The arrival of electricity as an everyday scientific and technological phenomenon into colonial Calcutta from the late-1870s onwards coincided with the emergence of the Bengali theatre as a physical and metaphorical stage to publicly portray, discuss and debate the contemporary social, cultural and nationalist issues of the emerging Bengali middle classes. This paper examines the place of electricity in Bengali theatre - not just in the physical spaces, but also in its plays and language - as an explanatory and metaphorical tool in literary and dramatic responses to the complexities of contemporary Bengali middle classes. It will study how electricity and electrical technologies served as tropes signalling wider Bengali middle-class anxieties over colonialism, identity, autonomy, nationalism and technological modernity, especially in the perception and portrayal of domestic electrification as a harbinger of radical change that could disrupt long-established 'Indian' cultural values within the Bengali household. Bengali dramatists, it will be shown, added their own interpretations of electricity, as well as their hopes and fears of its influence on the Bengali individual, family and society. While the works of Bengali dramatists and satirists are the main focus of this paper, I also use other forms of nationalist writings and imagery to explore how allusions to electricity in Bengali drama reflected not only anticolonial resistance to Western technologies in the Bengali domestic sphere, but also revealed ideological contestations within sections of the Bengali middle class on notions of modernity, tradition and the nation.
