Words, Space and Enacting the Archive
Ashutosh Potdar*
Abstract
This article reflects on the enactment of the archive in ideation and composition of a story through words and space. Focusing on his own engagement with the archive in playwriting, Ashutosh Potdar discusses the different artistic ways and techniques of dramatic compositions and theatrical representations in archival engagement and historicizing of a reality in India. Investigating different methodologies of writing a play, the article also addresses dramaturgical mediations in the context of evolving identities, languages, mobilities, collaborations and the dynamics of the local and the global.
Keywords: archive, colonial theatre, Marathi Drama, playwriting, Theatre Studies, dramaturgy
Focusing on my two plays, Sindhu Sudhakar Rum ani Itar (2017) and Sadasarvada Purvapar (2019), this paper discusses the role of archival material in the creative process of writing a play. The archival material here is the material that records the before and after of a performance. It is leftovers in the form of conceptual and physical material, organised and unorganised collections. Playwriting is not merely the act of scripting by an author; it is also a dramaturgical practice that involves shaping a narrative through rehearsals and iterative processes.
In this paper, firstly, I’ll explain what I meant by document, archive and the challenges I faced in working with theatre archives in India. Secondly, I will dwell on the process of writing Sindhu Sudhakar Rum ani Itar while working on the archive of a popular play from the early twentieth century and discuss how it has informed my understanding of society and history, on the one hand, and play-writing, on the other. Thirdly, I will reflect on my engagement with the presence and absence of the archive and the dramaturgical practice, in collaboration with a theatre director, with reference to Sadasarvada Purvapar.
A document, or दस्तऐवज in Marathi, is an original piece of visual, written or printed matter. It is a property or an instrument that has the power to create information for evidence. The information provided in a document can be transferred, elaborated or archived. To document a thing or a process is to apply references and notes to authoritative material.
An archive is daftar, a place to gather, classify and organise a document or documents. It is also daftarkhana, a public office, arche (archEE) run by the government. Objects, practices and processes are first documented and then archived. The archival repositories store material systematically and ensure its retrieval. All the documents collected can be stored systematically, but they may not be worthy of archiving. This is because the archival material needs to have the curatorial vision and the potential to generate cultural data. An archivist is a specialist in gathering, classifying and organising a document or documents. They come with special training in the field of documentation or historical studies. Ganesh Hari Khare, one of the earliest historians of Maratha history, discusses an appointment of an archivist in the Bombay Province in the early twentieth century in an essay, published in 1947, Mumbai Sarkarache Daftarkhane. In his essay, Khare examines a newspaper advertisement (Khare 47) that specifies the qualifications required for an archivist position. The ad states that candidates should possess an MA, PhD or DLit degree in History, along with training in archiving or library practices. Interestingly, the advertisement expected that a candidate should have government representation in a heavy-weight academic institution and should participate in intellectual debate.
Establishing and maintaining a successful theatre archive takes a certain amount of archival knowledge and skill, but it also requires time, money, long-term commitment and institutional advocacy. In India, institutionalised cultural documentation and archiving in a printed or photographic form was familiarised and popularised in colonial times in the nineteenth century, with the emergence of new administrative practices, education, print technologies and forms of knowledge consumption and circulation. Since then, the archives have been set by governmental organisations or corporate houses for administrative purposes or to preserve legacies. However, that doesn’t mean that the entire concept of cultural archives was foreign to India. One can see that in India, the primary ways of documenting or recording culture exist in different written forms and multiple oral traditions have prevailed in various areas of life. One needs to find context-specific practices and methodologies for engaging with the archiving practices.
