Akho Akha Bolo
Akho Akhabolo — literally, ‘Akho speaks’ — is an Ideas Unlimited play that brings the seventeenth-century Gujarati saint-poet Akho Bhagat onto stage in his own voice. Akho was an Ahmedabad goldsmith who watched his trade poison itself with greed, was framed for a theft he did not commit, and walked out of the workshop into a life of bare verse. His chhappa — six-line satirical stanzas — remain the sharpest critique of religious hypocrisy that Gujarati has produced. The play uses Akho's own monologues, his confrontations with the cosmic figures Chitt (mind) and Vichaar (thought), and his furious, lucid poetry to construct a portrait of a man who could not stop seeing through things. He saw through priests collecting rupees in the name of god, through saints who polished their reputations more carefully than the poor polished their floors, through the small daily betrayals of family — including the famous incident of the silver pendant, where his own sister-figure broke his trust by tampering with the gold he had given her. Akho watched, and Akho wrote. Manoj Shah's production stays close to the verse and close to the man. The stage is bare. The language is Akho's seventeenth-century Gujarati, untranslated, performed for an audience that hears it the way it was first heard — as both poetry and accusation. The play opens with the line that has become his signature, ‘Santo, aavoji, desh hamare’ — Saints, come, to my country — and closes on the same invitation, three centuries on, still open.
The People
Behind
the Play
Also Worth
Seeing
Huto and Huto Oh Yaa!
An Ideas Unlimited production directed by Manoj Shah, featuring Chirag Vohra.
Socrates
Mukkadamo — Socrates Trial. A 90-minute Gujarati play, written by Deepak Soliya and directed by Manoj Shah, that returns to the Athenian court 2,400 years after Socrates' death and asks why the philosopher still refuses to leave us alone. Drawing on the writings of three of Socrates' contemporaries — the playwright Aristophanes, the philosopher Plato, and the military general Xenophon — the play assembles a portrait that no single source could give. The five cardinal virtues that anchored his teaching — courage, temperance, justice, piety, and wisdom — are not philosophical abstractions here but the framework of a man's death sentence. What makes this Socrates new on the Gujarati stage is its insistence that any work containing something eternal must be continually reinterpreted. Socrates' obsession with morality, freedom of speech, fearlessness, and self-examination is read here against Indian philosophy, finding parallels that shorten the distance between Athens and Ahmedabad. The play also takes a fresh look at the reality of his death — not as state execution alone, but as the most demanding of his own choices. Performed by Dharmendra Gohil, Chirag Vohra, Jay Upadhyay, Darshan Pandya, Pulkit Solanki, Disha Savla, Neelam Panchal and others, the production argues that Socrates' insistence on critical thinking is indispensable today — from school education and scientific research to political understanding. After many earlier plays on Socrates, this is the one that brings him home in Gujarati.
Gujarati Ni Asmita
Gujarat Ni Asmita is a poetic journey into the rich literary culture of Gujarat — from Gujarat, by Gujarat. Directed by Manoj Shah, the play moves across centuries to bring the great voices of Gujarati poetry and reform onto a single stage: Narsinh Mehta and Meera, Akho and Premanand, the Krishna-Sudama-Premanand triangle, Dayaram and his devotional verse, Dalpatram and his historic meeting with Forbes, Narmad with his fierce reformist prose, and Meghani with the folk songs of Saurashtra. The play projects these characters, their work, and their lives alongside the everyday people of Gujarat for whom they wrote. It is an epic, presented in a contemporary register — designed to help anyone with no or only a slight idea of Gujarati literature discover the gem of the past, without lecture or apology. The verse comes through in the language it was written in, and the staging trusts the audience to lean in and listen. Woven through is an outstanding musical score moving from Narsinh Mehta's bhajans to Meghani's lokgeet, the score itself a parallel narrative of how Gujarati identity has always been carried in melody. The whole evening is overall very entertaining — a celebration of what Gujarati has produced, and a quiet argument for why it must be heard again.
