Puppetry or the puppet theater is one of the ancient forms of entertainment in India. Although primarily it is used as a form of entertainment; yet its importance in conveying significant meaning cannot be denied. Right from the ancient days Indian Puppet Theater therefore developed not only as an art form but also as an effort of conveying a lot whilst uttering actually nothing. India, which has a rich history of her creativity, has slowly became a name in the rich timeline of Indian Natya with the emergence of this Indian puppetry as a typical visual art form.

The chronicle of Indian puppetry unveils the verity that the puppetry in India somewhat dates back to the long gone era of the 5th Century BC. Not only as an art form Indian puppet theater at that epoch was an effort of illustrating the histories of great prince, princes, and mythological heroes and even unveiled the legendary incidents and also portrayed those eposes and stories from the epics. Puppetry was then chiefly a media for entertainment; an effort to humanize the mass amidst its creativity and in the midst of its story telling aspects. Quite ideally, then, evolved two distinct types of Indian puppetry; one form which was then chiefly evolved as the religious portrayal and the other form mainly made satire and farce as the central theme. It is with the colossal development of the religious puppetry, shadow puppetry evolved as a media in epitomizing the stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata. It was much later; in the history of puppetry, satire and farcical comedies became quite a connected part in articulating the socio political set up of India. The chic dash was then missing; even the modish approach was not there; yet Indian puppetry as an enduring form of entertainment stood apart as intense form of theater since the historic days of ancient rimes. While some says Indian Puppet Theater did originate in medieval India, other says that it was there throughout, typically as an art form even at the time of the Indus Valley civilization.

Indian theater as an old and multicolored art form therefore holds the fact that the Indians were always comfortable in expressing themselves in varied forms of Mudraa, rupaka, Natya, Leela, Rasa and Lasya and the massive success of Indian Puppet Theater as an artistic expression of natya further strengthens this fact to a great level.