Kathryn Hansen

Acute promyelocytic leukemia: report of a variant translocation, t(1;17).

A 4-year-old female with acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) was found to have a variant form of the 15;17 translocation, which is diagnostic of APL. The karyotype of the malignant cells was 47,XX,t(1;11)(q25;q21),t(1;17)(p36;q21), + 8. This case is additional evidence that the breakpoint of #17 at q21 is the characteristic chromosomal aberration of APL. The present case is also unusual because of the young age of the patient.

Languages on Stage: Linguistic Pluralism and Community Formation in the Nineteenth-Century Parsi Theatre

The Parsi theatre was the dominant form of dramatic entertainment in urban India from the 1860s to the 1930s. Named for its Bombay-based pioneers, the Parsi theatre blended certain European practices of stagecraft and commercial organization with Indic, Persian, and English stories, music, and poetry. Through the impact of its touring companies, it had a catalytic effect on the development of modern drama and regional theatre throughout South and Southeast Asia. Moreover, Parsi theatre is widely credited with contributing to popular Indian cinema its genres, aesthetic, and economic base. With Hindi films now the major cultural signifier for the middle classes and the ‘masses’ in South Asia and its diaspora, documentation and evaluation of the Parsi theatre is much needed, especially to connect it convincingly to the cinematic medium that followed.

Staging Composite Culture Nautanki and Parsi Theatre in Recent Revivals

Both the rural-based Nautanki and its urban counterpart, the Parsi theatre, remain part of the cultural scenario of modern India and continue to contribute to the ongoing negotiation of Indias composite culture. Part of the appreciation of these older stylized theatre genres comes from awareness of their hybrid character. As emblems of composite culture, these theatrical traditions remind viewers of a popular secular outlook that is still within reach. This article discusses two performances observed during 2004 in New Delhi, of Amar Singh Rathor and Yahudi ki Larki, both canonical popular texts. It is argued that the revival of these plays owes much to their ability to serve as allegories within the current polarized cultural and political climate. The discussion suggests the continuing potential of the impulse to counter neo-nationalist ideology by means of popular media such as Nautanki and Parsi theatre.

Who wants to be a cosmopolitan

This article explores two political discourses—composite culture and cosmopolitanism—as divergent, indeed competing, modes of advocating cultural pluralism. The first part of the article considers the genealogy of each construct and explores the theoretical differences between the two. The second part turns to the question of how composite culture and cosmopolitanism are configured in narrative terms in recent works of fiction and film. The primary focus is on Hindi author Manzoor Ahtesham’s 1986 novel Sukha Bargad (A Dying Banyan in English translation). The novel illustrates the withering of composite culture from the perspective of a brother and sister growing up in post-Independence Bhopal. To provide a comparative framework, two recent works of Anglophone fiction are drawn into the discussion: Aravind Adiga’s novel White Tiger (2008) and Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A, the basis for the movie Slumdog Millionaire. These texts may be read as critiques of cosmopolitanism from the subaltern position. The article asks whether composite culture and cosmopolitanism remain relevant in neo-liberalized India, while also calling for further research on these issues using literary texts in Hindi and Urdu.

Renu's Regionalism: Language and Form

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, Renus 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.

Performing Identities: Tyagaraja Music Festivals in North America

It is 9 a.m. in Cleveland and the beginning of what promises to be an extraordinary event.l Soon the speeches will commence and the governor’s proclamation will be read, declaring April 18 and 19, 1992, as Saint Tyagaraja Days throughout the state of Ohio. But now scores of musicians are coming up and sitting on the carpeted stage. Vocalists and instrumentalists, amateurs and professionals, women and men, old and young crowd together until there is room only in the wings. After a flute prelude, they launch into brisk unison singing, commencing with Jagadanandakaraka, a Sanskrit composition enumerating the 108 names of Lord Rama, composed in the raga Nata. This is followed immediately by three equally wordy but lively, rhythmic pieces set to different ghana (heavy, serious) ragas. The chorus falters a bit on the multiple stanzas of composition number four, Kanakana in raga Varali, musically the most challenging of the pieces, but the leaders at the front pull the laggards along. Endarõ mahanubhavula, a homage in Telugu to all the great souls who have gone before, brings the group singing triumphantly to an end. The paflcamma kridsthe five gems or masterworks have been completed, and another Tyagaraja festival has officially begun. The Tyagaraja festival, known to its participants as an aradhana utsavam (or a jayanti, when held on the birth rather than death anniversary of the poet-composer), has in the past decade become the most popular annual celebration for South Indians resident in North America. At least one hundred such observances are held in the United States

