An internal, three-hour tour de force, Heritage Mahesh distills Elkunchwar’s iconic vada trio In a poignant tale of the decay of a feudal family from within. It’s a powerful metaphor that speaks fluently to the present, depicting how the slow erosion of human values ​​and the environment continues to shape our world today.

Director Anuradha Kapoor has reimagined her 2013 experiment with a surreal realm set up by scenographer Deepan Sivaraman in New Delhi’s Sundar Nursery, moving away from the traditional stage to immerse the audience in a living, breathing landscape. The paradox is haunting as the audience watches a family suffer from the gradual loss of their land and history, while being surrounded by the rich biodiversity of a beautifully restored Mughal-era park.

Old-timers remember the 2013 staging as a critically acclaimed experience that proved that Elkunchwar’s vast trilogy could be condensed into a single evening. But it unfolded within the controlled institutional walls of the National School of Drama (NSD) Repertory Company. However, the beautiful nursery display is completely free of those institutional constraints. Commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and rebuilt with new artists, the production unmasks itself as an experiment. Anuradha, along with Sivaraman, creates spatial dramaturgy in which the physical environment actively tells the story. Saturday’s performance had to be stopped midway as monsoon spoiled the game. On Sunday, simulated birdsong found an acoustic duet with Delhi’s evening parrots, and the heavy wind carried the aroma of kitchen fires straight to the audience, turning the tragedy into a living reality.

In this intense setting of Wada – A huge ancestral mansion – the audience sits around it, just steps away from the actors. Sivaraman forces you to become an uninvited guest inside the intimate domestic bubble of the Deshpande family. It makes you feel like you’re trapped in a roomAs events unfold.

The play begins in Dharangaon in the 1970s, when the Deshpande family has recently performed the last rites of their patriarch Tatyaji, resulting in a bitter resentment that promptly tears apart the house. Deshpande has the stature, but he lacks the real liquidity to pay for the patriarch’s last rites. The eldest son, Bhaskar, is filled with bitterness as he stays behind to manage the crumbling estate, while his younger brother, Sudhir, moves to Mumbai in search of a job.

While the brothers fight for the inheritance and the family gold, their sister Prabha waits in vain for the education she aspires to pursue. Women are trapped in the kitchen, their lives reduced to repetitive routines of cooking and cleaning as hypocritical men try to lure them into gold, and turn them into foot soldiers in their own little wars while maintaining the facade of feudalism. The compelling night scene, where Bhaskar presents his wife with a box of ancestral gold jewelery shows the disintegration of feudal morality and how material greed overpowers familial bonds.

As the feudal system completely disintegrates, Bhaskar’s son Parag inherits the burden of land, and he joins hands with market forces who exploit his needs for profit. Instead of breaking free, the pollen slowly hardens, giving us hope that humanity will survive the apocalypse. His wife, Nandini, represents the emergence of the modern, self-realized Indian woman who actively destroys the stifling patterns of home.

The play begins with the patriarch’s cremation, which immediately divides the family. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Between the lines, through the generational saga of the Deshpande family up to the 1990s, Anuradha charts the painful transformation of post-independence India. The decline of a nuclear rural Brahmin family serves as a symbol of the extinction of the feudal system, the agrarian crisis, the environmental crisis and the dawn of predatory capitalism in sync with patriarchy.

The play does not present standard heroes. Instead, domestic conflicts and rhythmic daily routines collide to give it an epic feel. Household chores like bathing, changing the sacred thread or mending a saree are easily linked to a desperate attempt to wash away the moral stain on the family. Home feels like a black hole that swallows personal ambitions. While characters like Prabha and Anjali are eager to escape, the structure pulls them back into the endless labor of running a household and maintaining the architecture of patriarchy. wada Unbroken.

Like Elkunchwar, Anuradha makes sure that the deepest truths are not tossed in the air. She hopes audiences will find her between the lines. It’s a welcome respite from the essays thrown at us from various creative stages these days in the name of entertainment. It is a joy to discover truth in the pauses of an accomplished artist living the text. For example, the play reflects the psychological paralysis of a generation that cannot let go of its perceived superiority. Bhaskar, portrayed by Yash Yogi, is attached to the old structures, while Himanshu Kohli as Sudhir effectively brings out the everyday dilemmas of a son who left the village to make a better life in the city. Sajida Saji powerfully depicts the plight of aging women in the homes we all have grown up seeing, who, blinded by conditioning, do not defend the hypocrisy of men. They defend it because they have no other world. The younger generation, portrayed through the chameleon Ajit Singh Palwat’s Parag, becomes engaged in debauchery and give and take due to the invasion of the village by capitalist customs. Increasing agricultural distress and drought function as both a physical reality and an existential situation in the text. Uma Katju as Prabha embodies this gradual decline of sentiment.

The characters do not speak in the typical Maharashtrian rhythm of the text. Linguistic variations in North Indian dialects sometimes create dissonance, pulling the audience a bit out of the carefully constructed Vidarbha setting.

In summarizing the trilogy, the narrative inevitably suffers from sudden jumps. The final act takes a stylistic turn, becoming highly symbolic and philosophical, a shift that moves away from the grounded progression of the said and the untold that Anuradha had so carefully established in the beginning and adhered to even after the halfway point.

That said, it’s hard to see the end of our time through this compelling mirror.

published – September 29, 2026 05:24 PM IST