Modern theatre in Bangladesh was inaugurated by the British colonizers in Dhaka on 18 July 1857, when the town was virtually turned into a military camp fortified by a hundred sailors of the colonial Indian navy. As the Indian Rebellion of 1857 raged all over British India, the sailors in the town of Dhaka performed two farces in a proscenium-arch theatre,

and the

, as the colonizer-spectators “relaxed for an hour or two from the cares and anxieties of [their] daily life” (Mamun 85-86). Over a century and a half later, modern theatre has been entirely refashioned by the people of Bangladesh as a reflexive tool that serves as a “drawing board” to sketch out “more apt or interesting ‘designs for living’” (Turner 24). Although inaugurated by the…

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Citation: Ahmed, Syed Jamil. "Post-Independence Modern Theatre in Bangladesh". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 August 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19582, accessed 22 December 2024.]

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