![]() Children are an important part of theatre. And a lot of credit goes to Rabindranath Tagorewho was among the first to promote children theatre, after he set up his ashram for boys at Santiniketan in West Bengal in Birbhum District. He made theatre compulsory for boys and he, himself, supervised the rehearsals. He insisted that theatre should be open to all to help students grow. Tagore started writing new scripts for children in 1908. He started with Sharadotsab (Autumn-Festival) - the first of his plays about season specifying man in peace with nature. King and Rebel is the only play he wrote in English in the year 1913, was meant as a pedagogical exercise to develop the boys' fluency in that language. Rabindranath Tagore as a Dramatist has contributed greatly towards promoting children theatre in India. Apart from Tagore, some of the other children's playwright from West Bengal are; Sukumar Ray, Sirshendu Mukherjee etc. Some of the other legends in children's theatre include Sankaradas Swamigal, who kick started the famous Tamil movement of boys' companies by setting up the Samarasa Sanmarga Sabha (1910) and Tattuva Minalochani Vidya Balasabha (1918), teaching and preparing young talented boys to act. ![]() Many Marathi dramatists and playwrights like; P.L. Deshpande tried their hand at children's plays when radio drama for young audiences became well-known; some of the printed scripts even made it to school syllabi. Vijay Tendulkar has six anthologies of drama for young people. In Gujarati, Pragji Dossa composed over a hundred children's plays. Other significant children's dramatists include K.V. Subbanna (Kannada), G. Sankara Pillai (Malayalam), Satya Prasad Barua (Assamese), Safdar Hashmi (Urdu/Hindi), and Pundalik Naik (Konkani). Pransukh Nayak, the Gujarati theatre actor, set up his own group in the 1980s to stage drama related to education for children. M. Ramasamy and Velu Saravanan, in Tamil Nadu, became renowned as special for children's-theatre. |
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