H How the Parsis Shaped Theatre in Colonial Bombay

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January 12, 2021

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Flops, frauds or community disapproval did not prove obstacles to the growth of the theatre enterprise.

Elphinstone Circle in Bombay in the 1870s. Photo: Lee-Warner Collection/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

When one thinks of Horniman Circle – the ring of elegant old buildings in south Mumbai – today, several associations spring to mind: the glossy storefronts of Starbucks and Hermes – the temples of neoliberal globalism; men snoozing on the garden’s shaded benches – a respite from Mumbai’s prickly afternoon heat; and the ghosting of an all but forgotten colonial past in the worn-out balustrades framing the round.

Article by Rashna Nicholson | The Wire

Yet few appreciate that this unassuming area, one of the better-conserved vestiges of the city’s history, was, more than a century ago, the pulsing heart of Old Bombay. While St Thomas Cathedral, consecrated in 1718, marked Bombay’s centre, the city’s first theatre – the other primary point of congregation for European residents – stood merely a few feet away.

Johnson, William; Henderson, William, The Cathedral, Bombay, 1855-1862. Photo: SMU Central University Libraries/Public Domain

According to the Bombay Times of 1842, the Bombay Amateur Theatre that ‘owed its origin to an earlier period than any Theatre in India’ was built in 1770 at the old Bombay Green, a location that was ‘a mere receptacle for rubbish’ granted without condition of any kind. The theatre initially served as the location for all significant socio-cultural events for the English community as Bombay possessed no Town Hall at the time.

Kumud Mehta notes that at this early stage when the Bombay Amateur Theatre’s membership comprised East India Company officers, women did not hesitate to perform. Nevertheless, as Bombay grew from town to metropolis this practice was discontinued, males having to impersonate the female parts. Crucially, this change in onstage personnel echoed larger demographic shifts offstage – Indians had begun to frequent the theatre.

Shortly after the introduction of English education in Western India, on August 3, 1821, a dress box seat was purchased by a ‘Balcrustnath Sunkerset’. A few months later, Hormusjee Bomanjee and Sorabji Framji purchased tickets for The Rivals. Meanwhile, the theatre that had incurred significant debts due to the disproportionate indulgences of its stage management, began to receive donations from the wealth seṭhīās for its upkeep, thus further reflecting the development of a diverse theatre-going public.

Francis Frith, Elphinstone Circle Bombay, 1850s-1870s. Photo: Wikipedia Commons

The decline of the Bombay Amateur Theatre

But the theatre would not last for long. By the time the theatre’s last manager, William Newnham – an outstanding figure in the civil service – retired, its debt was upwards of Rs 33,000. Consequently, the government resolved to liquidate Bombay’s much loved first theatre. In the beginning, its books, props, painted backdrops, and furniture were auctioned for the trifling amount of Rs 2,133, and subsequently, in 1835, the building was sold via Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy to Bomanjee Hormusji Wadia for Rs 52,000.

With the sale of the theatre and the discharging of its debts, the left-over sum due to the public amounted to Rs 30,000 and lengthy was the debate as to the best way to put it to use for the benefit of the ‘public’. While some insisted on the erection of a market, an Indian hospital or a permanent spot for the Bombay General Library, others contended that as the theatre had been founded and nurtured exclusively by the city’s European residents the surplus should be used for the establishment of a grammar school for Europeans.

Finally, the government conceded to a memorial, with the merchant philanthropists Jagannath Shankarsheth and Framjee Cowasjee heading the signatories, that demanded that the balance realised from the sale of the old theatre be used for the erection of a new one. A plot in Grant Road in the heart of what was then known as the ‘Native Town’ was gifted by Shankarsheth, as the site for the theatre, and although many European residents expressed forebodings of the ‘mixed’ that is, European and Indian character of the new playhouse, the Grant Road Theatre, as it came to be known, opened to much fanfare in 1845.

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At that time, the city’s refuse was deposited on either side of Grant Road making the district uninhabitable and unhealthy. The Grant Road Theatre was the only building among these flats, standing like an oasis in the desert. Kekhuśro Kābrājī, the father of the Parsi theatre reminisced, “As I was returning one night with my father from the Grant Road theatre in a carriage…a ruffian prowling about in the dark at Falkland Road, snatched my gold embroidered cap and ran away with it.”

