Photos: Weaving Dankaur’s social fabric, one Parsi play at a time
For over 90 years, a Parsi theatre group in Dankaur, a small town in western Uttar Pradesh has been cultivating a culture of theatre among people and weaving in social message into the social fabric with its performances. Maintaining the running cost of the theatre out of their own pockets, the artists continue to keep the people of the town united while the audience in turn keeps an age-old form of performance art alive.
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A rehearsal session at Drona Natya Mandal at Dankaur, in Greater Noida. Every Janmashtami, Hindus and Muslims sit together inside the premises of a temple to cheer for artists of the Drona Natya Mandal, a local Parsi theatre group, which has enthralled audiences with its social, historical and religious plays for over 90 years.
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Parsi theatre was introduced by Parsi artists in India in the mid-19th century where larger-than-life sets and cut-outs were used and epics were enacted with a distinctly energetic dialogue delivery, for hours together. The Mandal boasts of itself as one of the rare surviving Parsi theatre groups in the era of modern, nihilistic performance art forms. (Sunil Ghosh / HT Photo)
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An artist performs during a rehearsal session. “We try to keep the content (of the plays) relatable to our audiences because of the mixed population. One of our most memorable characters has been a Qazi in the play ‘Veer Haqiqat Rai’, whose sublime dialogues are almost lip synced by the audience,” Manoj Tyagi, president, Drona Natya Mandal, said. (Sunil Ghosh / HT Photo)
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Props used by the artists. The theatre group, which consists of 25 members, all men from Dankaur, has performed over 150 different plays since it was founded in 1923 by Late Mangat Ram of Sikandarabad who worked with Prithvi Raj Kapoor in erstwhile Bombay before returning to his roots, according to credentials seen by Hindustan Times. (Sunil Ghosh / HT Photo)
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