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Niru's children are named Peter and Bob, and will take Tom Helmer's surname.

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The Kathak dance is a pivotal moment in the play. As Niru prepares to perform this ritual temple dance for a party of British colonialists she is objectified and sexualised by Tom. The dance is not only symbolic of his orientalist fantasy of Niru and the power imbalance in their relationship, but it also embodies her fraught emotional state, loss of control and ultimately her loss of identity.

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With the spread of colonial British rule in 19th-century India, Kathak along with all other classical dance forms were discouraged and it severely declined. This was in part the result of the Victorian morality of sexual repressiveness along with Anglican missionaries who criticized Hinduism. Reverend James Long, for example, proposed that Kathak dancers should forget ancient Indian tales and Hindu legends, and substitute them with European legends and Christian tales. Missionaries recorded their frustration in Church Missionary Review when they saw Hindu audiences applaud and shout "Ram, Ram" during Kathak performances.

The seductive gestures and facial expressions during Kathak performances in Temples and family occasions were caricatured in The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood, published at the start of the 20th century, as evidence of "harlots, debased erotic culture, slavery to idols and priests" tradition, and Christian missionaries demanded that this must be stopped, launching the "anti-dance movement" or "anti-nautch movement" in 1892.

Officials and newspapers dehumanized the Kathak dancers and the sources of patronage were pressured to stop supporting the Kathak performing girls.
Not only did missionaries and colonial officials ridicule the Kathak dancers, Indian men who had been educated in colonial Britain and had adapted to Victorian prudery joined the criticism, states Margaret Walker, possibly because they had lost their cultural connection, no longer understood the underlying spiritual themes behind the dance, and assumed this was one of the "social ills, immoral and backward elements" in their heritage that they must stamp out. However, the Hindu families continued their private tutoring and kept the Kathak art alive as an oral tradition. Kathak teachers also shifted to training boys to preserve the tradition, as most of the 20th-century ridicule had been directed at Kathak "nautch girls".

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Kathak is one of the eight major forms of Indian Classical Dance. The origin of Kathak is traditionally attributed to the traveling bards of ancient northern India known as Kathakars or storytellers. The term Kathak is derived from the Vedic Sanskrit word Katha which means "story", and Kathakar which means "the one who tells a story", or "to do with stories".

Wandering Kathakars communicated stories from the great epics and ancient mythology through dance, songs and music. Kathak dancers tell various stories through their hand movements and extensive footwork, their body movements and flexibility but most importantly through their facial expressions.

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Tanika Gupta speaking about her play 'The Empress' which is set in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, when Rani Das and Abdul Karim step ashore onto London's Tilbury Docks after a long voyage from India.

The play blends the true story of Queen Victoria's relationship with her servant and 'Munshi' (teacher) Abdul Karim, with the experiences of Indian ayahs who came to Britain during the 19th century.

Born in India in 1863, Abdul Karim was selected to be a servant to Queen Victoria. He was brought to England and presented to the Queen by the Viceroy of India. He continued to serve the Queen throughout the final 15 years of her reign, quickly becoming a favourite of hers, which caused friction amongst her other attendants. Ayahs were Indian nannies largely employed by English families living in India to care for their children. From as early as the 1700s, many accompanied their employers back to Britain for personal and financial reasons.

It played in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon from 11 April to 4 May 2013.

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Tanika Gupta interview | The Empress | Royal Shakespeare Company

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Hinduism is the oldest religion in the world dating 5,000 years. It is followed by over 1.5 billion people today making it the third largest religion. There were no founders because Hinduism was formed as a way of life (dharma). Hindus was the name given to people who live around the Indus Valley. The term 'Hinduism' was only coined in the 19th Century. It was called Sanatana Dharma (the Eternal Law).

7 Core Beliefs:
1. PARAMATAMA: Universal soul, the source of all reality
2. ATMAN: Immortal individual soul
3. KARMA: the moral law of cause and effect
4. MOKSHA: Release from pattern of Life and Death
5. VEDAS: Hindu Scriptures
6. CYCLE OF TIME: No beginning or end
7. DHARMA: Balance of nature through peace and discipline

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"It's a supremely smart switch. Setting the play in 1879, the year it was written, Gupta allows its new Kolkata setting to add a layer of racial domination to its examination of patriarchy and its effects. Ibsen was always about society as well as the individual and here the social structures that pinion Niru in her place are graphically and brilliantly realised."

