SAGAR VOL.

XXI 2013
sagarjournal.org
Special Feature

THE INTERVIEW

In Kathryn Hansen’s thirty-five-year career, she has produced an astound-

ingly large body of work examining several themes in South Asian theatre
and literature. Her scholarship provides rich resources for those interested
in theatrical and musical traditions in India, gender and performance the-
ory, language politics, urban studies, and Indian cinema studies. In this in-
terview, we discuss her contributions to these areas through her work as a
translator. In her earliest work, Hansen translated a selection of stories by
the “regionalist” writer Phanishwarnath Renu, which was published in The
Third Vow and Other Stories (1986). In her next book, Grounds for Play: The
Nautanki Theatre of North India (1992), she included a translated excerpt
from Indal Haran, transcribed from an All India Radio recording. As part
of her extensive work on Parsi theatre, she translated a theatre history
by Somnath Gupt, The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development (2005),
as well as four autobiographies of prominent Parsi theatre personali-
ties in Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies (2011). She has also
translated a number of articles on theatre history from English to Hindi for
Indian academic journals such as Natrang and Alochana.

—Suzanne L. Schulz, Sagar Editor

SLS — You have translated several different genres of writing from Hindi,
Urdu, and Gujarati to English and have employed a number of innovative
translation strategies throughout your career. Can you talk a little about
the role of translation in your work? When have texts alone proved in-
adequate? When has it become necessary to supplement your texts with
visual materials, appendixes and glossaries? 

KGH — Translation has come to mean a lot of things to me. Fundamen-

tally, translation is a bridge of communication that connects different
groups by carrying meaning from one to the other. We tend to think
of it as a way to expand the circulation of a text to new audiences.
The activity of translating also involves the translator in a sustained
search within the text for meaning. It produces deeper understand-

>> fida husain in bhakt narsi mehta / natya shodh sansthan, kolkata 67
 Kathryn Hansen

ing of how signification is constructed. I’ve found that translation as

an intellectual process facilitates unexpected insights into linguis-
tic choices and the mediating factors that produce them, genre, dis-
course, style, dialect, and so on. Bringing that more sustained engage-
ment with the text into the translation is the big challenge we face as
translators.
Images and other enhancements can enable apprehension of
meaning, expanding the possibility of understanding, making it not
entirely dependent on verbal cues and codes. Appendices and glos-
saries are schematic formats that make it easier to recognize details.
They serve when complexity begins to obscure the perception of pat-
terns. We have learned the practical benefit of these supplemental
aids in our own exploration as researchers. What we tend to forget
or underestimate is the struggle that the mind encounters when per-
ceiving and ordering a new system. Translation is centrally about that
process, about communicating configurations of knowledge.

SLS — How have your various strategies for translating, editing and an-
notating different genres of writing evolved? How have they overlapped
with other aspects of your scholarly work?

KGH — As a language learner, I translated to make sure I understood

the words and syntax and could convey a text in readable English.
This is still an important aspect of how I teach Hindi: translation
as auto-feedback. For my first book-length translation, the anthol-
ogy of Renu’s short stories, I thought annotation should be kept to a
minimum in the interests of flow. Then with the Nautanki plays, the
objectives were archiving and preservation, on the one hand, and re-
contextualizing and re-presenting, on the other, so a fairly extensive
scholarly apparatus was necessary. I didn’t toy with the oral texts
themselves: I treated the transcripts as artifacts, as sacrosanct. With
Somnath Gupt’s history of the Parsi theatre, I intervened quite a bit,
enhancing the original with corrections, footnotes, illustrations, and

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appendices to make it a more comprehensive (and hopefully interest-

ing) reference. By the time of Stages of Life, my thinking about texts,
authors, and selves had evolved with the literary theories of the day.
I had moved away from the notion of the fixity of the word and its
meaning, through the idea of multiple meanings, and to the possibil-
ity of meaning being ever fluid, constructed in performance.

SLS – For those who know you primarily as an expert on Indian the-
atre, can you speak a bit more about your early work on Phanish-
warnath Renu? What unique challenges arose in translating Renu’s
writings? Why had his work resisted translation for so long?

