Academic literature on the topic 'Utpal Dutta'

In the Post-Independence era, the prolific playwrights of India started using the aesthetic form of theater to contest authoritarian structures, and to voice their anti-establishment dissent. Utpal Dutt, a pioneering figure in Modern Indian Theater, used the medium of drama for propaganda and political conscientization of the oppressed. The indefatigable thespian contributed significantly towards the formation of modern Bengali theater, as his plays voiced his intransigent protest against the authoritarian government and concurrently, showed his impressive experimentation with different dramatic techniques, theatrical devices and theatrical genres. Dutt’s anti-establishment play, Nightmare City presents a fastidious account of the turbulent years of late-1960s and early-1970s Bengal gripped by Naxalite violence and police brutalism. Set against the backdrop of Naxalite insurgency, the play savagely exposes the ideological hypocrisy of the autocratic government leaders of the time and their violent hooliganism. However, the playwright, in sync with his earlier plays, has not only portrayed the tumultuous socio-political ambiance of the 70s Calcutta, but has also constructed a soul-shattering voice of resistance to the political oppressions perpetuated by the state apparatuses. The objective of this paper is to study the revolutionary propaganda of Dutt and redefine his concept of “political theater” with special reference to his intricately structured political satire, Nightmare City.

This paper is an attempt to explore how the powerful gaze of the panoptical power relation through the technological aids of this neocolonial era which forms the ‘Self,’ distorts the identity, privacy and liberty of the lives under this surveillance who becomes the ‘other’. The study is based on the reading of Rituparno Ghosh’s 2007 English–language film The Last Lear. The film which won the National Award of India for the best feature film in English in 2007 is based on a 1985 Bengali play, Ajker Shajahan ( Today’s Shakespeare) written by Utpala Dutt. The film unfolds the story of an aging Shakespearean actor persuaded by a young ambitious director to take up acting again. But the retired actor is unwilling to adjust the new world of cinema and its complex technical tricks. The film also expose how the powerful camera gaze and mobile phones turn as the new colonizer who distorts truth and induce fears in the minds of the people under surveillance. This study is carried out based on the Post-Panoptical theories of Surveillance.

Folk theatre is the root of modern Indian drama, and with the advancement of modernity, folk theatre keeps balancing the dynamic aspect of modernity. Most of India's well-known playwrights overcame the limitations of regional language throughout the 1970s and produced a number of excellent plays on a national scale. The majority of their experimental productions were focused on incorporating Indian folk theatre components or performance traditions into mainstream theatre. As a result, we see Utpal Dutt using Jatra in Surya Sikar and Girish Karnad adopting Yakshagna, a traditional type of theatre, in his play Hayavadana (1972). In order to create a new type of theatre that he called the "Third Theatre" or "Street Theatre", Badal Sircar experimented with incorporating folk elements into proscenium theatres. Similar to his contemporaries, Vijay Tendulkar also experimented with many types of folk drama in Ghasiram Kotwal (1972) and other plays. The current study is an integrated effort to concentrate on how tradition and modernity are portrayed in Vijay Tendulkar's plays. Another way to put it is that modernity has economic, social, cultural, and political ramifications. A cultural driving force with social, economic, and political ramifications is tradition. Vijay Tendulkar explores both conventional and contemporary tendencies in his plays through folk theatre. In his plays, he combines elements of heritage and modernism. They are entangled with both modernity and tradition. One may easily notice Tendulkar's keen observation of life in his plays . He strikes a delicate balance between tradition and contemporary in expressing the social realities . The purpose of this article is try to understand how Tendulkar employed various folk theatre styles to express power dynamics and the outcome of oppression, a very modern and postcolonial subject, on stage.