Pure Enterainment: Parsi Theatre, Gender, and Performance by Kathryn Hansen. Published in 2024 by Primus Books, an imprint of Ratna Sagar P. Ltd., Virat Bhavan, Mukherjee Nagar Commercial Complex, Delhi 110009; website: www.primusbooks.com; email: rsagar@ratnasagar.com; Pp: xxii+449. Price: Rs 1,495.
Pure Entertainment: Parsi Theatre, Gender, and Performance, a compendium of 14 essays, is a testament to a life’s work on Parsi theater. Written over the course of 25 years by Kathryn Hansen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas, Austin, these essays are a window into the world of Parsi theater, drawing on theories of gender, visual culture, colonialism, autobiography, global history and translation. In assembling Hansen’s best known work on Parsi theater into one accessible monograph, the book showcases one of her primary contributions to South Asian Studies and beyond: generating scholarly interest in and attributing international recognition to Parsi theater.
Kathryn Hansen: monograph of life’s work
Prior to Hansen’s and, to a lesser extent, Anuradha Kapur’s critical work, Parsi theater — the predecessor of Indian cinema — had suffered from denigration or exclusion in English language nationalist and regional histories of Indian theater. Through Hansen’s significant translation of Somnath Gupt’s Parsi Thiyetar: Udbhav aur Vikas (The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development), scholars of South Asian Studies and Theater and Performance Studies increasingly recognized it as a key contributor to discourses of nationalism, vernacular modernity, 19th and early 20th century models of womanhood and femininity, forms of modern consumption, and the development of vernacular languages. To "establish Parsi theater as a crucial component of South Asia’s cultural heritage,” and open up pathways for future scholarship have been the main functions of the essays in this volume and of Hansen’s life’s work.
Stylistically, the book is divided into four parts: I. Community, Class, Language; II. Gender in Performance; III. Spectatorship and Genre; IV. Connected Histories. Through this structural framework, the monograph traces Hansen’s chief critical interests over her career: cosmopolitanism, gender, translation and global theater. As the book is a compendium of essays without a unified narrative arc, it makes for difficult reading from cover to cover — there is a considerable amount of repetition as each essay necessarily recapitulates details on what the Parsi theater was: its origins, exponents, stylistic form and use of language. Readers would likely benefit from picking and reading articles as per interest or necessity.
In terms of content, Hansen’s position in relation to her object of study complicates how one reads her body of scholarship. The overwhelming authorial tone is one of a dispassionate, objective, seemingly neutral outsider, who impartially arbitrates on the quality of existing, descriptive sources in vernacular languages. In her words, Hansen reads against "the linguistic divides” of extant scholarship in Hindi, Urdu and English, drawing extensively on critical theory to shed light on what the theater was doing. This position allows for exceptional critical work in sections II and IV.
There are several dense theoretical insights in these sections that have been significant for future scholarship. Some of the important questions that she probes are: how female impersonators created spaces in the theater for female performers through new models of femininity (such as the bharatiya nari of the nationalists); how homoerotic connections developed through shared gazes between heroes and male heroines on stage and between impersonators and male spectators off stage; how cross-dressing "introduced new possibilities for homoerotic pleasure and expression”; how Parsi theater left an unmistakable impact on the Madras Presidency region by serving as a connecting link between Tamil drama and "Hindustani/Urdu language use, Muslim actors and patrons, north Indian instruments and ragas, and Perso-Arabic tales.”
Concurrently, however, Hansen’s seemingly unbiased, non-partisan position reads as problematic in parts I and III. This has largely to do with one of the running threads of Hansen’s work — her cosmopolitan thesis of the Parsi theater. In the book’s preface and in Part I, she underscores how the languages spoken in the heyday of Parsi theater and the varied themes and sources of the drama reflected the cosmopolitan, composite culture of the time. Parsi theater, she has long argued, was polyglot, secular and a site of communal harmony where Parsis, Hindus, Muslims, Anglo-Indians and Baghdadi Jews consorted amicably. Audiences, she says, were heterogeneous and no genre was produced exclusively for a particular viewership. It is secondary literature that postdates the heyday of Parsi theater, she says, that is distorted by a substantial degree of communal bias. Scholars writing in Urdu favor Muslim playwrights, whereas the corresponding scholarship in Gujarati and Hindi ignores the Muslim contribution or incorporates it within a nationalist framework that equates Hindustani and Hindustan with Hindi and Hindu. She therefore reiterates that "writing the history of Parsi theater…demands an effort to cut across the linguistic lines that are now firmly drawn in South Asian literary scholarship.”
What, however, does this mode of doing historical scholarship — of "reading across linguistic divides” — entail for South Asian cultural history? Is it possible for one person to adequately study primary sources — the bedrock of historical scholarship — across South Asia’s numerous languages for a near 100-year theatrical phenomenon that spread from Bombay to Burma and beyond? Can one historian read a 100 years’ worth of vernacular newspapers (in Bombay alone the available Parsi Gujarati language newspapers that chronicle the theater are the Kaiser-i-Hind, Rast Goftar, Mumbai Samachar and Jame Jamshed), plays (the extant corpus in Gujarati type between Delhi, Bombay and Surat stands at more than 120 scripts) and oral histories in multiple languages without a considerable reliance on often underpaid and unacknowledged student assistants and translators? The simple answer is no. Necessarily, therefore, reading across linguistic lines privileges secondary sources — existing histories of Parsi theater, which were primarily written in Gujarati, Urdu and Hindi.
