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Languages on Stage: Linguistic Pluralism and Community Formation in the Nineteenth-Century Parsi Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2003

Kathryn Hansen
Kathryn Hansen
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
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Abstract

The Parsi theatre was the dominant form of dramatic entertainment in urban India from the 1860s to the 1930s. Named for its Bombay-based pioneers, the Parsi theatre blended certain European practices of stagecraft and commercial organization with Indic, Persian, and English stories, music, and poetry. Through the impact of its touring companies, it had a catalytic effect on the development of modern drama and regional theatre throughout South and Southeast Asia. Moreover, Parsi theatre is widely credited with contributing to popular Indian cinema its genres, aesthetic, and economic base. With Hindi films now the major cultural signifier for the middle classes and the ‘masses’ in South Asia and its diaspora, documentation and evaluation of the Parsi theatre is much needed, especially to connect it convincingly to the cinematic medium that followed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , May 2003 , pp. 381 - 405
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The author wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the USIA Fulbright Senior Scholar Program in aid of this research. Special thanks are extended to Samira Sheikh and Sunil Sharma for their assistance with the translations from Gujarati used in this article. The article is based upon a paper presented at the conference ‘New Literary Histories for 19th Century India’ at the University of California, Berkeley, on September 17, 1999.