Parsi Theatre – Its Origins and Development
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A seminal study of a historically significant theater style.
Unrivaled in its long-term impact, Parsi theater remains a crucial component of South Asia’s cultural heritage. Like vaudeville in America, Parsi theater dominated mass entertainment in colonial India in the era before cinema. Drawn by the magic of sight and sound, crowds filled the country’s urban playhouses each night. Marked by extravagant acting, operatic singing, and melodramatic stage effects, this cosmopolitan theater brought an unprecedented level of sophistication to the South Asian stage and transformed commercial drama into a modern industry, paving the way for Indian cinema. This volume presents Somnath Gupt’s classic history of Parsi theater in an English translation enhanced by illustrations, annotations, and appendices, which make it a more comprehensive and accurate reference work.
Unrivaled in its long-term impact, Parsi theater remains a crucial component of South Asia’s cultural heritage. Like vaudeville in America, Parsi theater dominated mass entertainment in colonial India in the era before cinema. Drawn by the magic of sight and sound, crowds filled the country’s urban playhouses each night. Marked by extravagant acting, operatic singing, and melodramatic stage effects, this cosmopolitan theater brought an unprecedented level of sophistication to the South Asian stage and transformed commercial drama into a modern industry, paving the way for Indian cinema. This volume presents Somnath Gupt’s classic history of Parsi theater in an English translation enhanced by illustrations, annotations, and appendices, which make it a more comprehensive and accurate reference work.
Somnath Gupt chaired the Hindi departments at Jaswant College, Jodhpur, and the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, in the 1950s and 1960s and wrote more than a dozen books on Hindi drama, fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. Kathryn Hansen is professor emeritus of Asian studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she served as director of the Center for Asian Studies. She is the author of Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India and Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies.