In The Monk & The Warrior, a creative collaboration between playwright Mahesh Dattani and director Jonathan Taikina Taylor, a documented encounter between Alexander the Great and an Indian monk becomes an epic, cross-cultural love story.

By Gitanjali Dang

When Alexander the Great pauses before a monk at the edge of his campaign in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent, history offers only a fragment of that encounter. In The Monk & The Warrior, Mahesh Dattani and Jonathan Taikina Taylor take that fragment and worry at it from different directions—textual and physical, historical and speculative—until it opens into a cross-cultural queer epic. With music by Finnish composer Eero Hämeenniemi, the production follows a Bodhisattva monk and the Macedonian conqueror across time, myth and dreams, asking what it means to cross borders for love rather than domination.

The originating image was Taylor’s. Invited to Bengaluru to teach, he found himself in sustained conversations with queer historians, artists and mythologists. “I was really struck by how when people talk about queerness here, it has such an old lineage and the conversation is so deep,” he recalls. He was equally struck by how ingrained mythological stories are in contemporary Indian understandings of the self.

On a visit to a temple, the New York-based actor, director and movement artiste, encountered a visual history of India in which Alexander appeared in conversation with monks by the roadside. “I got curious about that story,” Taylor says. “That led to research into that individual event.” Alexander’s meeting with the so-called gymnosophists provided the container for the play.

“It was Jonathan’s conception and I joined in,” Mumbai-based Dattani says plainly. The Greek term gymnosophist, he notes, refers to “naked monks”. In shaping the dramatic premise, he made a shift: “I’ve sort of changed it a bit—he’s not a Jain monk but a Buddhist monk.” The encounter, as he frames it, is less about antiquarian accuracy—there is no known record of such a love—and more about metaphysical opposition. “You do have two polar opposite characters falling in love,” he says. “The inherent conflict is what Alexander and the monk are seeking in life. While one is conquering space, the other wants to conquer time.”

That tension— between expansion and transcendence—structures the play. Dattani did his research: Buddhist and Jain philosophy, the history of Alexander’s campaigns up to River Jhelum and the enigmatic retreat. Yet, he states, the work is “deliberately kept inauthentic.” Chronology is bent. “The events are not really [presented] the way they were recorded,” he says.

Taylor’s approach to history is similarly interrogative. His company, The SuperGeographics, is committed to building equity across disparate cultures. “If I go in and dictate how the play is going to work and how the process is going to work, that’s a reproduction of the colonial act,” he argues. The five-year development process— interrupted by the pandemic—was accidental but also ethical. Early workshops generated a collage of stories, images and research drawn from multiple voices of the actors, who hail from India, Chile and Australia. “That was the thing I handed over to Mahesh,” Taylor says. “I think it starts here … and ends here but I don’t know how it weaves.”

Dattani took 18 months to draft a script that could hold this material without reducing it to ornament. One of his primary concerns was to avoid romanticising Indian folklore. Tales such as those of the ‘Monkey and the Crocodile’ and ‘Chandravati and Malavati’ had emerged in workshops before he entered the process. “I did want them to be central to moving the relationship between Alexander and the monk forward,” he says. The challenge was to curate them so that they served the protagonists’ inner journeys rather than offering ethnographic spectacle.

Language presented another practical and philosophical problem. What idiom could plausibly connect a Macedonian king and an Indian monk? Taking his cue from Rumi’s notion that love rises above language, Dattani dispensed with all doubt. “The language of the play is English. I just took that liberty,” he says. A lot of the communication though, he adds, is “non-linguistic.”

Here, Taylor’s training becomes crucial. He works extensively with the Suzuki method developed by Japanese theatre director, writer and philosopher, Tadashi Suzuki, and with Viewpoints, a technique of improvisation developed by American dancer, choreographer and theatre artiste, Mary Overlie. Suzuki’s rigorous physical discipline grounds the actor in the body; text, when spoken, emerges “from a very visceral source,” Dattani observes. Viewpoints, made popular by American theatre directors Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, explores time and space without recourse to a psychological backstory. “We also have a lot of material that is not part of the script,” Taylor says—movement scores, choreography and Hämeenniemi’s compositions. “How we build the physical grammar of the play is yet to be decided,” he says in this conversation at the end of February, as they are about to start rehearsing.

The script, then, is not a fixed monument but part of an evolving ecology. Dattani describes the process through The Ship of Theseus paradox: an ancestral knife whose handle, blade or screw is replaced with each generation, until it is materially transformed and yet recognised as a family heirloom. “If you look at the script now and if you look at the notes of the workshop they did earlier, you will find very little in common,” he says. “But it has evolved to this. I wouldn’t say that what was previously present was abandoned and something else took its place.” The metaphor underscores both continuity and change.

For Dattani, the epic scale marks a departure from his earlier domestic dramas, including the ideological On a Muggy Night in Mumbai. Yet he maintains his commitment to structure: “I do believe in structure. I’m not a post-modernist.” What drives him are the characters’ desires; the architecture follows.

His approach to queer storytelling has also shifted. In his earlier work, queerness was placed centre stage in explicit opposition to heteronormativity. In The Monk & The Warrior, queerness is assumed rather than defended. “There is a given that queerness is not met with societal hostility, although I’m not saying that there is none,” he notes. Instead of foregrounding that familiar conflict, the play gives queer love “the space it deserves.”

Taylor articulates a parallel concern from another angle. “Queer people have been there the whole time,” he says, referring to their presence in Indian cultural history. “Why would someone say that queerness is a Western import when it’s been there all along?” The play, for him, is less about argument than about illumination—allowing that presence to be visible without polemic.

Hämeenniemi’s live score reinforces this interweaving. Drawing on Carnatic traditions alongside European strings and brass, the Helsinki-based composer’s music resists singular lineage. The sonic world mirrors the dramaturgical one: layered, hybrid, in motion.

If there is a conversation Dattani hopes to prompt, it concerns the ethics of crossing borders. He draws a line from ancient campaigns to contemporary geopolitics, questioning how different Alexander’s conquests are from modern territorial claims. The play does not stage current events explicitly, yet it invites reflection on motive. “If we’re crossing borders, it should be for love and understanding,” he says, “not for conquests.”

Taylor, wary of fixed endpoints, resists framing the work as a thesis. “I really answer the question that’s in front of me,” he says. Unlike Alexander, who sought “to get to the end of the world,” Taylor prefers to attend to each step along the way. Between Dattani’s structural clarity and Taylor’s process-driven openness, The Monk & The Warrior occupies a space where stories are neither re-enacted nor dismissed but meant to be re-experienced.

This article was originally published in the April 2026 issue of ON Stage.