ABSTRACT
As the British Empire spread across the globe, those responsible for maintaining and expanding it yearned to remember their far-away homeland. They also wanted to demonstrate to the Empire’s subject peoples their cultural superiority. As the British Empire spread across the globe, those responsible for maintaining and expanding it yearned to remember their far-away homeland. They also wanted to demonstrate to the Empire’s subject peoples their cultural superiority. By this time, East India Company officials and military men, sadly ignorant of the vibrant traditions of indigenous Indian drama all about them, had built for themselves a ‘most elegant theatre’ in Kolkata (Calcutta) which opened in 1775. The man known as the ‘Shakespeare Wallah’ was Geoffrey Kendal, a repertory actor before the Second World War, who formed his own company, ‘Shakespeareana’, after the war to tour Shakespeare and other English dramatists’ work across India, in schools, private and public theatres, army camps and in the open air.
