Popcorn with Parsai: How Ideas Unlimited Sold Hindi's Sharpest Satirist by the Cone

The set was a popcorn cart. Not a suggestion of one — an actual vendor's cart, striped red and white, glass box with the kettle inside, two bicycle wheels, paper cones stacked along the roof, a bottle of oil wedged in beside the corn. The only thing wrong with it was the hoarding across the top, which in a cinema forecourt would carry a brand name. This one read HARISHANKAR PARSAI ALIVE.

That is the whole idea of the play in one prop, and it took a while to arrive at. The problem Ideas Unlimited had set itself was this: Parsai is the most quotable writer in modern Hindi and one of the least stageable. He wrote vyangya — satire — in the form of the short essay and the sketch. There is no plot. There are barely any characters. There is a voice, and the voice is the whole event. You cannot dramatise an essay. You can, it turns out, sell it.

Harishankar Parsai was born on 22 August 1924 at Jamani, a village near Itarsi in what is now Madhya Pradesh, and he died in Jabalpur on 10 August 1995. Between those dates he did almost nothing that looks like a career. He took an MA in Hindi from Nagpur University, taught for a while, gave it up, and lived in Jabalpur on what his writing brought in, which for long stretches was not much. He never married; by his own account the early years were too uncertain for it. He founded a literary magazine called Vasudha, which was admired and which folded because it lost money. For years he ran a column in the Hindi daily Deshbandhu under a standing headline that is itself a small masterpiece of positioning: Poochhiye Parsai Se. Ask Parsai. Readers wrote in with questions; he answered them, and the answers were satire.

The work that came out of that life is the reason two generations of Indian schoolchildren have read him without being told what they were reading. In Bholaram ka Jeev, a dead clerk's soul cannot be delivered to the afterlife because the paperwork has gone missing in a government office — Yamraj's messenger comes back empty-handed, defeated by a file. In Inspector Matadeen Chand Par, an Indian police officer is deputed to the moon to modernise the lunar force, and teaches it the Indian method: register the crime against whoever is available. Premchand ke Phate Joote takes a single photograph of Hindi's greatest novelist wearing torn shoes and turns it, in four pages, into an argument about what a country does to the writers it claims to venerate. Viklaang Shraddha ka Daur — the age of crippled reverence — won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1982. Nithalle ki Diary, Awara Bheed ke Khatre, Thithurta Hua Gantantra, Sadachar ka Taviz, Vaishnav ki Fisalan: the titles alone are an index of what he thought was wrong.

What made him dangerous rather than merely funny was that he did not have a side to protect. Parsai was a writer of the Left who spared the Left nothing. Reporting on his centenary in 2024, PTI's survey of what he still means quoted the Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi saying that thirty years after his death there is no comparable satirist writing in the language, and the satirist Prem Janmejay on how evenly Parsai distributed his contempt — communists and communalists, bureaucrats and bhakts, the pious and the professionally outraged. Vishnu Nagar's point in the same piece is the one that matters for a play: the satire was never the whole of him. There is a novelist and a memoirist in there too, and a great deal of tenderness underneath the acid.

Manoj Shah has been building plays out of writers for twenty-five years, and by 2014 he had a method. Mareez put the Gujarati poet Abdul Ali Bhimani on stage. Hu Chandrakant Bakshi did it for the novelist. Karl Marx in Kalbadevi imported Marx into a Gujarati diamond merchant's front room to argue with him. The pattern in all of them is the same: do not dramatise the biography, stage the writing, and let the writing do the acting. A writer's life is usually a man at a desk. A writer's sentences are a performance waiting for someone to give them a body.

The script came from Nilay Upadhyay, a Hindi poet born in 1963 at Buxar in Bihar and counted among the generation that came up in the 1980s. He has spent most of his working life at the margins of the literary trade rather than inside it — at one point running a fortnightly newspaper out of Ara that he wrote and sold himself, with his wife Lakshmi Upadhyay as its publisher, and later some years in Mumbai on film and television work. In the years since Popcorn with Parsai he has followed the Ganga instead, with a publication called Ganga Samay, a folk-music team collecting songs from the riverside villages, and a book of the journey called Gangotri se Gangasagar. Wikipedia's entry on Manoj Shah describes the script as co-written by the two men; the poster credits Upadhyay, and Mumbai Theatre Guide lists him as the writer.

What they arrived at was not a biography with a popcorn cart in it. The cart is the argument. A vendor at a cinema does not explain the film; he works the interval, hands you something salty, takes your money and moves down the row. Parsai's satires were consumed exactly that way — in a newspaper column, on a bus, between other things, one fistful at a time — and they were cheap on purpose. Putting the writing in a vendor's mouth returns it to its native format. The production's own line for what the audience was buying: stories funny enough to make you laugh, serious enough to prick your conscience. Mumbai Theatre Guide's listing called it a fantasy on stage, with feeling, emotion and above all the joy of transgression.

Everything else on the floor was subtracted. A folding chair, the sort that comes out at a municipal function. A light. No other actor. No music cue doing the emotional work. The cart could be pushed, leaned on, sat behind, abandoned upstage in the dark; the chair could be sat on, straddled, dragged. That is the entire vocabulary, which means the evening stands or falls on one performer's ability to change register faster than the audience can settle.

Dayashankar Pandey was the one asked to do it. Born in Mumbai on 19 November 1965 into an Awadhi-speaking family from Bhadohi in Uttar Pradesh, he had been working in films since Pehla Nasha in 1993 — Goli in Lagaan, then Gangaajal, Swades, Raajneeti — and by 2014 was on Indian television every week as Inspector Chalu Pandey in Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah, a role he still plays and for which he also works as creative consultant. He is, in other words, a face the audience arrives already knowing, and that is useful for a play about a writer nobody can picture. The recognisable man walks out; within a minute he is a clerk, then a constable, then a corpse arguing with a filing system.

Pandey has since described the job in plain terms. "A one-man show, it was a dream role for any actor," he told Jahnavi Pal of Mumbai Theatre Guide. "I did 48 shows and all of them were housefull." And on the mechanics: "It is a one hour, 60 minute play where I am on stage throughout and hold my audience with my energy, voice and magnetic stage presence." He added that he wanted to bring it back once the pandemic was over, so that more people could see it.

It opened at the NCPA in Mumbai on 6 December 2014. The photographs from that night survive with their timestamps intact, and they are a precise record of a little over an hour: at 19:13 someone is still on stage in a spotlight making the introductions; at 19:16 the cart is in position and the actor is beside it; at 20:29 he is taking his bow between two other men, hands folded. Between those two frames there is nothing in the archive but one man moving around a bare floor — flung open, doubled over, pointing into the dark, sitting on the ground with his back against a folding chair.

What the company had after that was a play that could go anywhere, and the paperwork shows they built it that way on purpose. The performance agreement for a booking at the Science Centre in Surat on 29 November 2015 fits on two pages. Group of six. Three hours to set up in the auditorium. Rs 35,000 for a single performance, a flat sum stated to include every royalty — writer, dialogue writer, music director, voice-over artist, light designer, costume designer, set designer, director and actor — and every professional fee for sets, researchers, consultant, music operator, light operator and backstage. Travel from Mumbai borne by the company. One line at the end, underlined: no recording, audio or video, is allowed.

It went back to Prithvi Theatre on 10 February 2016 for a nine o'clock show, on a poster that ran the words "Hilarious Funny Rib Tickling Comedy" down both margins like a barker's patter and put a green vegetarian mark in the corner beside the line "recommended for age 9+". Both are jokes. Both are also accurate, which is the kind of thing Parsai would have noticed.

In 2024 India marked his hundredth birthday. There is a Harishankar Parsai Bhavan in Jabalpur now, and the theatre group Samagam Rangmandal works out of it. His pieces are still in the school syllabus and still, awkwardly, current — the dead man who cannot get his file cleared, the policeman who books the nearest available suspect, the writer photographed in torn shoes while the nation calls him immortal. Parsai's own defence of what he did was that he wrote for readers rather than for rulers. A popcorn cart is a reasonable place to keep a writer like that: out front, near the doors, where the crowd goes by.