Jagannath Shankarshet. Photo: M. Jackson/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The Grant Road Theatre

Despite the theatre’s insalubrious location, in many ways, it may be deemed the incubator of the modern South Asian theatre and Indian cinema, as the Parsi theatre found its roots there. On Saturday, October 29, 1853, Roostum Zabooli and Sohrab was performed by the first Parsi theatrical company at the Grant Road Theatre. Thereafter, Parsi social reformists, seeking to reform the Parsis of ‘evil’ customs such as child marriage, dowry, opium addiction, and gambling, produced plays such as Nādarśā nā Lagan, Bāl Vīvā, Bad ilat no Gofo, and Ūṭhāūgīr Śurtī.

These performances were condemned and subsequently, boycotted by the traditionalist faction of the community to little avail – but the theatre had put an unstoppable cultural movement into motion. By 1858, four Parsi theatrical troupes had come into being, even as this number ‘was increasing day by day,’ resulting in 1861 in the aptly entitled phenomenon of ‘mushroom clubs’, the number of theatre companies having increased to approximately 20 in the span of three short years.

Thus, even as the English amateur theatre came under difficulties, the Parsi theatre became a profitable enterprise as observed when, in April 1859, two Parsis and two Borahs were charged for having defrauded the public. Subsequent to announcing a performance at the Grant Road Theatre and taking the entrance money, the errant boys absconded from the building.

Subsequently, the press reported of sailors who brawled and children who threw rotten eggs, slippers, mud and cow-dung on stage – a phenomenon that newspapers termed ‘dramatic mania’. In response to this perceived deterioration of the theatre and the proliferation of dramatic companies that the Gujarati periodical the Rāst Goftār bitterly described as ‘mosquitos breeding together’, the Victoria Theatrical Company – the longest running troupe of the Parsi stage – was formed.

Parsi social reformists, aching to return the theatre to its erstwhile objective of inculcating ‘morality and virtue’, produced epic Persian plays such as Bejan ane Manījeh, Rustam ane Sohrāb and Khuśru Śīrīn based on the orientalist scholarship of Franz Bopp, Max Müller, Friedrich Spiegel and Martin Haug even as actors were compelled to undergo vigorous training based on Kābrājī’s exacting standards.

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Yet the theatre also witnessed a hitherto unknown popularity: large crowds gathered on the street blocking the road before the commencement of plays and despite a number of stout doorkeepers, when the theatre’s doors were opened scores of men leaped in. Ḍaglīs tore, pāghḍīs flew, and hundreds returned as they could not find seats. The Victoria’s popularity lead not only to the construction of Bombay’s second theatre, the Victoria Theatre in Grant Road (Grant Road thus becoming Bombay’s theatre district) but also foreshadowed the Parsi theatre’s popularity across the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

The Parsi theatre’s expansion

Dadabhai Paṭel’s entry on the stage marks a pivotal moment in South Asian theatre history. Paṭel, the descendant of one of the first Parsis to have settled in Bombay and one of the few seṭhīā scions to attain the covetable M.A. title, joined the Victoria and quickly rose through its ranks to become managing director. He replaced Sassanid emperors with flying fairies, a dramaturgical transition that reflected a shift in the Parsi theatre’s objective: from the social reform of the Parsi community to profit-making and mass appeal. Increasingly, the theatre, abandoning the geographic specificity of ancient Iran, set about to produce an alternative imaginary non-occidental space somewhere between Turkey and China and, by analogy, of an imagined community somewhere in between even as the theatre’s language changed: from Gujarati to Hindustani.

On October 1871, Sonānā Mulnī Khorśed that portrayed the power and prestige of a Mughal kingdom, hīndī and sīndhī costume, and monuments such as the Taj Mahal transpired for the first time to thundering success and Khojas, Bohras, and Memons allegedly thronged the theatre. The play thus set larger wheels in motion. While other troupes followed the precedent set by the Victoria of ‘hīndī lebāś, hīndī dekhāv and hīndī ḍhapchap’, the Victoria set off for the first Parsi theatre tour outside the Bombay presidency in 1872. On February 2, 1873, news was published of Sir Salar Jung’s intention to build Hyderabad’s first proscenium-based theatre for the Victoria’s use. Thereafter, on October 11, 1873, four ‘respectable women’ graced the Victoria’s production of Indar Sabhā, an event that was proclaimed by the Parsi press as a sign of the ‘downfall’ of the theatre and of Parsi domestic well-being.

