Any appreciation of the range, variety, and long-term consequences of encounters of Indian writers and creative artists with European art forms from the nineteenth century onwards requires us to widen our focus beyond English and Anglophone literature. For the past two centuries, creative artists writing in various modern Indian languages engaged not only with English literature but also with literatures in other European and non-European languages, a point that, with some exceptions, has not received the kind of critical attention it deserves. Yet, in many ways, Indian engagements with non-Anglophone European literatures (especially Russian, Norwegian, French, and German) have been liberating both aesthetically and politically, a fact widely agreed upon by writers and critics in modern Indian languages. The critical neglect of Indian receptions of non-Anglophone European literature and drama is, therefore, particularly regrettable, since those reception histories shed light upon the ways in which Indian creative artists asserted their agency in the face of British colonialism and, indeed, through their engagement with European literary traditions beyond English, contributed to the shaping of political and aesthetic movements in post-independence India. Historically speaking, Indian engagements with non-Anglophone European literature and drama were not channelled through the route of colonial classroom education; and the political impact of such literatures on Indian writers cannot be understood in terms of hegemony or mimicry. As such, an examination of Indian engagements with non-Anglophone European literature cannot be adequately understood through the tools offered by mainstream postcolonial theory; indeed, systematic accounts of the impact of various European literatures on modern Indian writing are yet to be written.

Keeping this lacuna in mind, this special session seeks to bring together three presentations, each lasting 15-18 minutes, on the impact of non-Anglophone European theatre on some iconic South Asian dramatists whose lives straddled India’s colonial past and post-independence present. In the opening paper of the panel, Aparna Dharwadker compares the impact of Henrik Ibsen and Bertolt Brecht on modern Indian drama and argues that, despite his apparently lower profile, it is Ibsen whose “model of a socially-oriented realism has been qualitatively more productive in practice than Brecht’s politically-oriented theories of epic theatre.” Dharwadker argues that realism "is the mode through which Indian-language playwrights begin their initially fraught attempts in the 1920s to engage with sociocultural and political issues by using narratives of the present (rather than allegories based on history and myth), and a modernist turn after independence produces the form of urban social realism that we now regard as iconic (in the plays of Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, and Mahesh Dattani, for instance)". She further argues that, “in comparison with figures such as Shaw, Chekhov, and Brecht, Ibsen stands out because of the frequency with which Indian playwrights invoke him explicitly, and attempt to recreate realist drama as a meaningful image of their own time and place.”

In contrast, in the second paper of the panel, Nishat Zaidi draws upon Urdu-language theatrical adaptations of Brecht from India and Pakistan to argue that “on the one hand Brecht’s theatrical techniques opened up a possibility for these playwrights to reconnect with the folk, while on the other, they offered to these playwrights a powerful tool for the politicisation of urban stages.” While confining her focus on one language, Urdu, Zaidi casts her net far and wide both temporally and geographically, assessing the enduring impact of Brecht on both Indian and Pakistani writers ranging from early translators such as Begum Qudsia Zaidi to present-day activist-playwrights such as Shahid Nadeem. Along related lines, the final panelist, Natasa Thoudam, discusses the impact of Brechtian techniques on the Meitei theatre director Heisnam Kanhailal. She also draws biographical parallels between Kanhailal and Brecht by drawing attention to the impact of Kanhailal’s wife Sabitri and Brecht’s wife Helene Weigel, both of them noted actresses, on their husbands' creative work.

The panel thus explores, through a set of contrasting papers, the impact of two of the most influential non-Anglophone playwrights from Europe on modern South Asian theatre in a range of languages, principally Marathi, Hindi, Meiteilon, and Urdu. The discussion on these authors and their works is likely to go beyond postcolonial theory and focus on the relevance of adaptation studies and other approaches for the analysis of cross-cultural encounters between India and Europe. As such, the panel should be of interest to a wide range of scholars across linguistic backgrounds and disciplinary interests.