Importance Of Traditional Theatre

Our traditional theatre has been the carrier of the basic values and beliefs of Indian life. It can be said that this theatre has been instrumental in bridging the gap between the various castes, classes and communities of a given region and provided a medium to unify them. Without any external encouragement and owing to the lack of patronage, the traditional theatre tended to become stagnant and very soon a new kind of theatre introduced by the British colonizers in the 19th century began to take hold. This new theatre has no connection with our rich heritage of traditional theatre but catered to the likings of the new ruling class by which it was patronized. This led the traditional theatre to be limited to rural India while the

Its patrons and practitioners were the Indians who were trained in Western education and who heartily accepted subordination. The new theatre got immense patronage and encouragement in cities like Calcutta, Bombay and to some extent in Madras and had no connection with the countryside traditional theatre. In Bengali and Marathi, this theatre became most active. The written text and the playwright got central importance in this new theatrical activity. The theatrical activity in Bengal was far advanced in all respects. Only in Calcutta, an urban residential theatre on the model of the western world, especially of London, came into existence and has

The plays written for this theatre were generally imitating the Shakespearean model and their stories were mostly drawn from the Muslim or Indian romantic tales and later, also from mythological and historical episodes. In the Parsi theatre there was a preponderance of music and dance which it absorbed from the folk theatre or natyas. The Parsi stage was divided in deep and shallow scenes—the deep scenes involved the characters of the main plot while the shallow scenes were link scenes which depicted characters of lower-class, which were staged in the foreground of the stage with painted curtain often depicting a street scene while the stage could be prepared for the more important deep