Academic literature on the topic 'Sanskrit theatre'

Why does comedy take the form of satire, slapstick, parody, burlesque, or comedy of manners? Chapter 2 examines the bewildering profusion of comic genres and sub-genres: how they have evolved, where and when they thrive, how they distinguish themselves from or merge with one another. It shows what the word’s great repertoire of comic movie genres and subgenres owes to earlier traditions of Greek theatre, satirical Roman verse, Italian commedia dell’arte, French stage farce, Sanskrit parodies, the Kyogen skits of Japan, and the English novel. Each cinematic form has developed its own set of traits and serves a distinctive purpose. Some forms, like “crisis slapstick,” push old genres in new directions that are still testing the limits of humor and acceptable behavior.

Film historians have long noted the various intertexts of Bollywood cinema, which has historically evolved from the intermingling of Sanskrit drama, folk mythology, Parsi theatre, and ancient religious texts. Comparatively little critical attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which popular Hindi films remake Hollywood films, even though Bollywood films have borrowed consistently from American cinema. Transnational film remakes do much more than reconstruct their narratives to conform to local cultural practices. They engage in intense ideological and aesthetic negotiations, which result in complex performances of resistance, parody, and homage. This chapter explores such negotiations by investigating how Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante (India, 2002) remakes Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (USA, 1992), which is itself a remake of Ringo Lam's City on Fire (Hong Kong 1987). Each version of a heist gone wrong emphasises the performance of “cool.” This chapter explores Gupta's cross-cultural makeover by paying attention to the ways in which the idea of “cool” travels across industries and cultures. Such an investigation steers the remake beyond traditional categories of uncritical admiration or derivative plagiarism and allows an examination of the transnational media flows between Hong Kong, Hollywood, and Bollywood.

Fundamental in making the myth of civilization meaningful in Indian culture was the performance of the Navarātra, the festival of the Nine Nights, which was intertwined with Durgā's cult. This final chapter deals with how the cult functioned in creating the spectacle of ‘public religion’ through a reconstruction of this ritual in which the goddess was worshipped by a ruler in the month of Āśvina. A detailed exposition of the modus operandi of the Nine Nights shows us how the religion of the goddess was spectacularly brought to life in an event of grand theatre and solemnized before its participants, the king and the entire community. The development of the Nine Nights from a fringe, Vaiṣṇava ceremony in the month of Kṛṣṇa's birth under the Guptas, to a ritual supplanting the established autumnal Brahmanical ceremonies of kingship and finally into a crucial rite in Indian culture for consolidating royal power, formed a crucial motivation for the expansion of Durgā's cult. The chapter isolates and analyzes in depth the principal early traditions of the Navarātra in East India and in the Deccan by an assessment of the available ritual descriptions and prescriptions in Sanskrit and eye-witness sources from a later period, used to fill in the gaps in the earlier sources. The most elaborate description of a court-sponsored rite emerges from the Kārṇāṭa and Oinwar courts of Mithilā, which embody what appears to be a ritual that had matured a good few centuries earlier before it was recorded in official literature. Among these the account of the Oinwars by the Maithila paṇḍita Vidyāpati is the most extensive treatment of the goddess's autumnal worship by a king, and attained great renown among the learned at the time as an authoritative source. His description portrays a spectacular court ceremony, involving pomp and pageantry, in which horses and weapons were worshipped, the king was anointed, and the goddess propitiated as the central symbol of royal power in various substrates over the course of the Nine Nights. Vidyapati's work also reveals the marked impact of Tantricism on the character of the rite, which employed Śākta mantras and propitiated autonomous, ferocious forms of the goddess associated with the occult, particularly on the penultimate days. Maturing in eastern India, the goddess's Navarātra ceremony was proselytized by the smartas further to the west and percolated into the Deccan, where, from around the 12th century, it attained an independent southern character. Whereas the eastern rite focused on the goddess as the central object of devotion, the southern rite focused on the symbolism of the king, attaining its most distinctive and lavish manifestation in the kingdom of Vijayanagara. Throughout this development, the Navarātra remained intimately associated with the theme of dispelling calamities, thereby augmenting secular power in the world, sustaining the power of the ruler and granting political might and health to a community. It remained from its ancient core a ritual of dealing with and averting crises performed collectively by a polis. Such remains its character even today.