The late-colonial period in British India saw the emergence of revolutionary art-collectives like Progressive Writers’ Association and Indian People’s Theatre Association. Their works were characterized by a streak of rebellion against the excessiveness of colonizers but also simultaneously pointing out follies like caste and class inequalities, that plagued the Indian society then.
The endeavors of the IPTA were tied to the strain of social realism. IPTA was a group of Left-leaning intellectuals, writers and artists. Even though it had slightly different incarnations from region to region in the Indian subcontinent, they were all committed to the idea that theatre can be a force for social change.
Social realism is defined by the Museum of Modern Art as artists pivoting “to realism as a way of making art easily accessible and legible to the wider public, often portraying their subjects—including well-known figures and anonymous everyday workers” wherein they are depicted “as heroic symbols of persistence and strength in the face of adversity.”
Bijon Bhattacharya’s Nabanna (1944) is a play chronicling the Bengal Famine of 1943. The IPTA's depiction of gut-wrenching famine and anguish on-stage gained them a financial aid worth three lakhs’ Rupees, which was distributed to the affected regions of rural Bengal. It also inspired a film, Dharti Ke Lal. Nabanna heralded the arrival of this tradition of social realistic theatre in India.
Playwrights like Bijon Bhattacharya analyzed the historical causes and material circumstances responsible for the famine in their works. This paper seeks to trace the aesthetics of rebellion prevalent in the social realist tradition, which provided a vocabulary to the writers, poets and playwrights in critiquing the socio-economic conditions of exploitation and (mis)management of famines, as entailed by colonialism and imperialism.
