Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The vanished world of India’s late-colonial theatre provides the backdrop for 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. These men were schooled not in the classroom but in large theatrical companies run by Parsi entrepreneurs. Their memoirs, replete with anecdote and humor, are as significant to the understanding of the nationalist era as the lives of political leaders or social reformers.
Kathryn Hansen is a leading scholar of South Asian theatre history, especially the Hindi and Urdu vernacular traditions of North India. She has authored ‘Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India’, translated ‘The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development’, and co-edited ‘A Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective’. She holds the position of Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
List of Illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgments; Part 1; Chapter 1. Pioneers to Professionals: A Retrospective of the Parsi Theatre; Chapter 2. Theatrical Memoirs and the Archives of Autobiography; Part 2; Chapter 3. Narayan Prasad Betab, ‘The Deeds of Betab’; Chapter 4. Radheshyam Kathavachak, ‘My Theatre Days’; Chapter 5. Jayshankar Sundari, ‘Some Blossoms, Some Tears’; Chapter 6. Fida Husain, ‘Fifty Years in the Parsi Theatre’; Part 3; Chapter 7. Self and Subjectivity in Autobiographical Criticism; Chapter 8. Voices and Silences: Reading the Texts; Appendix 1. Historical Personages and Institutions; Appendix 2. List of Plays and Films; Glossary Hindi and Urdu Terms; Bibliography