Research in Drama Education

Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2006, pp. 59
75 /

Negotiating ‘theatre (in place/instead)

of war’
Syed Jamil Ahmed*
University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

The small string of words ‘in place of’ is problematic because if it denotes ‘instead of’ then it is
questionable whether conflicts and wars can ever be abrogated so long as there are relations of
power. However, if the string denotes a location, i.e. a war zone, then it is not inconsequential that
we justify our eagerness for knowledge on performances of war zones when the war machines of the
North are in business in the South in this monopolised
globalised world. This essay negotiates the
problematic string by examining the notions of ‘theatre in place of war’ and ‘social drama’. It tests
the validity of ‘social drama’ by examining the rituals of Devol Madua in Sri Lanka and Pangtoed
‘Cham in Sikkim and scrutinises the utility of ‘theatre in place of war’ against the notion of
nationalism as a political construct by examining four plays from contemporary Sri Lanka and
Bangladesh in 1971. It concludes by arguing that it is necessary for theatre practitioners who devise
performances as mechanisms of healing or as a tool for resistance to see that they are not subjects as
agents of peace (and its substitutes) but complex and variable functions of numerous discourses,
located in specific historical contexts, constituted within relations of power, many tentacles of
which are invisible, and that they are engaged in micropolitics.

What is the relationship of theatre to war and conflict? What are the ways in which
theatre gets used as a mechanism for healing and as a tool for resistance? What can be
learnt from an understanding of theatre in situations of extreme conflict such as war?
Faced with violence and ravages of war, what role does a theatre practitioner play?
Having been through a war as an urban guerrilla, having seen dead bodies rotting
with gaping holes and the charred remains of abandoned homes, having walked the
streets of Dhaka city, clasping the clip of an unpinned grenade in my trouser pocket,
it never occurred to me that theatre could have a function in a war zone. But then, I
was only 16 and completely uninformed about the subtleties of life and theatre.
Although I am still grappling with both, I am prepared to agree unhesitatingly with
Richard Schechner (2002b) when he says, it is not necessarily true that while battle
rages people not only think of surviving but also make theatre. That theatre,
following Victor Turner’s formula of ‘social drama’, may even function as a
mechanism of redressive action and plural reflexivity. However, when James
Thompson (2005), in a conference paper presented at the University of Exeter in

*Department of Theatre and Music, Arts Faculty Building, University of Dhaka, Dhaka 1000,
Bangladesh. Email: arnab.agni.com
ISSN 1356-9783 (print)/ISSN 1470-112X (online)/06/010059-17
# 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569780500437705
60 S. J. Ahmed

April 2005, advocated for a ‘theatre of beauty in sites of war’, and not theatre instead
of war, I am challenged to think afresh: what happened in Bangladesh in 1971? What
is happening in Sri Lanka and Sikkim today? How valid is Turner’s formula and
Thompson’s notion?
This essay is a testimony of a journey that was impelled by the notions of ‘theatre
in place of war’ and ‘social drama’ in which I occasionally abandon an impersonal
identity associated with traditional European academicism in my writing. In seeking
to negotiate*i.e. ‘to discuss’ and also ‘to navigate around’, ‘to cross’ and ‘to cope
/

with’*the uncharted terrain of ‘theatre in place of war’, I intend to proceed in three

/

stages. Stage one begins with a brief review of Turner’s notion of social drama,
provides a historical context in which Sri Lankan performances based on ethnic
violence need to be read, then moves on to examine the ritual of Devol Madua that is
still performed in Sri Lanka, briefly discusses the performance of Pangtoed ‘Cham
that is still performed in Sikkim (now annexed by India) and ends by testing the
validity of Turner’s concept. Stage two begins with a brief review of Thompson’s
notion of ‘theatre of beauty and pain in sites of war’, examines four plays from
contemporary Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in 1971, and ends by examining the utility
of Thompson’s notion against the notion of nationalism as a political construct. The
third stage does not so much furnish prophetic ‘answers’ to the questions posed at
the beginning of the essay; rather it problematises the relationship between theatre
and situations of war by invoking Foucauldian expositions on ‘subject’, ‘discourse’
and ‘power’.
It is necessary to insert a note of acknowledgement before I proceed. In his
conference paper, Thompson’s advocacy of theatre of beauty in sites of war urged me
to search for ‘theatre of war’ in Bangladesh. The major research project of which
Thompson is director, ‘In Place of War’, seeks to examine performance in sites of
conflict (www.inplaceofwar.net). Quite frankly, nothing has been written on the
subject, although the liberation war features prominently both in the political
harangue and in ideological articulations of cultural activists. Hence, I gratefully
acknowledge my indebtedness to Thompson for provoking me to examine a
‘forgotten’ location of my own postcolonial history.

‘Social drama’ and rituals in Sri Lanka and Sikkim

Victor Turner’s work on social dramas provides an obvious theoretical lens through
which to view the civil war in Sri Lanka. The country is an important research site for
Thompson and his collaborators, and Sri Lankan theatre is the subject of my own
research in a recent publication (Ahmed, 2003). Hence, this is an extremely suitable
common ground to commence my negotiation from.
Turner contends that each social system contains within itself hierarchical orders
arranged with their followings. Each of these orders, in the effort to further its own
interest, face opposition from those which find their interest hindered. The
consequent situation of conflict is seen as a clash between ‘indetermination’ (i.e.
 Negotiating ‘theatre (in place/instead) of war’ 61

that which ‘could be’ or ‘should be’) and ‘modes of determination’ of the normative
structure. The process of conflict, argues Turner, is universal and it invariably follows
a four-stage course of action: ‘breach, crisis, redress and either reintegration or
recognition of schism’ (Turner, 1982, p. 69). In the first stage, discontent surfaces
because of a ‘breach of a norm, the infraction of a rule of morality, law, custom, or
etiquette in some public arena’ (p. 70). The breach escalates into the second stage of
‘crisis’*‘at which seeming peace becomes overt conflict and covert antagonism
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becomes visible’ (Ibid.). Once a crisis manifests itself, a redressive mechanism is

