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its repertoire. In this way, the ideological conflict among the indigo
capitalists,
the government, and the missionaries not only revealed the connections
of law, colonization, and theater; it brought out an overt questioning
of colonial policies and initiated a new phase in the life of the stage in India.
Gaekwar Durpan and Chakar Durpan are two notable anticolonial plays that
followed Nil Darpan.83 Both plays were written in the wake of exploitative
circumstances and lashed out against British policies in India.
With the exploitation of the tea laborers
as its central focus, Chakar Durpan exposed the legal malpractices by the
rulers and the complete subordination of the laborers in the process involving
the trade, consumption, and production of tea.
The play took on a special significance in drawing the critical attention of
the native press, which responded by pointing out that " [p] ossibly the
oppressions actually practiced on the labourers are [more] severe than these
depicted in the 'Chakar Durpan
Gaekwar Durpan attacked the political process of British expansion in the
late nineteenth century through the gradual annexation of the princely
states to the empire
In its dramatization of the incident, Gaekwar Durpan exposed the
malpractices
of planting false courtroom evidence, the framing of witnesses, the
power exercised by the British army, and the ways in which the British pitted
natives against each other.
The underlying motive for banning the plays was not to protect Indian
women but to suppress dissent. Nonetheless, intertwining the rhetoric of
morality with the issue of gender enabled authorities to legitimize colonial
rule. By showing sympathy for Hindu women, British rulers reinforced their
position that the males in Indian society were too "effeminate" to take care
of their women, and that if the Hindu men were unfit to take care of their
women, then the "civilized" Europeans would take care of them. In this
way, they validated their reasons for censoring native drama and made the
nationalist playwrights seem like betrayers of their own women. The
rhetoric of obscenity and morality for Hindu women was also strategic, as it
won the rulers the sympathy and support of the conservative Brahman
element
on whom, argues Uma Chakravarty, they heavily relied. Implementing
policy against drama on the pretext of (mis) representation of women,
therefore,
became a strategic means of preventing rising disaffection with colonial
rule
Despite the censors' approval of a number of plays for some time after 1876,
theaters saw a lull in political dramatic activity. 120 European attendance at
the theaters , police surveillance, and coercion of theater managers made it
difficult to present dramas that openly attacked colonial rule. This led to the
dwindling of the National Theatre. 121 At such a time, playwrights searched
for a drama that could elude censorship and at the same time disseminate
nationalist ideas . Because of its religiously affiliated characteristic, which
made it less susceptible to strict censorship measures, mythological drama
seemed quite appropriate for these purposes.
The genre would also have popular appeal at a time when revivalist Hinduism
recuperated mythological characters s
As a cultural phenomenon, therefore, mythological drama can be
seen as a vital and invigorating activity that challenged the political
machinery