Introduction Anthropologist Milton Singer wrote that "cultural performances are the surest indicators of a society's essential ideas and values. He felt that a culture was "encapsulated in such discrete performances," which are "the most concrete observable units of the cultural structure," because each such cultural performance has "a definitely limited time span, a beginning and an end, an organized program of activity, a set of performers, an audience, and a place and occasion of performance. Drama is an especially interesting and revealing cultural performance because its content often is of religious, social, and political significance. Classical drama in India is a particularly rewarding subject for research because it is an ancient tradition which has preserved many texts of plays, as well as learned commentaries, treatises on literary theory and poetics, etc. Even more significantly, the tradition is not exclusively recoverable through a kind of literary archaeology, but continues to exist today.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
