Out Of the wings

With a slew of awards and critically-acclaimed works under their belts, Bazaar tracks the rise of India’s four emerging women playwrights

Theatre might have found its place in the Indian mainstream but women playwrights have for most part been a rare breed in India. Maybe it’s part commerce, part inertia; theatre groups have been more at ease replicating successful international formulas, or staying within their comfort zones. That’s fortunately changed since the 2000s, and a wave of young women playwrights in their 30s are at the heart of this renaissance.

PURVA NARESH

It’s not unusual for playwrights to wear many theatrical hats, but 36-year old Purva Naresh’s multi-tasking capabilities stretch beyond the stage. A line producer at Reliance Entertainment in Mumbai by day—she co-wrote the Abhishek Bachchan-starrer Dum Maaro

Dum, and has acted in the recently-released Nautanki Saala!— Naresh is also an accomplished percussionist and Kathak dancer, her foray into playwriting a result of the latter. Naresh had to write a small piece for a dance-cum-narrative in 2008 that she also performed—

Afsaane-Bai se Bioscope Tak (2009) is an interesting journey about the women who shaped the nautanki and baithak cultures before cinema ultimately replaced them. Afsaane received hugely positive reviews, and soon Naresh found herself in a writer’s workshop. “My foray into playwriting might have been unplanned, but I always knew I had the knack for telling a good story,” she says.

This set the tone for her work that found her going back to milieus and backdrops she was familiar with. “I love to champion the cause of women on the margins of society and yet would not like to be counted as a feminist writer,” she says. Her OK Tata Bye Bye (2012), which revolves around the lives of commercial sex workers, was invited by the Royal Court Theatre, London, for a rehearsed reading and received rave reviews in the British media.

Naresh, who completed her masters from Film and Television Institute of India (where she received the Dada Saheb Phalke Memorial Honour award for topping her class), says that she doesn’t mind exploring bold themes in her works and is hugely concerned about moral censorship. Her other works include the political satire

Preth (the play did not have a manuscript) and adapted stories of Ruskin Bond A Special Bond 1 and 2. Naresh has just started work on her next play.

ANUPAMA CHANDRASEKHAR Chennai-based playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar feels there is no better time to be a playwright than now, and is fascinated by how Indian society is being shaped. “We live in three centuries at the same time,” she says. Chandrasekhar’s breakout work was the 2007 Free

Outgoing, which illustrated how modern technology collides with conservative society—it revolved around how a family comes to terms with an MMS sex clip of their young daughter doing the rounds.

Free Outgoing showed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and was a finalist for the Whiting Award in the UK and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in the US (2009), making Chandrasekhar the first Indian to be nominated for these awards.

“My plays aim to highlight some of the female archetypes in India, and how women are expected to stay within these boxes