom space resembles the stage space in a theatre. Teaching a play demands performative rhetoric (modulation of voice, tone, gestures, eye contact and pregnant pauses) to convey the dynamism and vibrancy of the text. This approach, however, remains limited because it is teacher-centric and unidimensional. It does not allow students to communicate their emotions/ feelings/thoughts of the students as they read the text with the teacher. The third theatre removes the barrier between the performer and the audience.

The first exercise is to rearrange the classroom benches so that the teacher is among the students rather than on a podium above them. The new spatial dynamics would put the teacher and the students on an equal platform and allow freedom of expression. This class arrangement would conscientise the students about the power dynamics and disparities based on caste, class, gender and race in our society. This is the first step towards emancipating young minds and inviting them to actively participate in reading the play. The text must explore the untapped emotions of the collective body to create a transformative experience for the teacher and students. After a group reading of the play, the next exercise is to open it for editing, revision, comparison, and rejection in light of new-age ethical and aesthetic demands.

To conclude, this methodology is not intended to undermine conventional literary analysis; rather, it supplements the contextual/historical paradigms of literary criticism. Badal Sircar contributed to transforming Bengali theatre, albeit modern Indian theatre, from an illusionistic stage entertainment into a ‘post dramatic theatre’ (Lehmann’s term) and a community-building exercise to fight social evils. This paper argues that some of his radical methodologies might be useful for building a discourse on action in the classroom. (IPA Service)