The discipline of theatre historiography in India is an inherently embattled field because, like other forms of modern history writing in India, it seeks to reconstruct methods of historical inquiry in a culture where "history," "historicity," "historical experience," "historical consciousness," and "the historical sense" have been and continue to be deeply contested concepts. Any metacritical reflection on method in Indian theatre history therefore has to begin at an unusual level of generality, by considering the theoretical, conceptual, and historicopolitical reasons for the crisis of representation that pervades the genres of historiography. To a large extent the crisis is a product of cultural difference: it registers the conflicts between intrinsic Indian and extrinsic Western ideas of time and history that were inevitable under the asymmetrical power relations of colonialism between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries.