It takes quite a lot to understand the relationship between Theatre and Cinema. For most parts they share an interchangeability which is very difficult to pattern or trace. for most parts it a dynamic which moves back and forth at all times.
In India Cinema largely means Bollywood, and Bollywood happens to be a different ball game all together. It could be considered blasphemous or a complete tamasha or maybe the most effective way of making riches but at the end of the day it remains to be the most magnimous and enimatic representative of mass culture.
whats interesting to note is how much it borrows and gives back to Theatre. In Mumbai as much as the rest of the country Bollywood is so big that it takes away a lot of attention from theatre. people watch movies as a part of the discipline but not plays. so they are willing to spend 200 bucks on a multiplex ticket but wouldnt invest that much for a theatre performance.
Most actors start off from the stage as a launching base to eventually enter into main stream cinema. Acclaimed actors like Om puri, Pankaj Kapoor, and Irfan Khan who graduated from the National School Of Drama and made it big in bollywood never turned back to theatre again.
Likewise there are other established actors who have kept their dedication towards Theatre as one of the main priorities in their lives and careers. Naseeruddin Shah for that matter is a great example. The actor's theatre group Motley has over the years been staging some wonderfull narratives and short stories ranging from Beckett with who it first started out to Jerom Kitty and also to some of our most gifted, home grown authors like Ismat Chughtai and Minto.
On a very informal conversation with Imaad Shah who happens to be the flag bearer for the future of the group, he explained that " if asked about making preferrences between films and theatre as a career for future, i really dont want to make a choice, because it then seems restrictive" and then on other notes amidst conversations he recalls his first role play in one of the group's earliest performances and how vividly he remembers it.
whether or not Theatre is a poor man's art, whether films are merely business,would be a never ending conversation but the scope and viewership of the two are entirely different. A film can be and needs to be pitched to a million audience, the very nature of it allows that kind of an interaction, a play on the other hand is live, is real and needs the involvement of its audience and therefore cannot have large numbers of it. therefore a play can never make as much money a film does.
Thus Theatre can never be thought in terms gaining large profits. but in a world where everything is cost verified and comes along with a prize tag, thriving and surviving of such an old tradition throught it and through the every changing roles of life seems to be difficult.
yet there always will be people who would come and in their time revive it, galvanize it or adapt into a newer life.