Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Opera (South-East Asian Social Science Monographs)

Bangsawan--the first popular urban commercial theatre in Malaysia--emerged in the late nineteenth century as an adaptation of the Parsi theatre of India which toured Malaya. This book traces stylistic changes of Bangsawan from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s, linking these changes to socio-political transformations in Malaysian society.