Grant Road Theatre

Grant Road Theatre was possibly the longest-lived nineteenth-century auditorium in India. Grant Road Theatre was situated in the heart of what was then known as the Black Town of Bombay. Before it there was only one theatre that came into existence. The theatre was the Bombay Amateur Theatre. This was mainly a venue for the European residents` important social events, and for comedies and farces popular in early nineteenth-century England. It had been auctioned off in 1835. Eventually Grant Road Theatre, built by the merchant Jagannath Sunkersett in 1842 on land donated by him, opened on 10 February 1846, representing an attempt to fill a void in Bombay`s cultural life. Modeled on British playhouses like Drury Lane but having a capacity of just 337, with a drop curtain not found anywhere else, it provided for English theatrical entertainment.

Because of Bombay`s development as an industrial and commercial centre, the area around Grant Road Theatre developed as `native` theatre land. This happened after 1850. Companies rented Grant Road Theatre by the week. Vishnudas Bhave, the initiator of modern Marathi theatre, performed here on 9 March 1853 and later. Parsi theatre companies also used it, for performances in Gujarati and Urdu. This was the first documented Gujarati theatre production, Rustam Zabuli and Sohrab, took place here in October 1853. The Urdu plays were farcical afterpieces accompanying the Gujarati plays, starting from 1854. An Italian opera company installed gas lighting at its own cost in 1866. The building was finally sold in 1885.

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