KGH — My translations of Renu were something of a mish-mash, be-

cause of the ambiguity of the intended audience. They were done ini-
tially for a Western readership, then edited for publication in India,
but without consistency. And there were other difficulties. Through-
out my work on Renu, I had a lot of trouble finding experts who knew
the local references. I was really interested in Renu’s borrowings from
oral culture (stories, songs, dramas), but I was only beginning to rec-
ognize the oral genres myself, let alone find anybody who knew about
them. The process of discovery was much more than linguistic, and
it really continued for years, as I turned to folklore and folk theatre
as objects of study in their own right. The limits of my translations
loomed large: it was very frustrating to be dealing with so many un-
knowns. I managed to produce something that was roughly workable,
filling the gap for an author who was considered untranslatable pre-
cisely because of the local allusions and their obscurity. I suppose I
decided that it was better to have something in English rather than
nothing to represent such an important writer. For the anthology The
Third Vow, I put untranslated words into a glossary at the back of the
story collection. I didn’t want to “intrude.” And yet the curious thing
was that Renu himself provided footnotes to his novels and stories.
He had to gloss his own texts, such were their difficulty!

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 Kathryn Hansen

SLS – What in particular attracted you to Renu’s story “The Third

Vow” and its film version Tisri Kasam (Bhattacharya, 1966)? As you
have written, the film is an anomaly among popular films of its time
and is itself a kind of translation of Renu’s regionalism—shot on loca-
tion in Bihar and featuring folk instruments and regional language
dialogues. Thinking about your shift from Renu to Nautanki, how did
you adapt your translation strategies when you confronted the story,
the film, and the other rich materials of Grounds for Play?

KGH — “The Third Vow” led me to Nautanki, because it revolved

around an actress who works in a traveling Nautanki company. I need-
ed to know more about the context of that folk theatre, and about its
stories and songs, an example of which was present as Renu’s story’s
subtitle, “Mare Gaye Gulfam.” When I discovered a large cache of san-
gits (libretti) in London and connected them to the Nautanki/Swang
performance style, I knew I had a major project in front of me. Out of
this trove new imperatives emerged: to describe the repertoire, which
was really huge, and to preserve the texts, develop an archive. I’ll
come back to the archiving piece in a minute.
In writing Grounds for Play, the main task was reclamation. I was
in essence translating a lost cultural text, to bring it out of its margin-
ality and obsolescence into the discourse of today. As far as the spe-
cific translation of a sample libretto, Indal Haran was one of the radio
recordings I collected, and it had to be transcribed first. We developed
a verbal transcript and also rendered most of it in musical notation.
I used the sung material in Grounds for Play for musicological and
metrical analysis. Thus I had gained a feel for — and technical grasp
of — the rhythms of the lines, their patterns and variations, which was
quite exciting. Could I carry any of this into an English translation?
Impossible: this was going to be simply an exercise in storytelling.
Indal Haran is one of the 52 episodes of the great Alha cycle, the
old oral epic of Bundelkhand. Even to have the Nautanki version of
the story in English would be valuable, I thought. Well, stories have

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their essential features

­— characters, time, place,
action, and such — but
when one is dealing with
the word-for-word tran-
script of a poetic drama
(and this probably applies
to folktales and narrative
songs too), the basic infor-
mation often is missing.
The names and places are
altered, elided, alluded to
in cryptic ways. The Nau-
tanki text of Indal Haran
was quite opaque in Hindi.
Consulting other versions
of the story was one way of
filling in the blanks, mak-
Fig. 1: Nainuram playing a virangana (warrior-
woman) / Natya Shodh Sansthan, Kolkata ing sense out of the abbre-
viated references. In the
finished translation, I added crucial facts in brackets. The translation
appeared in an appendix, an odd strategy, now that I think about it.

SLS — Speaking of brackets and appendixes, your translation of Som-

nath Gupt’s history of Parsi theatre is really one of my favorites. Your
supplements to Gupt’s original text are embedded so lovingly from
start to finish, creating almost a book within a book: you perform the
usual prefatory notes explaining the limitations of your interventions
and thanking your university (and so does he); your endnotes, rear-
rangements, and additional images enhance Gupt’s own notes and
images. For me, this method makes visible processes of knowledge
accretion usually hidden. The resulting text is both a valuable source
of information on Parsi theatre within the architectural and social en-

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 Kathryn Hansen

Fig. 2: Postcard of the Empire Theatre, Bombay, 1920s / Phillips Antiques, Mumbai

vironment of Bombay and a cultural artifact in its own right. Can you
explain why you thought that translation of this text into English was
“long overdue”? 

