[In the following review, Anderson asserts that "Anand sees the theatre as a potent instrument for social reform."]

This attractively printed and illustrated volume [The Indian Theatre] is at once a somewhat partisan history of the theatre in India today and an essay on the persistence and value of the folk tradition in the theatre. The author sketches first the origin of folk drama—a subject which does not readily admit of such compression as it receives here—and then surveys the theatre in each of the great provinces of India. The book is of value in presenting compactly the extensive and varied use of folk institutions and themes in the drama of a politically awakened India. In Bengal where the influence of the Tagore household has been considerable Mulk Raj Anand finds a satisfactory professional theatre, but he believes that the future of the Indian theatre lies with such groups as Shankar and his dance troupe in Andhra and the Indian People's Theatre Association with its use of bardic recitals and folk songs and semi-dramatic folk materials as well as real folk plays. The successful middle and upper class Parsi theatre of Bombay and the Europeanized drama of the centers of former British influence the author condemns as vulgarly commercial and decadent. The chief contribution of the west has been the theatre building.

Most of the material here is available elsewhere but less conveniently, and the folklorist who is concerned with the use of folk materials for reviving regional culture interest and for political propaganda will find much that is stimulating. One is vividly reminded, however, of the proletariat drama phase in both Russia and the United States in the author's critical attitude. Aside from folk plays, "good" plays are plays which have to do with the great famine of Bengal, the plight of the factory workers in Bombay, and the inherent viciousness of the aristocratic society of old India. That such burning issues should predominate in a new and experimental drama is only natural, but an analogy with The Lower Depths and also with the Chinese Communists' use of the ancient Yangko dance of the peasants as the basis for a drama of political indoctrination is clear. Mulk Raj Anand sees the theatre as a potent instrument for social reform. This makes him underemphasize the possibility of giving new life to the Indian theatre generally by the methods of more "literary" innovators like Tagore, and he would blame the lack of success of the professional drama largely on a failure of the dramatist to have his roots in a strong folk tradition, for which good western style lighting is no substitute.

But the Indian theatre even in Calcutta has not yet got good western style lighting, scenery, acting techniques, or direction, and there is no reason to suspect that a renaissance in the Indian drama would not see on a conventional stage the successful adaptation of materials from classical Indian literature as well as from folk sources or that it would necessarily exclude a combination of eastern and western elements. The attempts toward this so far are inconclusive, as several more conservative students of the Indian theatre have pointed out.