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Nora has become Niru as playwright Tanika Gupta takes Ibsen's study of marital discontent and transposes it to India where an English colonial administrator has taken "a little chirruping Indian skylark" to be his pretty, exoticised bride.

It's a supremely smart switch. Setting the play in 1879, the year it was written, Gupta allows its new Kolkata setting to add a layer of racial domination to its examination of patriarchy and its effects. Ibsen was always about society as well as the individual and here the social structures that pinion Niru in her place are graphically and brilliantly realised.

It helps that Anjana Vasan as Niru really does look like a doll; petite and beautiful she begins the play stealing sweets like a child. Over and over again Elliot Cowan's Tom sweeps her up in his arms, whirling her around like a puppet, depriving her of agency by his ability physically to overwhelm her. The simple disparity in their heights makes her vulnerability all the more touching.

When - in the great final act - the fraud that she committed to raise money to nurse him back to health is finally revealed, he turns on her with the vehemence of man who thinks he is tolerant and is now revealed as a closet racist. As in Robert Icke's adaptation of Schnitzler's , the terrible, swirling mix of prejudice uncovered by crisis strengthens Ibsen's central tenet. The moment when he describes her as a "savage heathen" is almost as shocking as his contention she is not fit to look after her children; when the system is built on inequality those outside the power structure will always be in a weak position.

Vasan and Cowan play the scene with total commitment. Her journey from dependence to fierce independence is beautifully charted; she conveys thought in wide-eyed stillness. It's a lovely nuanced performance, marking Vasan as a talent to watch. Cowan is more shouty, but he manages to suggest the weakness that leaves Helmer with just a shred of likeability. At the end of this marriage the door does not slam; there's a suggestion that in leaving it open, Niru also leaves her husband with the possibility of glimpsing a wider world.

It all fits seamlessly into the Indian setting beautifully realised by Lily Arnold's design for a courtyard house with its terracotta walls and a banana tree growing high into the sky; the lighting by Kevin Treacy is atmospheric, matching the mood as much as the changing time of day. Arun Ghosh's onstage musician (playing the music he composed) and Gregory Clarke's sound design both further the sense of a clash of cultures and of ideals. A Kathak dance is a perfect substitution for Nora's famous tarantella; the idea of Niru performing it at a party of white people all the more disturbing.

The secondary changes work equally well. Assad Zaman brings a wheedling sympathy to the role of the blackmailing money-lender, now a struggling clerk; Tripti Tripuraneni is both strong and sad as Niru's friend, a widow forced to wear white and beg for work; Colin Tierney is a sympathetic though slightly sinister Doctor Rank, his fascination for Niru tinged with a forbidden desire. He conveys a general sense of impotence: he despairs at the English imperialists but cannot act.

Rachel O'Riordan, in her first production as director of the Lyric, keeps everything moving along with sensitivity and flair; there are occasional longeurs in the pacing but the production is both faithful to Ibsen and revelatory in its rethinking.

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Review: A Doll's House (Lyric Hammersmith Theatre) | WhatsOnStage

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Nora has become Niru as playwright Tanika Gupta takes Ibsen's study of marital discontent and transposes it to India where an English colonial administrator has taken "a little chirruping Indian skylark" to be his pretty, exoticised bride. It's a supremely smart switch.

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Tanika Gupta has transposed Ibsen’s seminal play to 1879 Calcutta and the result is multilayered, massively intelligent and moving. In Gupta’s version, colonial politics are inescapably intertwined with an inflexible patriarchy and, although I have the odd caveat, Rachel O’Riordan’s production gets the Lyric’s new regime off to a rousing start.

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anika Gupta has transposed Ibsen's seminal play to 1879 Calcutta and the result is multilayered, massively intelligent and moving. In Gupta 's version, colonial politics are inescapably intertwined with an inflexible patriarchy and, although I have the odd caveat, Rachel O'Riordan's production gets the Lyric's new regime off to a rousing start.

Following Ibsen's structure, Gupta turns Tom Helmer into a chief of tax collection who exoticises his wife, Niru, as his "little Indian princess". This instantly highlights the isolation of Niru, a sari-wearing Christian convert regarded with equal suspicion by the colonial wives and her fellow Indians. It also allows Gupta to fascinatingly redefine the other characters. Niru's closest friend, the terminally ill Dr Rank, becomes a fiercely pro-Indian expat who argues that it's the English that need civilizing.

