This day was marked by the first performance of “modern” Indian theatre, staged by a Russian, in Kolkata.
Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedev, actor and violinist, who left Russia to tour Europe as a musician, had arrived in India as part of a military band. From Madras, he came to Calcutta, where he stayed for about 10 years. Here he learnt Bengali, Hindi and Sanskrit from a local school teacher, Golokhnath Das.
In 1795, Lebedev founded the first European-style proscenium drama theatre in Domtala, Ezra Street. On November 27, Kalpanik Sangbadal, translated and adapted into Bengali by him from Richard Paul Jodrell’s The Disguise, was performed. It was considered the first instance of theatre in an Indian language, in a Western performing style. But Lebedev blended Indian elements of music and narrative with Western ideas: he used the songs of the popular eighteenth-century Bengali poet, Bharat Chandra Ray, in this production.
This was also the first time Bengali actors and actresses were performing on a Calcutta stage. Theatre in Calcutta was previously by and for Europeans, mostly the British. Lebedev’s success provoked so much envy that it was suspected that just two days before the performance of his next play in March 1796, a Bengali translation of Moliere’s Love is the Best Doctor, his theatre was burned down. Lebedev left India soon. He spent some time in London and returned to Russia and worked in the foreign service at St. Petersburg.
In London, he published A Grammar of the Pure and Mixed East Indian Dialects, With Dialogues Affixed, Spoken in all the Eastern Countries (1801).
He passed away in 1817.