Sohaila Kapur explores Mahesh Elkunchwar’s remarkable journey from rural Maharashtra to becoming one of Indian theatre’s most influential playwrights, examining his celebrated works, enduring themes, personal influences and lasting contribution to modern drama.

Veteran theatre director Anuradha Kapur, former Director of the National School of Drama (NSD), revived her acclaimed production of Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Virasat last month. Kapur has undertaken the mammoth task of combining Elkunchwar’s nine-hour Wada Chirebandi Trilogy in Marathi into a three-and-a-half-hour Hindi play.

The current production was commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, developed in residence, and previewed at the Black Box Okhla. This was followed by open-air, ticketed public performances at Sunder Nursery.

The play first opened at the National School of Drama in 2013. The outdoor set, designed and built by scenographer Deepan Sivaraman, himself a director who has worked closely with Kapur, was an imaginative cage-like structure with wooden arches, pillars and empty spaces, giving audiences a top-down, bird’s-eye view of the action. At the Sunder Nursery performances last month, the audience sat at and a little above eye level, all around the house, giving them a new perspective.

Kapur likes to view this production as a fresh one rather than a revival. “I wanted to remake Virasat because the text is ever relevant to the condition of India. And it reverberates on many different planes now.”

The theme is relevant to current social, economic, climate, landscape and planetary degradation; the feudal order and the position of Indian women, which remain practically the same, she says. “There have been substantial changes in the way it has been edited and reimagined, and so it is a new production.”

Mahesh Elkunchwar, the playwright, was present at the performances. He found “this interpretation very compelling, which captured the essence while allowing for fresh perspectives.” “It was certainly more intense, more polished and completely aware of its power,” he adds.

The play’s residency at the Black Box was “a small disruption” in traditional theatre-making, says Nikhil Mehta, founder of Black Box. Text and improvisations were compacted in a model that ran contrary to the commercial playmaking ecosystem.

Virasat unfolds in real time. The characters bathed, changed, swept and cooked while engaging in conversations and enduring catastrophes. The women slogged endlessly through time and their domestic chores. The men lazed and debated, and the audience eavesdropped on them. Thematically, the play observes the gradual collapse of the feudal structure in rural Maharashtra and the effect of urbanisation on the Deshpandes, a Brahmin joint family, and its vulnerable women.

Although rooted in the past, the dilemmas and dialogues are modern, giving the play a contemporary feel. There is a beautiful fusion of the past and the present, almost like a fragrant memory floating past one, which soon slips away and brings one down to the hard ground of reality.

Elkunchwar wrote the trilogy with his own extended family in mind, with some of the characters inspired by them. His Wada, or homestead of his childhood, still exists, he says, and members of the family, including himself, still get together there during festivals and holidays.

Elkunchwar’s gift for revealing character through environment and circumstance is equally striking in his other plays, like Holi (1969), Yatnaghar (1970), Garbo (1970), Raktapushpa (1971), Party (1972), Vasanakand (1982), Virasat (1982), Atmakatha (1987), Pratibimb (1987) and Sonata (2000). Many of these plays were directed in Hindi by his close theatre associate, Satyadev Dubey.

THE BEGINNING

Mahesh Elkunchwar left home at the age of four to be raised in the countryside. Films and theatre were taboo in his conservative family. He saw his first play when he moved to Nagpur for his matriculation.

He began taking an interest in theatre after his postgraduate studies in English literature at Nagpur University. While still at college, he had seen famous Marathi theatre director Vijaya Mehta’s production of Vijay Tendulkar’s Mee Jinklo Mee Harlo (I Won, I Lost) in 1965 and fallen in love with the medium. Deeply impacted by the play, he saw it again and decided on a course that would become his career. His self-confidence was improving. He began writing. “I didn’t think it would be difficult,” he says. “If others could do it, so could I!”

He spent the following year reading a variety of plays and writing some. Meanwhile, he began teaching literature at the university, brushing up his skills as a writer.

SUCCESS

In 1967, his one-act play Sultan was published in the prominent literary magazine Satyakatha. It attracted Vijaya Bai’s attention. She went on to direct it and four of his early plays, including Holi, for her Mumbai-based group Rangayan, which also included the Marathi stage legends Vijay Tendulkar, Arvind Deshpande and Dr Shriram Lagoo.

A number of theatrical hits followed those productions. Elkunchwar had arrived. His most prolific period as a playwright was between the 1970s and 1980s. In 1984, his play on campus politics, Holi, was made into a film by Ketan Mehta. Elkunchwar wrote the screenplay. It won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi. His father wasn’t too happy with the play’s theme, he says. He wanted him to stay away from politics of any kind.

In the same year, Govind Nihalani made a film based on his play Party, which again won National Film Awards and an award at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival (APFF).

In 2017, his play Sonata was made into a film by Aparna Sen, starring Sen herself, Shabana Azmi and Lillete Dubey. His last play, Eka Natacha Mrityu (An Actor’s Death), was written in 2005. It was staged for the very first time this year, with Elkunchwar in attendance.

He has written 21 plays and published theoretical, autobiographical, critical and meditative essays, as well as interviews, in anthologies like Maunrang, Paschimprabha, Baatcheet, Saptak, Tribandh and Vinashavela, which have also been translated into English by him.

INFLUENCE

Considered a successor to Vijay Tendulkar, Elkunchwar wrote in Marathi. His plays were subsequently translated into different Indian and Western languages, including English, by him, French and German.

Elkunchwar has experimented with many forms of dramatic expression, ranging from the realistic to the symbolic, and from expressionist to absurd theatre, with many thought-provoking themes. He has influenced modern Indian theatre for more than three decades.

For a boy with rural, feudal, immigrant roots—he was born into a Telugu Brahmin migrant family in Vidarbha, Maharashtra—Elkunchwar rose to become one of the most progressive and influential playwrights, not only in Marathi but also in Indian theatre.

In 2014, he was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the highest national recognition given specifically for the performing arts. He has also won the Nandikar and Sahitya Akademi Awards and the Saraswati and Kalidasa Sammans, among many others. At 86, he continues to write.