Unity in travesty: reimagining the nation on the national stage

Abstract

The essay discusses the use of a national institution, the National School of Drama, by the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh) and its political wing BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) as a hyphen, cobbling together the Hindutva configuration of the two words ‘nation’ and ‘state’ to construct a homogenized national imagination while projecting Muslims as the perpetual internal antagonists. It uses the National School of Drama’s stage adaptation of Bhisham Sahni’s novel Tamas (2025) as its primary example to investigate the questions of who ‘does’ and ‘does not’ count as the citizen of this country, and how the institutional sphere of national theatre has been infiltrated and reshaped through its growing proximity to the RSS and its cultural wing, Sanskar Bharti. Ultimately, the paper interrogates the political dangers inherent in such performances, where spectators are converted into witnesses of a singular ‘truth’ about the nation, collapsing the distance between representation and ideological mobilization.