RESEARCH SPECIALISATION

World Drama, Theatres of Resistance, African and Caribbean Theatre, Literature of the Global South, Modern South Asian Literature, Humour in Postcolonial Drama and The Trickster/Slave in European Comedy

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I have a PhD in contemporary drama. I was awarded the prestigious University Grants Commission Junior/Senior Research Fellowship in Humanities by the Government of India for my doctoral research in European comic traditions as representative of culturally marginalized performance spaces focused on the revolutionary theatre of Dario Fo. My dissertation, "Tradition, Innovation and Social Reform: Dario Fo's Drama of Dissent," examines Fo's Marxist interpretation of dissident humour traditions: the ancient Roman saturnalias and Plautine farces, medieval jester routines and renaissance commedia dell'arte, and weaponizes their satiric potential to scourge dominant discourses in post-war Italy. It incorporates detailed analyses of two of his most representative farces, Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can't Pay? Won't Pay! and his monologue, Mistero buffo. In addition, I trace the evolution of the subaltern figure of the trickster/slave through a comparative study of the servus callidus, the saturnalian lord of misrule, the giullari, Zanni/Harlequin and Fo's madman. I draw on Bakhtin to scrutinize how the carnivalesque status of the trickster empowers him with threatening social mobility and linguistic agency to incorporate the place of humour as a powerful counter-discourse.

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My current research focusses on connecting issues of inequality and class to the literature of postcolonial countries with questions of colonialism, neo-colonialism, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, diaspora, caste, migration of labour, gender and sexuality. I also analyze literary narratives in the Global South that have come about in the wake of subaltern and postcolonial perspectives. I'm equally fascinated by what happens when we bring laughter and the postcolonial together. My research deconstructs the decolonizing potential of a comedic discourse in registering protest, destabilizing western dramatic traditions, and envisaging alternate solutions to the asymmetric balance of power in postcolonial cultures.

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I am working on a book-length project exploring the relationship between theatre, revolution and cultural education based on the theoretical aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, Dario Fo and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. My emphasis is on analysing the connections between the revolutionary potential of staging resistance to encourage community engagement and positive citizen action through the theatre of Dario Fo (Italy), Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Kenya), Sistren Theatre Company (Jamaica), Habib Tanvir (India) and Shahid Nadeem (Pakistan).