The Theatre District: Cornwallis Street & Beadon Street

A tradition as important as the Bengal Renaissance’s literary output, and almost entirely overlooked by visitors, runs through these streets: the birth of modern Bengali theatre. From the mid-19th century this area was home to three defining playhouses, Star, Minerva and Rangmahal. The presiding genius was Girish Chandra Ghosh (1844-1912), actor, playwright and Ramakrishna devotee, considered the father of modern Bengali theatre; he wrote nearly eighty plays, translated Shakespeare’s Macbeth and ran Star Theatre as a laboratory for Bengali drama, drawing the same intellectual crowd as the Coffee House and the Tagore mansion.
Star Theatre, built in 1883, mixes Hindu temple and Mughal forms; after a 1991 fire it was rebuilt with a contemporary interior behind its surviving heritage façade and now functions mainly as a cinema, with plays staged only a few days a month (more in winter). It was renamed Binodini Theatre in December 2024, honouring Binodini Dasi, one of its founders and most celebrated stars. A short walk away on Beadon Street, Minerva Theatre (built 1893, altered 1922) is another surviving landmark of the era.