The archival repositories of theatre have mainly existed in the physical or digital forms of printed material available in the libraries. The repositories are expected to create a comprehensive base for and provide provocations to critical and creative work concerning the documented material. Theatre-makers, researchers and scholars have always emphasized the need to look at the archives as a substantive source in writing the history of the theatre. For instance, Shankar Bapuji Mujumdar, the Manager of Kirloskar Natak Mandali, a well-known theatre company in nineteenth-century India, credited to have created a newer vocabulary of theatrical form,[1] writes in foreword to Ganesh Ranganath Dandwate’s book Maharashtra Natyakala va Natyavangamay: 1841-1930 (Maharashtrian Dramatic Art and Dramatic Literature: 1841- 1930): “More and more material of theatre-art history should be published in Maharashtra language (Marathi). It will be useful in writing the future history of the theatre of our nation” (Mujumdar 9). However, despite the archive’s essential role in performance practices, it remains the most neglected source of information in the theatre archive. As far as Marathi theatre practices go, the theatre material hasn’t been maintained; leave aside developing the archive. Whatever material we get to see is in print form, published in theatre-history books and periodicals. Or it is published in souvenirs released in the celebration of birth or death anniversaries of well-known writers or artists. Despite this typical interest in treating archival material in celebrating our ‘glorious past’, the archives are largely ignored in maintaining the legacies of theatre.
Also, preserving theatre requires time, money and long-term commitment. The theatre I have been part of has been mostly non-mainstream, non-commercial activity with limited financial resources and weak sustenance models. Though society in general loves this ephemeral art of theatre, it doesn’t seem to be concerned about the theatre’s value and locating its place in history and culture. A theatre worker or a group is mostly focused on the making of theatre. The government is unenthusiastic about archiving. Therefore, researchers or creative artists engaging with the archives have to work with very limited sources.
In writing my two plays, I focused on the records that are generated in the course of creating, producing and publicizing theatre productions. I studied archival material to establish a historical framework for my work, understand social networks and meanings, and decode artistic forms and practices. Besides written material, I looked into photo documentation, press clippings, reviews, letters written by artists, song lists, set design notes, painted sceneries, visual expressions in the typographical arrangements, stamps, logos, posters, advertisements, leaflets, and so on. Additionally, I was intrigued by the contract agreements, financial and other accounts maintained by theatre groups and their performance travel records in the nineteenth century.
A part of my work has been to retrieve and revisit the archival material. The archive was stimuli for my plays, the processes and their forms. As a playwright, I intended to creatively engage with the archive material at two levels: archive as a concept and archive as a material. In this, I worked with two different forms of the archive.
One was found material, such as written documents of letters and contract agreements, theatre posters and newspaper announcements, photographs, biographies and autobiographies related to a playwright and his play. These are materials produced before or after a performance. Another form of material I worked with was sought objects that are not present in the archive but have had an existence—local performances and narratives of theatre artists that I witnessed while growing up in a village and working in the cities across India. As I am going to explain in the later part of my presentation, my interest was in retrieving the material to make it fit my understanding of playwriting and dramaturgical practice, The process involves retrieval and revisit in order to re-create. The process changed the form and function of the accessed archival material, while it was being reshaped and recontextualised in exploring the dramatic world.
For the retrieval, revisit and recreation, I focused on dramaturgical practices in the broad sense of the term that cover not only scripting by an author but also devising a narrative through rehearsals and ongoing processes. My engagement was with the intersection of pre-production research work, engagement with the team of artists, dramaturgical mediations and directorial perspectives while highlighting the dialogue between archive, research and creation in the contemporary context in India and outside.
The engagement with the archive has allowed me to creatively interact with the material that holds, in Walter Benjamin’s term, “messianic power” (Benjamin 2). It enabled me to understand our present time through the context of the past. The interaction created immense possibilities of, “encounter,” to use Louis Althusser’s term that he discussed in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87. As Althusser discusses, in the history of philosophy, there exists, apart from the rationalist traditions of materialism, another kind of materialism, the materialism of the encounter. He argues for a randomness of origins, that is, a “non-necessary chance” from which the world is born. An Althusserian definition of an encounter hence presupposes birth from vacuum—the coming of the new. For him, the encounter is essentially a “non-necessary chance,” and it is the randomness of origins from which the world keeps being born. It is hence a self-renewing process of those involved in such a “chance.” I believed such a “non-necessary chance” opened up possibilities of ‘creative/cultural encounters’ to make a play happen (Althusser 163-208).
