Police of Pig and Sheep: Representations of the White Sahib and the construction of theatre censorship in colonial India

Abstract

The dramas that triggered the British imposed 1876 Dramatic Performance Act in India reveal a playful indictment of the British colonial character in portrayals that range from benevolent missionaries, swindlers, rapists, lusty princes, and monkeys, to pigs and sheep. This paper examines the relationship between dramatic representations of the white sahib (colonial ruler) and the construction of theatre censorship, through the plays performed by The Great National Theatre, Calcutta: Dinabandhu Mitra's Indigo Mirror (Nil Darpan, 1860), Dakshina Charan Chattopadhyay's Tea Planters' Mirror (Chakar Darpan, 1875), Upendra Nath Das's Surendra-Binodini (1875), Gajadananda and the Prince (1876), and Police of Pig and Sheep (1876). In this discussion I hope to illustrate how the British perpetuated colonial hegemony in alliance with a Brahman and Indian elite and in so doing deflected the native gaze away from its own representations, whereby what was political was branded ‘obscene’ and resistance to the colonial ‘other’ was forced into self-abnegation.

Notes

^1. For a history of the Great National Theatre see Rimli Bhattacharya (in Binodini 172–73).

^2. Parsi entrepreneurs pioneered the modern urban professional commercial theatre. Though originally centred in Bombay (1853–) the Parsi Theatre had by the 1870s spread to all parts of India with major companies routinely touring to Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, Delhi, and the Gangetic plain Calcutta and Madras, and even as far as Rangoon, Singapore and London (Hansen 80). Early performances were in Gujarati and English, and from the 1870s were mostly in Urdu. See Suvorova Early Urdu Theatre.

^3. Poor peasants and small landlords exposed the exploitation of the East India Company indigo planters in Bengal. Though protests against the planters had ensued since ca. 1839, the movement gained momentum after First War of Indian Independence lending to the Indigo Revolt in 1859. It should also be noted that by 1861 the cultivation of indigo had almost come to its end.

Out of 500 copies of Indigo Mirror's English translation, only 14 copies were distributed in India itself (Gupta 96).

^4. The indigo planters and missionaries had long been at odds; both having decisive interests on the indigo belt.

^5. Phulan Devi, Rani of Jhansi and Mother India are among popular representations (see Hansen 194–98).

^6. Britain's 1737 Licensing Act had been passed in order to protect Walpole's government from criticism on the stage, and its terms were later redefined in the 1843 Theatre Act. Both required scripts to be submitted in advance of production for the Lord Chamberlain's approval (Nicholson 4). Unlike the Indian Dramatic Performance Act, which specified its powers to ‘prohibit public dramatic performances which are scandalous, defamatory, seditious or obscene’ (British Indian Government 1), Britain's legislature at home offered no criteria to define precisely the grounds on which a license could be refused (Nicholson 4). It was only in 1909 when a joint parliamentary committee was held that the terms of licensing were elucidated (Aldgate and Robertson 1).

^7. Surendra-Binodini was first performed on 14 August 1875 at the New Aryan Theatre, and in the same year at the Bengal Theatre (see Rimli Bhattacharya in Binodini 157). In 1876 it had also been playing in repertoire with Gajadananda and the Prince, until the latter was withdrawn.

^8. The re-trial compared Surendra-Binodini with a European melodramatic novel Twenty Straws (author unknown) and plays performed in London like Sonnambula Travatore and Don Juan, Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor and Romeo and Juliet. It was asserted by the Defence Council that ‘if such plays were performed in the great city which was in the highest state of civilization, there was really no necessity for plays in Calcutta to be so closely scrutinized’ (qtd in Gupta 278–79).

^9. Das had reportedly given a stirring speech (in English) on actresses the very night Surendra-Binodini was pulled off of the stage (Gupta 261).

^10. See Pandhe for full debate on legislature leading to the Dramatic Performance Ordinance, between Lord Northbrook, Hobhouse, Temple and other government lawmakers.

^11. This Is How You Can Shut the Chattering Mouth of the British may also have been prohibited under the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 and the Press Act of 1910.