There can be no denying that there is a great positive factor in our favour: our people are still possessed by an inordinate love of drama and often display natural histronic talent of a high order�Perhaps the earliest histrionic efforts of primitive man arose when he disguised himself as a bird or animal in stalking his quarry. Anyhow, the instinct for drama was present long before he became self-conscious, for he seems to have had energy enough to impersonate and represent, coupled with an uncanny assurance that he could move an audience by means of this representation.

The power to act was therefore incipient in his nature�Specially important in this context is the dance which our primitive ancestors performed before going out to hunt. Some of them dressed up as hunters and the others as hunted animals�Later on the mimed hunt became formalized, that is to say certain gestures, sounds and movements were abstracted from the naturalistic representation and developed into symbols and patterns which signified the dance at a higher level.

The same magical idea appeared again when man began to till the earth and extract his food from it. Certain ritualistic dances were evolved with the rhythmical chants, incantations and spells to make the rain fall and the sun shine�These invocations to the good and evil spirits were acted, not by single individuals but by the whole tribe�

As the tribe danced with a single will, the sheer excitement of rhythm caught their single imagination and they were given the joy of their own strength and movement, the joy of creation. And soon if one person showed greater skill in the dance he would step out into the middle and lead the others�and gradually it was discovered that some members of the tribe had greater talents than the others in representations of scenes and could stir up emotions in the audience at will�and in the interplay between the actors and the audience the theatre was born.

The skill of the actor seemed to the tribe to have divine origin. Naturally, therefore, the actor began to arrogate to himself the functions of the priest and evolved a symbolism and technique of which he was the unique custodian�But the alteration in the balance of the means of production which took place when the nomadic tribal life yielded to a settled existence, and the other such changes that followed, made men less and less dependent on the gods�The gods began to be conceived as made in the image of man rather than the other way about. And the actor began to celebrate the deeds of heroes, of the ideal men in whom the gods had become incarnate.

Drama then became personal and concerned itself less and less with the supernatural�And thus the theatre grew, till it came to be the commercial art which it is today in the great cities of the world. All the old forms of drama did not die out, however, but survived in the dances of the primitive tribes; in the dances and mimes which celebrate nature myths in our villages; in the enactment of the heroic deeds of our ancestors�as well as in the plays which enact the victory of the right over wrong.

The Ras or Nautanki, the Ram and Krishna Lila, the enactment of the victory of the Pandus over the Kurus, the Muharram, the Holi as well as the several harvest dance-dramas, are the apotheosis of the old drama, survivals which are an important reservoir of energy from which a new living art of the theatre can be made.

For, in India, we have to begin almost at the beginning and come full circle if we are to build up an indigenous tradition rooted in the soil and the consciousness of our people. They have remained, despite all the civilizing processes they have undergone and despite the sophisticated classical city dramas, the custodians of certain elemental forms.

No sudden leap into the future can be attempted, but we can advance only if we develop a national drama rather than a superficial smart middle-class comedy, borrowed from the West.