I explored archival material from theatre’s past to make it relevant for the present by reimagining it in contemporary time and space. The now moment has been an abiding force in bringing my re-visualizing and reimagining of the archival material in contemporary times. I worked mediating between two poles: the then of the archive and the now of the performance. Based on the material, I created texts that capture the ephemeral nature of a performance—occurring at a specific moment in time. As a playwright, I view the playwriting process as a real-time event.
My job was to write a text to capture ideas, imagining them happening in a particular moment. I write words to be uttered in a performance, but when those words are uttered in a performance, they are lost in that specific moment, since they are presented in a live performance. But before that performance gets lost in a particular moment, it has been archived—in the form of a written word or of visuals and sounds. Thus, there is a live work; however, the next moment, the live work turns into an archive. That way, I am also an archivist of a performance. However, inside my mind, I wish to create a long-lasting impact of the play through my written words. Is this a long-lasting impact to do with impacting affectively or to be remembered in history? Another question that comes to my mind is: What’s the role of a playwright? An archivist/a collector or a curator?
A Dramatic Retelling
Sindhu, Sudhkar, Rum ani Itar is a dramatic retelling of the story of one of the famous Indian plays of the early twentieth century, Ekach Pyala (Just a Glass) written by Ram Ganesh Gadkari (1885–1919) in 1917. My play, set in a costume designer’s studio, is a story of five characters: Apple, Rama, Raghu, a tailor and a cyclist, who are working towards a period film based on Ekach Pyala. The characters from diverse backgrounds, equipped with their own means and motivated by their own ends, get engulfed in the characters and plot of the Ekach Pyala.
Through the dramatic role-playing and constant game of flipping costumes, characters and mannequins in the studio, my play is a journey into colourful and dark facets of society and individuals transgress boundaries of time and space. In writing Sindhu, Sudhakar, Rum ani Itar; my interest was in reinterpreting Ekach Pyala in the larger context of society and performative traditions in India. I attempted to find the past and the present frames punctuating each other. I tried, in Rebecca Schneider’s words, “to bring that time—that prior moment—to the very fingertips of the present (Schneider 3).

Ekach Pyala has fascinated several Marathi-speaking generations in India. It is a story of the tragic effects of alcoholism on a young lawyer, Sudhakar, his wife Sindhu and their baby son. The melodrama about the tragic end of an alcoholic, his wife and child is modelled on Shakespearean drama. The lead role in the original 1919 production was performed by the great Indian actor and female impersonator, Bal Gandharv (1888–1967). Several well-known actors from different generations have performed characters in the play enthusiastically as a challenge in their performing careers.
There have been different attempts in commercial as well as amateur theatre to perform the entire play, scenes or monologues from it. The mainstream media has aimed at keeping the (glorious) past alive through Ekach Pyala. Its goal has been to allow modern audiences to see past celebrity figures engaging with their fans, helping them to re-experience and re-imagine these figures in a way that makes the past more appealing. The primary thought implicit here is that the memory of “the glorious past” should be revived before it dies. For them, the memory and the archive of the play become a tool to re-experience the past by celebrating those moments. The moments are non-negotiable for the artists and society because both believe in the glories of the past. The underlying belief in the popular re-enactment of Ekach Pyala is that the past moments couldn’t be moved away from their position of glorification. The past event of the popular play has been rendered repeatedly to preserve its glorified status and talk about its importance in contemporary times. It was a kind of reiterative act of telling people what happened at that time with a particular legendary play, the characters in the plays and the female impersonation of Balgandharva.

In this context, I revisited Ekach Pyala and enacted the archive that informed my understanding of Ekach Pyala, its history and its form. I imagined a character wearing a saree that Bal Gandharv might have had in his performance. The material is from the past, but I imagined “what if” an individual from today, the character of a costume designer in the contemporary reimagination, would hold the same saree and look at it to design something like it in today’s time. Thus, the question was what Schneider asks: “I wonder here not only about the ‘as if’ but also about the ‘what if’: what if the time (re)turns? What does it drag along with it? I have been interested in the attempt to touch time through the residue of the gesture or the cross-temporality of the pose” (Schneider 2).