Although these changes gestated deep intra and inter-communal fissures in Bombay, the Parsi theatre experienced unmitigated expansion in these years – fanning out across the subcontinent to Delhi, Calcutta, Benares, Lucknow, and Madras where Patel grasped the opportunity of staging a scene from his company’s Śakuntala for the Prince of Wales. Dame fortune however, would only smile for a little while on the heir of the legendary Paṭel family.

The Original Victoria subsequently set off for Bangalore on December 19, 1875, where Paṭel fell mortally ill. He was hastily sent back to Bombay to the care of numerous physicians employed by his influential family only to succumb after an operation of the stomach at the ripe age of thirty-two on March 17, 1876. Thus wretchedly ended the life of the proponent of the pan-Asian Parsi theatre.

Yet the staggering influence of his work – of introducing Indo-Persian mythological stories in contemporary garb, mechanical scenery, and daredevil stunts on the South Asian stage, would persist well into the twentieth century through the medium of not only Hindustani modern drama but also the Indian cinema industry that is, ‘Bollywood’.

Rashna Nicholson is an assistant professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Her book The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853-1893) which provides the first comprehensive, archive-based history of the Parsi theatre is forthcoming in 2021.

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How Parsi Theatre Gave an Impetus to Hindu Mythological Plays in Victorian India

The Hindu drama groups that then came up were early crucibles of ethnic identity and sectarianism.

The climax of a tragedy on the stage of India, a company of actors in then-Bombay, India. Photo: H.C. White Co. Publishers.

Sunday mornings for us half-Parsi children of the early 90s, reared in Colaba on an unabashedly snobbish repertoire of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s greatest hits, were an exercise in cultural discombobulation. At our conservative Gujarati maternal grandmother’s Matunga flat, we waited impatiently, while thumbing our cousin’s worn Tinkle and Amar Chitra Katha volumes, for B. R. Chopra’s televised Mahabharata to end.

Though relatively peripheral to our ideological upbringing, those balmy, hot-sticky Sundays, with bus route 123 passing through Marine Drive and the Churchgate slow local functioning as portals slipping us across microcultures and aesthetic worlds, were formative (as for many other children) in our imaginings of history, country and inter-religious sameness and difference.

The significant impact of Doordarshan’s Hindu mythological serials in Indians’ popular consciousness has often been noted as also the renewed popularity of old reruns and new shows such as Sankatmochan Hanuman and Vighnaharta Ganesh during lockdown. So also have a few female-centric films: Padmavati and Manikarnika most notably, tapped into a not untroubling desire for an ‘authentic, uncontaminated’ Hindu past. Yet few apprehend that the oft-described ‘timelessness’ and strong ‘psycho-social influence’ of these serials and films, have less to do with narrative-excellence or nostalgia than the enduring socio-cultural influence of and the collective memory honed by the dramatic precursor of Indian cinema: the nineteenth century pan-Asian Parsi theatre.

The Parsi theatre

By the late 1860s, the Parsi theatre, comprising Persian mythological plays, Gujarati adaptations of Shakespeare and farces on an assortment of themes from the Franco-Prussian war to child-marriage, had ceased to cater to its erstwhile founders: ‘respectable’ Parsi reformists.

Along with a new public of ‘Khojas’, ‘Memons’ and ‘Bhatias’, the Parsi press noted not only the theatre’s transregional popularity across Delhi, Calcutta, Madras and Hyderabad, but also the increasing attendance of sailors, schoolboys and the ‘servants’ at Bombay’s Grant Road and Victoria theatre.

Itching with the desire to bring his beloved theatre back to the path of righteousness, that is, to a place of decorum for the ‘respectable’ classes, Kekhuśro Kābrājī, the purported father of the Parsi theatre, established the Society for the Amelioration of the Drama in March 1875 to ‘put an end to the public’s nāṭaknũ ceṭak (theatre mania).’ (“Revival of the Parsee Drama”, Times of India, March 26, 1875, 3 and “The Guzrati Drama.”, Times of India, March 14, 1875, 177.)

