Who watches mobile theatres in Assam, and why it matters

Each season, mobile theatre troupes in Assam load trucks with stages, props and costumes and travel from village to town to city. Their audiences include farmers, teachers, students, housewives and children. 

The form began in Pathshala in the 1920s, took early inspiration from jatra, and grew into a commercial enterprise with troupes of 100 to 200 members. It is often described as entertainment or as a symbol of Assamese identity. 

Rituparna Patgiri argues that both descriptions are incomplete. In her monograph Mobile Theatre of Assam: Public Culture, Counter-Public, and Consumption, she treats the form as a place where Assamese society debates language, politics, class and the pull of global culture. In an interview with EastMojo, she explains what the stage reveals about the public that gathers around it.

The Book and Its Argument

The monograph was published on September 28, 2026. It received the International Centre Goa’s Scholar-in-Residence award for 2026. It sets out to place mobile theatre within the modern Assamese public sphere and public culture, a subject that, in Patgiri’s view, has received little sustained scholarly attention despite its prominence in public life.

The book asks whether mobile theatre can be read as a counter-public, a space where members of subordinated social groups are dominant and where a non-elite culture finds expression. It also identifies a feature that complicates the picture. Mobile theatre is commercial and mediated. It sells tickets, courts sponsors and circulates songs and trailers on digital platforms.

The book holds that mobile theatre has features of a counter-public and, at the same time, belongs to the larger Assamese public culture. The point where these two forms of public meet is the organising concern of the volume.

Patgiri draws on fieldwork to connect theatre, society and technology. Her interview answers follow the same path as the book.

They begin with history and audience, move to commerce and technology, and end with the labour that keeps the troupes running. Throughout, she declines to treat the Assamese public as a single body. “Mobile theatre reveals that the Assamese public cannot be understood as a single, homogeneous public,” she says.

A Public Formed by History

Patgiri insists that mobile theatre cannot be studied apart from the history that produced it. “The public that watches mobile theatre is heterogeneous, and its formation is embedded in Assam’s socio-cultural history,” she says. She adds that “mobile theatre cannot be studied as a separate theatrical form without taking into account Assam’s historical context.”

The book traces the form to external and internal pressures. British colonialism and the presence of Bengalis in colonial Assam shaped its early years, as did exchanges between regions and communities within the state. “In this complex interaction, mobile theatre became a symbol of Assamese language and culture,” she says.

Language proved central. Mobile theatre began in the 1920s as an art form inspired by Bengali jatra. By the 1960s, people involved in theatre felt that original Assamese plays were scarce, since many productions were translated from Bengali.

When Achyut Lahkar’s Nataraj group staged plays regarded as indigenous, audiences responded in large numbers. The form thus became a platform where questions of language were negotiated in public.

The content of the plays followed the concerns of the day. In the early phase, stories drawn from Hindu epics served, according to the book, as a way of bringing people together during the colonial period.

From the 1970s, social issues replaced religious themes. The 1980s brought plays on corruption and the Assam Movement, among them Bhabendra Nath Saikia’s Ramdhenu, Abirat Jatra, Duliyajaan and Swahid. Kanaklata, Kushal Konwar and Akau Ejon Lachit spoke to regional sentiment. In the 1990s, Maaj Nikhar Siyore, Aapun Manuh and Maharyna addressed the ULFA issue, while Maatir Morom took up the flood problem.

The book also records what the stage avoided. Producers and playwrights sometimes steered clear of subjects that could provoke a reaction. Patgiri points to Lahkar’s Erina as a telling case. “Written during the Emergency, the play changed its setting from India to Rome so that it could avoid censorship,” she says.

These examples support her larger claim about the form. “Mobile theatre does not simply reflect Assamese society from outside,” she says. Its content, she explains, gives a large and varied public a space in which questions of language, identity, nationalism, social problems, popular culture and consumption become visible.

She ties this to Nancy Fraser’s argument about multiple and competing publics, and notes that ideas of culture, nationalism and identity do not fit easily into Jürgen Habermas’s original account of the public sphere.

Who Sits in the Audience

The counter-public argument rests on the audience. Patgiri describes the public that watches mobile theatre as predominantly rural and lower-middle-class, though not restricted to those categories.

It cuts across class, caste, gender and ethnicity. She contrasts it with the audience of prosceniumtheatre, citing Awasthi and Schechner (1989) on the difficulty modern Indian theatre had in reaching rural India because it was seen as urban and elite. Mobile theatre began in a rural setting and later moved into towns and cities.

