"Between History and Performance: Reflections on the limits of disciplines" a talk by Prof. Rustom Bharucha at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 5pm on 1st November 2013

Time : 5:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, 1st Floor, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
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Event Description :The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to a Public Lecture (in the ‘Rethinking History’ series) on ‘Between History and Performance: Reflections on the limits of disciplines’ by Prof. Rustom Bharucha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

In this talk the focus will be on mapping a series of speculations, enigmas and problems in articulating the ambivalent relationship between history and performance. Beginning with the challenge of writing oral history, the talk will spell out the limits of academic historiography in dealing with the elusive, yet embodied, evidence of orality, and the mnemonic resources of song and folk performance. Moving on to the ephemerality of performance in the larger context of theatre, the talk will problematize how the evidence of performance needs to be created through an immersion in the afterlives of theatre surviving through lingering affects and discourses. While arguing that there can be no direct nexus between text and performance, the talk will posit alternative ways of constructing ‘performance texts’, which are often ignored by social historians in the instrumentalization of theatre history for grander narratives relating to colonialism and empire.

In making a case for a more minute reading of the illumination of history through theatre, on the lines of Ranajit Guha's History at the Limit of World-History, the talk will provide some clues as to how ‘another history’ of theatre and performance can be created on the borders of dominant social and political models of mainstream academic history.

Can theatre claim a history of its own?

Conversely, can the history upheld in the social sciences unlearn its dominative modes of expertise to arrive at a new understanding of performance?

Speaker : Prof. Rustom Bharucha is the author of several books including Theatre and the World, The Question of Faith, In the Name of the Secular, The Politics of Cultural Practice and Another Asia. His new book Terror and Performance will be published by Tulika Books and Routledge (London) in April 2014. He is presently a Professor in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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