mobilised to reinstate harmony. This usually takes the shape of juridical means,
religious rituals, political or social reformative measures, and other private and public
procedures. In the fourth phase, there may be ‘reintegration’ if the redressive
measures succeed; but if the antagonists fail to reconcile and heal the breach, then a
permanent ‘schism’ is caused, bringing about radical change in the social structure.
The fourth phase of ‘social drama’, i.e. the phase of ‘redressive action’, is a
mechanism of reflexivity in which a group assesses situations of crisis. The function
of the juridical, religious or other processes set in motion in the fourth phase is to
quell mounting crisis, deal with it, and by reflecting over it, make sense out of
disharmony and chaos. It is a time of intensified reflection and problematisation that
signals reconstruction as well as critique. As a consequence of all these, the group
manifests a remarkable rise in ‘plural reflexivity’, that is, ‘the ways in which [it] tries
to scrutinize, portray, understand and then act on itself’ (Turner, 1982, p. 75).
Turner argues, all forms of performance play an important role in this phase.
By means of such genres as theatre, including puppetry and shadow theatre, dance
drama, and professional story-telling, performances are presented which probe a
community’s weaknesses, call its leaders to account, desacralize its most cherished
values and beliefs, portray its characteristic conflicts and suggest remedies for them, and
generally take stock of its current situation in the known world. (Turner, 1982, p. 11)
Following Turner’s formulation, the civil war in Sri Lanka, which erupted in 1983,
can be seen as the ‘crisis’ of the social drama that that was ‘enacted’ in the island after
it gained independence from British colonial rule. It arose out of a clash of interest
between the ‘indetermination’ of the Tamils (who constitute 18% of the population
mostly professing Brahmanical faith) and the ‘modes of determination’ of the
Sinhalese (who constitute 76% of the entire population and are mostly Buddhists).
The Sinhalese normative structure, which attempted to bind the country into a
harmonious whole, was spurred by nationalist sentiment at the end of colonisation,
and was built on the core ethnocentric principle of ‘Sinhala only’. The principle
sought to establish Sinhala (in place of English) as the official language of Ceylon and
thus set in motion a process of undoing British colonial policies. The Tamils read the
rise of Sinhalese nationalism as chauvinism and internal colonisation aimed at
destroying their ethnic identity and to imperil their linguistic, educational and
employment rights. They claim: Sinhalese nationalism ‘deprived their right to
ownership of their traditional lands, endangered their religious and cultural life and
62 S. J. Ahmed

as a consequence posed a serious threat to their very right to existence’ (Peace

Secretariat of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, 2005).
The ‘breach’ in the Sri Lankan social drama became evident in 1958 when riots
broke out between the Sinhalese and the Tamils as a consequence of the legislative
act (titled ‘Official Language Act No. 33 of 1956’) stipulating Sinhala as the only
official language of the country. The ‘precipitating event’ occurred in 1976 when the
Tamil United Liberation Front publicly mooted the concept of a separate nation
(Tamil Eelam) and contested the general election of 1977 on the issue of an
independent state for the Tamils in Sri Lanka. They won in the northern and eastern
provinces and joined the parliament to represent the Tamils. The government
retaliated by banning TLUF representatives from the parliament. Tensions between
the two communities erupted into a civil war in 1983 after Tamil guerrillas attacked
Sinhalese soldiers which in turn sparked a three-day-long riot throughout the
country resulting in the death of thousands. The Indian peace-keeping forces,
mobilised as a redressive measure, failed to negotiate the crisis. Currently, the
Norwegian-brokered peace talks have put a temporary brake on the civil war, which
has already caused the deaths of over 60,000 civilians, forced 750,000 to flee abroad
and thousands to be internally displaced.
The Sri Lankan social drama needs to be placed in its historic context. The Tamils
claim that they are the earliest settlers of the island. Although it is a matter of debate
as to when they began to populate the island, the Tamil claim of early settlement may
not be entirely groundless since only 30 miles of water separate it from south India.
They also claim the rightful status of a nation with a culture and polity distinct from
the Tamils of south India. This claim is justified by citing the history of their
independent kingdom of Jaffna which was situated in the north and east of Sri Lanka,
and flourished from the thirteenth century until Portuguese colonisation in the early
seventeenth century. During colonial administration of the British, the island was
divided into nine provinces, two of which were carved out of the kingdom of Jaffna
where the population was predominantly Tamil. ‘In so doing’, the Tamils argue, the
British ‘recognised the Tamil ethnic character of the territory and population of the
old Jaffna Kingdom and ensured its continuity . . .’ (Peace Secretariat of Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam, 2005).
For their part, the Sinhalese do not disclaim their migrant status since they trace
their descent from Prince Vijaya from southwestern Bengal, who as the legend
related in Sri Lanka’s national chronicle the Mahavamsa (Chapter Six: Geiger, 1986)
goes, landed on the island with 500 of his followers in the fifth century BC. They lay
claim to a long line of Sinhalese
Buddhist monarchs who ruled over the island since
the reign of King Devanampiya Tissa (247
207 BC), during whose time Buddhism
was introduced in the island, down to 1815 when the British colonisers extended
their authority over the kingdom of Kandy (central highlands of Sri Lanka).1 The
Sinhalese nurture intense suspicion towards the Tamils because the Sinhalese

