This paper analyzes the 1977 Tamil-language Honeymoon Couple , written by Crazy Mohan for comedian Kathadi Ramamurthy, as a typical play that illustrates the basic content as well as structural and aesthetic characteristics of the sabha theatre genre. This work exhibits the major traits that in my analysis constitute the genre: patronage by sabha s, with their middle-class, usually Brahmin, audience base; a central theme concerning marriage alliances and/or married life; scripted witty dialogue with a thin plot and one-liner jokes, often including language jokes that code-switch between Tamil and English; a socially conservative message; and an "amateur aesthetic" that involves minimal sets, costumes, and lighting, and two-hour evening or weekend matinee performances. The reading of Kathadi Ramamurthy's Honeymoon Couple illustrates the flamboyant quotidian nature of the pure comedy plays that focus on fast-paced dialogue filled with jokes, puns, and allusions, and works from that humor to a deeper understanding of middle-class Tamil Brahmin culture.

High School Musical, the 2006 Disney Channel original movie, was a surprise hit in the United States, but its Bollywood-style format and sanitized depiction of American high school life contributed to its popularity in India as well. The Disney Channel, which entered the growing Indian market for children's television in 2004, has been a leader in developing strategies for localization. Many standard strategies are visible in the marketing of High School Musical, including dubbing content into local languages, creating content locally or drawing on local themes, and running local promotions and competitions. The My School Rocks dance competition, run in conjunction with the release of High School Musical, added creative and performance components to the equation that encouraged Indian kids to actively alter and interpret the film's musical numbers, thus making them relevant to their particular cultural experiences. Additionally, My School Rocks took advantage of the film's musical format to exploit similarities with the popular existing Bollywood industry, by both imitating popular performance practices inspired by Bollywood song-and-dance sequences and enlisting well-known Bollywood choreographers to serve as judges. The promotion involved schools, through the existing structure of interschool dance competitions, and local communities, through the voting that took place on the Disney India website. Through this Asia-specific competition, Disney encouraged children to take ownership of the film's content by creating and performing original dances to the songs, thus developing hybrid and bilingual choreographies that function as signifiers of class-based urban Indian cosmopolitanism.

Aravanis (transsexuals or transgenders) experience a moment called nirvanam (transcendence), when they are surgically transformed from woman-in-a-man’s-body to woman. Pritham Chakravarthy, an assistant professor of dramaturgy and film history at the Ramanaidu Film Institute in Hyderabad, presents the life of an aravani , culminating in this moment, in her 2001 one-woman play Nirvanam (Trancendence). This article is an exploration of that play and its performance and reception both within the aravani community itself and for broader audiences. It is based on extensive interviews with Chakravarthy herself as well as film Our Family , and my personal experiences as an audience member at some of Chakravarthy’s applied theatre performances. She developed Nirvanam at the request of the aravani community, and many of them have been actively involved through interviews and critiques of performances. Through her sharing of life stories in performance, Chakravarthy emphasizes women’s agency, choice, and power in an Indian context to inspire hope and recognition instead of despair, she is able to transform narratives that may be both traumatic and quotidian into stories to which caste-privileged, educated, middle-class intellectuals can relate. Her work grapples with the politics of representation and issues of the body as she attempts to expand both her own and her audiences’ points of understanding and experience as well as to benefit in some way the communities she is representing.

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Since the early 2000s, contest-based performance reality shows have become a major source of televisual entertainment in South Asia as well as an important site of publicity for musicians, singers, dancers and choreographers. They have become important venues for the performance of film, folk and classical music and dance, as well as sites where the aesthetics, meaning and status of these genres, and the boundaries between them, are recast. The reality show format has introduced new performance practices, new practices of viewing and audition and new modes of identification and evaluation. The articles in this Special Issue present case studies of the staging, curation and presentation of performance-based reality shows and the kinds of gendered, ethnic, classed and casted subjects produced and recruited through these shows. Moving beyond the more-studied Hindi belt, the articles focus on India’s south and northeast, as well as Pakistan and Nepal.