Abhishek Majumdar’s play-within-a-play, Kaumudi, is a penetrative probe into the inner workings of the world of theatre and the constituents of great writing and acting, exhibiting that neither emerges from a vacuum, but from the grit required to analyse and channel lived experiences.
By Vidhi Salla
When Krishna, at the brink of the colossal war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, gave a sermon to Arjuna, it was on a moonlit night. Time stood still as the two conversed about the nature of reality, relationships, dharma and karma. Abhishek Majumdar’s Kaumudi (Moonlight) alludes to this suspension of time, and, much like the concept it is based on, the two hours of runtime hardly register, as the tightly written, well-performed drama unfolds before the audience.
Kaumudi, which premiered in Bengaluru in 2014 and has since toured many cities of India, returns to the NCPA after over six years. The playwright and director, in an exclusive interview with ON Stage, explains the significance of suspended time in his play: “When Krishna is giving the sermon of the Bhagavad Gita, we say that time is suspended: there is no war raging nor is there dusk or dawn, just Krishna speaking and Arjuna listening with rapt attention. In the proscenium theatre, we do the same: we create artificial light and our audience doesn’t wonder whether it is evening or night, they stay within the time portrayed in the play. In life, there are moments—when we learn something or fall in love—when we stop thinking about time. That ‘kaumudi’ is something theatre has, the Mahabharata has. Moments of enlightenment, love … all these abstract but important events somehow happen in a suspension of time. That’s what I wanted to allude to.”
Set in the 1960s, Kaumudi tells the story of veteran actor Satyasheel, who is slowly losing his sight and has been asked to bow out as the star performer of Neelima, a Hindi theatre in Allahabad. During the course of the play, the audience witnesses Satyasheel grappling with his fading faculties, his ego as a performer and his painful past with his estranged son, Paritosh, who happens to be the new actor, here to eventually replace him. The play-within-a-play storyline unspools the tension between Satyasheel and Paritosh as they perform an episode based on the Mahabharata, playing Eklavya’s ghost and Abhimanyu respectively.
The play boasts an ensemble of seasoned cast members, including Kumud Mishra as Satyasheel and Sandeep Shikhar as Paritosh, along with Gopal Datt and Shubhrajyoti Barat. Majumdar’s nuanced writing manages to pack in humour alongside commentaries on caste, parenting, good acting, even leaning on the fourth wall in one scene in which the characters take jibes at the relationship between theatre and its audiences.
Kaumudi emerged from a combination of influences and exploration. While at university, Majumdar’s professor introduced him to Anand’s novel Vyasanam Vigneswaram, which features an allegorical conversation between Eklavya’s ghost and Abhimanyu. The latter, while struggling to find a way out of the chakravyuha—its navigation was a skill he had imbibed from his father Arjuna—is visited by the ghost of Eklavya. The ghost foretells the young warrior that because he was formally educated and not self-taught like Eklavya, he is going to die. Building upon this conversation and other stories of Eklavya that Majumdar heard from theatre luminaries such as Veenapani Chawla and Arundhati Nag, he began exploring Eklavya and his ghost as characters. In addition, from Jorges Luis Borges’s essay ‘Blindness’, the playwright incorporated the idea of an artiste going blind at the end of his life.
These varied sources of inspiration led Majumdar to think about the learning process of an artiste. “Are my eyes really helpful or do they get in the way? Do my senses help me understand the world or are they an impediment? Also, I really wanted to write a play that attempts the languages of two of my favourite plays— Aadhe Adhure and Laharon Ke Rajhans—both by Mohan Rakesh. The former is written in contemporary Hindi and the latter has classical Hindi. So it had to be a play which is within a play,” Majumdar elaborates.
Worth their salt
This is a challenging play for actors. While switching between classical and colloquial Hindi, the actors are also straddling their on-stage and off-stage personas within the framework of the play. The biggest challenge undoubtedly rests with Mishra, who is shown to be battling with his deteriorating vision (and a heightened sense of hearing) as the plot advances
Majumdar had written the play with Mishra in mind as the lead. Sharing his vision for Satyasheel’s character, the playwright says, “He doesn’t start off being blind. You have to be a really good actor to deliver that arc. Often actors deliver blindness with their face, which works on film, but blindness actually has to do with feet. So, if a person has to go blind in front of us, then their walk has to change. And it has to be gradual. If my audience can tell after the show, ‘This is where he went blind’, then we have failed.”
“Similarly, Sandeep’s role is a tough one too,” he adds. “His coming in as a cocky actor who thinks he knows everything to eventually filling the big shoes of Satyasheel is an intense journey. It is a demanding play and I was lucky that the people I wrote the parts for, agreed to play them.”
The moments of comic relief sprinkled throughout Kaumudi offer incisive peeks into the world of theatre. Datt, who plays the theatre manager, and Barat in his portrayal of other characters obscured by Satyasheel’s overwhelming stage presence, are brilliant in their reminder of all that goes into making a play successful, but remains in the shadows.
All in the process
During the initial all-day rehearsals that took place in Bengaluru around 2012, Majumdar would give plenty of homework to his actors. Most of these were questions that the actors were expected to write answers to and discuss the following day. In addition, they were also asked to read Borges’s essay. “As a director, one’s role is to create room where things happen, but the key responsibility is: what kind of room? Because something will definitely happen when you put five interesting people in a room. In all my plays, I’m very interested in exploring what the nature of that collaboration would be.”
With all these inputs, Mishra created his own mould for the character, finding within himself the tools he needed to get into the skin of the character. To prepare for a part, especially one that is much older than him, Mishra believes, “Your own history has a big role to play in how you grow as an actor.” What might appear to an audience as an effortless presence onstage is expressed by Mishra as “still struggling with the character”. He explains, “One assumes that the more one performs, the closer one gets to achieving it. But over the years, I’ve realised that to achieve [an empathetic portrayal], you have to go through a process that takes time and perhaps we are not always able to give it the required time as actors.”
Mishra’s humility is in contrast to his character’s selfabsorption, as is his own relationship with his father. Mishra grew up in Rewa, Madhya Pradesh, watching his father, a former army constable, act in local Ram Leela productions and deliver sermons at temples and gurudwaras. Young Mishra watched in awe as his father enraptured the audience with his simplicity. It was also his father who brought him the forms to enroll for his first acting workshop on seeing his son’s inclination for theatre, offering Mishra the kind of parental support that was unheard of at the time. Mishra’s journey exhibits an amalgamation of imbibing his parents’ skills, being self-taught as well as receiving formal instruction—the kind that perhaps Eklavya hoped Abhimanyu would have.
To be able to witness the unfolding of several years of influences, learning, seeking, perfecting and relating onstage in a masterful play is certainly one of the most important and under-explored privileges of being in the audience.
This article was originally published in the October 2025 issue of ON Stage.
