Upcoming Events

Sunday, May 17, 2026 at 5pm at the United Irish Cultural Center

Join us Sunday May 17, 2026 at 5pm at the United Irish Cultural Center, Members Room as the ILHS hosts Professor Sukanya Chakrabarti giving a lecture titled “Absurd” Afterlives: Samuel Beckett in South Asian Contexts.

This presentation critically examines the intercultural adaptation of Samuel Beckett in South Asian performance traditions, focusing on how Beckett’s minimalist dramaturgy has been translated, appropriated, and politically reimagined within postcolonial cultural contexts. Taking the 2006 Jadavpur University production Birth-Breath/Dearth-Death as a central case study, the paper explores how nine of Beckett’s rarely staged dramaticules were reinterpreted through performance practices familiar to South Asian audiences, including intimate “little theatre” staging, gender reversals, and the incorporation of stylized forms such as Japanese Noh-inspired movement. Rather than treating Beckett as a fixed European modernist figure, the presentation argues that South Asian adaptations transform his theatre into a site of intercultural negotiation where local histories, political anxieties, and aesthetic traditions intersect with existential modernism.

The discussion situates the Jadavpur production alongside other intercultural adaptations of Beckett across India and South Asia, including Bengali, Marathi, and Hindi reinterpretations of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, as well as postcolonial productions that foreground themes of displacement, poverty, bureaucracy, and state violence. Drawing on theories of intercultural theatre by scholars such as Rustom Bharucha, Patrice Pavis, and Erika Fischer-Lichte, the presentation interrogates whether these adaptations challenge Eurocentric notions of universality or risk reproducing cultural asymmetries embedded within global modernism. Particular attention is paid to how Beckett’s sparse language, silences, and fragmented bodies resonate with South Asian theatrical idioms rooted in performativity, ritual, and collective memory. Ultimately, the presentation argues that Beckett’s afterlives in South Asia reveal a dynamic process of cultural translation in which intercultural performance becomes both an act of artistic inheritance and a critique of canonical Western modernism.

Born and raised in Kolkata, Sukanya Chakrabarti, an artist-scholar-teacher, received her doctoral degree in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University. She is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at the Department of Film, Theatre, and Dance at San Jose State University.

Both as a scholar and an artist, she is interested in spaces and their contribution to meaning-making, placemaking and storytelling. She is the Editor of the journal Theatre Topics, and her current and ongoing research project is on performances of the South Asian diaspora in the US across generations of immigration. As an artist, she has worked as a playwright, director, dramaturg, and performer in New York, the Bay Area, and Kolkata. She served as the Cultural Dramaturg for Public Obscenities, written and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2024. Recently, she translated Rabindranath Tagore’s Kingdom of Cards, which she directed and co-adapted with Matthew Spangler for a contemporary audience. More details about her projects can be found on her website: www.sukanyac.com

Date: Sunday, May 17 at 5pm

Location: United Irish Cultural Center – Members Room, 45th and Sloat Blvd, SF