The story of the past in Sindhu Sudhakar Rum ani Itar turns into a story of the present. The characters from the present confuse themselves with history. I played with the in-between-spaces of the past and the present. While working on Sindhu, Sudhakar, Rum ani Itar, I realised that Ram Ganesh Gadkari’s Ekach Pyala is engraved in the memory of contemporary middle-class society in Maharashtra. Through different archival documents and myths, Ekach Pyala and Bal Gandharv have continued to remain embedded in the popular imagination in the form of bio-sketches, commercial films and singing the singles from the play. As part of my research work, I looked into the material on the play and the actors in the archives and libraries.
The task for me was to search for the theatrical past through the photographs and written narratives, as well as what is not available in material form, such as gestures or memories of songs and music. A tricky part of the entire exercise was that the archival material about Ekach Pyala and the performances of the aura of Balgandharva existed in multiple forms, including a popular film, Balgandharva (2011). My understanding of Balgandharva and his theatre evolved through all these expressions. The archival research helped me provide the body poses and gestures of old-time sangeet natak (Musical Drama) relevant to the characters I wrote in Sindhu Sudhakar Rum ani Itar. The available recordings of voice modulations that Balgandharva was known for helped me bring musicality in my play. Interestingly, any actor or singer performing Balgandharva’s songs on the stage doesn’t have to be known or versatile like Balgandharva. But the memory of that song would be something that would be carried forward through archived moments. While the memory of Balgandharva and his aura draws the contemporary audience to the play, I responded to the memory and the remains of the memory in my play.
As discussed in the beginning, the archival material on theatre isn’t easily available. It is scattered through the libraries. What is mostly available is printed material. We don’t have dedicated archival spaces that collect and curate theatre objects and materials. Thus, when I say I worked with the archive, I engaged with the spaces that disobeyed the disciplinary space of an archive as a curated space. What I found was a constellation of material. I looked at fragments from different times and contexts. Also, I had seen different versions of Ekach Pyala as I was growing up. Additionally, the material I studied in the archives and the libraries was not the same as the practice I had witnessed. Thus, I remained in the spaces that were constantly moving, connecting different dots from my past and the play’s past.
While the archival material helped me structure my play through the writing process, the organising principle for the archival work was my desire to develop a play. I drew on the archive as a reconstruction of the lost. That way, I felt the playwriting process would need to seep through an archive, whether it is of texts, teaching practices, skills or just memories. In my engagement with the archive while developing the play, Sindhu Sudhakar Rum ani Itar, and bringing performativity in it, the questions that came to my mind were: How does one look at the archive that is not in a documented form but in one’s memory in the form of visuals or sounds? How do we understand what is lost? How much is lost, and at what point is it lost? For whom is it lost in a group of performers we are working with?
Performing with the Material
While Sindhu Sudhakar Rum ani Itar enabled me to investigate the archive through a play, my other play, Sadasarvada Purvapar (2019) was an effort to theatricalise the material through the simultaneous activity of writing a script as well as working on it through the theatre processes designed by the director, Sharmistha Saha. The play revolves around three researchers, namely Rafique, Ria and Nadi, who are looking for a lost play, based on the well-known story of the romance of Karna and Draupadi from the Mahabharata, the epic. Another character named Netaji—a roadside bookseller who knows the entire mystery behind the lost play—refuses to divulge any details. Dinanath, an important character of the play within the play, has been barred from performing the play on Karna-Draupadi and the three researchers wish to understand why. In the process, the characters realise that there is a lot of subterfuge regarding its performance. This is the crux of my play, which explores the relationship between an archive, history and performance unfolding like a detective mystery. Through the search for the missing play, three character-researchers address questions such as: Who maintains records of such a play that is lost? What material do we have to prove that it was performed? And if we don’t have an archive of the play, can we say that this play never happened? Was the play erased from history as per the convenience of society?

