Böcker av Kathryn Hansen

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.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Western-style playhouses were found in every Indian city. Professional drama troupes held crowds spellbound with their spectacular productions. From this colorful world of entertainment come the autobiographies in this book. The life-stories of a quartet of early Indian actors and poet-playwrights are here translated into English for the first time.The most famous, Jayshankar Sundari, was a female impersonator of the highest order. Fida Husain Narsi also played womens parts, until gaining great fame for his role as a Hindu saint. Two others, Narayan Prasad Betab and Radheshyam Kathavachak, wrote landmark dramas that ushered in the mythological genre, intertwining politics and religion with popular performance.These men were schooled not in the classroom but in large theatrical companies run by Parsi entrepreneurs. Their memoirs, replete with anecdote and humor, offer an unparalleled window onto a vanished world, where Indias late-colonial vernacular culture and early cinema history come alive. From another perspective, these narratives are as significant to the understanding of the nationalist era as the lives of political leaders or social reformers.This book includes four substantive chapters on the history of the Parsi theatre, debates over autobiography in the Indian context, strategies for reading autobiography in general, and responses to these specific texts. The apparatus, based on the translators extensive research, includes notes on personages, performances, texts, vernacular usage, and cultural institutions.