KGH — I first translated some passages from Gupt for my own use. As
time went on, I realized it was a core reference for me and could be
useful for others as well. True, it was pretty dry, mainly an assemblage
of details, not much narrative or analysis. To round it out, I intervened
quite a bit, both to clean it up and correct some errors and to make
it more appealing. The translation is not a book you can easily read
cover to cover, but you can look things up in it, and it has an interest
for the specialist. The apparatus was driven by the scope and variety
of Parsi theatrical productions over a long period. Gupt was not an
impartial source: but he understood the secular moorings of Parsi the-
atre and gave credit to all the communities involved with it. I suppose
I translated this work to provide legitimacy to a forgotten art. When
phenomena have a published history, they seem more real. Unless
the history is published in English, however, it lacks authority, to say

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nothing of the limitation on access. Books in Hindi pretty much get

ignored beyond a small literati readership in India, and they go out of
print very rapidly. Although certain publishers are making efforts to
change this, the bias towards English-language publication in India is
definitely greater now than when I began studying Hindi in the 1960s.

SLS — Can you think of other works like this that might be translated
into English? What kinds of theater, performance, and autobiography
archives—a few of which you mention in Stages of Life — might con-
tinue to be sources for future scholars who hope to contribute to the
kinds of historiography that you have developed in your own scholar-
ship?

KGH — I know of valuable works in several Indian languages, and I’m

sure there are other books in Hindi too. Towards the end of the nine-
teenth century, sketches of theatre personalities, life stories of actors,
and notes on theatrical productions started appearing in India. First
they were focused on English theatre. It was a kind of gossip, who’s
who on the stage, what’s showing where. As theatrical activity came
to be concentrated in the hands of Indians, similar vignettes about
Indian actors filled the pages of newspapers and magazines. So there
is quite a lot of performance history available, in English as well as
in regional languages like Bengali, Tamil, and Marathi. Commercial
theatre flourished first in urban areas – Calcutta, Madras, Bombay –
thus, it’s natural that the sources would be in those languages.

SLS — Coming back to the issue of the balance between commentary

and translation, in Stages of Life how were you able to navigate this
challenge? It seems you had to choose between the presentation of an
“archive” that has a very strong voice and the orchestration of that ar-
chive into a coherent narrative/historiography through commentary/
analysis. Is there a poet inside every translator?

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 Kathryn Hansen

KGH — Yes, and sometimes that poet gets support to emerge due to in-
tellectual trends that might seem quite tangential. I had already been
intrigued by the idea of multivocality when I began writing Grounds
for Play. In Chapter 1, I experimented with crafting a multistranded
narrative, playing off different sources (Renu’s short story, the libretto
of Sangit Nautanki, some interviews with actors) against each other.
This kind of interlaced structure is now ubiquitous in TV serials and
novels. But it’s still not that common in academic writing. Similarly,
with Stages of Life, my thinking about autobiography was influenced
by deconstruction and performance theory. The word and its mean-
ing had lost the aura of permanence and truth; canonical texts were
no longer viewed with the reverence of old. This was a huge boon for
folklorists and people who were working on popular culture, since it
opened the door to all kinds of projects. The possibility of meaning
being always fluid, always constructed in performance, really created
an expansive space.
This theoretical shift freed me to take even greater liberties in
translation. With the autobiographies of Parsi theatre actors, I had lots
of misgivings about reliability, whether the narrators were telling the
truth. It turned out that a couple of them didn’t even write their own
autobiographies; they used collaborators or ghost writers. But they
were all great raconteurs, able to talk about themselves with gusto at
great length. I had to cut all of the autobiographies severely, take out
a lot, trying to leave the juiciest bits. In this book, I think I achieved
the right balance of commentary to translation: about 50/50. There’s
a lot of information on the authors and the theatre contained in foot-
notes, appendices, and introductory material. I also have several sec-
tions that are totally interpretive or theoretical. Maybe translation in
this case was an occasion for me to perform, so to speak, to develop
themes and elaborate upon them. Those actors’ voices gave me an op-
portunity to orchestrate translation with background material and re-
lease layers of meaning.

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SLS — Can you say more about how your training in Indian classical
music has come in handy at various points throughout your career?
How has your musical background shaped your research and your ap-
proach to translation?