Passionate refrains: the theatricality of Urdu on the Parsi stage

ABSTRACT The Parsi theatre is known to have contributed to early Indian cinema textual legacies of story and theme, genre and star roles. It also supplied technical expertise, personnel, and capital vital to the new industry. I argue that the aesthetic sensibility associated with the Urdu language was also of great importance, especially to the emergence of the Islamicate idiom in Bombay cinema. Beginning with the popular pageant, the Indar Sabha, Parsi theatrical companies embraced the poetics of the Urdu ghazal with its declarations of ishq (passion) and recurring radifs (refrains). Why did Urdu win out over English and Gujarati as the dominant language of the then Bombay-based theatre? The analysis traces the contribution of Urdu munshis (playwrights), who together with their more illustrious actor-manager employers, co-created a distinctive Parsi-Urdu theatrical style. The performance of Urdu poetry together with Hindustani music and dance is seen as enhancing the literary appeal and musicality of new dramas, imparting a commercial advantage. Moreover, changes in playhouse design and the conventions of melodrama called for a forceful, rhythmic style of delivery, for which actors trained in Urdu were well suited. The article concludes with a case study of Agha Hashr Kashmiri, author of countless dramas and screeplays, focusing on his historical allegory, Yahudi ki Larki, which was made into a well-known Bombay film in 1955.

Mapping Melodrama: Global Theatrical Circuits, Parsi Theater, and the Rise of the Social

This essay documents the transnational circulation of Victorian domestic melodrama and its adaptation to Indian theatrical practice, through the example of The Colleen Bawn, one of Dion Boucicault’s most successful works. Using the historical South Asian newspaper archives, the study traces the introduction of melodrama and modern stagecraft into India via the Lewis Company, an enterprising Anglo-Australian family troupe. The drama’s performance history and reception are charted as it traveled from Calcutta to Simla and Bombay. Its subsequent translation and reworking in the Parsi theater, in the form of Bholi Jan, the Gujarati-language version authored by K.N. Kabraji, reveal the highly productive role of melodrama in the South Asian environment. From melodrama developed the “social”, a distinct genre centered on women, the family, and the tensions of modernity. Domestic melodrama’s shape and meaning were thus recast in the new location, leaving a legacy of great importance to the evolution of modern theater and cinema in Indian languages.

Grounds for Play: The Nauntaki Theatre of North India

The nautanki performances of northern India entertain their audiences with often ribald and profane stories. Rooted in the peasant society of pre-modern India, this theater vibrates with lively dancing, pulsating drumbeats, and full-throated singing. In Grounds for Play, Kathryn Hansen draws on field research to describe the different elements of nautanki performance: music, dance, poetry, popular story lines, and written texts. She traces the social history of the form and explores the play of meanings within nautanki narratives, focusing on the ways important social issues such as political authority, community identity, and gender differences are represented in these narratives. Unlike other styles of Indian theater, the nautanki does not draw on the pan-Indian religious epics such as the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for its subjects. Indeed, their storylines tend to center on the vicissitudes of stranded heroines in the throes of melodramatic romance. Whereas nautanki performers were once much in demand, live performances now are rare and nautanki increasingly reaches its audiences through electronic media--records, cassettes, films, television. In spite of this change, the theater form still functions as an effective conduit in the cultural flow that connects urban centers and the hinterland in an ongoing process of exchange.