ABSTRACT
Maharashtrians love live entertainment; in the cities as much as the countryside, in rich communities as much as in poor. So let us now go in search of Tamasha in other parts of this performance culture. Because Maharashtra is such a modern and urban state, let us return to the city. As well as the Sangeet Bari-type entertainments, there are many other shows going on in all sorts of venues in even the smallest town. In many of these, the status of the written text is particularly evident, with an exceptionally strong playwriting tradition. Modern Marathi playwrights have been translated into numerous other languages and performed all over the world.1 The majority of these have judiciously avoided any association with Tamasha and its text-based vag section, regarding it as irrelevant to modern life. But since an enthusiasm for folk theatre took hold of the sub-continent for a while in the 1960s and 1970s, all sorts of late twentieth-century Maharashtrian theatre practitioners have been inspired to experiment and revivify their work with Tamasha influences.
