The Making of the Audience in Colonial Bengal Public Theatre

Abstract

In the context of the emergence of the diffuse public formed in the course of the commercialisation of cultural production, the proscenium theatre in the second half of the 19th century in Bengal established a potentially and indefinitely expansible constituency. Bengali theatre actively sought to construct its audiences as a new kind of public, different from the personal audiences, meeting only as part of a community celebration. In addressing this expanded public/ audience, the new theatres implicitly assigned to it a certain relationship to spectacle. This paper argues that the audiences in colonial Bengal were a historical product. Western style theatres in the second half of the nineteenth century in Calcutta, as a metropolitan form, addressed an audience that was truly cosmopolitan in its outlook and often transregional. These theatres used both European and Indian conventions and contents, thus pioneering new ways of seeing. The paper discusses the nature of Bengali audience, how it changed with the institutionalisation and economics of entertainment through reading of autobiographies, memoirs and newspaper reviews of contemporary times. The paper argues that the concept of the public/ audience, as a new form of coming together became characteristic of the colonial era. The audience/public addressed was anonymous and undifferentiated who like the new public theatre came to represent the “desire for a reformed, recognizable other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”