An attempt towards a Hindustani theatre was made by Imanat who wrote his play Indar Sabha at the behest of Wajid Ali Shah, the Nawab of Oudh and enacted it at his court with the Nawab in the main role. Ever since then, however, the disruption created by the British impact on India which inhibited the growth of the theatre in other languages, strangled it in the areas wherever it rose�

The Parsis who recreated the Hindustani stage, though starting under the impulse of Imanat's Indar Sabha and the copious adaptations of the Elizabethans, soon made the theatre purely a business proposition. The Balliwala, Alfred and the New Alfred Theatrical Companies of Bombay as well as the Madan Theatre Co. of Calcutta all distinguished themselves by commercializing the theatre on the familiar formula of 'give the public what it wants'. As usual, this meant titillating the people with songs, jokes, bons mots and sensation-mongering, using ham actors and the crudest melodrama�

And for two or three generations the main writer of drama remained, apart from the anonymous adapters of Shakespeare, a hack called Aga Hashr Kashmiri, a third-rate poetaster whose stock-in-trade was the blood and thunder melodrama�

The pure drama of more sensitive writers like Abdul Halim Sharar, therefore, became more and more literary while the commercial stage merely decayed till the film and the talkie came and sealed its fate for a time.

The more sensitive minds of the younger generation of Hindustani writers could not but be shocked into an awareness of the inexpressible misery of the people who endured foreign rule and feudal and religious impositions. As the development of democracy in the West, and particularly the Russian Revolution, showed that their dreams of a good life for the people were possibilities, they began from their different angles to tackle the overpowering tragedy of Indian life�The notion of struggle itself became for these (writers) the chief catharsis, the elevating circumstance.

There is no writer under forty to-day who will deny that at one time or another he did not subscribe to the dominant influence of the Progressive Writers' Association which was formed in 1935�The mainstream of this movement met the corresponding theatrical current, which had started from very humble beginnings in the Indian People's Theatre founded by Anil de Silva, a young Singhalese woman writer, in Bangalore, but which had matured in the vast network of Indian People's Theatre Association branches all over the country.

The chief language group of the Indian People's Theatre Association is the Hindustani group. And the most consistent writer of this group has been Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, whose chief contribution, a play entitled Zubeida, enjoyed a terrific popularity among audiences both in Western and Northern India.

Zubeida is the name of a girl from the United Provinces who is stirred by the dirges of the funeral processions and the spirited songs of the relief workers outside her house to cast away her veil and join the volunteers. She dies, like many other people, through the lack of an anti-cholera vaccine. Abbas made a conscious attempt in this play to unite the public life of processions with their chants and slogans with the private life of the Muslem household, and he tried to create almost a new form of drama very akin to the living newspaper�

The recent productions of adaptations based on Gogol's Inspector General and the Irish play Remembered Forever (Desh Bhagat) were highly successful efforts�But by far the greatest contribution to the Hindustani stage has surely been made in recent years by the actor-producer Prithvi Raj Kapoor with his two productions Deewar and Pathan.

With an uncanny theatrical instinct Prithvi Raj seized upon certain memories of his village life as it was presented in the Ras of North West India and, uniting several motifs of the folk play, he has knit them into the framework of two modern plays dealing with a contemporary theme, communalism�

I am afraid that moving as is this play (Deewar), and a fairly good example of the community spirit informing the three-act drama, the bad stage sets and indifferent costuming destroyed the illusion to a great extent, though its vitality and urgency was not lost�

But no Hindustani play that I have read or seen has impressed me with its integrity as much as the simple, starkly beautiful and elemental drama of the life on the frontier, entitled Pathan.

The story of the friendship between the two families of a Khan and a Hindu nobleman portrays the deathless loyalty which is the essence of the code of honour in this part of the world, even as the exaction of the ultimate penalty by those who have a feud with these two families shows the evil inherent in this relentless society�Altogether, Pathan stands with the Bengali play, Navanna, at the cross-roads of the old and new traditions, and it is equally revolutionary in that it presents our Indian life with an anxious regard for aesthetic values which brooks no compromise with the tawdry habiliments of the shows of Balliwala theatre�

Politics are part of Prithvi Raj's ethics and the courage with which he goes straight to the heart of the conflict makes his productions a not insignificant part of our cultural emancipation�His productions have given a great fillip to theatrical life among the middle classes, while the younger Indian People's Theatre Association groups have helped by taking simpler forms of drama from the peasantry to whom they give performances.

It is this dual programme that may build the ground-work for a theatrical tradition in India. For the theatre must go to the middle classes, garbed in a parody of their costume and manners to show how ridiculous they are. The theatre must go to the poor dressed as the poor and lift them up with their own cries till their calamities become articulate, and compel a change in this sad world of ours�For, not only do the peculiar exigencies of India require the conservation of the two main techniques which appeal to the two chief strata of the population, but the synthesis of the two will bring us to the basis of a new kind of theatrical expression�

Thus may be built a theatre which Lope de Vega had in mind when he wrote: 'The company�was like some faces, not a perfect feature in it, but, because of the harmony with which they are united, the face is beautiful'�

As we adapt our knowledge of the survivals of the old folk theatre to the needs of to-day, it is possible that a new indigenous tradition of the Indian theatre may be built which is unique to our country and which may contribute something different to the hackneyed forms current in the contemporary European theatre.