Also read: How the Parsis Shaped Theatre in Colonial Bombay

Shortly after its opening, the Society produced the first śuḍh (pure) Gujarati play of the Parsi stage, Hariścandra at the honourable Framjee Cowasjee Institute that had hitherto primarily been used for scientific lectures and exhibitions. The Hindu reformist Raṇchoḍbhāi Udayrām translated the play from Sanskrit into Gujarati and Kābrājī subsequently adapted this ‘uncorrupted’ text for the stage.

Although the Society’s Parsi amateur actors dreaded the prospect of mastering ‘unsullied’ grammar and pronunciation from a Hindu teacher and of performing in an ‘alien’ language before possibly disgruntled Parsis and condescending Hindus, after months of training in distinguishing āne with āe (and), āvyũ with āvīũ (came) and āpyũś with āpīũ, the play transpired to much aplomb. Audiences had to return home due to the unavailability of seats for weeks on end for this landmark production that would be staged for an unheard of hundred and fifty times in the history of the Parsi stage.

Why, however, was a process underway in the 1870s ‘to revive ancient Hindoo literature and rescue it from the ravages of time’?(Times of India, April 12, 1881, 3.) Why was the play, shorn of spectacular effect and elaborate costume, the object of such immense public esteem?

Raja Harischandra (Cinema, 1913). Photo: The New York Public Library.

The play tells the tale, known to many Indians, of King Hariścandra’s trials and tribulations due to the wily Vīśvamitra. He first gives up his kingdom and all his worldly possessions, then he finds himself tricked into an enormous debt and is driven to sell Queen Tārāmatī and his son to a wealthy Brahmin even as he sells himself to a funeral caretaker. While his child eventually dies from a snake-bite, his wife is implicated in the death of the Prince of Benares. She is found, accused of the murder and condemned to a death at the hand of her husband. Hariśchandra, unswerving from his dharma, prepares to strike when the Gods stall this act of self-sacrifice and commend him for his virtues.

Like the panoramas, dioramas and trapdoors of previous Parsi spectacular plays, this first Hindu mythological play thus implicitly demonstrated the principle, preponderant in the turn of the century stage, that what one appeared to perceive was not necessarily ‘truth’. The hallmark of the Hindu play, Maya – that the visible world was an illusion and that reality existed elsewhere or was otherwise – gratified the burgeoning socio-political belief in the 1870s that European post-enlightenment knowledge as articulated in colonial linear history, science or philosophical treatises à la Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham had no monopoly on conceptualizing reality, a sentiment that obliquely articulated disquiet and resentment over foreign rule.

Hindu deities of the Parsi theatre (already a successful cultural phenomenon in North and South India) enunciated mytho-poetic versions of the past, thereby facilitating the proliferation of populist visual icons and motifs in the form of what would come to be known as Hindu revivalism.

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On December 3, 1876 the newspaper Rāst announced the production of the Society’s next play, Naḷ Damayantī adapted for the stage by Kābrājī from a script that, once again, had been written by Udayrām. While Harīścandra presented the significance of satya (truth), this second play portrayed patīvratā (duty/devotion of a virtuous wife).

Damayantī thus pursues her dharma of remaining loyal to her husband in the face of numerous trials and tribulations inflicted by the gods, particularly a personified Kalyug (Age of Downfall). That the illusion of the difficulties of the contemporary world would yield to a communal awakening towards a brighter reality, was the production’s dramaturgical design, potent not least due to the concurrence of the Queen’s proclamation as Empress of India.

Raja Ravi Varma was known to have been influenced by the staging techniques of the Parsi theatre’s Hindu mythological plays. Raja Ravi Varma, ‘Damayanti and the Swan’. Photo: Ravi-Vijaya Press, Ghatkopar.

