Vijaya Mehta and the Art of Committing Fully, Then Letting Go

When Vijaya Mehta passed away, Marathi theatre lost not just a director, but also a living archive of what she called, without a trace of nostalgia-for-nostalgia's-sake, "a fortunate generation." Since June 30, 2026, while I have been reflecting on her work, one thing has become quite clear: hers was a mind that never stopped restlessly reinventing itself.

Mehta's own image for this is the most useful key to her career: culture, she said, is like a pond in a forest. "We were all naturally swept up in this current of the artistic renaissance," she said of post-Independence India, "We didn't have to make a conscious effort to join it." It is a humble way of describing an extraordinary confluence. Be it Ebrahim Alkazi holding his first workshop after returning from England; Ravi Shankar's Kinnara and Sachin Shankar's dance troupe; the studios of M.F. Husain, Akbar Padamsee and V.S. Gaitonde all housed under one roof at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute or a seventeen-year-old finding herself in the company of Ganpatrao Bodas, Nanasaheb Phatak and Keshavrao Date. Mehta insisted this was luck, geography, timing. 

But the legends that she alludes to – Vijay Tendulkar, Kishori Amonkar, Jitendra Abhisheki, Prafulla Dahanukar – gathered in what she fondly called the "Girgaon gang." This suggests something more than just being at the right place at the right time: a capacity for finding and then holding onto serious collaborators and for turning friendship into a working method.

Rangayan and the courage to let go

That method found its first institutional form in Rangayan, the theatre movement she co-founded with Vijay Tendulkar, Vasant Sarwate and Madhav Vatve, under the presidency of Pu Bhagwat, who, interestingly, was not a theatrewallah but the publisher of the cult publication Satyakatha.

Mehta used to describe Rangayan's structure with the precision of an architect: a core circle of five deciding the vision, a second circle of implementers like Arvind Deshpande and Arun Kakade, an advisory board stacked with the likes of Vinda Karandikar and Kumar Gandharva and finally a membership of a 1,000 people who paid Rs 10 a year for 12 programmes – six plays and six seminars, each followed by an open discussion with the audience. "It was precisely because of this dynamic that it became a movement," she said. 

Later, when the need for it passed, when the former amateurs were graduating into professional theatre and the founding circle had scattered, Mehta and Tendulkar chose to close Rangayan rather than let it become "a hollow shell." Mehta compared it to the decision to lose a child. Tendulkar and Kakade have their own version of this story.  But more about that on some other day.

Ideology to truth

What came after is instructive for anyone who assumes an artist's identity should stay fixed. Mehta moved into commercial theatre and worked for eight years, primarily with the playwright Jaywant Dalvi, on plays like Sandhyachhaya, Hamidabaichi Kothi, Mahasagar and Purush.

She was candid about her initial discomfort as a Rangayan artist stepping into a managerial commercial structure and equally open about her refusal to make ideology the organising principle of her work. "I never performed plays that could be labelled as feminist or political," she said, not because the material lacked politics but because she distrusted theatre used as "a tool to serve a theme."

Her account of Purush makes the distinction precise: the play was not about rape as an issue but about masculinity and the complicity of women in a young woman's destruction. This difference, she insisted, changes everything about how a play should be built and how an audience receives it. The play ran for 16 years.

Twelve-year cycles

Then, characteristically, she moved again. Mehta describes herself as someone who commits to a phase for approximately 12 years, "ek tapp," she called it, a period of disciplined practice, before restlessness sets in.

That rhythm carried her from Rangayan to commercial theatre to a rediscovery, during directing training at Oxford, of Indian "non-urban" performance conventions she had once dismissed as unsuited to her own urban sensibility. Staging Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi using tamasha's touring, village-to-village structure startled her Indian audiences.

Discovering that Brecht had made a parallel journey into Asian non-urban forms led her to Fritz Bennewitz and years of cross-cultural work in Germany, producing Marathi and German-language versions of Hayavadana and Ajab Nyay Vartulacha and eventually to a genuine friendship and creative exchange with Peter Brook around a shared understanding of Shakuntala (Mehta, interestingly, saw the play not as Shakuntala's story but as Dushyanta's journey of self-discovery).

"When two completely distinct cultures come together in such a way, while respecting each other, a new truth unfolds," Brook told her. It could serve as a theatre-mantra for her entire working life.

That life did not stop with theatre. There was the two-and-a-half-year,  36 set television epic Smritichitre, one of the best literary adaptations on Indian TV, an apprenticeship under Shyam Benegal, films like Raosaheb and Pestonjee and finally a return to something like Bhulabhai's original spirit as creative head at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), working alongside Chandralekha, Daksha Seth and Zakir Hussain.

I recall my own days at the NCPA in the pre-Mehta era, when subjects like Indian literature and Hindustani music were discussed with much ease. Liberalisation had not crept in. There was no obvious material pay-off to good old-fashioned gup (conversation). The idea of doing something purely for delight worries the guardians of art. Pure pointlessness, it turns out, is a profoundly subversive matter. But more about that on some other day.

Three lessons for young theatre-makers from Vijaya Mehta

Commit fully, then let go. Give a phase of work everything you have but have the courage to end it before it hollows out, rather than clinging to its shell. 

Distance reveals truth. Stepping outside your own culture, Mehta did in Germany, often clarifies it far more than staying put ever could. 

Theatre needs conviction, not ideology. Let the human truth of a story carry meaning; don't bend the work to serve a message.

Alvida, Mrs Mehta. I will remember you for all the gup, the warmth and affection and an extraordinary few days when I watched you and Shafaat Khan work (and re-work) the Marathi playtext of Girish Karnad’s Nagamandala.

Ramu Ramanathan is a journalist, playwright and poet, who has a few books to his credit. His collection of poems Mumbai, People & Things will be published by Guwahati-based Red River in 2026. 

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