Released into the Future: (Re)Claiming Brecht in India

Summary

In India, the “people’s” theater movement grew out of the Progressive Writers’ Association, which was initiated in England in 1935 by Sajjad Zaheer, Mulk Raj Anand, and others. These writers attended the International Symposium of Writers for the Defense of Culture against Fascism, which took place in Paris in June 1935, where stalwarts like Maxim Gorky, André Gide, André Malraux, E. M. Forster, and Bertolt Brecht made massive pleas for the freedom of artistic expression. Inspired, these young Indians felt compelled to form an association of their own in India. Officially inaugurated in Lucknow in April 1936, it was named the All India Writers’ Association. Its manifesto stated:

We believe that the new literature must deal with the basic problems of our existence today—the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjugation. All that drags us down to passivity, inaction and unreason, we reject as reactionary—all that arouses in us the critical spirit, which examines institutions and customs, in the light of reason, which helps us to act, to organize ourselves, to transform, we accept as progressive.

Rapidly attracting a sizable following of Indian writers both at home and abroad, one of the founder members, Mulk Raj Anand, represented India on behalf of the new association at the second International Symposium held in Paris later in 1936. Once again, Bertolt Brecht was among those present. It is not known whether Anand personally met Brecht on this occasion, but it is not unlikely that Brecht's ideas made an impression on him, which he carried back to India and discussed in various literary forums.

Anand was a young writer, extremely interested in theater, which led him and others in the PWA to encourage those working in the theater to align themselves with the Communist Party and use theater to resist the threat of fascism. It was in these circumstances that the Indian People's Theater Association (IPTA) was born in 1943. Prioritizing the use of popular/folk culture in order to reach out to the masses, IPTA's focus was on educating both the urban and “rural” masses, arousing them to political awareness and action. Regarding itself as a “people's theater,” IPTA provided an alternative to the “Parsi Natak” kind of commercial theater that was prevalent, dismissing it as a capitalist enterprise.