Sumit Chaturvedi
The Hindi theatre tradition evolved later than many other linguistic theatre traditions of India. It came up within the specific sociopolitical context of India’s Independence movement and as a response to the call given for social and cultural renaissance in the Hindi-speaking belt during the late…
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Deepti Priya Mehrotra
Until the 1930s, nautanki had no women actors; men took on all female roles. Once women joined, however, they quickly achieved popularity and stature as star attractions, often overshadowing the men. The rise of heroines in nautanki paralleled the rise of heroines in Bollywood: leading ladies were…
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Deepti Priya Mehrotra
She worked with several companies during the 1960s and started her own group, the Krishna Kala Kendra, in the early 1970s. The group performed thousands of shows across North India, especially helping raise funds for schools, colleges and other public institutions. Krishna Kumari Mathur received…
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Deepti Priya Mehrotra
Nautanki is an operatic theatre form combining music, dance, story, dialogue, humour, pathos, melodrama and wit in a magical whole. Nautanki, earlier known as svang, originated in the late nineteenth century in Uttar Pradesh (then United Provinces of Agra and Oudh) and steadily gained popularity.…
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Deepti Priya Mehrotra
Nautanki is a popular performance genre combining story, music, dance and dialogue. It started as an all-male form of musical entertainment in Hathras during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but the theatrical dimensions of nautanki developed in the Kanpur region, from the early…
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Udit Kulshreshtra
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Kanza Fatima
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Manan Kapoor
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William Dalrymple
Surrounded by thick forest on a hilltop plateau lost in the jungles of central India, Mandu is reached by a narrow road that corkscrews steeply up a near-vertical ravine. At the top lies a landscape of fallen palaces, shattered domes and overgrown arcades—all that remains of one of the most…
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Sharmistha Dutta
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