An irredeemable creep ... Elliot Cowan as Tom and Colin Tierney as Dr Rank. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Ibsen's blackmailing Krogstad, whose power resides in his knowledge that the heroine has forged her father's signature, is also transformed into the more complex figure of the lowly clerk, Kaushik Das. When he declares that he will rise through the ranks so that "it'll be me, an Indian, calling the shots," you hear the stored up resentment of an oppressed people.

Everything in Ibsen has been shrewdly reimagined: Niru shows her command over Rank by getting him to tie dancing-bells round her ankles. Anjana Vasan gives a career-defining performance as Niru. She captures perfectly the gradations in Niru's character as she moves from the assumed role of skittish, smiling child bride to the suicidal frenzy of a dance that has her beating the walls in despair to the poised, climactic declaration of independence. It's a measure of Vasan's success that she seems to age 20 years in the course of the performance. Elliot Cowan is equally assured as Tom and, if I have any criticism of Gupta's text, it is that it makes his character seem an irredeemable creep as, at the end, he moves from racist abuse of Niru to patronising ingratiation. I miss the note of hope Ibsen offers of Tom's possible moral reawakening. But there is superb support from Colin Tierney as an anti-colonial Rank, Assad Zaman as the understandably vengeful Das and Tripti Tripuraneni as a self-sacrificing Indian widow.

Deftly staged around Lily Arnold's tiered courtyard, this is a fine production that makes us see a familiar classic through fresh eyes.

* At Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 5 October.

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A Doll's House review - Ibsen's classic shrewdly reimagined in colonial India

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Tanika Gupta has transposed Ibsen's seminal play to 1879 Calcutta and the result is multilayered, massively intelligent and moving. In Gupta's version, colonial politics are inescapably intertwined with an inflexible patriarchy and, although I have the odd caveat, Rachel O'Riordan's production gets the Lyric's new regime off to a rousing start.

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Before British colonialism, those who would now be defined as Hindu existed without one collective identity and certainly did not possess a unified collective religious identity. The group now defined as Hindu can be said to have existed only because it was a group independent of Islam, Christianity or Judaism, although not internally coherent. The lack of religious coherence within the Hindu group is demonstrated by the fact that they did not view Islam in religious terms.

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Anglo-Indian Relationships leading up to this time

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Anglo-Indian Relationships leading up to this time

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The wills of East India Company officials, now in the India Office library, clearly show that in the 1780s, more than one-third of the British men in India were leaving all their possessions to one or more Indian wives, or to Anglo-Indian children - a degree of cross-cultural mixing which has never made it into the history books. It suggests that the India of the East India Company was an infinitely more culturally, racially and religiously mixed place than modern Britain can even dream of being.

In the more loving relationships of this period, Indian wives often retired with their husbands to England.
Many of these 'mixed-blood children'  who resulted from these marriages/relationships  had been quietly and successfully absorbed into the British establishment, some even attaining high office: Lord Liverpool, the early-19th-century prime minister, was of Anglo-Indian descent.

Much, however, depended on skin colour. As a Calcutta agent wrote to Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India, when discussing what to do with his Anglo-Indian step-grandchildren: "The two eldest - [who] are almost as fair as European children - should be sent to Europe. I could have made no distinction between the children if the youngest was of a complexion that could possibly escape detection; but as I daily see the injurious consequences resulting from bringing up certain [darker-skinned] native children at home, it has become a question in my own mind how far I should confer a service in recommending the third child" to proceed to England. It was decided, in the end, that the "dark" child should stay in India, while the others were shipped to Britain.

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Tanika Gupta's adaptation of A Doll's House contrasts the original which was at the same time but in a completely different setting. The original was written and performed in the same year at the Royal theatre in Denmark, written by Norweigan playwright Henrik Ibsen. Tanika Gupta said she was "enlightened by the story of an empowering woman in what was typically a mans world" and rewrote the play about Calcutta.

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Tanika Gupta's adaptation of A Doll's House on at the Lyrics Hammersmith in 2019. Directed by Rachel O'Riordan and starring Anjana Vasan and Elliot Cowan as the leads.

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The Reverend Jennings arrives in India on a mission

In 1852 the Reverend John Jennings  arrived in Delhi in 1852 on a mission to convert as many people as he could to Christianity. He was just one of many Christian evangelicals who had come to India in the years since the 1820s to convert Indians to Christianity.

