Utpal Dutt’s Political Jatra and Modern Indian Drama: Marxist Reinventions of Theatrical Tradition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jatra, the traditional folk theatre of Bengal, intrigued Marxist dramatist Utpal Dutt both for its unparalleled popularity among the rural proletariat and for its suitability as a medium to communicate his politics to the masses. This article explores Dutt’s engagement with the stylistic and thematic aspects of traditional Jatra throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s within the context of the contemporaneous political climate in West Bengal and his “search for […] a wider audience.” I analyse a number of Dutt’s representative Jatra plays – including Baisākhi Megh [ The Cloud in Summer] (1974), Aranyer Ghum Bhāngchhe [ The Forest Is Waking Up] (1978), Sādā Posāk [ White Dress] (1979), Kuthār [ The Axe] (1980), Svadhinatār Phānki [ False Independence] (1981), and Dāmāmā Oi Bāje [ The Call for War Has Been Sounded] (1988) – to interrogate Dutt’s reliance on aesthetic and populist elements in Jatra as he politicized a traditional form and transformed it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".