Naḷ Damayantī‘s performances received, like Harīścandra, an inordinately enthusiastic response, prompting the press to castigate the wailing spectators, the excessive applauses and unremitting encores. Similarly, the historian Dadabhai Paṭel describes the considerable impact of the play on Bombay’s Hindus who allegedly sent their helpers hours before the performance to occupy the house’s best seats. ‘Hindu women came by the hordes to see the play, causing bedlam when the wails of their crying infants reverberated throughout the playhouse.’ (Paṭel, Dhanjībhāi Na. Pārsī Nāṭak Takhtānī Tavārīkh, 291-292.)

Cognisant of this new public, the Society took up, under Kābrājī’s supervision, the significant initiative of providing cots in the playhouse’s yard. The company thus tapped into an entirely new demographic of spectatorship in Bombay’s Hindu women who thronged the theatre to see their gods and goddesses on stage. Through the Hindu mythological play that was eventually staged across the subcontinent, the Parsi theatre thus inadvertently propagated a new set of devotional practices and forms of religious consumption that provided common symbols and meanings across a confoundingly complex, segmented polity for modern religious rituals, political assemblies, and anti-colonial demonstrations.

Raja Ravi Varma, ‘Saraswati’. Photo: Ravi Varma Press, Karla-Lonavla.

Moreover through pure, ritual-abiding female figures such as Damayanti and subsequently Sita and Padmini, Parsi mythological plays articulated a crucial development: the creation of self-suffering Hindu feminine icons that would become fundamental to both militant as well as non-violent Satyagraha nationalist movements. The figure of Bharatmata was here first gestated, the theatre inadvertently seeing the nation into being long before elite discourses of political revolution and national awakening came to the fore.

For the first time in the subcontinent, long before serialised or filmed versions of Hindu mythological tales came to the homes of a slowly liberalising India, overwhelmingly distinctive regional, ethnic and language-based communities were simultaneously introduced to a common archive of symbols: glowing trishuls, ‘pure’ subtly nasal twang, jasmine garlanded hair knots, a highly influential anti-colonial visual frame of reference that eventually constituted an aesthetic vocabulary for the history of the nation.

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A Hindu theatre

Increasingly Udayrām thought about his dependence on Parsi companies for the production of his Hindu mythological plays. In January, 1878, the playwright set up the Gujarātī Nāṭak Maṇḍaḷī at the Original Victoria Theatre for the express benefit of Hindus for whom pious refreshments (for example, milk) were served by a Brahmin.

The company performed Udayrām’s Lalitā Dukh Darśak that portrayed the travails inflicted on a dutiful Hindu wife by her family amidst much Parsi criticism of the Bania actors who lacked the experience and self-assuredness of their Parsi peers.

Raṇchoḍbhāi Udayrām, ‘Śatābdīsmārakgrantha’. Photo: Digital Library of India.

Additionally the Hindu press began to complain of the growth of the nāṭaknũ ceṭak (theatre mania) amongst Gujarati-speaking Hindus. The Nureelam cautioned of the hazards of pursuing the Parsi example of actresses, bankruptcy, deaths of actors on tour albeit to little heed.

Despite criticisms that they were not as good as the Parsis, Hindu troupes such as the Ārīya Saṅgītotejak Maṇḍaḷī, observing Parsi techniques of stage craft, management and plot began to spawn, propelling a significant shift in socio-cultural prestige and power.

Thus for example on October 27, 1878, long before the period of high-nationalism and communalism, the Nāṭak Utejak Maṇḍalī advertised that its first and second class seats for its Sītāharaṇ would be reserved exclusively for Hindus.

Consequently, while through the Hindu mythological play, a popular, anti-colonial politics was developed and disseminated for audiences who could not participate in the Anglophone public sphere, the theatre also propagated a vision of insiders and outsiders, ‘us’ and ‘them’, and ‘our’ as opposed to ‘their’ history.

The Parsi theatre thus assumed the seminal function of diffusing across a linguistically and ethnically fractured polity a distinctly modern, colonial vision of the ‘Hindu’ as an essentialised, monolithic, clearly circumscribed, symbolic whole thereby laying the groundwork for the sectarian politics that cleave the subcontinent to this day.

Rashna Darius Nicholson is assistant professor of theatre studies at the University of Hong Kong. Her book The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853-1893) traces the early development of the Parsi theatre.

This article went live on November second, two thousand twenty one, at zero minutes past eight in the morning.

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