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The
Parsi dramatic companies laid the foundation for the modern
Gujarati and Urdu theatre in the late 1870s. These companies
traveled widely abroad and assimilated the western techniques and
themes with Indian folk theatre and music to form a vernacular
theatre. The Gujarati theatre which has been dominated by
translated or transcribed commercial plays for a long time saw the
growth of original plays like Kumar
Ki Chhat Par and Kahat
Kabira by renowned playwrights like Madhurai, Vinayak Purohit,
Shiv Kumar Joshi and others.
The
developments of the modern drama movement in Hindi began with
Bharatendu Harishchandra during the last decades of the 19th
century. His
best-known plays, which enjoy great popularity even today, are Satya
Harishchandra, Andher Nagari and Bharat
Durdasha. Between 1900 and 1925, the playwrights who dominated
the Urdu and Hindi stage were Agha Hashr Kashmiri, Pandit Radhe
Shyam Pathak, Narayan Prasad 'Betab', Tulsi Datt 'Shaida' and Hari
Krishna 'Jauhar'. Most
of their plays were written for the Parsi Theatre. In the recent
years, Jayashankar Prasad has also written some outstanding plays
like Skandgupta,
Chandragupta and
Dhruvswamini.
Dramatic
activity increased both in volume and in quality in the
post-Independence period with the coming onto scene of talented
playwrights like Dharmaveer Bharati (Andha
Yug), Mohan Rakesh (Ashadha
Ka Ek Din), Surendra Verma (Quaid-e-Hayat),
Feroz Khan (Tumhari Amrita,
Mahatma Vs.Gandhi) and others.
The
city of Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh gained much fame as an
important centre of the Urdu theatre, which flourished on the
theme of humour. Babban
Khan's Adrak Ke Panje
and Abid Ali's Dedh Matwale
are two outstanding specimens of humorous plays.
Adrak Ke Panje,
which is a satire on corruption in daily life, is acclaimed by the
Guinness Book of World Records as the longest one-man show.
In the past 35 years, the play has been staged 10,000 times
in 65 towns and cities in India and in 60 countries across the
globe.
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