Gender

GENDER: CHAI AND LOVE MEET ON STAGE

by Vinta Nanda January 17 2026, 12:00 am Estimated Reading Time: 5 mins, 43 secs

In this intimate column, Vinta Nanda writes about The Chai Queens, its emotional homecoming to Mumbai, and how theatre opens space for queer love, family silences, and difficult but necessary conversations.

The Chai Queens is an internationally acclaimed Indian theatre production exploring queer love, silence, and social conditioning within the setting of an Indian wedding. Directed by Ramanjit Kaur and performed by Taranjit Kaur, the play arrives in Mumbai this January.

There are some plays that announce themselves loudly, with spectacle and scale. And then there are those that slip into your consciousness quietly, almost like a shared secret, and stay with you long after the lights have gone out. The Chai Queens belongs firmly to the latter category.

When I first heard that The Chai Queens was coming to Mumbai for two special performances this January, I felt a curious sense of inevitability. After travelling across continents, winning hearts at international festivals, and being embraced by audiences far removed from its cultural setting, the play is finally coming home. And somehow, that feels right. Because this is a story born from our silences, our weddings, our drawing rooms, our unsaid truths.

Set against the familiar chaos and ritual of an Indian wedding, The Chai Queens brings together Babli and Tejal, childhood friends who meet again after fifteen years. What unfolds is not a dramatic declaration but something far more intimate and unsettling—glances that linger, pauses that ache, stories read aloud in torchlight, and emotions that were never given the language to exist. Desire, here, is not loud. It is careful. Conditioned. Trained to stay hidden.

The Team and the Craft

Produced by The Forbidden Productions, the play will be staged on 22nd and 23rd January at CHAUBARA, Andheri West, with two shows each evening. It stars Taranjit Kaur as Babli and Archana Patel as Tejal, is directed by Ramanjit Kaur, and is based on the original script So Far by Vikrant Dhote, with additional writing by the team. Music design by Pt. Tanmoy Bose and a sensitive lighting design ensure that the emotional world of the play remains understated yet deeply resonant.

What struck me most, even before watching the play, was the idea of its “homecoming”. So I asked Taranjit Kaur—founder of The Forbidden Productions and one of the lead actors—what bringing The Chai Queens back to Mumbai really means to her.

She didn’t romanticise it. Instead, she located it firmly in lived experience. “Bringing Chai Queens to Mumbai is very important to us as a team because it completes a full circle for us. Mumbai is the city where we live and where we struggle every day to find our own identity.”

Sisterhood, Theatre and Shared Roots

There was something deeply honest in that sentence. Mumbai, after all, gives you anonymity and exposure in equal measure. It allows you to exist, but not always to be understood.

Taranjit went on to speak about her long creative journey with director Ramanjit Kaur, who also happens to be her sister. “Ramanjit and I go back a long way—we actually began our theatre journeys together as teenagers, training under the same mentor, Padma Shri Neelam Man Singh Chowdhry… we both share a very similar foundation and understanding of theatre.”

Their shared history, from training to site-specific works in Kolkata like Merry-Go-Round, Crab Soup, and Upon a Yarn, has clearly shaped the emotional grammar of The Chai Queens. Trust, patience, and an instinctive understanding of silence are not things you can manufacture—they come from years of working, failing, and listening together.

The insistence that while international recognition matters, performing this play in India matters more, moved me. “The play has travelled across continents and received so much love from the audiences in Europe… But it’s most crucial for us to perform this here not only in Mumbai but across cities in India where women and queer have been struggling for the longest time.”

Beyond Abstraction: Lived Queer Realities

This is not a play about queerness as an abstract idea; it is about the daily negotiations that women and queer people make within families, marriages, and social structures that claim to love them while refusing to see them.

The next question I asked Taranjit was about aftermath—what she hopes the audience carries home once the wedding is over and the chai has gone cold. Her answer unfolded gently, but with clarity. “I hope the play opens up conversations that are often avoided—not just about queer love, but about the cost of silence in our lives.”

That cost is something many of us know intimately. Silence keeps families intact, but it also fractures individuals. Silence maintains social order, but at the expense of emotional truth. “Within families, I hope it invites empathy, the ability to listen without judgement, and to see love beyond social expectations.”

She then widened the lens, speaking about society, and, crucially, parenting. “On a societal level, I hope it encourages us to accept people’s choices. And perhaps most importantly, on a personal level, I hope it helps parents understand their children better… It is so important for us to give the space to our child to have the freedom to be, to explore, to reflect, to understand.”

That idea—that acceptance is not conditional, that love should not be aspirational but unconditional—is at the heart of The Chai Queens. “If someone leaves the theatre feeling a little braver, to ask a question, to have a difficult conversation, or to acknowledge a desire they’ve long buried, then The Chai Queens has done what it set out to do.”

As someone who has spent years listening to women’s stories—on film, in journalism, in private conversations—I know how rare such bravery can be. Theatre, at its best, doesn’t give you answers. It gives you permission.

For two nights in Mumbai, The Chai Queens offers exactly that: permission to feel, to question, and to listen to what has been waiting patiently inside us all along.

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