Her fieldwork gives a concrete picture. “A farmer, teacher, student, housewife and child can sit together and watch a performance,” she says. The public is not defined by one occupation or one social identity, and men and women of different ages attend.

Patgiri does not present this as a picture of equality. She describes differences within the audience that the ticketing system reinforces. Front seats cost more, middle-range seats less, and the gallery is the cheapest.

The gallery draws economically weaker sections, including workers. Daily-wage labourers often attend the second or third show, particularly when the next day is a holiday. Gender shapes attendance as well. “Young unmarried women are less visible among the audience than men of the same age,” she says.

She states the limits of the claim directly. “The book therefore does not describe mobile theatre as an entirely egalitarian public. Its importance is that it widens participation in theatre,” she says.

The book locates the counter-public in this pattern of participation rather than in the identity of any single marginalised group. In Patgiri’s words, the counter-public character lies in the fact that “a largely rural, lower-middle-class and heterogeneous audience participates in a cultural form that is often treated as inferior by elite understandings of art and theatre.”

Elite theatre, she notes, asks for a certain artistic disposition. Mobile theatre does not. Her point is not that institutional theatre lacks a popular audience. It is that mobile theatre reaches people who may have limited access to cultural institutions.

The book also turns to those who work behind the stage. Technicians, musicians, cooks, cleaners and other workers keep a production running yet receive far less recognition than star actors.

A troupe includes producers, actors, dancers, playwrights, musicians, singers, choreographers, sound artists, action artists, make-up artists and administrative staff. It functions like a company, and most workers are employed on contract. “This makes mobile theatre not only a cultural form but also an organisation of labour,” Patgiri says.

Commerce, Consumption and the Counter-Public

The most pointed question in the interview concerns money. Mobile theatre sells tickets, attracts advertisers and responds to demand. Does this weaken its claim to be a counter-public?

Patgiri answers that the book treats commerce as central to the form’s transformation, and that consumption is part of publicness rather than external to it. “The book explicitly states that the public watching mobile theatre is both a counter-public and a consuming public,” she says.

That tension appears in a long-running argument over whether mobile theatre is art or entertainment. Many art critics and social scientists in Assam regard it as highly commercial and doubt its artistic value and its capacity to raise social awareness. Patgiri connects this view to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1979) argument about a socially recognised hierarchy of the arts.

The Kohinoor group offers an example. In the 1980s, it suffered heavy losses after staging non-commercial plays such as Purukh, Baaghjaal and Draupadir Juge Juge. Organisers responded by asking what the public wanted. Producers, according to the book, widely believe that audiences want entertainment and use the theatre to relax after work.

The audience’s power to shape a production is clear from the reception of Purukh. When viewers disliked the play, the production met strong reactions, and stones were thrown at the actors. The example shows that producers do not dictate terms to the market. A relationship of demand holds among producer, market and audience.

Patgiri draws on Sara Dickey’s 1995 study of Tamil cinemagoers, which argues that cinema can help the urban poor feel part of India’s growing public culture. She applies the argument to Assam, where audiences value fantasy, stunts and relief from everyday problems. One organiser sums up the formula for a successful play as presenting the global and the national “in a local flavour.”

Advertising has grown in importance. The book notes that the earlier claim that mobile theatre needed no outside sponsors and made its own profit has weakened. Advertising is now a major source of revenue, and sponsors range from local clinics and mobile-phone companies to corporate brands such as Vodafone, Kajaria and Britannia. Advertisements can run before a performance, as they do in cinema.

Patgiri does not read this shift as a loss of the counter-public. “Mobile theatre is simultaneously a ‘rational-critical’ public and one that ‘consumes’ and is ‘mediatised,'” she says.

She continues: “Commercialisation does not simply eliminate the counter-public. Rather, the consuming nature of the public is one of the reasons mobile theatre has developed into a form of public culture.”

She takes the audience’s taste seriously. The preference for fantasy, songs, dance and action, she says, is not evidence of a lack of social awareness. The book also records the objections of playwrights and theatre experts who worry about commercialisation, the decline of issue-based plays, cinematic imitation and the use of gimmicks. Patgiri regards these disagreements as part of the public culture around the form.

Mobility, Technology and the Global Stage

Movement defines the form. Mobile theatre originated in Pathshala, known as the “Hollywood of Assam” because many groups have their headquarters there. As roads and transport improved, troupes reached villages, towns and cities, and the form spread from Lower Assam to Guwahati and Upper Assam.

