Bhav Prapanch

Sikka Ni Triji Baaju

Sikkani Treeji Baju (The Third Side of the Coin) is a 110-minute thriller-comedy in Gujarati, written by Naushil Mehta and directed by Manoj Shah. Adapted from Chazz Palminteri's play Faithful, it is a sensuous thriller on the fragile themes of marriage, men, and money — with unexpected dollops of humour. Madhvi is the wife of multimillionaire diamond exporter Arvind Kothari. She lives in a secluded sea-facing bungalow in Mumbai. On a rainy day when she is home alone, Dhiru ‘Sixer’ — a top hit-man — manages to enter and overpower her. As Dhiru waits impatiently for his client's signal to kill her, Madhvi sits tied to a chair, realising she has only moments to save herself. Who wants Madhvi dead? Why? Is Madhvi able to find a way out of this predicament? Is Dhiru really the killer he claims to be? Is Arvind really Dhiru's client? The answers arrive with increasingly slippery footing, and the play slides between thriller and farce often in the same line. The third side of the coin, the one no one looks at, turns out to be the only side that matters.

Kamrabhabhi No Barapo

The Outcry of Kamla

In the north Gujarat countryside the letter ળ softens into ર, and so Kamla becomes Kamra. The title is the joke and the whole play at once: Kamrabhabhi No Barapo — the outcry of Kamlabhabhi — is an evening of a woman complaining about her husband in a dialect that keeps mispronouncing her own name. Kamla's world turns on a single axis she never names directly. To anyone who will listen he is only "tamara bhai" — your brother. They started lower middle class and by the time he retired they had got as far as a second-hand car. The daughters are married off, the son works out of town, and Kamla has no leisure at all: she works while she talks, and everything she says is about him. Where is my towel. I cannot find my glasses. Kamra, where did you put the screwdriver. Thirty-seven years of putting the folded clothes in the same cupboard, and he still asks. She says she is fed up. What she is describing, sentence by sentence, is a life organised entirely around one man's comfort, and the complaint is how the affection gets said out loud. Then the play turns and hands him the stage. His name, he would like the audience to know, is Harshad Mehta — no relation, never bought a share in his life. He has been listening to all of it. The cotton wool he puts in his ears every morning after his bath is not for the draught; he took Best Actor prizes in college and has been performing partial deafness ever since he retired, because a man cannot read a newspaper while being told to count the cooker whistles. He has kept an accounting: forty tonnes of potatoes since the wedding, in every cut and configuration known to Gujarati cooking, which is why he had to learn to eat pickle. He knows every one of her techniques — a sari today, mohanthal tomorrow; a raised voice in the morning, dinner late at night. Reward and punishment, he says, like training a dog. And he knows she still half-suspects him about Bhavna from the neighbouring quarters, which was over before it began, forty years ago, because his job was private-sector and hers came with a government one. Manoj Shah directs and plays Harshad; Kalpana Shah plays Kamla and carries the bulk of the evening. Devanshu Pandit's script needs almost nothing on stage — a plastic chair, two people, a dialect — and it gets its comedy the hard way, out of observation rather than situation. There is no plot to spoil, because the marriage was never actually in dispute — only the question of who gets to describe it. Ideas Unlimited played it at the CCI in Churchgate and took it to the Hindustan Times Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in February 2017, where it was performed under Rang Savaari, the festival's Gujarati theatre strand.

Pai Pai

A Play for Ages 6 to 106

A pai was the smallest coin India ever minted — so small that the phrase pai pai came to mean every last fraction of what you own. Dhiruben Patel's play hangs one from a fishing line and lets a houseful of teenagers try to catch it. They are convinced their parents don't give them enough money. So they set out to earn some themselves, by every innovative scheme a group of school friends can dream up, and one after another the schemes fail. What arrives at the end is not a windfall but an understanding: of what it actually took their parents to build the comfortable home they had been taking for granted, and of how much of it was never about money at all. The play looks straight at the craze for money in the world these children are growing into, and does it as farce — a joke at the expense of everyone in the room, adults included. Written by Dhiruben Patel — novelist, playwright, editor of Sudha, president of the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, and winner of the Ranjitram Suvarna Chandrak and the Sahitya Akademi Award — and directed by Manoj Shah, who also plays in it. Riddhi Vora, Durgesh Rajput, Maulik Shah, Prakash Waghela, Prashant Savalia, Nimesh Shinde and Rushikesh Chandaran complete the company, on a set that is a teenager's living room down to the pop-star posters on the wall. The poster puts the argument in one image: a 1945 one-pice coin with a hole through the middle, dangling on a line cast from a moon shaped like a pie. Two hours with an interval, and, as the Gujarati poster says, for children aged six to a hundred and six.