As a part of the process, the director and I conducted a workshop with theatre artists and (humanities and media studies) students to explore the connections between the archive and performance-making. Sharmistha developed a performance exhibition that involved the curation of interludes of visual and performance exhibits within the narrative of the performance traditions as well as the relevant socio-political context in colonial India. It was an exercise of animating the archival material with theatrical energies to bring about the synergies between the archive, society and individuals. Instead of presenting a linear narrative by establishing a connection between the archive and the performance, Sharmistha’s idea of performance exhibition helped me explore the power dynamics between actors managers and patrons through the stories of the material objects and exhibiting them in a space. As a writer sitting through the process, I could respond to visual images, abstract movements and soundscapes that enabled me to sketch different scenes for the process and later writing of the play, Sadasarvada Purvapar.

As a part of the methodology, while developing the play script of Sadasarvada Purvapar, I accessed the archival material connected to nineteenth-century theatre practices in India. It included the contract agreement between the theatre company manager and the director, Vishnudas Bhave (1819–1901) and the artists in the company, his letter to his patron Chintamanrao Patwardhan, the ruler of the State of Sangli, and Vishnudas Bhave’s biography written by Raosaheb Vasudev Ganesh Bhave in 1943. I visualised the now absent Bhave’s theatre group and the group’s dynamic engagement with the audiences as ‘real’ while writing Sadasarvada Purvapar.
The study of the material that belonged to Bhave and his company, as well as its reading in the rehearsal process enabled me to write dialogues in old Marathi suitable for stylised performance and reimagine the Mahabharata epic narrative in contemporary times. The material helped me better understand the actual “event” of performance within the broader theatrical public sphere that emerged within the nineteenth-century middle-class society. In the later stage of work, the archival material collected and the scene work in Sadasarvada Purvapar was taken up for a performance by Sharmistha Saha with the actors of Lalit Kala Kendra, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune.

The material also reiterated the general perception that nineteenth-century colonial theatre practices followed the ongoing mythical tradition of drawing from epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayan. However, while visualising the Mahabharata characters of Karna and Draupadi for Sadasarvada Purvapar, I found it difficult to pinpoint the exact perception of memories of these characters of the Mahabharata as no record of performing these characters in the epic was found, except in certain Medieval poetic traditions. It led me to think that an individual from a society that likely experienced the epics through performative traditions, such as keertan (a form of recitation), carries the Mahabharata within their mind. The epics have been present in memory. Everyone’s memory of epics has been different. This is a special kind of memory such as other types of memories such as memory of food or memory of space, memory of a performance that is being enacted through a play.
One of the interesting observations that has emerged from the research work and creative process that I followed independently and with Sharmistha Saha was that it’s not just physical archival material that I engaged with but also with an idea. Through the artistic process, I could work with immaterial archives- in the form of memories or thoughts that are out there. The biographical reference to the work of Vishnudas Bhave mentions that he was asked to perform something like Bhagwat Mela. Another record says that he grew up listening, and watching the Ramayana and the Mahabharata from storytellers and kirtankars. However, the record doesn’t mention what exactly he followed that resulted in the emergence of modern professional theatre that he is supposed to have pioneered. And, what archive/archival material or idea are we referring to build our performance in today’s time? These and other unanswered questions directed me to build my own creative space of playwriting.
Whose Space and Whose Archive?
In one of the exercises that I did with Sharmistha Saha while creating Sadasarvada Purvapar, we looked into material on society, caste and politics in nineteenth-century India. One such material was related tothe revolutionary thinker, writer and Bhave’s contemporary, Mahatma Jotirao Phule (1827–90). Phule wrote a play, The Third Jewel, in 1885. In this play, a cunning Brahmin priest exploits an ignorant and superstitious peasant couple and later, a Christian missionary enlightens the couple. Broadly, the play addresses how systemic intervention by the dominant caste of Brahmins had imposed their authority over the lower castes. It is a known fact, as Phule himself has recorded in his book Slavery, that he had attempted to publish The Third Jewel with support from the Dakshina Prize Committee. But the influence of upper-caste Brahmins on the committee resulted in the rejection of the play. Therefore, the play was not published but much later, almost after a hundred years, in April-June 1979.