KGH — For a long time, I was interested in Hindi and literary mat-
ters in India, while on a completely separate track I was immersed in
learning Hindustani (and later Karnatak) music. I had the good for-
tune to meet and study from a great master, the sitarist Nikhil Baner-
jee, while I was a graduate student. That experience carried me into a
depth of appreciation that was quite transformative. For a number of
years after finishing my PhD, I practiced sitar religiously, and when I
lived in Canada I performed publicly and also organized a number of
musical events.
The musical aspect of my engagement with South Asia merged
with my academic work when I discovered Nautanki, a folk opera
form. For the first time, I
was able to focus on a literary
tradition that relied on music
for its unique character. My
training in Indian classical
music enabled me to get be-
yond the negative appraisal
of Nautanki’s musicality.
Most recordings of Nautanki
singing at that time were
quite distorted. The tech-
nology wasn’t up to the job
Fig. 3: Record jacket of the Nautanki Sul-
of capturing the traditional tana Daku, 1970s / Personal collection of
outdoor presentation style, Kathryn Hansen

where actors sing with full voice and often in high register. I realized
by interviewing singers that the melodies were formulaic but very ap-
pealing, and that the entire musical ensemble (including drumming

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on the naqqara, a specialized kettle-drum set) involved a lot of artistry.

I wanted to write about how well-adapted the musical drama was to
its environment, how moving it must have been for audiences in the
days before mass media.
Then, I suppose, the idea of improvisation was something that I
imbibed from Indian music. I went through a phase of trying to figure
out how to play alap, being completely puzzled about how you impro-
vise on a few notes so that it is your own invention, while conforming
to the stylistics of alap. I would dream about how to do it, but still not
be able. I think it is similar to a phase in language learning, where you
understand the language and know a lot of words but are struggling to
become fluent. You suddenly start speaking, like a child. Improvising
was that kind of skill, and getting the hang of it had a big impact on
my writing and translating. All of these activities are forms of expres-
sion, and for me the breakthrough into expression is a challenge and
a thrill. Again, it’s about apprehending a new system, configuring it,
communicating it back.

SLS — Can you think of a way, perhaps using digital archives, that
scholars might more readily present to readers the musicality and me-
ter of forms of Indian theatre and performance? What should be the
role of scholarship more generally in efforts to archive, preserve, and
promote such forms (an effort you yourself undertook for Nautanki
sangits)?

KGH — When we talk about preserving and archiving something

like folk plays, we have to explore our assumptions about fixity and
change. What is the thing we are trying to preserve? How fixed is it,
and how mutable? Is change okay? What if change leads to contami-
nation, or even extinction? Folklore theory has moved away from the
concept of the Ur-text, the search for pure origins, the ideal form of
the story or song. The prevalent opinion is that the object of study is
the text/performance as we find it in the present moment, bearing all

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of its changes, mediations and adaptations. The problem is that these

changes can’t be recognized if there is no prior entity for comparison.
Personally, I’m not compelled to search for the “original form” of a
story, song, or play; I don’t care that much about the earliest manifes-
tation of a text. But I am interested in boundaries, in what defines a
genre, what endures to create continuity over time.
My approach has been to mobilize historical awareness and make
use of different kinds of sources to create a longer view. By looking at
a larger set of data, we can identify similarities and differences and
create aggregates that reveal common characteristics. For example,
Nautanki as a genre can be identified by its distinctive meters. These
are visible in the texts of the nineteenth century as well as the per-
formances nowadays. With a firmer grasp of how the genre coheres,
preservation makes sense as an effort to record and document sam-
ples of it at a particular juncture. It’s not as though these samples
inherently possess greater legitimacy. They will probably acquire that
added value by being archived. So archiving is an intervention, and
we need to be clear about that. It does fix the text and reify its fea-
tures. But it also has the power to make the text accessible. Again,
“access” is not the same for everybody everywhere. Still, because of
the possibility that access may broaden the reach of communication,
I’m in favor of it.
I agree that with digital media becoming widely accessible, we
have more tools now and can attempt a multimedia approach to pres-
ervation. I don’t know of any models yet for this. Videotaping live the-
atre, especially musical theatre, is a challenge, and of course it is cost-
ly. Still, it is more common now for ethnomusicology monographs to
include a CD or DVD. YouTube is a real instructional resource: there
is so much amateur video that has merit. I expect the frontiers to keep
shifting.

