In my paper I have traced the major touchstones in the history of performance in India, from the epics and the wandering bards to the contemporary theatre of modern India. .
The post-Vedic literary period marks an important phase in the making of Indian drama. The epics Ramayana and Mahabharata with their dialogue oriented poetic structures, the tradition of recitation by a whole class of reciters, have enriched Indian performance tradition and have given the country a distinctive performative culture. Indian culture is essentially the product of oral tradition, which forms the blueprint of performances even today. .
There are four aspects of the epic tradition, namely the oral, the literary, the pictorial and the performing. They have a shared cultural setting and have coexisted in a lively relationship of exchange and interaction for all these centuries. It is through this complex pattern of the tradition that one can understand epic's true nature, and its role in the arts and cultural modes of the people. .
The performance tradition as old as the tradition of the epic itself, is the richest and the most varied of these four aspects. It takes thematic and textual material both from the literary and the oral traditions, and also influences the form and structure of the literary tradition. It also maintains close relationship with the pictorial tradition, and both often choose the same episodes and follow similar conventions. With its broad social base and absorbing capacity, the performance tradition of the epic has evolved multiple forms. Most of these forms with flexible and open structures freely incorporate elemts from the social, religious and artistic life of the people, and make epic theatre a most important cultural document. .
The epics were often recited as offerings to the Gods and seen as tools of spiritual and religious enrichment. Hence, in a tradition in which drama has been taken as a gift of the gods, it was but natural that theatre would find a place in the temple, the abode of the gods.