A typical troupe of 100 to 200 members travels with its equipment, props and costumes, and most groups own trucks. Patgiri treats this as more than logistics. Mobility shapes the kind of public the theatre creates. Kohinoor has performed outside Assam, including in New Delhi at the invitation of the National School of Drama in 2010, and in the Barak Valley and Arunachal Pradesh.

The book documents how global material entered the repertoire. From the 1980s, as the form gained an urban following, groups staged plays inspired by foreign theatre, such as Dastan Shahide Karbala, Benhoor and Cleopatra. From the 1990s, plays took in current affairs, fantasy and popular culture.

Lady Diana brought an international news subject to rural audiences, and Titanic and Anaconda adapted Hollywood films. Patgiri links the change to liberalisation and the growth of television, cinema, newspapers, VCDs and the internet, and says the content moved towards a more consumerist orientation.

Mary Kom, staged by Abahan in the 2016 to 2017 season in a production by Abhijeet Bhattacharya, shows the pattern at work. The Bollywood film had appeared in 2014. The stage version carried the story to people who did not understand Hindi or could not afford a multiplex ticket. The book describes mobile theatre as a place where the local, national and global meet.

The arrangement produces a contradiction that Patgiri does not smooth over. “Mobile theatre groups often claim to preserve Assamese language and culture and to resist the influence of Bollywood and Hollywood, while at the same time borrowing heavily from them,” she says. “The book does not resolve this contradiction.” She uses it instead to show that Assamese public culture is in constant negotiation among the local, the national and the global.

Technology has changed the spectacle as well. Kohinoor’s Breaking News introduced 3D technology at the suggestion of Pranab Lahkar, who had worked in Bollywood VFX. A fifteen-minute VFX sequence reportedly cost around Rs 50 lakh. Troupes use a double-stage arrangement that allows continuous performance, and they borrow cinematic techniques in staging.

Publicity has changed most visibly. Ticket sellers once went from door to door. Today, groups rely on billboards, posters, television, radio and social media. They release songs on YouTube before the season opens.

The song Oo Maa from Mur Maar Suwali drew approximately 4.5 million views after its release ahead of the 2017 to 2018 season. Instagram carries photographs of rehearsals, costumes, posters and stills. Patgiri calls the result “mediatised visuality.” The theatre remains physically mobile while its images, songs and interviews circulate through electronic and social media.

She declines to cast technology as either villain or rescuer. Audiences can now watch films on television and mobile phones, and one respondent notes that people no longer need to travel to Guwahati to see a film.

The same respondent adds that mobile theatre offers something those screens do not, because it comes to the village.

Some respondents also argue that Bollywood-style spectacle, dance, songs and gimmicks have weakened scripts and issue-based theatre. “The book’s evidence does not support reducing the relationship to either ‘technology is destroying mobile theatre’ or ‘technology will save mobile theatre,'” Patgiri says.

Technology has entered the content, spectacle, publicity and circulation of performances, while the live and physical character of the form keeps its value.

What the Stage Shows

Asked what people in Assam most misunderstand about mobile theatre, Patgiri returns to the problem of treating it as either entertainment or emblem. She proposes it as an entry point into the study of the public itself.

“The Assamese public is not singular. It is multiple, heterogeneous and multidimensional,” she says. The same public consumes, and that fact accounts for the book’s movement from the idea of the counter-public towards the idea of public culture.

The form also shows how Assamese identity is made. It does not develop in isolation from outside influence.

Mobile theatre claims to sustain Assamese language and culture while it takes in narratives, technologies and styles from Bollywood and Hollywood, and the contradiction is part of how the identity works in practice. Consumption matters to that process.

“The audience does not simply receive messages,” Patgiri says. “It makes demands, responds to performances and affects what producers stage.” The turn towards entertainment, in her account, follows a change in the public itself.

Her final claim is modest in scope and broad in consequence. The book describes mobile theatre as an integral part of Assam’s public discourse, a zone of debate that answers public demand and is shaped by local, national and global processes. In that discourse, she says, “a form of populist consensus is established.”

The claim carries weight because the monograph builds it from fieldwork, from a documented history of plays and from close attention to who attends, who pays and who works.

It gives scholars of sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies, theatre, performance and media a detailed account of a form that has long drawn crowds and little analysis.

For readers in Assam, it offers a reason to look again at the tents, trucks and posters that arrive each season, and to see in them an argument the state has been conducting with itself for a century.

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