Mareez
Sufi on the Rock Since 2004
The longest-running Gujarati play. Two hundred performances and counting, at Prithvi Theatre continuously since 2004. Abbas Abdul Ali Vasi was born in Surat in 1917 into a Dawoodi Bohra family. He dropped out of school in the second grade. By fourteen, he was composing ghazals. By his twenties, he was selling them for five rupees apiece to wealthy men who published them under their own names. He drank. He loved a woman who would not love him back. He married another who stood by him. He contracted tuberculosis. He wrote 178 poems that the literary establishment ignored and the people of Gujarat memorised. His pen name was Mareez — literally, ‘a sick man.’ They called him the Ghalib of Gujarat. He died in 1983 after being hit by an auto-rickshaw on a Mumbai street. Adapted by Vinit Shukla from Raeesh Maniar’s biography Mareez: Astitva Ane Vyaktitva, and directed by Manoj Shah, the play does not tell this story in order. It weaves poetry, fantasy, hallucination, and realism into a theatrical fantasia — inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s letters Dear Theo and Charles Bukowski’s Barfly. Dharmendra Gohil has played Mareez since the 2004 premiere — twenty years in the same role — with critics noting that ‘Mareez was in his veins.’ Kumkum Das plays Sona, his wife. The set comprises six paintings by Padma Bhushan-awarded artist Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh. The music is by Uday Mazumdar, a tabla player trained under Ravi Shankar.
Third Bell
Let's See Ourselves on Stage
In theatre tradition, the third bell signals that the show is about to start. But what if that bell never rings? What if the real drama is already unfolding in the seats of the auditorium? Third Bell is a meta-theatrical celebration of the audience — a series of conversations, confessions, arguments, and revelations between strangers and companions, all waiting for a performance to begin. A married couple whose argument about a bathroom break turns into a conversation about love, memory, and missed anniversaries. A grieving widow and a guarded painter who spark an unexpected friendship. Two men sitting beside each other who might be a bumbling impresario and a spy — or just very committed audience members. A first date on the edge of implosion. A father and daughter tangled in generational expectations. A narrator and director trying, and failing, to keep everything on schedule. Written by Ishan Doshi and directed by Manoj Shah, Third Bell is a tribute to those who come to watch, wait, wonder, and maybe find a little bit of themselves before the curtain rises.
Bombay Flower
The Untold Story of Ruttie Petit and Muhammad Ali Jinnah
A tribute to the legendary Parsi theatre — Bombay Flower tells the astonishingly daring story of Ruttie Petit (1900–1929), the fiercely independent daughter of Sir Dinshaw Petit, second baronet, who at eighteen married the era's most divisive political figure: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a man more than two decades her senior. Given the sobriquet 'Bombay Flower' by Sarojini Naidu, Ruttie's exuberance fills the first half of the play — her rebellion against family, faith, and Parsi society to marry for love. In the second half, shunned by her parents and increasingly isolated by Jinnah's consuming political ambitions, she becomes an embittered woman who finds solace in theosophy, opium, and solitary wanderings across Europe. She died at twenty-nine. Written by Geeta Manek and drawn from Sheela Reddy's Mr and Mrs Jinnah: The Marriage That Shook India, the play took four years to develop. It began as a one-woman show before Manoj Shah brought in Jinnah, then Ruttie's parents, his sister Fatima, and their friend Kanji Dwarkadas. Bhamini Oza Gandhi leads as Ruttie, with Vishal Shah as Jinnah. The play premiered to a full house at the Experimental Theatre, NCPA on March 26, 2023 — an NCPA co-production. Bombay Flower is dedicated to Parsi theatre, which Manoj Shah discovered to be the pioneer of both Gujarati and Urdu theatre during his research for Master Phoolmani in 1999. It asks a question that remains relevant: why would an intelligent, sensitive young woman from a privileged background risk everything for a man whose world was entirely different from hers?