In 1813 the East India Act forced the Honourable East India Company (HEIC) to allow missionaries into India which before they had not. Two years later the first of many societies, the Church Missionary Society, established a presence in India which was to lead to an influx of missionaries. Like many of his contemporaries, Jennings combined his job of administering to the English community in Delhi with doing what he could to convert Indians to Christianity.

There should be no compromise with false religions

Jennings believed that the British should be doing what they could to conquer the sub-continent for Anglicanism and the one true God.  In Calcutta the Reverend Edmunds believed that the Company should use its position to bring about the conversion of India to a Christian country.  In Peshawar, Herbert Edwards believed that the Empire had been given to Britain because of the virtues of English Protestantism.

He wrote: 'The Giver of Empires is indeed God and He gave the Empire to Britain because England had made the greatest efforts to preserve the Christian religion in its purest apostolic form'.

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Under colonialism, Indian religion clashed directly with British Christianity. With Christianity being one of the pillars on which the British Empire was built, the religion of Indians was targeted by colonial missionaries in the similar fashion as had happened across the empire.

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The British living in the Indian sub-continent continued to
wear the same clothes and attire as worn in England. They may have adapted the fabrics slightly wearing cooler cottons
and linens, but, on the most part they upheld the fashions as a point of principal.

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https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=995045597609258

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Bengali cuisine is one of the finest blends of non-vegetarian and vegetarian dishes. Bengal is known as the land of 'Maach aar Bhaat’ which means ‘fish and rice'. The wide varieties of Bengal Cuisine in festivals, occasions and seasons are integral part of Bengali Culture - literature, songs, paintings, movies have a nostalgic appeal . The Bengali cuisine has an unique feature being an assimilation of the best of the world gastronomy and Indian diverse cookery. Rasogolla and sweets of Bengal are world famous. Jalebis are made by deep-frying maida flour batter in pretzel or circular shapes, which are then soaked in sugar syrup.

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Food and Diet culture clash during Colonial Rule

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Food and Diet culture clash during Colonial Rule

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From David Arnold, historian, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, "Initially, the British were "exotic" outsiders who could learn to survive in an unfamiliar environment from the natives." British doctors frequently thought gorging meat and drink as unsuited to India's hot and humid climate.

Indians, on the other hand, looked on with horror at the British pork and beef. Francis Buchanan Hamilton, a physician, says that the British diet reduced them in Indian eyes "to the lowest dregs of Hindu impurity".

Because of repeated famine in the late 18th century, the British were interested in new food plants which might help ward off starvation and human misery. But they were also perplexed by the quantity and quality of food to be provided.

During the Madras famine of 1876-78, there was a heated exchange on this issue between W R Cornish, the Sanitary Commissioner for Madras, and Sir Richard Temple, the Government of India's Special Advisor. In 1874, Temple stated that a diet of one pound of grain was enough to sustain life and the government could not be expected to do more. Cornish argued that this diet was not sufficient and needed to be supplemented by other foodstuff. Cornish rightly linked inadequate food to ill health. The Cornish-Temple debate was about physical wasting and state responsibility -- it was not about malnutrition as a perennial problem.

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The British Raj brought about a change in the way saris were
draped as the traditional way of draping sari without blouse
was seen as too revealing and inappropriate. Influenced
by Victorian English fashion Bengali women started
wearing a sari with a blouse or an undershirt (jama) and
petticoat (shaya).

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Until the last decades of the East India Company (1600–1858), most British men in India
spent part of their careers living with at least one Indian or Eurasian woman. A member of
administration was as likely to have a ‘bibi’ or native mistress as a household handyman
in Calcutta, though the ‘bibi’ was very much more than a mistress.

Richard Burton, who spent seven years as an officer in India in the 1840s, lauded his first mistress as a nurse, a housekeeper and a teacher ‘not only [of] Hindostani grammar, but the [ways] of native life’
too; furthermore she knew how to keep ‘the servants in order’. In later years he recalled
that the erotic skills of Indian women were so superior to those of British men that no ‘bibi’
had ever been able to truly love her master.

In this era it was acceptable for women from Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies to be objectified. These ‘exotic’ women were depicted in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective, presenting and representing them as rare sexual objects for the pleasure of the white male viewer. Their ‘otherness’ was enforced as they were dressed up to dance, sing, entertain and please their colonial masters however they were bid.

