D Vasudha Dalmia-Luderitz century under British rule. Its emergence in the oral-narrative tradition can be reconstructed on the basis of the tales collected by Sir Richard Temple in the Punjab.12 From the Punjab it spread eastwards. The play, svang, as it developed in the heartland of north India, was of inordinate length, the performance lasting from ten to twelve hours or for several consecutive nights. Composed in traditional verse forms, it was recited or sung by a company of male actors. These could be professional or amateur, the practice developed according to different local traditions. 61 To this day, the svang troupe comprises a cross section of the village community, b6th Hindu and Muslim. The audience similarly consist of the 'people1, but it is patronized and supported by landowners and the village as a community.13 In its organizational and cognitive principles it is firmly rooted in the feudal countryside. While the folk play is obviously not a deliberate construction in accordance with classical Indian aesthetic theory, it exhibits a degree of correspondence with the rather diffuse interpretations which have developed during the course of the last century as part of an effort to reconstruct a national tradition, so that it is generally interpreted as the prototype of traditional Indian aesthetic creation in performance, a procedure fraught with hazards, as I hope to demonstrate in the last section of this paper. INTERACTION WITH THE WEST: POPULAR URBAN THEATRE The first contact with western theatre, which was to have far-reaching consequences for popular urban theatre, took place in Bombay. The Bombay Amateur Theatre (1776-1818) was, as its name implies, an unprofessional theatre for the amusement of the British civilian population as well as for the officers of the East India Company's regiments. The note of sentimentality pervading literature in England was reflected in the excessive sensibility of the Bombay audience, whose choice was automatically narrowed to contemporary melodrama, comedies, farces, burlesques.14 Set within the conservative ideological framework of the emerging urban middle classes in England, the plays manipulated emotions, created pleasurable suspense and appeased social tension. The stage se -up was spectacular — illusion-istic, histrionics were the order of the day. This was also the beginning of the star-system on Indian soil. The Parsi Theatre15 which sprang up through this contact and spread to all parts of north India from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, was a hybrid form. It took over all the stage practices of melodrama, the histrionics, the attempts to create suspense and illusion, and imposed this on folk forms which were largely musical, which revolved around well-known episodes, with long drawn-out action and relatively slow building-up of emotion. This Parsi Theatre flourished for well over a century; the last theatre of the kind, the Moonlight in Calcutta, closed its doors in 1962. Though literary urban theatre resisted the Parsi model, as the only successful urban theatre it remained a force to contend with. The direct material as well as conceptual heir of this theatre was the commercial Hindi film. Number 16