SLS — Let’s return to “old media” for a moment — can you talk about
your experiences having a dual publishing life in the United States

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 Kathryn Hansen

and India? What have been the rewards of publishing in both places?
What kinds of relationships, legalities, and sensibilities must one
negotiate in order to do this effectively? Have you ever felt there was
something you couldn’t say, had to say differently, or needed to say
more emphatically in either context?

KGH — When I started going to India and meeting living authors,

invitations came to translate their stories and publish them in little
magazines in India. This was a different enterprise from my student
exercises, translation for consumption as “literature.” The stakes were
higher in regard to accuracy and style, plus there was the issue of the
Indian reader, who did not need (or want) awkward equivalents of kin-
ship terms, food and dress items, or culturally specific vocabulary.
After The Third Vow, my interests turned towards folklore mate-
rial that was equally obscure for Indian and Western readers. I would
have been able to skirt the issue of the distinct readerships for a while,
except for the fact that I became very involved with gender theory.
Gender norms had been evolving in South Asia as elsewhere, but it
really was a little cheeky to speak to Indian feminism, and insert my
voice as I did with my article on heroic women (viranganas), where I
argued for a third model after Sita/Savitri and the Shakti goddesses.
Surprisingly, this piece has been the most reprinted of all my articles,
and reprinted in books assigned on syllabi in India.
Over the years, networks grow to reflect the relationships we
build. I look back with pride at the years I’ve enjoyed with my Indi-
an friends who were leaders in women’s studies, gender studies, and
feminist activism. It’s really such an honor to have known them, and
their work and perspectives have created a context for my scholarly
growth. They’ve helped me develop as no other network has.
I don’t censor my presentations in India. I’ve found that academic
audiences everywhere have very high standards, so it’s essential to
give one’s best effort and be ready to defend one’s argument. When
I read a paper once at the Sahitya Akademi on female impersonation

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and gender formation, the veteran artist Fida Husain was sitting in
the front row, eagerly taking it in. He had been a female impersonator
himself in his youth. The academics in the audience responded in
their usual style, but he gave an appreciation in Hindi at the end that
touched me the most.
As far as legality is concerned, earlier in my career I never worried
about it. Piracy was the norm and nobody bothered about copyright.
That’s still true in some cases, but there’s more of an attempt now in
India to clear copyright and get permissions. With the Gupt book, we
had to find the heir, who was a Superintendent of Police in Rajasthan,
and get his consent—not easy! Over this duration, academic publish-
ing in India has taken enormous strides and played a huge role in fos-
tering South Asian studies globally. I’m immensely gratified to have
been published by Rukun Advani’s press, Permanent Black. It’s only
ten or eleven years old, but it has done remarkable work.

SLS — An SP in Rajasthan? Incredible! One thing that really strikes

me about your work is that you have been able to convey the idioms
of Bombay as well as those of the qasbas of North India. Because the-
atrical companies travelled extensively in India, your research com-
pels us to understand both their cosmopolitan and local orientations.
What has this aspect of your work taught you about the travels of Hin-
di, Urdu, and other languages of the theatre more generally?

KGH — ­ Hindi, Urdu, and other languages of India are so capacious,

they reveal so many variants and inflections historically as well as geo-
graphically. It’s fascinating to think about how certain kinds of theatre
and literature communicate with their audiences at different points
along the social spectrum. I’ve looked at the Hindi literati’s reaction
to Renu’s writing right after Independence and their buttoned-down
approach to language. His fiction was saturated with localisms, and it
challenged the idea of a standardized version of Hindi that they were
promoting. Nautanki probably appealed to Renu’s villagers because

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it was still a notch more sophisticated than their own folk dramas.
It had an allure, a promise of classiness that was carried through its
Urdu verses. For cosmopolitan audiences, Parsi theatre did the same
thing on a larger scale. It projected a European style of representation,
drew on a broader universe of dramatic situations and tropes, and was
linguistically quite eclectic. In each case, the appeal seems to be the
expansion of boundaries, the encounter with new worlds. There is a
desire to explore at the leading edge, which the language is able to
facilitate because of its inherent plasticity. I’ve enjoyed working with
this set of cultural media since Hindi links them all. These forms also
defy some of the usual assumptions about social hierarchy, especially
in the mutual exchange between the local and the cosmopolitan.