Buddhist kingdom faced numerous Tamil invasions from south India. The most
painful of these occurred in the eleventh century (between 1017 AD and 1073 AD)
when the Brahmanical Cholas from south India invaded and occupied Sri Lanka. On
 Negotiating ‘theatre (in place/instead) of war’ 63

this occasion, according to Sinhalese chronicles, the invaders looted and destroyed
Buddhist establishments and their misrule caused famine and cannibalism among
the people, who even resorted to the corpses of dead monks. In this strife-ridden
maze of xenophobic mistrust between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, it is often
rendered invisible that the Veddas (or Wanniyla-Aetto, i.e. the ‘inhabitants of the
forest’ numbering about 3,000 and currently living in remote mountain areas) may
actually be the first nation of the island.
The ritual of Devol Madua, witnessed by the author at Kotte in 2000, is inscribed
with this history of ethnic conflict between the two communities. The key players
in the ritual are three deities: Pattini, Devol and Kataragama. Of the three,
Kataragama enjoys veneration of the widest segment of Sri Lankan society, including
the Buddhists, the Hindus, and even the Muslims. To the Veddas, Kataragama is the
Great Mountain-spirit, and Hunter-god (Harrigan, 2002). In the ritual, he plays
the role of the mediator. Pattini, the most popular goddess among the Buddhists of
Sri Lanka, represents the Sinhalese
Buddhists in the ritual. Devol may be seen as
representing waves of Tamil migrants from south India. According to a legend, Devol
was a prince of a south Indian kingdom who was expelled along with his brothers for
their aggressive and rowdy behaviour. They left as traders on a ship but were
shipwrecked and subsequently saved by divine intervention. When they prepared to
land at Seenigama in Sri Lanka, Pattini resisted their attempt by creating seven
mountains of fire. Nevertheless, because Devol had knowledge about overcoming the
fire, he succeeded in landing. Then, with the help of the god Kataragama, the
conflict was resolved on terms that Devol would receive offerings during Pattini’s
ritualised worship; in return he would cure all sickness from the land (Raghavan,
1967, pp. 134
135).
The core of the ritual of Devol Madua exemplifies the ‘way people remem-
ber’*their ‘memories in action, encoded into action’ (Schechner, 2002a, p. 45). It
/

presents the birth of Pattini, establishes the efficacy of her cult, recounts Devol’s
voyage, Pattini’s resistance, Kataragama’s mediation and peaceful resolution of
conflict (for details, see Ahmed, 2003, pp. 326
346). The clash between Pattini
and Devol, as projected in Devol Madua, may be seen as a paradigm of ethnic conflict
between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in Sri Lanka. Very much like Pattini, the
Sinhalese too are immigrants, if the legend of Prince Vijaya is given credence. The
Tamils, as symbolised by Devol, form a later wave of migration. Pattini resists Devol,
the new immigrant, and the two engage in warfare*very much like the recent war in
/

northern Sri Lanka between the Government and the secessionist Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Ironically, Pattini forgets her past*for she too was an
/

immigrant. Her violence reflects a strong racist mentality, which seeks to maintain a
pure identity, and protect economic interest, which is threatened by the intrusion of
the ‘other’. Pattini thus displays what may be said to be an ‘inverted minority
complex’, which is harboured by a majority population living in perpetual fear of being
consumed by a minority. In the case of Sri Lanka, the fear has a ‘real’ basis*a sense of
/

threat felt to be imminent both in terms of history (as discussed earlier) and geography
(emitting from across the narrow Palk Straits where a sizeable Tamil population lives).
64 S. J. Ahmed

Placed in the above context, it is possible to read at least two measures of redress
that Devol Madua suggests. Firstly, it advocates reintegration and attempts to
function as an act of healing between the Sinhalese and the Tamils by advocating
peaceful coexistence. This is what the action of Kataragama signifies when he
mediates in the crisis and settles the difference between the contending parties by
making it possible for both Pattini and Devol to be worshipped in the same
ritual*and by extension, both the Tamils and the Sinhalese to live harmoniously.
/

Hence, at this level, it can be taken as a striking example of how rituals may be ‘used
to manage potential conflict regarding power’ (Schechner, 2002a, p. 77), designed to
help a people in ‘difficult transitions, ambivalent relationships, hierarchies, and
desires that trouble, exceed, or violate the norms of daily life’ (p. 45). However, the
‘plural reflexivity’ of Devol Madua that advocates for harmonious coexistence, was
never actuated because the two communities failed to live peacefully in the same
kingdom. Hence, the ritual can at best be a desire or possibility but actually one that
has possibly failed to be efficacious. On a hopeful note, one may even believe that the
ritual is working because the civil war has been stalled. Secondly, because it is a
subaltern performance, the ‘plural reflexivity’ of the ritual may even be read as a
desire of the subaltern classes as to how they see peaceful coexistence as possible, i.e.
both Devol and Pattini should receive the homage of the people together. In this
light, the subaltern advocacy actually is a protest against Tamil and Sinhalese
warmongering elites who are determined to establish their respective interests.
Similar to Devol Madua, the Pangtoed ‘Cham (or the Dance of the warrior-retinue
of Kanchenjunga) in Sikkim also exemplifies the relationship of performance to war
and conflict. Each year, the monks of the Buddhist monastery of Pemayangtse in
west Sikkim present the dance to commemorate the legendary oath of blood
brotherhood between the Lepchas and the Bhutias. The key characters in the dance
are the two mountain-deities Kanchenjunga and Yab bdud (Mahākāla) and the
pangtoeds (the retinue of Kanchenjunga and supernatural warrior-guardians of
Sikkim). The core episodes of the dance that I witnessed in 1999, show the deities
Kanchenjunga and Yab bdud assuring the warriors of their support and the warriors
paying the deities their homage. The warriors also dance and sing a hymn as a tribute
to the deities, Dabla (the War-god), Rahula (a protective deity and attendant war-
god of Yab bdud), the Sword and the Gun (for details, see Ahmed, 2005).
Pangtoed ‘Cham may be seen as a redressive mechanism of a social drama based on
ethnic conflict between the Bhutias and the Lepchas, where the Bhutais as
immigrants staked their claim to state control. In order to explain, it is necessary
to go back to Sikkimese history. Two dominant ethnic communities in Sikkim are the
Lepchas (who settled in the pre-historic times) and the Bhutias (settlers of the
medieval age). The earliest Lepchas were animist-shamanists and worshipped spirits
of mountains, rivers and forests, the most prominent of which were (and still are)
Mount Kanchenjunga and Yab bdud. The Bhutias, followers of Tibetan Buddhism,
began migrating from Tibet to Sikkim around the fourteenth century. They trace
back the lineage of their ruling house to Khye Bhumsa, a Tibetan who settled in
Chumbi Valley (previously eastern Sikkim, now part of China). It is believed that he
 Negotiating ‘theatre (in place/instead) of war’ 65

