Indian and British Women’s Contributions to Modern Theatre in Punjab: 1830s -1940s

An analysis of histories and treatises on modern Punjabi theatre indicates a conspicuous absence of women as playwrights, directors, and performers. Countering the claims of critics and historians that women did not participate in theatre until 1941, this thesis shows that Indian and British women have been fostering and nourishing folk and modern theatre in Punjab. Pursuing the scholarship of Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, who impress upon the need to interrogate the historicity of constructing women’s subordinate position, this thesis examines the contributions of elite and working-class British women such as Emily Eden, Flora Annie Steel, and Norah Richards, and courtesans, kanjari, and ordinary women from Punjab whose social “respectability” was and continues to be defined by kinship and social lenses.\nThrough an “agnotological” approach, I examine the patriarchal framework of theatre historiography that silences and erases women’s contributions, and simultaneously retrieves women’s participation and production of multiple forms of theatre. In this regard, I analyze the works of Norah Richards, the “grand matriarch” of modern Punjabi theatre, who founded the tradition of dramatic competitions in colleges, wrote and directed drama, and formulated the naturalistic rural Punjabi theatre theory. Additionally, I examine reformist, colonialist, and nationalist imaginings that shaped social attitudes and perceptions about female performers, such as courtesans, as morally debasing the social fabric of Punjab. This is evaluated through the scrutiny of colonial caste-based stratifications of performers and notions of social respectability that women in private and public spaces experience and negotiate. As well, I analyze travel writing to understand how British women’s amateur theatre activities in Shimla and Dalhousie, Parsi travelling companies, and dramatic and theatrical activities of missionaries and Temperance Associations in the late nineteenth century shaped the public sphere of theatre in Punjab. Finally, I analyze Giddha as a form of folk theatre that provides women with an alternative space where they can express themselves freely through hybrid performances and engage in political and social activism alongside enriching theatre in Punjab.

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