SLS — In Grounds for Play, you

write that, “dictionaries are
slanted mirrors of language
and society, reflecting the lin-
guistic tapestries constructed
by social, political, and eco-
nomic forces at different mo-
ments of history” (13). Here,
you are discussing the sidelin-
ing of “nautanki” and its omis-
sion from standard Hindi and
Urdu dictionaries. Thinking
more broadly, especially about
the centrality of translation and
the dictionary in South Asian
studies, what advice would you Fig. 4: Page from a lithographed san-
git (Nautanki chapbook), 1870s / India
give junior translators inclined Office Library, London
to move beyond the limitations
of dictionaries and other accessible objects of study?

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KGH — Knowing one language even extremely well is usually not

enough. For anyone training to work in or translate from South Asian
languages, I would stress the need to study Sanskrit, historical linguis-
tics, and secondary languages as appropriate to one’s field. This is be-
cause the borders between languages are so fuzzy in the South Asian
context. One language interpenetrates another to a large extent. As far
as dictionaries and their limitations, I’m afraid the problem is getting
worse as South Asian languages are refashioned to catch up with the
present. It has been a real challenge, collaborating on the translation
of my scholarly articles into Hindi. Some of the theoretical and con-
ceptual vocabulary has to be coined on the spot by the Hindi-speaking
translator, and I wonder how it comes across—probably as even more
obscure than the original English! Nonetheless, we need more and
better translations, and part of the excitement of this kind of mental
activity lies in the sleuthing.

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SELECTED WORKS OF KATHRYN HANSEN

1986 — Renu, Phanishwar Nath. The Third Vow and Other Stories.
Translated by Kathryn G. Hansen. Delhi: Chanakya Publica-
tions, 1986.
1986 — Hansen, Kathryn. “Bharatiya Lok Paramparaen Aur Adhunik
Rangmanch [Indian Folk Traditions and the Modern Stage].”
Natrang (New Delhi) XLVI (1986): 22-29.
1988 — Hansen, Kathryn. “Tisri Kasam (The Third Vow): The Story
and the Film.” Journal of South Asian Literature 23, no. 1
(Winter-Spring 1988): 214-22.
1988 — Hansen, Kathryn. “Renu Ki Anchalikta: Bhasha, Rup Aur Vidha
[Renu’s Regionalism: Language, Form, and Genre].” Alochana
(New Delhi) 87 (1988): 37-54.
1988 — Hansen, Kathryn. “The Virangana in North Indian History:
Myth and Popular Culture.” Economic and Political Weekly
23, no. 18 (Apr. 30, 1988): WS25-WS33.
1992 — Hansen, Kathryn. Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of
North India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
1998 — Hansen, Kathryn. “The Migration of a Text: The Indar Sabha in
Print and Performance.” Sangeet Natak 127-128 (1998): 3-34.
1999 — Hansen, Kathryn. “Making Women Visible: Female Imperson-
ators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage and in Silent Cinema.”
In Women, Narration and Nation: Collective Images and Mul-
tiple Identities, edited by Selvy Thiruchandran. New Delhi:
Vikas Publishing, 1999.
2001 — Hansen, Kathryn. “The Indar Sabha Phenonmenon: Public
Theatre and Consumption in Greater India (1853-1956).” In
Pleasure and the Nation: The History and Politics of Public
Culture in India, edited by Chris Pinney and Rachel Dwyer.
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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2002 — Hansen, Kathryn. “Parsi Theatre and the City: Locations, Pa-
trons, Audiences.” Sarai Reader 2002. The Cities of Everyday
Life (2002): 40-49.
2003 — Hansen, Kathryn. “Languages on Stage: Linguistic Pluralism
and Community Formation in the Nineteenth-Century Parsi
Theatre.” Modern Asian Studies XXXVII, no. 2 (2003): 381-406.
2004 — Hansen, Kathryn. “A Different Desire, a Different Femininity:
Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati, and Marathi
Theatres, 1850-1940.” In Queering India: Same-Sex Love and
Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, edited by Ruth Vani-
ta. New York: Routledge, 2004.
2005 — Gupt, Somnath. The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Develop-
ment. Translated and edited by Kathryn Hansen. Calcutta:
Seagull Books, 2005.
2005 — Hansen, Kathryn and David Lelyveld, eds. A Wilderness of
Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.
2009 -- Hansen, Kathryn. "Staging Composite Culture: Nautanki and
Parsi Theatre in Recent Revivals." South Asia Research 29, no.
2 (2009): 151-68.
2011 — Hansen, Kathryn. Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiogra-
phies. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2011.

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