Gesticulating violently with extended arms, he ultimately reaches a sham balcony and has a vision of the heroine, who opens her arms to receive but not to give; for, instead of coming forward to embrace the hero, she bursts into a dithyrambic song of her own. And thus the play proceeds, slowly, surely, not leaving anything to chance and taking you through the paces, as curtain after curtain opens to the shooting of a gun, by way of comedy, tragedy, farce, heroic drama, morality play, and all just in order to ensure that your education is complete by the time you go home at five o' clock in the morning.

This is by no means an exaggerated account of a performance in one of our rare city theatres�Nothing is too fantastic on this stage. I have been seriously told by a distinguished man of the theatre that during one play a cow was supposed to perform a miracle. She was supposed to enter from one wing of the stage, chew up the rope with which the heroine's hands had been tied by the villain of the piece and then walk out through the opposite wing.

Usually the cow performed this trick docilely and efficiently enough, for she had obviously been trained by a circus master. But, occasionally, she took it into her head to walk straight through from one wing to the other without performing the miracle. And on those occasions the manager of the theatre appeared, made a little speech about the perversities of cows and the rarity of miracles, and asked the audience to be indulgent till the cow could be persuaded to come back and do the necessary and that, meanwhile, the heroine would regale the house with a song.

Upon this the heroine burst out into a melody like a bulbul, after which the cow, having been lured back with a bundle of straw, came and duly performed the miracle and walked away, and the play proceeded according to schedule.

In our villages the performance of a play, unusually called Ras or Nautanki or Tamasha, though more vigorous and unpretentious, is often a jumble rather like the European revue, consisting of scenes from a religious or a historical play, interspersed with humorous sketches which are based mainly on satirical narratives about the evil landlord, the moneylender or the Sarkar, and replete with songs, songs and more songs.

The relieving grace of a village play is that in it we get a simple survival of the most ancient theatre principle: the players and the audience are one, forming a unity through the circles in which they sit round the improvised booth of the stage while the actors walk up, to and from the dressing room, through the clearing which the audience obligingly affords as and when necessary.

Often the audience joins in community singing and the illusion is steadily and surely built up by the actors and the audience acting together, and the spectacle is utterly moving in certain moments. This, however, is not always the case, and the general decay which percolated into our lives through a thousand years of work by codifiers and grammarians of emotions and moods has tarnished the humanity of even the village players.

The puritanism of a moribund social order has inhibited the freedom of the mummer, till the taboo against women acting on the village stage is almost complete. In most parts of the country the professional mummers in the village, like the potters or the weavers, form a caste on their own, variously named bhands, nakals and mirasies. They are itinerant players who visit the houses of the peasants on marriage, birth, and festival, regaling the audience with jokes and songs and recitals for which they are paid in kind, but kept at an orthodox distance, being regarded more or less as untouchables.

There are, of course, many self-conscious attempts at the evolution of a new theatrical tradition. For over a hundred years, mostly under the impulse of the Western European drama, foreign and indigenous plays have been written and produced. In Bengal particularly, the genius of the Tagore household gave a definite shape to this art and after the rich creative activity of the last two generations there has emerged a professional stage of a fairly high order.

But in most other parts of the country theatrical activity is restricted to the annual show of the college dramatic society, usually playing in English to an audience whose own kinetic inheritance is something quite different; and there is the ramshackle circus-theatre of the Parsi entrepreneurs and their imitators.

To such depths of degradation has the great theatrical tradition built up by ancient and classical India sunk! And there seems little hope in redeeming it until we take stock of the whole situation in view of the changes caused by the industrial revolution, and self-consciously select from the remnants of the old tradition those elements which can be synthesized with modern innovations in theatrical art.