somewhere in the early 20th-century started being called nautanki, after the tale of a Nautanki Shahzadi became a popular theme. However this form lost much of its popularity and films made into road to rural area after the 1940s. Meanwhile, with the discovery of Kalidas's Abhijnanasakuntalam by Western scholars, it became the first Indian drama to be translated into a Western language, by Sir William Jones in 1789. In the next a hundred years, there were at least 46 translations in twelve European languages. This in turn initiated a concerted study and interest of Sanskrit drama tradition. In time the full extent of ancient Indian theatre's prowess came into light, which had been long lost, as classical Sanskrit drama mostly written from the 4th and 8th century AD faded out, with death of Sanskrit as a spoken language by the 10th century, only to be discovered many centuries later. Just as the first capital of British India, Calcutta, saw the rise of Bengali theatre in the light of Bengal renaissance early 19th century, at the same time Parsi theatre was coming up in Mumbai, inspired by English-style playhouses which had come up in the late 18th century in Mumbai and Kolkata, exclusively for the Raj gentry. Taking over the same proscenium stages, Parsi theatre took cue their European theatricality, but it brought in Indian themes, thus it "blended realism and fantasy, music and dance, narrative and spectacle, earthy dialogue and ingenuity of stage presentation, integrating them into a dramatic discourse of melodrama. The Parsi plays contained crude humour, melodious songs and music, sensationalism and dazzling stagecraft." Though it originally was in Gujarati language, by the 1870s, a flourishing Parsi theatre lead to the creation numerous travelling theatre companies, though they mostly used Indianised versions of Shakespeare's plays initially, soon Indian legends, epic and mythological tales made an appearance as source material, as Parsi theatre companies started travelling across North India, and employed native writers to churn out scripts in Hindustani the popular language in the territory, akin to Urdu, the court language in the Mughal era. These sources had also provided themes to the native Swang tradition, leading to cross-enrichment after Victoria Natak Mandali became the first Parsi theatre company to perform in Varanasi, in 1875. These theatre companies presented their mix of pure entertainment and nationalism during the Indian freedom struggle. This return of written dramatic text to theatre,