Guest speaker, Professor Ashis Sengupta, discussed his recently published book, Postdramatic Theatre and India: Theatre Making since the 1900s, at the Cultures Seminar Series.

The book is deliberately not titled Postdramatic Theatre in India, which might suggest a Western import of the concept of postdramatic cinema to India, but rather Postdramatic Theatre and India is about a complex relationship of dialogue and mutual influence between the theory and practice of postdramatic theatre and a great diversity of contemporary Indian theatre practices.

The author introduces the audience to how the book participates in the ongoing debate on the postdramatic by placing contemporary Indian theatre within the conversation. This is the first book of its kind. The talk demonstrates how urban productions in India since the 1990s which grew out of a complex changing global and regional circumstances have used theatre-making protocols that enter into dialogue with the postdramatic and how then the process reworked the paradigm by enriching it with contemporised domestic performance cultures.

Sengupta is Professor of English at the University of North Bengal specialising in Literary and Cultural Studies; Theatre and Performance Studies; US Studies and South Asian Studies.