The first speaker has some academic performance in the United States.

Sudipto Chatterjee is a playwright, poet, scholar, and theatre-worker from Calcutta and a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at New York University.
    Partha Chatterjee is a professor of Political Science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and the author of Nationalist Thought.
    Sudipto: The question that comes to my mind as a person from Calcutta, someone involved with the theatre, and at the same time as someone who is in the United States in the world of academics, is how do you reconcile your two images, being both a preeminent scholar and at the same time being very involved in the theatre as a playwright and a theatre worker?
    Partha: It’s very hard to answer this question. I think these are two very different hats that I wear. When I am doing theatre, and as you know this theatre is very much Calcutta theatre, which, although influenced over the last 150 years by Western theatre, it is still very much something that is localized, it has very very local resonances. On the other hand, academic work in India is necessarily carried out in the English language, and, in spite of all its specific India-centric nuances, it is still very much a part of an international academic life, which theatre is not. Therefore, it is not just the difference in language which is important—that most of my professional academic work is carried out in English but theatre is not, theatre is in Bengali. Both in terms of the audience or readership, and therefore even in terms of the relevant institutions in which one is located, doing these two kinds of work are very different. Of course, in some ways I do try to reconcile these two different kinds of activities in the same person, but I do think that they are different. And people involved in the theatre in Calcutta have very little idea or even interest hi what I do at other times and certainly people in the academic world know very little about Calcutta theatre.
    Sudipto: That precisely is the purpose of this interview well, maybe, one of the proposes is to present both aspects of your personality and writing.
    Partha: One of the things I would definitely emphasize is the fact of bilingualism. The way in which we hi India have to live it out necessarily means adopting all sorts of means, even in one’s personal life, in trying to work with two different languages and therefore work with two very different worlds which come together in the same lives, but they still have very different relevance and points of reference. And I am not saying that everybody does it in quite the same way. One of the ways in which I try and do it is to use theatre as one side which is completely centered around that part of my life which is lived out in the Bengali language. Drama is really the field in which I have tried it out. It’s not something I would ever attempt to do in the English language because, as I said, in my professional life as an academic clearly there are certain limitations, I am constantly aware of certain things which I am unable to do in terms of my own thinking and living, various modes of self-expression which it is impossible for me to work out in my professional academic life, given one’s very ambiguous relationship with the English language. So, I suppose, drama is the field where I have a sense of freedom, a sense of far greater control over the materials and language and the kinds of things I can do with a sense of proprietorship which I certainly don’t enjoy in the English language.