and his wife had children only after they were blessed by the Lepcha chief and
religious leader Thekong Tek and his wife. In gratitude, the Bhutia chief pledged
blood brotherhood between the Lepchas and the Bhutias. In a ritual facing Mount
Kanchenjunga, the two chiefs swore to treat each other as equals and consolidate
harmony between the two ethnic communities (Dokhampa, 1998, p. 15).
Pangtoed ‘Cham was devised as a mechanism ‘to regulate disruptive, turbulent,
dangerous, and ambivalent interactions’ (Schechner, 2002a, p. 57) between the
Bhutias and the Lepchas by reaffirming, reinstating, reminding and remembering
the promise of blood brotherhood. However, as medieval history of Sikkim shows,
the oath was never converted into political and social actuality because the Bhutias
always held the dominant position. This is further reflected in a ritual (now
discontinued) that Nebesky-Wojkowitz (1997, pp. 21
22) reports. A Lepcha spirit-
medium would arrive secretly at the royal palace on the evening before the Pangtoed
‘Cham was to take place. The medium would enter into a trace state after being
possessed by the spirit of Thekong Tek. Invariably, the spirit of Thekong Tek would
reproach the Chogyal (temporal and spiritual ruler) for breaking his pact of blood
brotherhood with Khye Bhumsa by making the Bhutias the masters of Sikkim. The
Chogyal dutifully appeased the spirit by promising to take redressive measures. In
return, he requested the spirit not to hinder the dance. However, the very fact that
the spirit would make the same complaint each year shows that the promised
redressive measures were never taken. In short, this means that rituals that claim to
‘heal’ disruptive, turbulent, dangerous and ambivalent interactions between two
groups can indeed be hegemonic devices that cover up for domination of one group
over the other.
The social structure of Sikkim with the Bhutias as the dominant community began
to be challenged with large-scale migration of the Nepalese from the mid-nineteenth
century. By the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, there erupted serious
differences between the migrant Nepalese settlers and the locals (mostly the Bhutias
and the Lepchas). In 1947, when India attained independence and the British
colonisers, until then the virtual overlords of the kingdom, withdrew their (visible)
presence from India, the overlords of Sikkim changed and it became a protectorate of
India. Under Indian ‘protection’, the demographic makeup of Sikkim was changed
even further, transforming it into a Nepali-majority state. Spurred by democracy, the
Nepalese ethnic community began to demand the end of the monarchical system,
abolishing of feudalism and institution of ‘democracy’. Their demand led to a
political crisis in 1973. The Indian government intervened and held a referendum
(the result of which was a forgone conclusion since the Nepalese were in the clear
majority), leading to a transformation of the political status of Sikkim from a
protectorate to an associate state of the Union of India. Under the pretext of growing
discontent against the Chogyal, the elected government joined the Union of India as
a full-fledged state on 16 May 1975 and subsequently abolished the institution of
Chogyal. Today, when the Pangtoed ‘Cham is performed, its function as a healing
device has been annulled. As the martial overtone of the ritual indicates, it serves as a
66 S. J. Ahmed

tool of resistance calling the Sikkimese to arms. This is indeed fascinating: a ritual
that was devised for reintegration has turned into a ritual for schism.
This examination shows that Turner’s notion of social drama is not too useful a
tool for probing into situations of social conflict. The ‘redressive action’ of Devol
Madua may be read as reintegrative-inefficacious, reintegrative-efficacious and an
articulation of subaltern protest; that of the Pangtoed ‘Cham as both reintegrative-
hegemonic and schismic. Clearly, the fragments of history that the rituals are obliged
to carry around, possibly as unwanted and hidden luggage, force open fissures when
discovered. These fissures unmask the rituals as problematic, polyphonic and/or
fractured*locate them in an indeterminate terrain, where they are under constant
/

pressure from ‘the textuality of the socius’ (Spivak, 1990, p. 120) to slip under their
signifiers.

Theatre of beauty and pain in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh

