Few more branches of Nautanki ..

Few more branches of Nautanki ..
 

Two extremes of folk theatre in North India : the secular Nautanki and Naqal, and the religious Ramlila and Raslila.
Nautanki, an operatic drama, is performed in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan.  The earliest dramas of this form were called sangeets (musicals).  One such musical, Shehzadi Nautanki ("The Story of Princess Nautanki"), became so populas in the nineteenth century that the people started calling the form "Nautanki".

 The Akharas:
                                     There are 5 important akharas (schools) of Nautanki: Hathras, Muzafar Nagar, Saharanpur, Kanpur and Kanauj, each named after the town in which it originated.  Of these, Hathras and Kanpur stand out for their individual styles.  The Hathras was given a robust form by Indarman and perfected by his pupil Natharam Gaur of Hathras.   The Kanpur is led by Srikrishan Pehalwan, an actor-singer-composer-wrestler of Kanpur who owned a Nautanki company.  Both these men were exceedingly popular fifty years ago.
Because of its commercial character, Nautanki has attracted women performers.  Its secularism has wiped out almost all of the religious elements, and it has become increasingly lewd.  In Maharastra, the Tamasha woman sparkles in a performance; In the north, the Nautanki woman is emerging.  After the adoption of Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act in 1959, many prostitutes and nautch girls, forced to leave their professions, joined Nautanki troupes.  In Kanpur, a Nautanki Company consisting solely of female artists makes use of film tunes and other cheap melodies and emphasises tantalizing gestures in its performances.  The city corporation has banned the performance of Nautanki companies within municipal limits.  The troupes perform on the outskirts of the city, and the townsmen flock to gay performances.  But it is the old Nautanki troupes with their all-male cast that preserve the vigor, singing style and the operatic beauty of the form.

BHAGAT depicts:
                                 Bhagat, a four-hundred-year-old form of operatic drama,  (This form of entertainment is mentioned in Ain-i-Akbari, the monumental sixteenth-century record of Akbar's court) was in its earlier stages a dramatized Keertan singing with a thin story.  Nautanki owes its birth to this old form and is called its "daughter".  The word Bhagat means the "devotee", and those who perform the drama in the earliest times were devotees of Vaishnava cult.   Later stories of kings, historical romances, chivalric tales were introduced, but the form never lost its religious pattern.   Today there are Bhagat akharas in Mathura, Vrindaban, Agra and places associated with relious fervor.  In Agra, in 1827, Ram Prasad of Amroha and Johari Raya of Motikatara produced a legendary folk play, Roop Basant, the story of 2 brothers who suffered at the hands of their step brothers.   The akhara was founded, and Johari Ray was acclaimed as its first Guru.

KHYAL, says:
                                 The Khyal of Rajasthan is lyrical in temperament.  The name probably comes from the Urdu word khyal, meaning "imagination", perhaps because of the Khyal is an operatic drama without realistic setting or decode, which depends upon the imagination of the audience.  It is also possibly a corruption of the Hindi word Khel, meaning "a play.

Tales of "MAANCH"
                                Maanch is the lyric drama of Malwa region in Madhya Pradesh.  The name Maanch originates from manch, "the stage".  A week before the performance, the flag staff,or stage pole, is fixed according to the old Sanskrit tradition and the Guru, generally the playwright-actor,performs the ceremonial worship. The stage is open on all sides. In earlier times, it had and extension where the village nobility and the officials sat. There was also an arrangement for instrumentalists to sit at another stage level.


source google and Britanica.