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Raja Ravi Varma is considered among the greatest painters in the history of Indian art. This epic painting by Raja Ravi Varma, depicts Shakuntula, an important character of Mahabharata, pretending to remove a thorn from her foot, while actually looking for her husband/lover, Dushyantha, while her friends call her bluff. Shakuntula is wearing a Kasta sari.

A sari is a women's garment from the Indian subcontinent that consists of an unstitched drape varying from 4.5 to 9 metres in length and 600 to 1,200 millimetres in breadth that is typically wrapped around the waist, with one end draped over the shoulder, partly baring the midriff.

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Gupta's clearest intervention in Ibsen's original text takes the form of a debate between Tom Helmer and Dr Rank in which Rank states his disgust at The British Colonialist treatment of its Indian subjects. He criticises the Empire's cruelty and applauds political leader and founder of 'The Bengali' newspaper, Surendranath Banerjee. Banerjee was nicknamed 'Surrender Not Banerjee' by the British due to his popular speeches condemning racial discrimination by British Officials and his promotion of a United India. In 1883, Bannerjee heralded the birth of the Indian National Congress, and, in turn, influenced the next generation of Indian Nationalists.

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Boggart Hole Clough, Charlestown Road, Blackley, Manchester, UK

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2. Questions about what exists and has happened before the action of the scene begins.

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2. Questions about what exists and has happened before the action of the scene begins.

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How old are Niru's children?
How long has Das wanted to have this conversation?
What trouble has Das been in?
What previous interactions have they had?
What did Baba die of?
How long has Niru owed
money?
What was Niru's relationship like with her Dad?
What is it like with her husband?
How long have Das an Niru known each other?

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3. Facts about the immediate circumstances of the scene. 

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3. Facts about the immediate circumstances of the scene. 

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>Tom Helmer got Krishna Lahiri a job in the tax office
>Das’s job at the tax office is in trouble
>Niru’s children are playing hide and seek with her
>Someone left their gate open
>Niru’s Husband left home
> It’s Christmas Eve
>Mrs Lahiri arrived in Calcutta and has just been employed by Niru's husband
>It is Christmas Eve
>Mrs Lahiri lost her husband

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1. Facts about what exists and has happened before the action of the play (first scene) begins.

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1. Facts about what exists and has happened before the action of the play (first scene) begins.

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>Set in 1879, Calcutta - a pivotal moment in the struggle for Indian independence from the British Raj.

>India was still recovering from the Great Famine (1876-1878) which caused the death of 5.5 million Indians.

>The famine was due to a number of factors including intense drought, crop failure and the British Government's continued export of grain to England (320,000 tonnes over two years) in the face of the starving population.

>India and its population suffered appalling exploitation for over 100 years since the arrival of the East India Company (1600-1858) and there was now an increasing number of British who were beginning to question the role and purpose of the British Empire in India.

>The British Government shut down the East India Company in 1858 and the Raj was established. Clear rules came into being regarding marriage for British men serving in Indian. Marriage to an Indian woman was scandalous and marriages to Anglo-Indians heavily frowned upon.

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> Tanika Gupta was born (1963) in London to immigrants from Calcutta.
> Gupta graduated from Oxford University with a Modern History degree.
> Gupta worked for an Asian women's refuge in Manchester
>Over the past 20 years Tanika Gupta has
written over 20 stage plays that have
been produced in major theatres across
the UK.
>Tanika Gupta is related to Dinesh Gupta, an Indian revolutionary against the British Rule in India
>Tanika's mother (Gairika Gupta) was a classically trained dancer, and her father (Tapan Gupta) was a singer.
Tanika and her husband David Archer have three children together: Nandini, Malini and Niharika Gupta.

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4. Questions about the immediate circumstances of the scene. 

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4. Questions about the immediate circumstances of the scene. 

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-Do the kids recognise Das?
-Is he identified as a danger to the family by Niru? Is that why she calls for the kids to go back inside?
-Is he being menacing?
-Is Niru scared of him right away or does she start off confident in her ability to tell him away?
-Where do they fall on the political spectrum?
-Has she changed her world views since marrying an English man?
-Is Das in immediate danger if he loses his job/does not get his money back?
-Since when has he felt this way about Niru and his past interaction with her?