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Representing India’s Pasts:: Time, Culture, and the Problems of Performance Historiography

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Abstract

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.

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... India has no national language. 6 Hindi, presently with the largest number of speakers in this country, is the official language of the government. 7 English is used extensively in business and administration purposes and has gained the status of "subsidiary official language". ...
... In 2015, the Indian economy was the world's seventh largest by nominal GDP and third largest by purchasing power parity. 6 Following marketbased economic reforms in 1991, India became one of the fastest-growing major economies, and is considered a newly industrialized country. 29 Though agriculture is the mainstay of Indian economy, but industrialization and technological advancement (notably the information technology sector) also play a major role in current economic progress of this country. ...
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India, officially the Republic of India is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country (with over 1.2 billion people), and the most populous democracy in the world. A country of myriad subcultures which constitutes a unique phenomenon of ‘unity in diversity’. India is the home of people of various ethnicity, religion, culture and languages. It has its own primitive cultures. Later, in different times this country was attacked by Greek, Shak, Hun, Pathan, Mughal, British, Dutch, French etc. So there is a diverse collection of culture and ethnicity, rather a conglomeration of these. The number of 100-year-olds in India has steadily increased over the last few decades. Keeping the above background in mind, the present scenario—the prospects, expectations and problems faced by a large number of centenarians scattered in different regions of this country, has discussed in this review.
Chapter
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Chapter
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Article
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