Borrowing from Elaine Scarry’s work on pain and beauty, Thompson argues that
both the experiences centre on the body. He relates her example of beauty filling the
mind and pain swelling the body to performance in situations of war. Beauty incites
one to look beyond their body, to engage with the wider world, to be prompted for
fairness and balance in personal and social relations and thus, the beautiful is directly
associated with justice. Intense pain, on the other hand, ‘destroys a person’s self and
world’ and is ‘experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to
the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe’.
It is also ‘language-destroying’, in that, as ‘the content of one’s language
disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its
source and its subject’ (Scarry, 1985, p. 35). Acknowledging that ‘there are many
forms of theatre in sites of conflict’, Thompson argues that ‘some can be compared
to the structures involved in the infliction of pain and others more readily borrow
from the structure of creation or beauty-making’ (2005, p. 2). Guarding against
making a moral judgment that some of these are right and others are wrong, he
suggests that ‘whatever the rhetoric surrounding certain practices, some sustain the
pain-inflicting logic of war, and others act to counter it’ (p. 2).
Thompson cites the example of Pongu Thamil (literally, ‘Tamil swell’ or ‘Tamil
overflowing’) as an example of ‘theatre of pain’. The event is a large-scale rally with
speeches, songs and agit-prop theatre and leads to a monumental outpouring of grief
and by inference, a call to arms. The event is controversial within the Tamil context:
whereas a Tamil human rights organisation has compared it to a Nazi rally, the
organisers of Pongu Thamil describe it as ‘a process of psychological cleansing, a
culturally appropriate means of the community expressing its pain, and a political
assertion of human rights’ (p. 4).
Thompson’s concern is against such a theatre of pain as seen in Pongu Thamil. He
cites Scarry to argue that when a society passes through a crisis of belief because its
central ideology or cultural construct is seen to be fictitious or is divested of ordinary
 Negotiating ‘theatre (in place/instead) of war’ 67

forms of substantiation, the human body is borrowed to prop up and mobilise

support for the ideology or cultural construct with a false aura of ‘realness’ and
‘certainty’. Taking an explicit position against war and at the same time acknowl-
edging that he has no moral right to condemn others for taking up arms, he
nevertheless sees the meaninglessness of using a creative act as theatre where pain is
realised to generate support for a destructive act of war.
Instead of a ‘theatre of pain’, Thompson advocates a ‘theatre of beauty’ which, he
says, ‘is a theatre directly connected to one that instils and promotes community and
social justice. Theatre of beauty in war is therefore not an affront to the seriousness of
war or the reality of people’s suffering but a purposeful counter to it’ (p. 2). At
present he is ‘trying to explore what that theatre of beauty might look like’ and offers
examples of joyous game playing of children in refugee camps of eastern Sri Lanka as
an area that may yield fruitful results.
I would like to test Thompson’s notion against two contemporary Sinhalese plays,
namely Last Bus Eke Kathawa (lit, ‘The Story of the Last Bus’) and Visakesa
Chandrasekaram’s Thahanam Adaviya (translated in English as Forbidden Area). In
addition to the Sri Lankan historical context mentioned earlier, Last Bus Eke
Kathawa needs also to be read in the context of what is popularly known in Sri Lanka
as the ‘the Reign of Terror’. In 1971 and again in 1987
89, a Marxist political party
named Janatha Vimukti Perumuna (JVP, also called Che Guevarists) staged two
unsuccessful but well-orchestrated guerrilla insurgencies against the Sri Lankan
state. The mainstay of the party was educated and unemployed Sinhalese youths.
During these uprisings, there were ‘unprecedented human rights abuses in the terror
and counter-terror of both the JVP and the United Nationalist Party government of
the day’ (de Mel, 2004, p. 1.2). It is estimated that 40,000 people ‘disappeared’
during the second uprising alone.
Last Bus Eke Kathawa, acclaimed as a Sinhalese masterpiece, is devised as a
narrative performance of one actor. A translated version of the play in which English
is liberally mixed with Sinhalese has toured Delhi and Manchester. The performance
of the play that I saw in Tokyo at an event titled ‘Theatre of Provocation*South /

Asian Drama’, began with the actor distributing chewing gum to the spectators as a
gift. Then he began to tell the story of an indignant drunkard who boarded the last
long distance bus to Horana that he was riding. The drunkard tells the fellow
passengers about how he approached the Chief Minister with a plea to search for his
son who was lost during a race riot but ended up by being forced to hand over his
beautiful wife. The narrative weaves through a large number of shades between the
comic and the pathetic as it scatters bits of incidents that reveal issues of poverty,
distortions arising out of ethnic difference in a pluralistic society, and operation of the
power structure. Towards the end, as the drunkard throws away the money that the
PM gave him to keep his mouth shut, and as the passengers scramble for it, he
stumbles and passes out. The actor ends his narrative by informing his spectators
that the chewing gum he gifted to the spectators at the beginning was bought with the
money that he pocketed.
68 S. J. Ahmed

I have not seen the Forbidden Area but only read about it. Hence, I will cite
extensively from de Mel, a Sri Lankan academic and critic, and her reading of the
play should have the additional advantage of being ‘unbiased’ by my argument. The
play begins with Urmilla, a female suicide bomber of the LTTE, waiting to detonate
explosives wired to her body and thus kill herself as well as the target she has been
directed to by the ‘Supremo’ (i.e. LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran). Veering
between nervousness, defensiveness and aggression, she continuously talks and asks
her controller, ‘How much longer?’ Before her mission, she made love to her
controller Raman against LTTE credo that views femininity and sexuality as crimes
and requires female combatants to suppress these ‘evil’ tendencies. Hence her life,
which she is about to destroy, assumes a particular poignancy. However, ‘when she
finds out that her victim is an elderly Tamil politician and not the President as she
had anticipated, she begins to question her mission. The play ends with her fulfilling
her task, but not before a series of hesitancies and a critical interrogation of the
authoritarian nature of the movement itself’ (de Mel, 2004, p. 4).
Are the Forbidden Area and the Last Bus Eke Kathawa examples of ‘theatre of pain’
or ‘theatre of beauty’? There can hardly be any doubt that in the Forbidden Area, the
human body is a central site of contest but it does not verge on to mobilising support
for an ideology or cultural construct with a false aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty’.
Indeed, the play aims for quite the opposite. The pain that one experiences, even
when merely reading an account of it, dismantles nationalist ideologies and
patriarchal cultural constructs. I remember, when Last Bus Eke Kathawa began, I
was chewing the gum like a lot of others sitting around me. I can’t tell about the
others but at one point I noticed that I was not chewing any more. By the time the
play ended, I wanted to throw up. In short, the play was painful: in hit me in the guts.
Surely it questions both JVP and the Sinhalese state and in that, the central ideology
of both the organs are seen to be fictitious or divested of ordinary forms of
substantiation. However, the experience of pain that arises at the end of the play can
hardly be called destructive. Instead, the performance*a ‘theatre of pain’*incites
/ /

