Public Women in British India: Icons and the Urban Stage
About this ebook
Each chapter offers new ways of conceptualising the actress as a professional, a colonial subject, simultaneously the other and the model of the ‘new woman’. An underlying motif is the playing out of the idea of spiritual salvation, redemption and modernity. Analysing the dynamics behind stagecraft and spectacle, the study highlights the politics of demarcation and exclusion of social roles. It presents rich archival work from diverse sources, many translated for the first time.
This book makes a distinctive contribution in intertwining performance studies with literary history and art practices within a cross-cultural framework. Interdisciplinary and innovative, it will appeal to scholars and researchers in South Asian theatre and performance studies, history and gender studies.
About the author
Rimli Bhattacharya currently teaches at the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. She has trained in Comparative Literature at Jadavpur and Brown Universities and has been Visiting Professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, the University of Pennsylvania and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She has collaborated with artists and filmmakers on multimedia projects and has published on critical areas in gender and performance, children’s literature and primary education. Her corpus of classic translations from Bangla into English includes novels by Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore. She is the author of the key text Binodini Dasi: ‘My Story’ and ‘My Life as an Actress’ (1998) and The Dancing Poet: Rabindranath Tagore and Choreographies of Participation (forthcoming).