We also discussed and read out a letter that Mahatma Phule had written to Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) on June 11, 1885. In this letter, Phule acknowledges Ranade’s invitation to participate in the proposed conference of the Marathi authors. In the same letter, he contested the hierarchical politics and the literary culture in the nineteenth century. Phule wrote in his letter: “But then esteemed sir, the conferences and the books of those who refuse to think of human rights generally, who do not concede them to others and going by their behaviour are unlikely to concede them in future, cannot make sense to us, they cannot concur with what we are trying to say in our books. The reason is that their ancestors, with a view to taking revenge on us, included in their pseudo-religious texts an account of how they turned us into slaves and thus gave our enslavement religious authority” (Phule 201). Further, he announced in the letter that “Your literature and our literature can never come together. Therefore, we will develop our own literature and will hold our conferences (Phule 201).

Such reading aided us in developing our dramaturgy by exploring a variety of nineteenth-century language, its structure, the sounds of its words, and its relationship to the bahujans (masses).The dramaturgical process opened discussions about the memory of a particular section of society, the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor, hierarchical structures, writing culture and the subaltern. Phule’s discourse demanded a re-interpretation of “shared” historiographic traditions that had established specific methodologies for the investigation.
I incorporated these ideas of critical engagement with the archive in the plot and characterization of Karna and Dinanath in Sadasarvada Purvapar. Inspired by the absences of certain archives in history, I plotted the detective form of a play in which the characters are in search of a missing play. It enabled us to acknowledge the fact that an archive does not remain only a physical property or an idea but also a provocation to imagine a different reality and a newer world order.
The lesson I learned was that the existence of the archive can manipulate history and historical processes. And the absence of the archive can trigger the creative process for a new world. The creation of theatre work, in such a case, reaches beyond documentary material evidence because there is no material available. This raised a series of questions: Is a writer able to develop a specific structure and characterisation through the search for a missing archive? Has a society remained oblivious to particular material that has disappeared, silenced or pushed into the darkness? Is it because society is not courageous enough to accommodate the fluid archive as the same archive can be slapped in its face? Has the creative process remained blindfolded to the intervention of the power play dynamic of an archive?
Thus, in conclusion, my journey of a creative process through the archive has been complex. There is always a sense of incompleteness I feel as a writer, as I am not able to access the past in its entirety through the enactment of the archive. Again and again, I would like to go back to that point in time, touch it, re-touch it, get something from it and interpret it. I knew I couldn’t change what was recorded. Nevertheless, I knew that I was making it available for my dramaturgy and collaboration. I was also aware that it’s not available in the form it could have existed. There are multiple filters—images, biographies, autobiographies, audio-video recordings and interpretations of other artists in different forms of expression. It’s always been a play between the past and the present, as well as a blurring of boundaries between the two. It’s like being at the threshold – umbra in Marathi—neither inside nor outside of the archive and the performance. And it has been a fascinating and reflective journey.
NOTE: I am grateful to Aishwarya Walvekar, Sharmistha Saha and Anagha Mandavar for giving me feedback on the paper at different stages of its writing.
Endnote
[1] Meera Kosambi writes in Gender, Culture and Performance: Marathi Theatre and Cinema Before Independence, “The Kirloskar tradition’s popularity and longevity was proof of the significant space it had carved out as a relatively realistic, musically enriching, and socially acceptable form of entertainment. On the one level it bridged the divide between a mythological and a social or family play; on another it ‘musicalised’ the audiences far more deeply than any other regional theatre tradition in India” (83).
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*Ashutosh Potdar is Associate Professor of Literature and Drama in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at FLAME University in Pune. His scholarly work in English and Marathi has explored Colonial Drama, Narrative Theory and Drama Studies and, more recently, the connections between the archive and performance making combining research and creative practice. He has published his research work on literature and drama in English and Marathi in various journals and presented papers at national and international conferences. He edited the anthology Greatest Marathi Stories Ever Told (Aleph Book Company) and co-edited a collection of essays on performance-making and the archive, as well as an anthology of art writing in Marathi. An award-winning writer, Ashutosh has authored numerous one-act and full-length plays, poems, short fiction and translations. He also serves as the editor of हाकारा । hākārā, a peer-reviewed bilingual journal of creative expression available online in both Marathi and English.
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Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
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