tamasha

noun

Etymology: Borrowed from Marathi तमाशा (tamāśā), from Classical Persian تماشا (tamāšā), ultimately from Arabic مَشَى (mašā, “to walk”).

1. A visual art form from Maharashtra, India, involving singing and dancing.

   “c.1885, A.L.O.E. The Wondrous Sickle We had fine clothes, and feasting, and drum-beating, and fireworks let off in our village. It was a grand tamasha!”

2. Any traditional indigenous public ceremony.

   “I went to a Tamasha, as the Indian troops call these affairs, one fine Sunday afternoon in May. A broad plateau in the middle of the fields had been selected for the sports, and when I arrived an enormous crowd, as picturesque as any I have ever seen, was thronging round the ropes.”

   “This superficial description is all the information the text has on the subject of the Muharram, and it is clear that to the author such activity was to be regarded as a tamasha, an outlandish ceremony of value to the foreign visitor only as a spectacle.”