Why would a reliance on secondary sources to write the history of 19th century South Asian theater be problematic? In addition to communal and linguistic bias, secondary sources on Parsi theater privilege top-down perspectives that inevitably collapse the historical arc. Extant histories of Parsi theater (and, consequently, much of Hansen’s earlier work) treat the theater as a relatively unchanging monolith. They are unable to provide specific details on which specific troupes existed when, how and when their star actors and managers emerged, what socio-political events led to the development of specific genres, and what forms of contention occurred between troupes and audiences of different communities and classes. The building blocks of history — precise dates, names, figures, facts, and most importantly evolving context — are conspicuously absent.
The chapter "Pioneers to Professionals: A Retrospective of Parsi theater,” which provides an overview of the century-long theater form, is a particularly egregious example of this problem. The Victoria, the Alfred and the Elphinstone theatrical companies, Hansen says, were identified by their charismatic managing directors: K. M. Balivala, K. P. Khatau and K. S. Nazir. In reality, though, all three troupes experienced multiple, significant changes in management and were identified with numerous directors. The Victoria alone changed hands several times over a 30-year period – from an illustrious committee comprising Kekhushro Kabraji to Dadabhai Patel to Patel and Nazir to Nazir alone to the five managers Dadabhai Thuthi, K. M. Balivala, Faramji Apu, Dhanjibhai Ghadiali and Dosabhai Mogal to Balivala alone. Similarly, key facts in the chapter are incorrect: Edalji Khori is described as the playwright of the first Parsi dramatic script Rustom Zabooli ané Sohrab performed in 1853 when, in fact, his Rustam ané Sohrab was first written 15 years later, in 1869, for a playwriting competition.
Most vexing of all is Hansen’s consistent, ill-advised denotation of Kekhushro Kabraji — the alleged father of the Parsi theater — as Kekhushro Kabra and his brother Bahmanji Kabraji as B. N. Kabra. "Ji,” she argues, is an honorific commonly suffixed to Parsi names. Hansen thus transforms the names of seminal figures following a grotesque method of transcription that would, technically, mutate the vast majority of Parsi names, eg: Dadabhai Naoroji (Dadabhai Naoro), Jamsetji Tata (Jamset Tata) to Shapoorji Pallonji (Shapoor Pallon).
A close reading of primary sources from a clear center (for example: through Parsi Gujarati language sources written in Bombay) not only forestalls sweeping generalizations, factual inaccuracies and stylistic errors but also debunks key ideas such as the Parsi theater as a secular, cosmopolitan site of communal harmony. Vernacular newspapers such as the Rast Goftar closely chronicle how the theater unsettled, modified and reinforced ethnic, communal and linguistic identities long before the heyday of Indian nationalism. Communal disturbances between Muslims and Parsis often degenerated into brawls within the theater; Iranian Zoroastrians sought to develop their own identity as distinct from that of the Parsis of Bombay through drama in the 1860s; and by the 1870s Gujarati Banias and Parsis competed for spaces to perform and for linguistic and cultural legitimacy. Theses such as "the cosmopolitan entertainment economy of Parsi theater,” comparative readings of Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn and "Kabra’s” Bholi Jan (without reference to vernacular discourses and debates on race thinking, population decline, and rural nostalgia in Bombay that produced the latter), and textual analyses of Pandit Narayan Parshad Betab’s Mahabharata with only a passing reference to the rise of Hindu nationalism, are clean in argumentation yet problematic. They bespeak of cultural history shorn of socio-political context. The messiness that archival research necessarily entails — of manually combing through vernacular newspapers (as opposed to reading across available vernacular histories); digging into the vast network of the descendants of Parsi theater families (as opposed to translating extant autobiographies and oral histories); and collating and examining the vast corpus of plays littered across India (as opposed to analyzing a select few) — is missing.
In many ways Hansen was a product of her time and of a generation of South Asian Studies scholars now in decline. The Cold and post-Cold War era produced a swathe of cultural historians, ethnographers and anthropologists from the US who transformed "affective fascination with a foreign society to the professional production of knowledge.”
These scholars opened up entire fields of study, merging new, cutting edge modes of analysis and methods of inquiry with Asian sociocultural forms that had been or were in the process of being neglected or forgotten. For this, they depended on local information and experts (extant histories, language teachers, cultural interpreters and translators). Simultaneously, they functioned as arbiters of worth, discriminating between that which was riddled with bias and inaccuracy and that which was worthy of translation and reproduction. Financial aid, material support and institutional prestige not only allowed for travel, translation and access to networks but also granted legitimacy and recognition to persons, institutions and cultural forms in decline or almost lost to obscurity.
Would Parsi theater possess the international currency that it enjoys today without Hansen’s significant work? Would professional and amateur scholars of film and theater studies, Southeast Asian and South Asian studies acknowledge its vital importance in Asian cultural history? Would the form have become a key point of departure for thinking about South Asian visual culture, gender and modernity? I’m not sure. Perhaps, then, a top-down, seemingly objective gaze; power dynamics between center and periphery; and associated, seemingly innocuous forms of linguistic and cultural violence were a small price to pay.
Dr RASHNA NICHOLSON
Nicholson is Associate Professor of Theater Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research specializations include 19th, 20th and 21st century theater history, historiography and practice.