When Power Performs: How Performances Shaped Revolution and Public Consciousness

Power is rarely exercised in isolation; it goes beyond laws and policies and into the realm of persuasion and perception. Authority ultimately remains in the hands of the leader and their ability to evoke, persuade and mobilise collective imagination.

Illustration by The Geostrata

Long before the advent of social media, politics unfolded on streets and marketplaces where the audience was not just passive observers but active members in shaping a narrative and leading to a revolution.

In the Natya Shastra, the Ancient Sanskrit Encyclopedia on art and theatre in India, Bharat Muni stresses the liberation of theatre from external forces, where the four walls of theatre emerge as an empowering medium, granting the individual the liberty to explore and perform without any external constraints, highlighting theatre as one of the earliest mediums promoting free speech and expression.

Theatre emerged as one such arena where power was actively contested and debated. While the conventional notion of governance through diplomacy, policies and warfare dictates geopolitics today, during the nationalist movement, theatre emerged as a means to translate the abstract policies and decisions into emotionally resonant experiences to connect the audience with the larger game at play.

In colonial India and Europe, theatrical performances emerged as mediums to evoke a sense of nationalism and shape the public consciousness. 

Through the use of real-life examples, satire, and historical symbolism, theatre enabled societies to emerge as unified entities and build a space for themselves in the grand project of nation-building.

Today, too, while the stage has now been replaced by screens, the audience remains the same, and the political leadership continues their dependence on performance to build its legitimacy.

Geopolitics is not exercised, it is choreographed, rehearsed, watched and ultimately believed. 

THEATRE AS A TOOL OF EXPRESSION

In the nineteenth century, the absence of electronic media and the limited scope of print media paved the way for theatre to emerge as an accessible public medium uniting the marginalised communities.

Performed in public spaces, theatre emerged as a glaring reflection of the socio-political functioning prevalent in the society and used means such as street theatre to evoke emotions amongst the common man.

The capacity of theatre to evoke, fundamentally shift the perspective and shape public opinion made it a crucial medium for revolutionaries in cultivating a political consciousness. The stage once meant for entertainment now adorned the gown of rebellion and pulled the strings to lead the new act of revolt.

These performative mechanics found distinct relevance, particularly in the 19th century and played the pivotal role in dictating the revolution in Europe and the anti-colonial movement in South Asia.

THEATRE AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

During the French Revolution, theatre served as a mass cultural medium that emerged as the common thread between the entire society, i.e. the marginalised communities and the elites.

While often used by the ruling powers to further their propaganda, the revolutionaries, recognising its unabashed potential, theatre slowly transformed into a means of subversion and reimagining the idea of citizenship. 

The French government viewed theatre as a revolutionary tool that could bring the nation together and imbibe the values of patriotism.

Recognising the same, the National Convention in 1792 instructed repeated performances of Voltaire's Brutus to foster the republican ideals and resistance to authoritarianism, influencing revolutionary figures like Jacques-Louis David.

Plays centred around war, sacrifice and martyrdom started gaining traction, including plays like De Belloy’s Le Siege De Calais, by Pierre Laurent, which emerged as one of the first plays focused on war and martyrdom. 

Throughout the 1790s, France bore witness to war-related productions, designed with the motive to sustain the patriotic fervour and imbibe the values of nationalism.

Yet, despite strict censorship, theatre remained a means of subversion for the public and theatre itself emerged as an arena for regime change protests. In 1815, the Nantes audience, expressing their displeasure with Napoleon, smothered the imperial eagle with cooked pears.

Further plays, such as La Chaste Suzanne, were moved by the stage and led to physical rebellion, leading to riots due to its perceived counter-revolutionary message.

During the same time frame, Benedict Anderson’s influential theory, through the publication of his thought-provoking book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, in 1983, further steered the nationalist movement in Europe.

Benedict viewed nations as imagined communities and not as ancient or natural entities. He expanded on the role of private capitalism and universal religious systems, paving the way towards conceiving the idea of shared identities with distant strangers, and imbuingBonapartism a sense of oneness through common language and media.

Emerging in America, it soon became a global template for modern sovereign states across the globe.

During the 19th century, France bore witness to the rise of Bonapartism, a political movement that arose in response to the French Revolution in 1789. The theory emerged as an authoritarian movement directed towards the retention of power by a strong leader at the helm of affairs, as the historical political circumstances underwent an overhaul.

The movement reflected a shift from the earlier approach, where the nation now became the foundation and the means of legitimation of the modern state. During the French Revolution, the theory emerged as a stabilising force against the political disorders that the 1789 revolution had failed to resolve.

The movement focused on the oppression of power and suppressing dissent, with a centralised and powerful executive transitioning France, from a once true democracy to a dictatorial rule.

Theatre during the 19th century moved beyond the realms of entertainment and emerged as a societal mirror reflecting the glaring realities and cracks prevalent in the system, hoping to sow the seeds of revolution against the state, while shedding light on how performances became inseparable from power during moments of political transformation.

Post the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a new page was turned, and entertainment emerged as a means of consolidation. Faced with an overwhelmingly illiterate population, with the peasantry emerging as the predominant class, the Soviet regime turned to public performances as a means of mass mobilisation.

Mass spectacles, street performances turned public spaces into ideological grounds where entertainment emerged as a tool to familiarise the citizens with the socialist values and emerged as a mechanism for the state to cultivate a sense of unity, belonging and collectiveness.

