The regional theatre, which has grown a great deal towards realizing a true synthesis of old and new forms, without actually reviving the old folk theatre, is in Bengal. This is something of a paradox since Bengal had a much richer folk tradition than any other part of India. However, it was the first part of the country to be ruled by the British, and the enactment of the Permanent Settlement Act in 1795 created a new class of absentee landlord popularly known as the Bhadra Log. These gentry almost lost touch with the peasantry, the reservoir of folk culture. As in politics, so in the area of arts, Bengal therefore developed a highly talented city culture, located mostly in Calcutta. And this culture was most easily influenced by the West...

Already before the battle of Plassey, an English theatre was in existence in Calcutta, and Warren Hastings is mentioned one of its subscribers. At this Calcutta theatre sparkling comedies like The School for Scandal and The Beaux Stratagem were staged under the direction of one Mr. Massinck, said to have been sent out to India by David Garrick himself. At first the female roles were taken by men, but following the example set by Mrs. Bristow, women were later introduced. Apart from the English, only the rich native landlords were admitted to the portals of this holy of holies.

Similar English theatres were founded variously by a Russian adventurer named Herasim Lebedeff...and English classics, mainly Shakespeare and the eighteenth-century dramatists, were presented to the rich Indians. Under the influence of these theatres, the landed gentry of Bengal gave private shows of which one of the first was the popular medieval drama Vidyasunder, enacted by a cast of women as well as men, in the house of Nabinchandra Basu in Sham Bazar.

After this, the idea of applying European stage conventions to indigenous material spread and the amateur theatre flourished, fed mostly on English and Italian classics...The exalted private theatres, lavishly financed by the gentry, flourished, and original plays on the English model began to be written, like Is this Civilization? By Michael Madhusudan Datta.

Girishchander Ghosh launched a regular National Theatre in 1872 with a professional company. And many of the later theatres like 'The Star', 'The Minerva', 'The Manmohan' were modeled on Ghosh's effort. The repertory of these theatres included Pauranic plays, rewritten to suit new conditions, adaptations from Shakespeare, historical and social plays. And highly skilful writing began to be produced, such as the plays of Dvijendralal Ray and Rabindra Nath Tagore.

In spite of the deep inroads made by the foreigners into the lives of the Bengali middle class, the intelligentsia reacted sharply against the rulers and led the movement for national self awareness...Rabindra Nath Tagore, whose life work as a writer coincided with these developments, went further than most in his dramas to emancipate himself, and by implication Bengali literature, from the spurious and mechanical influences of English forms. He consciously evolved a highly developed, technically efficient style of his own in dramatic writing which owed not a little to the folk culture of Bengal. But a great deal of the fantasy and poetry which he brought to his playwriting was peculiar to a detached individual whose experience of life was limited and highly abstracted because of rigid clan affiliation, and this was betrayed by his poetic narrative and conceptual thinking.

The one great contribution of the British had been the opening of well-equipped theatres in Calcutta...But the themes (chosen) continued to be taken from the old Pauranic stories with an occasional dash of the revue-cum-tragedy-cum-farce-cum-opera which reflected contemporary manners and customs.