Troubling Englishness: The Eastward Success and Westward Failure of the Parsi Theatre

Abstract

The Parsi theatre that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century was India's principal commercial theatre and an answer to the bourgeois aspirations of a new middle class. Although its importance has been acknowledged due to its role as the predecessor of the South and Southeast Asian ‘modern’ theatre, there exists to this date no published critical history of the politics of its professionalisation and transregional expansion. This article will serve as a corrective measure, filling in the gap in existing research through a comparative analysis of the reception of the Parsi theatre marked by the Victoria Nāṭak Maṇḍali's (Victoria Theatrical Company's) decision to tour Burma in 1881 and subsequently to participate in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 in London. As a vehicle of increasingly globalised mass consumption practices, the Parsi theatre was a resounding success in Southeast Asia, inspiring the creation of ‘imitation Parsi theatre’ in present-day Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. In stark comparison, the Parsi theatre's portrayal of a cosmopolitan, urban, industrially advanced orient was ‘doomed to disappointment’ in London and was an unequivocal financial failure. By demonstrating the reasons for the Parsi theatre's eastward success and westward failure this article demonstrates not merely the unevenness of cultural globalisation but also the need for a reconsideration of the place of material, socio-political and racial imbalances and relatedly of immobilities, embargoes, disjunctures and exclusions in our understandings of global or transnational theatre history.