one to look beyond the body, ‘to engage with the wider world’, to be prompted for
fairness and balance in social relations.
The problem, I believe, is that Thompson has mixed up aesthetic and real-life
emotions, which, as George (1999, pp. 31
32) argues, is a problematic area for
Western aesthetic theory in general. As Sanskrit theory shows, aesthetic emotions
(rasa) and real-life emotions are distinct because the latter is motivational and ‘is
always accompanied by an urge to act’ but the former is always vicarious and is
truncated at the point of the urge to act. Rasas, ‘are therefore desireless emotions;
sensual impressions which do not generate want’ (George, 1999, p. 32). Hence, any
emotion, including pain, may make beautiful aesthetic emotion in a performance.
One may generate pain for propping up fictitious ideological or cultural constructs
with a false aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty’, but that pain, if it is an effective
aesthetic emotion, is necessarily ‘beautiful’ (or, as the Sanskrit aestheticians would
say, adbhuta, i.e. marvellous) otherwise it would fail to be aesthetic.
 Negotiating ‘theatre (in place/instead) of war’ 69

Before moving on to examine the theatre of war in Bangladesh, it is necessary to

situate it in the historical context. The war of liberation may be seen as the result of
economic clash of interest between the elites of East Pakistan who saw themselves as
unable to prosper because those in West Pakistan were controlling the entire
domestic market of Pakistan. Nationalism was the mantra for both the groups, except
that those of the east emphasised Bengali language and those in the West, Islam. The
elites in East Pakistan backed the Awami League, a political party which sought to
mobilise popular support by constructing the nationness of the Bengalis and the
myth that a Golden Bengal was just around the corner. All that had to be done was to
immobilise West Pakistani exploitation by instituting a federal form of government
which would be responsible only for defence and foreign affairs while the provinces
such as East Pakistan would enjoy complete autonomy in all other affairs including
collection of taxes.
In the general election of 1970, The Awami League won a majority of the assembly
seats (167 of 313) and thereby appeared to be in a position to materialise their
demands. However, fearing disintegration of the country, the caretaker government
of Pakistan headed by General Yahya Khan suspended the parliament indefinitely.
The Awami League retaliated by calling a general strike, which turned the state
machinery in East Pakistan virtually non-functional. Although the young Turks of
the party called for immediate cessation from Pakistan, the party continued to
negotiate for a peaceful resolution. Failing to move the League to soften its position,
Yahya Khan abandoned the negotiation and moved in the army on 25 March 1971.
As a consequence, a civil war erupted in East Pakistan, which led to a total of 10
million refugees crossing into India and uncounted thousands of civilians being
brutally killed.
Unlike skilful dramaturgical craft noticeable in the Sri Lankan plays, those
performed during the liberation war of Bangladesh*and I have been able to trace
/

only two one-act plays and a series of puppet performances*will appear to be quite
/

rudimentary. They were all performed in refugee camps near the India
Bangladesh
border, on the Indian side. There was no central support or coordination; whatever
was produced came out of the initiatives of a few individuals, who were always
economically constrained. None of the initiatives described below was sustained for
more than a couple of months.
One of the plays produced during the war of 1971 was Biplobi Bangladesh by
Khairul Bashar. It portrays a war-torn image of the country with savagery. The play
begins with a scene in a Pakistani army camp where a few junior officers are seen
drinking and planning their operation and belittling the Bengalis. As the action
unfolds, refugees are seen fleeing for shelter. Amidst hardship and suffering, they
stand by each other and help the freedom fighters. After an operation, a freedom
fighter is brought in to the Pakistani army camp; he is tortured and brutally killed.
These actions gradually build to a climax when the Pakistanis are overcome by a
band of valiant freedom fighters determined to avenge injustice meted out on the
Bengali nation. They fly their beloved flag of Bangladesh and pledge their life anew to
the glorious cause of their motherland (Khan, 2005; Bashar, 2005).
70 S. J. Ahmed

The second play, Pratham Jātra by Narawan Biswas, shows a middleclass Bengali
family, having fled from war-torn East Pakistan, passing their days in economic
hardship in a refugee camp in India after their Indian relatives refused to shelter
them. Their misery is aggravated due to mismanagement in the relief camp and
misappropriation of relief funds by the ruling party’s musclemen. Nevertheless,
Hindus and Muslims forget their religious differences and share what little they can
to eke out their impoverishment. They are united by a common dream: an
independent Bangladesh. The play climaxes when freedom fighters return from
the battlefront; they recount how they fought the Pakistan army and inflicted heavy
casualties on them. Infused by their bravery, the meekest teenager of the camp
decides to join the freedom fighters (Rashid, 2005).
It is easy to see a strong similarity of intent between these performances and Pongu
Thamil that Thompson describes. In many cases, the plays in the Indian refugee
camps were preceded by blood-curling political harangue that invoked memories of
death, grief, bereavement and loss. Invariably, the plays were greeted with frenzied
responses from thousands of refugee-spectators. Thompson’s identification may even
seem accurate in this case because the standard formula during the war of liberation
was evoking, as Scarry (1985, p. 14) would say, ‘the sheer material factualness of the
human body [. . .] to lend [the] cultural construct of [Bengali nationalism] the aura of
‘‘realness’’ and ‘‘certainty’’’.
Pratham Jātra must also have been a ‘theatre of pain’ for many Indian spectators,
especially the Congress (Indira) activists (and, in case you miss the point, the implied
irony is intended). After the premiere performance near Madhyam Gram (near
Bongaon), Congress (I) activists attacked the performers on stage (because they were
directly accused of misappropriation of funds) and confined them without food at the
nearby railway station waiting room. At the same time, the play may also have been a
‘theatre of beauty’ for quite a few Indian spectators as well*especially for an old
/

