Indian Parsi Theatrical Companies

There were a number of Parsi theatrical companies touring the country and performing before crowded audiences.. These dramatists had a practical cast of mind and were more interested in commercial success than artistic achievement. The Parsi theatre excelled in both social and historical plays. Stylistically, they displayed a curious amalgam of realism and fantasy, music and dance, narrative and spectacle, lively dialogues and stage ingenuity, all welded within the framework of melodrama. These plays with their melodious songs, crude humour, sensationalism, dazzling stage craft were designed to appeal to the broad mass of people, and they did. The Parsi theatre which drew on both western and Indian modalities of entertainment represented an attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Thus, we notice that these plays bear an uncanny resemblance to the generality of popular Indian films. If the folk-dramas were based on rural areas and presented the vocabulary of traditionally inherited theatrical expression, the Parsi plays signified an urban theatre exposed to western styles and sensibilities.