Abstract
How does live art mediate our relationship with technology? In turn, how do new technologies impact the way we create, consume, and interpret art works? These questions are at the heart of the proposed project, "All on the Line: Theatre, Performance and Telephony in Modern South Asia, 1890-1990." My research hypothesis is that in South Asia (as elsewhere) the development of theatre and telephony was mutually constitutive; thus, the history of theatre teaches us a great deal about the history of telephony, and vice versa. In South Asia, as the telephone evolved from being a niche novelty object in the colonial era (1890s) to an indispensable instrument for mass communication by the postcolonial period (post-1950s), it catalysed seismic sociopolitical, economic, and cultural shifts. My project will demonstrate how theatre was a vital platform where these transformations could be registered, debated, and challenged. Adopting a media archaeological approach, it proposes to assemble and analyse a primary corpus consisting of dramatic texts in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Urdu. By tracing the reciprocal relationship between theatre and telephony this project aims to discover how art helps us to position ourselves – ethically, philosophically, and ontologically – in relation to our technological futures.
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