It is heartening to find new productions in Urdu based on history, one by a young group and the other a troupe of long standing, both with one foot in Delhi. On the other hand, staging history demands responsibility, the neglect of which often boomerangs on the play.
Guards at the Taj, the Obie awardee for Best New American Play (2016), exemplifies this. The Indian-American dramatist, Rajiv Joseph, saddles two Mughal sentries straight out of Waiting for Godot with guard duty at the Taj Mahal on the night before Shah Jahan opens it to the public. All well and good, until Joseph abruptly injects a Grand Guignol of bloodshed, on the premise that the Emperor ordered the amputation of the hands of all 20,000 artists who worked on the Taj. Because no proof exists to support this tourist-guide-driven urban myth, to present it to gullible audiences feeds into our dangerously right-wing climate of demonization, whether in the US or here (this very fabrication resurfaced as a “contrast” to our Prime Minister’s benevolence at a recent monumental event; no doubt he would love to project this drama as the truth). Didn’t Out Of Nowhere Productions think this through when choosing it, more so when our education policy fixates on erasing Mughal rule?
But Joseph does worse. He details the two guards with the barbaric job, an impossible one. Do the math: assuming a night covered 12 hours, to butcher 20,000 pairs of hands (in his script, one man chopped and the other cauterized) averages less than a second for each hand in a nonstop assembly line—a little like Chaplin’s Modern Times—not factoring in any resistance. Theatre of Cruelty meets Theatre of the Absurd, but beats all credibility. I might add that Joseph seems obsessed with hand-chopping, going by his other theatrical works. Given this unlikely Sweeney Todd scenario (and the realistic Guards is not even a slasher musical), I can only praise Yuvraj Surana and Pratyush Tiwari for their flawlessly natural acting as the friends, for their faithful direction and translation respectively, and Bidushi Roy for her grisly props.
Gandharvi’s Gulabijaan, too (presented by Kolkata Centre for Creativity), fictionalizes history, during Nawab Wajid Ali Shah’s ouster from Awadh and its aftermath, of the migration of hundreds in his durbar following him to Calcutta. Dramatist-director Shukla Banerjee focuses on the sisterhood of tawāifs who left their respectable courtly position in Lucknow to eke out a downgraded living as bāijis here, through the imaginary memoirs of the eponymous courtesan relocated to Chitpur. Alongside her recollections recounted in 1881 as an elderly lady, she relates anecdotes from real life of personalities like the Nawab’s second wife Begum Hazrat Mahal, who fought for the First War of Independence, and the poet Ghalib in Delhi. But Banerjee should correct the mispronunciation of Outram.
Billed as a musical drama, coalescing the triple input of theatre, dance and song, Gulabijaan satisfies most on the music front, showcasing a stellar, seated performance from octogenarian Pamela Singh in the lead, her ghazal gāyaki interpretations unaffected by age, including the obligatory “Bābul morā” thumri, and complemented by the accompaniment of Kamaal Ahmed on sarangi and Salamat Ali Khan, eminent khayal singer. The dance component left us unfulfilled because only Ramandeep Kaur (significantly of the Lucknow gharānā) could display the grace, abhinaya and aesthetic riches of Kathak. And I expected at least one excerpt from Wajid Ali Shah’s historic production, Indar Sabhā, which inspired so much Indian theatre later, but Banerjee inexplicably excluded it, as well as his pioneering rahas musicals.
(21 February 2026)