Vasudha Dalmia reads modern Indian theatre as a contested machinery for producing culture, language and national identity.

Beginning with the nineteenth-century emergence of modern Hindi drama, she traces how theatre became entangled with colonial modernity, religious reform, nationalism and the effort to establish Hindi as the language of a newly imagined public. The stage here is formed by decisions about vocabulary, dramatic form, audience and performance tradition are also decisions about who can represent India, and which version of India is being made visible.

The book is particularly interested in the modern theatre’s recurrent turn toward Sanskrit drama, devotional traditions, folk performance and regional forms. Dalmia resists treating this as the uncomplicated recovery of an authentic past. These traditions were selected, translated and reorganised by urban intellectuals working within modern institutions; “the folk” could function as a living practice, a national resource, or a convenient emblem of cultural legitimacy. Her discussion moves from Bharatendu Harishchandra and the formation of Hindi theatre through twentieth-century encounters with Brecht, political performance and the search for an indigenous theatrical idiom.

Dense but unusually alert to performance as a political act, this is for readers interested in theatre history, Hindi literary culture, postcolonial modernity and the unstable border between cultural preservation and cultural invention. It is also a useful corrective to accounts of modernism that continue to behave as though Europe invented history and everyone else merely received the paperwork.