ਰੰਗਮੰਚਰੰਗਮੰਚ

Rangmanch, which means The Stage, is a Punjabi book on theatre by Balwant Gargi (1916 to 2003), published in 1962. It is a treatise on the art of theatre: its history, its techniques and its cultural significance, written by a working playwright and director rather than a distant scholar. The Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters, gave Gargi its award for Punjabi in 1962 for this book, and its official winners list describes the work as a history and development of Indian theatre. It remains the best known work of theatre criticism in Punjabi.

About the book

Rangmanch was written in Punjabi and published in 1962, with the Punjab University Publication Bureau at Chandigarh named as its publisher in modern listings of the work. Its subject is the whole life of the stage. Sections of the book trace the evolution of drama, the role of the playwright, the dynamics of performance, and the meeting of tradition and modernity in Indian theatre, and it also deals with practical stagecraft: stage design, actor training and the engagement of the audience. In the same year, 1962, Gargi's English volume Theatre in India appeared from Theatre Arts Books, a book of 245 pages whose contents begin with the birth of theatre, Greek and Hindu theatre, and the two epics. Together the two books carried one argument in two languages: Indian theatre had a long, serious history, and it deserved serious study.

What does Rangmanch cover?

Rangmanch covers theatre from its classical and folk roots to the modern stage. On one side stands the classical Sanskrit drama and the Punjabi folk forms, the open air performance traditions of the countryside that Gargi had chronicled since his youth. On the other side stand the modern masters whose methods Gargi used in his own plays: the Sanskrit classics beside Lorca's poetic drama, Brecht's epic theatre and Artaud's theatre of cruelty, with the realistic stagecraft of Stanislavski in the same conversation. The book's claim, as later reviewers have put it, is that Indian theatre is at its most alive when music, dance and dialogue meet in a single performance, and that a modern Indian theatre should grow out of its own folk and classical ground rather than copy the West.

That argument mattered because of who was making it. When Rangmanch appeared, Gargi had already been writing plays for almost twenty years. His first play, Loha Kutt (The Blacksmith) of 1944, also in this Kosh, had caused controversy for its stark picture of the Punjab countryside. By 1962 he had written on poverty, illiteracy and village life, and on mythology, history and folklore, moving between the realistic and the mythic as his subjects demanded. Rangmanch is the theory that stands behind that practice.

Themes: tradition, folk forms and a modern stage

Three themes run through the book. The first is continuity: Greek and Hindu theatre, the two great epics, Sanskrit drama and Punjabi folk performance are treated as one long stage history, not as separate worlds. The second is the folk: for Gargi, the folk forms of Punjab were not decoration on theatre but its living root, a judgement he later carried into English in Folk Theatre of India, published in New York. The third is modernity. A playwright who relied as much on Brecht and Artaud as on the Sanskrit classics was arguing, in Punjabi, that a Punjabi stage could be both rooted and new at once. That is the position the Sahitya Akademi chose to honour.

ਲੇਖਕ

Balwant Gargi was born on 4 December 1916 and studied at Government College, Lahore, taking master's degrees in English and in political science from FC College, Lahore. He learned theatre with Norah Richards at her school in the Kangra Valley, the training ground of modern Punjabi drama. He wrote a dozen full length plays and five collections of one act plays, among them Loha Kutt, Kanak Di Bali, Sohni Mahiwal, Sultan Razia, Mirza Sahiban and Dhooni Di Agg, and his plays were translated into 12 languages and performed in Moscow, London, New Delhi and across the United States. He taught for two years at the University of Washington, and in 1972 he became the founder professor and director of the Department of Indian Theatre at Panjab University, Chandigarh, whose open air theatre now carries his name. He died in Mumbai in April 2003. His novels and plays in this Kosh include Loha Kutt, Kanak Di Bali and Nangi Dhup.

Reception and legacy

The Sahitya Akademi Award of 1962 made Rangmanch a landmark: a work of criticism, not a poem or a novel, honoured as the Punjabi book of its year. Gargi went on to receive the Padma Shri in 1972 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Punjabi playwriting in 1998, becoming one of the few artists to hold both Akademi awards, and in 2017 India Post honoured him with a stamp in its Eminent Writers series, which names Rang Manch first among the reasons. For students, the book's legacy is practical as much as literary. The department Gargi founded at Chandigarh still trains actors and directors, and Rangmanch still stands at the head of Punjabi writing about the stage: the book in which Punjab's leading playwright explained, in Punjabi, what theatre is and where it came from.