Russian Enterprise, Bengali Theatre And The Machinations Of The East India Company
Laurence Senelick
Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory
Tufts University
Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedev (1749-1817) was a Russian court musician who taught himself fluent English, French, German and the violin. As a member of an ambassadorial ensemble, he traveled to Vienna and then to London, whence he embarked to British India. In Madras in 1785 he staged concerts, but could not pursue his study of ancient Indian languages. Moving to Calcutta two years later, he learned Hindi, Sanskrit and Bengali, earning a living by performing music, including Indian melodies played on Western instruments. He founded the first professional playhouse open to Bengalis in India in 1795, mounting an English comedy translated into both the language and manners of Bengal. His success provoked the envy of the two English-language theatres and there was an attempt to burn down his playhouse. Bankrupted by a trumped-up court case, he chose to leave British India in 1797. He sailed for Cape Town, keeping a valuable journal, on his way to London, where he published his grammar of East Indian tongues. Ultimately, he founded a printing house in St Petersburg, the first with Sanskrit type, and issued his observations on Brahmin customs.
Although for a long time Sanskrit scholars dismissed Lebedev’s researches as amateurish and out of touch with later Orientalism, historians of Indian drama called him “the father of Bengali theatre.” In the current cultural climate, Indian artists, such as the playwright Al Deen, have objected to the idea that a foreigner should found a native theatre. Russian scholars know him as the founder of Russian Indology. His polyglot and picaresque career are all but unknown otherwise.
This paper intends to concentrate on Lebedev’s embroiled relations with the East India Company and the larger conflicts between England and Russia that ruined his enterprise and drove him out of the sub-Continent. Using original documents that have hitherto appeared only in Russian scholarly publications, it will illustrate how Lebedev’s innovative Bengali theatre project was doomed to fail, given the socio-political prejudices of a British colonial society.
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