Unlike the French revolution where theatre emerged as a means of subversion and challenged the state, Soviet theatre slowly became a subset of the machinery of governance, where performances were now used to stabilise and even legitimise the power.

The idea was further steered forward in the third world countries, ridden with abject poverty and illiteracy, where theatre emerged as a vehicle of conceptual decolonisation.

Theatre emerged as a reflection of the current lives and conditions of the common man and emerged as a glimmer of hope, providing an alternative to reinvent themselves and their social relationships.

Theatre also established itself as a means of self-proclamation, where power was no longer exerted; it was also performed.

As the newly independent nations dealt with the crisis of a heterogeneous population with little bureaucratic authority, theatre acted as a vehicle to mass mobilisation and narrative building, thus emerging as a means where legitimacy moved from institutions to now evoking abstract emotions and beliefs, transforming power into acceptance. 

While the revolution in France dictated how theatre could inculcate a sense of citizenship, theatre in India moved beyond, with a recalibrated effort towards manufacturing resistance against colonial rule.

THEATRE AND INDIAN NATIONALISM

In colonial India, theatre functioned as the narrative-shaping mechanism and a powerful resistance tool against the British atrocities, bridging the gap between the elite and the illiterate masses.

In an era when India battled against high illiteracy rates, theatre emerged as a forum tackling the hurdles in communication and establishing itself as a unifying force, disseminating the abstract political ideas and evoking a sense of patriotism.

Recognising the overwhelming reach of theatre and connecting with the common man, nationalist leaders such as Nehru understood the significance of theatre in mobilising the common audience, and diverse theatre groups emerged all across India.

India and Natyashastra, with a key focus on folk theatre, gained importance where indigenous groups such as Behrupiya, nautanki and Jatras gained prevalence. 

Jatras, a folk theatre group popular in the Bengali theatre circuit, spread its roots way beyond the eastern areas of the Indian subcontinent and gained massive traction on the streets and marketplace.

Emerging with the rise of Sri Chaitanya’s bhakti movement, Jatra performances played a pivotal role in shaping the Indian independence movement. The plays are often written in didactic script composed of a musical concert preceding the four-hour-long plays, performed on open stages, with the use of diverse musical instruments such as harmonium, dholak and flute.

The Jatra plays were extremely melodramatic with heightened depiction of emotion. The uniqueness of Jatras lies in the use of unique allegorical figures, such as bibek (the moral consciousness) and niyati, the fate.

In the early 20th century, the group took over political themes and was called Swadeshi Jatra with plays focused on social issues such as untouchability, non-violent movement and opposed the colonialist ideology and oppression by the British officers. 

The use of heroic characters from legends and myths, often revered by the audience, inspired patriotism and nationalism amongst the common people.

Nautanki, the folk theatre group also known as svang, emerging in the 19th century Uttar Pradesh, has been a pioneering force playing a critical role in steering the nationalist movement. 

Troupes such as Pt. Ramraj Tripathi’s Shri Ram Sangit Mandali were used to gather an audience for nationalist leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru. Performed in an elevated stage in local languages, Nautanki, under the influence of Parsi theatre, adorned a wide spectrum of modern conventions such as wings and front curtains, proscenium stage with backdrops, adapting commercial form to the traditional theatre.

In the first half of the 20th century, contemporary sentiment against the British and the feudal landlords found a voice through Nautankis such as Sultana Daku, Jallianwala Bagh and Amar Singh Rathore. 

War dramas such as Ballia Balidan, presenting the life of martyr Chittu Panday and promoting Hindu-Muslim unity, and Aurat Ka Pyar, designed to invoke patriotic feeling, were the hallmarks of the Nautanki group and their success in shaping the nationalist narrative.

The growing popularity and success of local folk theatre groups in creating a sense of identity amongst the common people became an issue of grave concern to the British, ultimately leading to the passing of the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876. 

THE DRAMATIC PERFORMANCES ACT OF 1876

Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan is considered to be the first nationalist and anti colonial play in the history of Indian theatre. The plot revolves around the adversaries that the peasants faced every day. By bringing these social injustices to the limelight, theatre emerged as a critique of the societal setup under the British Empire.

Angered by the heightened popularity and growing sense of nationalism, the British officers passed the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876 as a means to clamp down on the growing popularity of theatre.

The act used lucid terms such as scandalous and seditious without a defined meaning, and mandated the theatre groups to produce their scripts to the local government at least three days before the performance.

The act was later used to ban various folk performances, including Zulmi Dyer in 1922, which criticised the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.

Despite this censorship, the political fervour could not be clamped down, and street theatre continued popularising the idea of nationalism with groups such as Jann Natya Manch and Indian People’s Theatre Association.

These groups continued to contest against the powerful political structures in the 20th century as the British tried to shut down the door to the loud cries from reaching the crowd outside.

CONCLUSION

Theatre moved beyond the realms of stage and actors; it has historically played a crucial role in determining power, and performances adorned the cloak of dissent. It moved beyond ornaments and the grand set designs, to the streets, to connect with the common man and emerge as a resounding force steering revolution and change.

Despite censorship, theatre continued to remain a means of subversion. Today, while the stage is now replaced with screens, the objective remains the same: when political legitimacy falters, performance once again becomes a lethal weapon, reclaiming the public spaces and exposing the power to the audience it seeks to control. 

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BY ANANYA SHARMA

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com