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Rangoon circa 1900 was known as ‘one of the best show towns in the East’. As the capital city of Burma, then ruled from Calcutta as a province of India, it was home to more Indian nationals than Burmese. In this cosmopolitan context, two vernacular arts complexes — the Parsi theatre of India and the popular zat-pwe of Burma — flourished, competed, and converged. This article documents the 55-year long engagement of Parsi theatre in Burma within the larger history of global theatrical flows in the Indian Ocean. It highlights the story of Dosabhai Hathiram, a theatre man who rooted himself in Rangoon his entire life. And it asks, why was Parsi theatre celebrated elsewhere in Southeast Asia as a vector of modernity, and yet in Burma it left scarcely a trace behind?

The modern Hindi writer Phanishwarnath Renu developed a distinctive “regional” style in his fiction, which Hindi critics have defined in terms of his focus on the way of life of a particular area, the Purnea region of northeastern Bihar. However, Renu's regionalism cannot be separated from his innovations in the language and form of fiction. He employed a variety of dialects and deviated from conventional spelling and grammar, to draw the reader into the rural universe of sound. He included indigenous genres, such as the folk song, folktale, and rural drama, within the frame of the modern novel, thereby creating a new structure for the regional novel.