woman and some underground communist activists. They visited the performers late
at night with food that the woman had cooked. She was in tears of joy for what the
play showed and blessed them for the success of their dream.
Theatre of liberation war in Bangladesh may also have produced Thompson’s
‘theatre of beauty’, as was the case with the puppet performances (and no irony is
intended in this case). These were a series of improvised skits not exceeding half an
hour of performance time and were devised with rod-puppets. One of these, titled
Āgāchā (literally, The Weeds) featured three characters: Yahya Khan, a Bengali
collaborator and a Bengali farmer. Apparently stupid and not imbued with a great
deal of heroics, the farmer is accosted by the collaborator and the general to divulge
the secret plans of the freedom fighter but he finds ways of fooling them with his
apparent stupidity. The play ends with the freedom fighters encircling the general
and the collaborator, and the farmer tossing them out as weeds.
The puppet performances instilled an urge for justice by purposefully countering
the reality of people’s suffering. More importantly, they generated a great deal of
laughter*a reaction that was extremely uncommon in the refugee camps where the
/

pale shadows of malnutrition, poverty, hopelessness and painful memories were stark
 Negotiating ‘theatre (in place/instead) of war’ 71

realities. The children and the aged enjoyed the shows most, laughing to their heart’s
content whenever the farmer outwitted the general and his henchman. Some old
persons are reported to have commented that the performances reminded them that
they had not laughed for a very long time. Given the horrific condition of the refugee
camps, that indeed was remarkable. Having said that, one should not also miss the
point that the same laughter, directed against the Pakistani general and his
henchman, was derisive and was marked by an undercurrent of aggression.
Thus, following Thompson’s notion, one is landed in indeterminacy and in-
betweenness. Instead of what he suggests, it may be more profitable to see the theatre
of war in Bangladesh as a contested site of struggle for power*one that it was
/

mobilised for, borrowing a phrase from Homi Bhabha (1994, p. 145), ‘the
production of the nation as narration’. Because the ‘nation’ is fraught with political
constructs and is, as Benedict Anderson argues, an ‘imagined community’ (1983, pp.
15
16), ‘scraps, patches of rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into signs of a
coherent national culture’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 145). Although they function as a
mechanism of resistance against colonial cultural impositions, there is no denying
that the ideological or cultural constructs of nationalism, because they are constructs,
are inevitably fictitious. As a site of struggle for power among the indigenous elite
classes of a nation in its post-colonial period (i.e. the period posterior to colonial
rule), a performance is usually mobilised to endow the fictive construct with an aura
of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty’. In a war that was a struggle of the local elites in East
Pakistan to carve out a market free from those in West Pakistan so as to ensure their
unhampered growth, Pratham Jātra, Biplobi Bangladesh and Āgāchā served the
purpose of turning scraps, patches of rags of daily life into signs of a coherent
national culture of Bangladesh. The struggle for power, as represented in these plays,
was between the binary of the self (the Bengali) and the other (the Pakistani); the
aesthetic emotions (rasas) that these plays aimed for were the pathetic, the furious,
the heroic and/or the comic. But because ‘nationalism leads to the interpretation of
diverse phenomenon through one glossary, thus erasing specificities, setting norms
and limits, lopping off tangentials’ (George, 1996, p. 14), the plays (unlike the Last
Bus and The Forbidden Area) fail to re-present the complex and polyphonic
representations of everyday reality. And hence the horrific responses that are
generated in nationalist rallies.

Subject, discourse and power

Not denying his intention as a Good Samaritan, unfortunately Thompson’s advocacy
adds up to arguing that if we must have war*and there seems to be no way of getting
/

around it*then let us make beautiful theatre to make war more bearable. There are
/

three twists in what Thompson advocates: firstly, he equates Subjectivity with

Agency in the manner that the human subject, believed to possess a valid self-
knowledge and the capacity to act, is seen as the sole point of origin of an act of
theatre; secondly, such a subject with the knowledge and the capacity, does not stop
72 S. J. Ahmed

the war but makes it more manageable; thirdly, by failing to take into account the
fragments of history that any piece of theatre is obliged to carry around, his subject
turns out to be the missionary determined to perform his act of all-encompassing
love and compassion (if such ‘all-encompassing etc.’ can ever be possible).
As this examination shows further, Turner’s notion is also problematic in its
uncritical and uninterrogated assumptions regarding the subject. When Turner says,
as in the passage cited above, ‘. . . performances are presented which probe a
community’s weaknesses, call its leaders to account, desacralize its most cherished
values and beliefs . . .’, one derives the impression that the motor element in the
fourth phase of redress is the individual self rather than extra-individual forces.
Turner assumes the self as being constituted by a unitary rational consciousness and
equates it with agency in a manner that human action is seen to rise from the self.
Hence, in Devol Madua in Sri Lanka or in Pangtoed ‘Cham in Sikkim, the subjects
who are presenting, probing, reflecting, desacralising, and critiquing all appear to be
operating with independent volition*self-determining, originating, autonomous and
/

homogenous, with freedom and capacity to act in a manner of their choice.

