Imagining the Proletariat: The Indian People’s Theatre Association and the Making of a Working‑Class Public Sphere

Abstract

This paper examines the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) as a political-cultural movement that sought to imagine, mobilise and represent the working class during a critical conjuncture in late colonial and early postcolonial India. Founded in 1943 amid the Second World War, the Bengal famine, and intensifying anti-colonial struggle, IPTA emerged as the cultural front of the communist movement and the first all-India attempt to create a people’s theatre rooted in labouring lives. Rather than treating IPTA’s plays and songs as literary texts, this study situates the organisation historically as an institutional network, a mode of political mobilisation, and a site where ideas of the “working class” were actively constructed. Drawing on IPTA manifestos, conference resolutions, memoirs of activists and artists, contemporary press reports and Communist Party and trade-union materials, the paper investigates how IPTA conceptualised the worker as a political subject. It analyses the organisation’s touring practices, performance spaces, and links with trade unions and peasant organisations to show how IPTA attempted to create a working-class public sphere beyond elite urban theatre. The paper further explores the ideological framing of workers on stage as victims of famine and exploitation, as heroic agents of collective struggle and as constituents of a broader “people’s” bloc that fused class politics with anti-imperialist nationalism. The study also addresses the limits of this representational project, highlighting tensions between IPTA’s predominantly middle-class leadership and the labouring subjects it sought to speak for, as well as silences around caste, gender, and regional diversity within the working class. Finally, it traces how shifts in communist politics after independence reshaped IPTA’s labour imagination and contributed to the movement’s fragmentation, while leaving a durable legacy for later people’s theatre initiatives. By locating IPTA within labour history and political-cultural historiography, the paper argues that cultural representation was central to the making of working-class consciousness in modern India.