Faculty of Arts - English

Academic contribution in last five years

Professor Ananda Lal specializes in theatre, translation and Tagore studies. He edited the Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre (2004), the first reference work on its subject in any language, and contributed entries to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia (CD-ROM), Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (Routledge), The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre, and other international resources. He edited a volume of contemporary Indian plays titled Twist in the Folktale (Seagull) and, with Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri, the DSA publication Shakespeare on the Calcutta Stage: A Checklist (Papyrus). He is an active translator of Bengali drama and poetry: his critical edition of Three Plays by Rabindranath Tagore is in its second edition (Oxford University Press), he contributed to the Oxford Tagore series of translations, and he translated Jibanananda Das, among other poets. He provided the introduction, commentary and translated texts for his project on Tagore's archival recordings, The Voice of Rabindranath Tagore (audio CD, Hindusthan). He has lectured at Harvard, Tufts and New York Universities, the Universities of California (Berkeley), Illinois and Connecticut, and La Trobe and Monash Universities (Australia). He has been a Cambridge Fellow (Downing College) and Senior Fulbright Fellow (Indiana University). Dr Lal is Calcutta’s leading theatre critic, reviewing for The Telegraph. The Drama Academy India chose him as Best Theatre Researcher, 2000. He directs the yearly departmental theatre productions, keenly awaited events around which the student calendar to some extent revolves, and now formalized as an optional course for academic credit. Dr Lal is a member of the Publications Committee, Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, and the Committee of the Natya Shodh Sansthan theatre archives, Kolkata. He has done extensive scriptwriting, subtitling and voiceover work for educational films and television programmes.

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