Does this merely mean that the Indian theatre must return to the grunting and howling of the primitive man? Must it resurrect the simple dance dramas of the past and be content with revivalism�All that is implied here is that we cannot be content to import the smart comedy manufactured in Europe during the machine-age under circumstances very different from those in India to-day.

We have to seek inspiration in the vitality of those impulses, which have persisted in the sub-conscious strata of our culture�Let me (Mulk Raj Anand) develop this point further: If there is one general fact which may seem to explain the decay of sensibility in the city theatre, it is probably the Puritanism which began to seep through the Indian theatre when the medieval codifiers and grammarians damned the floodgates of creative art by rigid criticism.

The soulless formalism with which they tabulated the moods and emotions atrophied those very moods and emotions, and for centuries there has been nothing left to the Indian theatre but the memories and scattered remnants of the classical tradition petrified in the form of the sophisticated drama.

But no people can live merely by weeping over the ruins and exalting the graves. Life asserts itself. Certainly, when puritanism and decadence become allied with nihilism and despair born of slavery, and art becomes removed from the people, it needs a change in the social order to create a new art.

It is no use denying that to-day the Indian theatre, as well as the other arts, is looked down upon�unfit for the sons and daughters (especially the daughters) of respectable middle-class citizens. Of course, there have been dirty plays and dissolute players, and the same tradition which ensured the sanctity of the wife, forced the courtesan to provide entertainment.

But this perverse morality did not always poison Indian theatrical art. In fact the moral urge, which has now turned sour, supplied the inspiring ideal of the early drama�The actor has for ever been presenting what the people wanted to see, the revenge of evil and the triumph of good�

For we have come late to industrialism and have not yet evolved an extensive middle class interested, like its European counterpart, in the bedroom farce�it is obvious to some extent why we must derive enthusiasm from the folk forms, what motifs we should take from them, and how we should develop them self-consciously till we achieve the natural curve of drama from the simplest to the most sophisticated