Dialectics of Defeat-Some Reflections on Literature, Theatre and Music in Colonial India

Trends and tendencies in Indian literature and theatre today owe their origin to the colonial experience. In the three language areas dealt with here the patterns of aesthetic and creative enterprise of those times were remarkably similar. The scope of the argument here is limited to the nineteenth century when the bhadralok of British India tried to imitate Victorian mores and morals. And it was in contra-distinction to the arrogance and ideals of the age that India's search for a bourgeois sensibility and identity was carried out.