A Night of Theatre, Memory, and the Scripts That Refuse to Leave

Some theatre evenings feel like performances. Others feel like mirrors. This was the latter.

I expected the inaugural Udayan Bhattacharya Memorial Lecture at Nehru Centre to be solemn. Instead, it turned out warm, thoughtful and quietly humorous. The evening opened and closed with Tagore songs sung softly, as if reminding us that culture breathes best at its own pace. It was also the evening I was properly introduced to Sahana, Mumbai, a remarkable collective that has spent decades nurturing performing arts in the city with quiet resolve.

At the centre of it all was Sunil Shanbag, one of Mumbai’s most respected theatre-makers and a protégé of the legendary Satyadev Dubey. He had the ease of someone shaped by decades of rehearsal rooms, difficult scripts and stubborn hope. Shanbag spoke calmly, stroking his goatee now and then, and made the history of Mumbai theatre feel less like a lesson and more like a stroll through a familiar neighbourhood. He offered hope simply by holding history in one hand and possibility in the other.

Somewhere along the way, a small door opened in me too, a familiar pathway to my own dalliances with theatre from years ago.

The Plays That Found Me

My introduction to theatre did not come with spotlights or pedigree. I was discovered by Prof Elango at Fourthwall, at The American College, who plucked me out of wayward obscurity and gave me a role in a play titled In the Name of God. One moment I was minding my own business, the next I was on stage wondering which limb was meant to move first. Theatre does not wait for you to be ready. It simply says, “Your turn.”

What followed was a fast, compressed and surprisingly thorough education. A little Shakespeare, a little Chekhov, and then The Zoo Story, the two-person pressure cooker that offers no escape and no excuses. Those early plays left an imprint, the way a river leaves its mark on stone. They shaped how I listened, how I observed, and how I carried myself long before I understood what they were doing.

Plays do not end when the curtain falls. They end when they are done with you. They return in airport queues and quiet mornings, tapping you on the shoulder when you least expect it. A play you performed at nineteen can return at forty with a completely different meaning. Theatre builds an internal archive without asking for permission, and it keeps adding to it long after the stage has gone dark.

For that imprint I owe a lifelong debt to Prof Elango and everyone at Fourthwall. Their passion ran on a different voltage and it sweepingly carried me along. Without them I would have remained exactly where I was, minding my business instead of discovering a new way of seeing and being.

And it was that way of seeing and being that sat upright that evening, listening to Sunil Shanbag narrate how Tagore’s play Dak Ghar had travelled all the way into Nazi Germany, slipping quietly into the shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto. It felt less like a history lesson and more like a reminder that stories often go further than their writers ever imagine.

Tagore, Korczak and a Lesson I Was Not Expecting

To understand the story, it helps to picture the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940s. A sealed district created by Nazi Germany. Starvation, cold and constant deportations. Entire childhoods cut short before they had begun.

In the middle of this was Janusz Korczak, whom I have been reading about ever since that evening. He was a paediatrician and educator who ran an orphanage with fierce tenderness. He believed children deserved clarity and dignity even when adults around them had lost both. His compassion was stubborn in the best possible way.

Shanbag described how Korczak used Tagore’s Dak Ghar to prepare the orphaned children for the idea of death. Amal, the sick child in the play who dreams of the world beyond his window, became a mirror for children whose own world was closing in. For many of us, this was the first time the Warsaw Ghetto was introduced not through numbers but through a play, through frightened children performing a gentle story, and through one man’s determination to give them a last taste of imagination.

The part that stayed with me came after the play. A few days later the children were marched away with hundreds of others towards the trains that would take them to a concentration camp. Adults around them wailed and collapsed. The children walked in silence, steady and composed. One of them held a violin and played as they moved. They were as ready as children can ever be for a fate they did not choose.

It struck me that the evening was as much an education about Korczak as it was about Tagore. Sometimes we learn about literature through the lives it touches. And sometimes we learn about history through the plays it chooses.

That night Korczak became the teacher and Dak Ghar became his chalk. Shanbag kept weaving that story through Mumbai’s own theatre tales, stories that were no less fascinating in their own way.

The Spaces That Built Mumbai’s Theatre

Shanbag’s stories reminded me that theatres do not just host plays. They build cities. They shape how a place thinks and imagines, held together not by budgets but by conviction.

Much of that conviction came from people like Dubey, who kept appearing in Shanbag’s telling. Dubey could spot actors who did not know they were actors, push them into difficult roles, and treat theatre as oxygen rather than entertainment. That energy seeped into the rooms where Mumbai’s theatre first found its voice.

Chhabildas: A School Hall That Sparked a Movement

The way Shanbag described Chhabildas, you could see it. A modest school hall in Dadar. A high tiled roof. A storeroom pretending to be a backstage. A toilet that worked on its own mood. Almost no equipment. And yet it became the beating heart of experimental theatre. For nearly two decades, dozens of groups performed there across languages, on diwans and rattling steel chairs, with traffic, vendors and radios leaking in from the street. On one night, even a murder downstairs.

In Shanbag’s telling, Chhabildas thrived not despite its flaws but because of them. The room taught theatre makers to be inventive, honest and fully awake to life.

Prithvi and NCPA: Spaces That Grew a City’s Confidence

Prithvi and NCPA, as Shanbag described them, were Mumbai’s two strictest teachers. Prithvi demanded intimacy, its thrust stage leaving no place to hide. NCPA offered the opposite lesson, insisting on scale and discipline. Together they taught artists to stretch, adapt and rise to whatever room held them. They were not just venues. They were training grounds.

Why Money Cannot Be the Only Question

Shanbag also traced how things shifted after 1992. As the country opened its markets, theatre was nudged into the logic of “an evening out.” Plays became shorter, lighter and more “dinner-friendly,” trimmed to suit appetites rather than ideas.

But Chhabildas reminded me of something else. Art does not need money to live. It needs people who care enough to rehearse after work, to perform in hot rooms, to sit on diwans and steel chairs and still feel something. Chhabildas did not decorate Mumbai. It animated it. It kept the city honest and awake.

Somewhere between the pollution outside and the conversation inside, something shifted. The air in the hall felt lighter, as if talking about plays and playwrights could momentarily clean a city’s lungs. It left me with nostalgia, a hint of melancholy, and most unexpectedly, hope.

Art that depends only on money cannot build a city. It can only decorate it. But art that depends on love and belief gives a city a soul.

Why Theatre Matters Even More Today

In a digital age we have traded presence for convenience. There is more to watch than ever, yet far less to truly feel. Our attention has become a marketplace and everything wants a piece of it.

Which is why theatre feels almost radical now. People in one room. Shared breathing. Shared laughter. And shared silence. No pause button. No algorithm.

Culture is not luxury. It is how a society remembers to stay human. And theatre remains one of the few places where India’s astonishing diversity gathers, listens to itself and recognises its own depth.

A week later, it still sits with me.