Re-making ‘Public Sphere’ in Tiner Tolowar: Performing Gender, Class, and Caste of 19th Century Bengal

This essay offers a neo-historicist reading of Tiner Tolowar (The Tin Sword), a play by Utpal Dutt against censorship, situating nineteenth-century Bengali society as a contested terrain of class, caste, gender, and colonial power. The play was first performed in 1971 by the newly formed theatre group named People’s Little Theatre by Utpal Dutt. The playtext interrogates how theatre becomes a cultural battleground where colonial pedagogies, capitalist interests, and indigenous reformist/revivalist ideologies intersect. By analyzing characters like Priyonath and Kapten Babu, the paper explores how theatre dramatizes the contradictions of the Bengali Bhadralok—caught between colonial mimicry and indigenous assertion. The essay also unpacks the gendered structure of power embedded within the domestic-public divide, showing how female performers like Moyna become symbols of both resistance and commodification under colonial state. Drawing on the works of Tanika Sarkar, Ranajit Guha, and Partha Chatterjee, the essay argues that Tiner Tolowar stages a historically contingent yet ideologically rich performance of societal transformation, making theatre itself a site of cultural and political negotiation. Nevertheless, the paper is limited in addressing the political contingency in the 70s in the last century and also in the contemporary time while it was re-produced by Suman Mukherjee, an important Bengali theatre director, through a collaborative effort. Another limitation underscores the analysis of performance and scenography through a contemporary intervention as the article focuses on the context of the play text and teases out the politics in the colonial stage.