Directing
Kavan
2025 - PRESENT | HINDI | ON TOUR
In a rapidly changing India, young Bejul and the people around him navigate desire and ambition while negotiating caste and class. An operatic satire written and performed entirely in poetry and song, drawing on Shahiri protest poetry alongside folk, rock and rap, asking where we go when the boundaries between right and wrong, sacred and profane, personal and universal have blurred.
Produced by Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch and Nalanda Arts Studio. Co-commissioned by The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi with support from NYUAD Arts and Humanities and the Global Asia Program. Music composed and supervised by MD Pallavi. Dramaturgy by Irawati Karnik and Jocelyn Clarke. Touring in India and internationally, with versions for large theatres, studio spaces and outdoor public gatherings.
Presented by the Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch and Nalanda Arts Studio.
Desdemona Roopakam
2021 - PRESENT | KANNADA, TAMIL & ENGLISH | ON TOUR
A concert theatre piece examining the missing voices of women in Othello and in Indian epics. Composed in Carnatic, Hindustani and South Indian folk music, it uses Yakshagana, Harikatha and Burra Katha alongside contemporary idioms, and questions the erasure of Desdemona's resistance as she is killed.
Premiered at Ranga Shankara, Bangalore in April 2021, made during the pandemic at Arundhati Nag's invitation when the theatre wanted to reopen. The constraints are built into the piece: two performers who never touch, and props bought across only two trips to the market. Devised and written with Irawati Karnik, MD Pallavi, Veena Appiah, Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy and Nikhil Nagaraj, drawing on Shakespeare and Tishani Doshi's Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods. A Nalanda Arts Studio production supported by Ranga Shankara's Play the Play programme. Winner of Best Director at the Windermere Theatre Festival, Bareilly, 2025. Touring India and booking internationally.
Des
2020 - PRESENT | HINDI | ON TOUR
Set on the night of 14 August 1947, as India is about to be free of the British Empire. A dark comedy about the ideological battle waiting on the other side of independence, and a challenge to the narrative that everything was settled once the British left.
Winner of the Sanhita Rangmanch Puraskar 2020, a national award for Hindi playwriting. Opened with multiple theatre companies across India simultaneously. Currently in repertoire.
