71 – Early Modern and Modern Retellings: Texts, Theatre and Performance
This panel explores the retelling of stories through theatre and performance in early modern and modern India. We are interested in the analysis of texts, but also of performances of theatre plays or other texts.
The retelling of stories in different contexts, forms, languages and genres has been a feature of South Asian literature since ancient times. While preserving traditional stories, this process is also a way of creating new narratives and adapting to new social and cultural concerns. Through translation, adaptation, re-creation, stories are retold, following new idioms, new contexts, adapting again and again. This panel concentrates on how stories are retold within the theatre genre and on the stage. How are classical plays adapted by early modern authors? How are texts and stories performed on a modern stage? How are certain characters given new roles to respond to new concerns? How are heroines recast? We invite papers examining early modern and modern theatre plays. We are particularly interested in the processes of retelling, through translation, reinterpretation, adaptation, reworking of non-theatrical sources, adaptation to the economics of the theatrical genre. We are also interested in the performative adaptation of texts in a broader sense and encourage the analysis of understudied theatre plays. This panel aims to provide a forum for discussion between scholars working on different languages, but also on historical periods that are too often studied in isolation, in an attempt to identify cross-cutting processes of retelling and to contribute to the history of South Asian theatre.
