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Paper short abstract

Against instrumental, consensus-obsessed peacebuilding, this paper insists that theatre education—grounded in the Nāṭyaśāstra—cultivates peace through shared affect (rasa) and ethical witnessing (sahridaya), exposing the limits of colonial pedagogy under India’s NEP 2020.

Paper long abstract

In contexts of increasing social polarisation, misinformation, and uncertainty, peacebuilding is increasingly understood as a relational and affective process rather than a purely institutional or policy-driven one. This paper explores theatre education as a site of everyday peacebuilding, drawing on the Nāṭyaśāstra, a foundational Indian text that theorises art as a mediator of social life. Despite its significance, the Nāṭyaśāstra remained largely absent from formal educational curricula in India due to colonial pedagogical frameworks that privileged Western aesthetic theory, marginalising indigenous knowledge systems.

Central to the Nāṭyaśāstra are concepts such as rasa, a collectively experienced aesthetic-affective state, bhāva, structured emotional expression, and sahridaya, the attuned spectator. Together, these frame performance as a shared experiential space where complex or conflicting emotions can be engaged without antagonism or the demand for consensus. Such an approach enables empathy, emotional regulation, and ethical distance—capacities vital to peacebuilding in divided contexts.

The paper situates these ideas within contemporary higher education through reflections from the author’s teaching practice in theatre and performing arts at the University of Delhi, particularly in the context of India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which explicitly calls for the integration of indigenous knowledge systems and challenges colonial epistemologies.

The paper argues that Nāṭyaśāstra offers a culturally grounded yet globally relevant framework for understanding how art education contributes to peacebuilding by reshaping modes of attention, feeling, and relation, while also highlighting the challenges of translating such affective outcomes into dominant development and policy-oriented evidence frameworks.