In examining the relationship of theatre to war and conflict, and the ways in which
theatre gets mobilised as a mechanism for healing and as a tool for resistance, it is
necessary not to get trapped in the liberal-humanist notion of the Subject. It is
necessary to rigorously interrogate the notion and see that the subject is the site
where things happen and not the centre that makes things happen. As Foucault
(1977, p. 138) insists ‘the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative
role and analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse’. A subject
(including this ‘author’) is ‘not the speaking consciousness, not the author of the
formulation, but a position that may be filled in certain condition by various
individuals’ (Foucault, 2002, p. 129). Subjectivity is formed by discursive practices;
it is historically constituted within relations of power. Intrinsic to social life,
ubiquitous and multiple, power is that which constitutes and differentiates
competing interests and ‘manifests itself in forms of struggle at the political level.
These struggles make subjects what they are’ (Edgar & Sedgwick, 2002, p. 74). By
this argument, ‘Agency shifts from lying in equation with the Subject, to being a
discursive product, an effect of a range of discourse/practices associated with
particular subject-positionings’ (Thorpe, 1998).2 This is not simply to claim that
agency is abolished and invoke in its place a form of structural determination.
Rather, this is to transgress the logic of the structure/agency polarity and seek a non-
Bhabhan third space, where subjectivity is precarious, contradictory and in process,
constantly being reconstituted within relations of power, acting as well as being acted
upon.
All the social dramas discussed above were manifestations of power. The rituals,
produced in the fourth stage of each drama as redressive measures, were effects of
discourses (of postcoloniality, nationality and ethnicity, among others) associated
with particular subject-positionings. The same is true of the plays of war zones.
Because discourse, as ‘a fragment of history’ (Foucault, 2002, p. 131) and a means of
producing and organising meaning within a social context, produces knowledge
 Negotiating ‘theatre (in place/instead) of war’ 73

(since we can only have a knowledge of things if they have a meaning) and because
knowledge is always inextricably enmeshed in circuitries of power, theatre*as a /

production of knowledge and effect of discourse*is always-already entangled in the

/

circuitries of power. As our examination shows, it is woven by numerous strands

inscribed with fragments of history (and that history, it is acknowledged, is also a
contested terrain). Further, the relationship between theatre and situations of war
and conflict cannot be mapped as a meta-critique but only in terms of ‘micro-
politics’, i.e. ‘a form of practical engagement within particular social relations’
(Edgar & Sedgwick, 2002, p. 74).
Hence, it is necessary that those of us who wish to devise performances as
mechanisms of healing or as a tool for resistance, those of us who wish to make
‘theatre in place of war’ as our (evangelical) goal, see that we are not subjects as
agents of peace (and its substitutes) but complex and variable functions of numerous
discourses, located in specific historical contexts, constituted within relations of
power many tentacles of which are invisible and engaged in micropolitics. If the small
string of words ‘in place of’ denotes ‘instead of’, then perhaps there will never be
theatre in place of war because there will always be relations of power*until death
/

do us apart. However, if the string of words ‘in place of war’ denotes a location, i.e. a
place where war and conflict is taking place, then we will always be in business like
the war machines of the North are in business in the South in a monopolised

globalised world. The knowledge produced in conferences and seminars on theatre
and war3 is also enmeshed in invisible tentacles of monopolising
globalising power
that, I suspect, is not disinterested in exercising control over places of war and
situations of conflict. As Schechner (2002b, p. 157) admits explicitly, ‘[i]f you follow
the money you will soon discover that the governments, the NGOs, the foundations,
and the universities, etc., are the very ones who, in other guises, maintain the
structural inequities’. Hence, it is not inconsequential, too, that we ask ourselves why
we seek to examine theatre in place of war, and justify our eagerness for and
entitlement to knowledge represented in these performances.
My post-colonial location*a discursive product woven by discontinuous frag-
/

ments of colonial history, now integrated into a totalising society through commodity
exchange*generates intense scepticism in knowledge produced in journals such as
/

this because it actually may invest heavily on (neo)orientalist strategies. This is

because, the nodules of Euro-American ‘learning’ such as this journal, resourced by
the totalising society*resources that are necessarily consistent with its basic
/

principles of quantification and exchange*will inevitably be reduced to a common

/

quantitative measure, i.e. money-value. Hence, even Anglophone post-colonialism

‘has become a mimic canon that functions effectively to reinforce neo-colonial
hegemony’ (Hassan & Saunders, 2003, p. 18). I acknowledge that I am no less a
complicit ‘intellectual’, engaged, ironically enough, in reinforcing the invisible
tentacles of the monopolising
globalising relations of power that renders me a
subaltern.
74 S. J. Ahmed

Notes
1. Central authority in Sri Lanka dissolved in the thirteenth century after a Brahmanical prince
named Magha from Kalinga (Orissa in India) invaded and occupied Sri Lanka between 1214
and 1235. Towards the beginning of the sixteenth century, when three clear political centres
(of Jaffna, Kandy, and Kotte) had emerged in Sri Lanka, the European colonisers began to
make their presence felt. First came the Portuguese (who occupied some coastal regions
from 1505 to 1658) and then the Dutch (who controlled most of the coastal provinces from
1658 to 1796). At the end of the eighteenth century, immediately before the British
colonisers moved in, Kandy was the only independent kingdom in Sri Lanka, and it was
ruled by Buddhist Sinhalese monarchs. With the British extending its authority over Kandy
in 1815, the entire island of Sri Lanka turned into a British colony, from which freedom was
wrought in 1948.
2. Because I read the notion of discourse as superseding the traditional distinction between
language and practice, Thorpe’s ‘discourse/practice’ is abandoned in the following
discussion in favour of ‘discourse’.
3. Such as the international conference War Theatre and Actions for Peace held in Milan, 17
18
May 2002 and In Place of War: International Practitioner Seminar at the University of
Manchester, 8
9 April 2005.

Notes on contributor
Syed Jamil Ahmed is a Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the
University of Dhaka. His full-length publications include Acinpākhi infinity:
indigenous theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka, University Press Limited, 2000) and In
praise of Nirañjan: Islam, theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka, Pathak Samabesh,
2001).

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