Master Builder

In All the Universe, I Alone Am God

Henrik Ibsen published Bygmester Solness in December 1892, and for the next hundred and twenty-two years nobody staged it in Gujarati. When Ila Arun and K K Raina's Surnai Theatre invited Ideas Unlimited to make work for the first Ibsen Theatre Festival in Mumbai, Manoj Shah went through the whole canon looking for the play nobody had claimed. Every other major Ibsen — A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, Peer Gynt — had already been translated into Gujarati, several of them performed. The Master Builder had not been translated, adapted or staged even once. "It is my choice and my decision," he wrote in his director's note, "to check myself as an artist." Chirantana Bhatt's adaptation moves the play from Norway to Mumbai, and Halvard Solness becomes Akhil Nanavati — an architect who prefers to be called a master builder, and who has made his name building temples. Ibsen's Christian imagery, gothic spires and mythic creatures give way to something older: the Sompura lineage of hereditary temple architects, the shikhara, three thousand years of building towards the sky. Knut Brovik, the old draughtsman Solness has broken, becomes Bhanushankar Sompura; his son Ragnar becomes Aadarsh; Hilde Wangel, who arrives out of nowhere to collect on a promise, becomes Kamya. Shah compressed Ibsen's three acts into two. Akhil is at the top and terrified of it. He is vain, unjust to the very people he learnt from, and frightened of the generation coming up behind him. His marriage to Saumya is a ruin held together by a fire years ago that took their children. Then Kamya walks in — twenty-four, from another town — and reminds him that they are not strangers, that he once made her a promise she chose to believe. She takes a place in his house, then in his practice, then in his head. She also discovers that the man who builds towers cannot bear heights. At the public opening of his newest building she asks him to climb it anyway. He does. He falls. Of the crowd standing appalled around the body, only Kamya steps forward, and she is smiling: my master builder. The poster carried the whole argument in a single line. Narsinh Mehta's fifteenth-century bhajan opens Akhil brahmandma ek tu Shrihari — in all the universe, you alone are God. Ideas Unlimited changed one word. Ek hu ja Shrihari: I alone am God. The architect's name is Akhil. Master Builder was made for the inaugural Ibsen Theatre Festival in Mumbai, ran at Bhaidas Auditorium on 9 November 2014, and had its first independent show at Prithvi Theatre on 14 December 2014.

Hu Chandrakant Bakshi

I, Chandrakant Bakshi

The story of Gujarati literature's most controversial writer, told by the man himself — or rather, by Pratik Gandhi inhabiting him with a ferocity that made audiences forget they were watching an actor. Chandrakant Bakshi (1932–2006) authored 178 books, served as Professor of History, became Sheriff of Mumbai, got his short story 'Kutti' banned by the Gujarat government, publicly defied Bal Thackeray and refused to apologise, and wrote an autobiography so incendiary that parts of it could not be published. His writing style — Gujarati laced with Urdu, Hindi, and English — was as deliberately provocative as his public persona. He was, by every account, an incredible egoist. He was also, by every account, adored by his readers. Written by Shishir Ramavat and drawn from Bakshi's autobiography Bakshinama, the play premiered on 15 June 2013 at Prithvi Theatre. Manoj Shah uses a ladder throughout the production as a metaphor for Bakshi's obsession with being on top. Gandhi — years before Scam 1992 would make him a household name — delivers what CreativeYatra called a 'cautious yet fearless' performance, bringing the bold and egotist protagonist to 'flawless perfection.' This play, along with Mohan No Masalo two years later, is credited with solidifying Pratik Gandhi's reputation as an actor of immense talent.

Apoorav Khela

The Ecstatic Wanderer of Rajasthan

Apoorav Khela — meaning 'a wondrous play' — is the biography of Avdhoot Anandghanji, a 17th-century Jain mystical poet who dwelled in the forests of Rajasthan and whose name has been all but erased from the books of history. Anandghan — literally 'cloud of bliss' — was born as Labhanand, likely before 1624, and was initiated as a Svetambara monk in the Tapa Gaccha order under the name Labhavijaya. But monastic convention could not contain him. He became an avdhoot — an ascetic wanderer who had renounced all worldly attachments — and disappeared into the forests of Rajasthan, where his proximity to nature was said to pacify the beasts and make the trees sway in joy. His absence from monastic records suggests he was always an outsider, more mystic than monk. What survived is his poetry. Anandghan composed padas — devotional songs — in a mixed vernacular of Gujarati, Rajasthani, and Braj that were spontaneous, ecstatic, and radically non-sectarian. His Anandghan Chauvisi honours the twenty-four Jain Tirthankaras. His Anandghan Bahattari was transmitted orally and in manuscripts, its verses sometimes found alongside those of Kabir, Surdas, and Banarasidas. Mahatma Gandhi included one of his hymns in his prayer collection. His songs are still sung in Jain temples across India — and even appear in Digambara hymn collections, despite his Svetambara origins. The play, written by Dr. Dhanvant Shah and directed by Manoj Shah, is constructed from the anecdotes and oral traditions surrounding this enigmatic figure. Five actors — Ashok Parmar, Jay Upadhyay, Nimesh Dave, Manish Rohit, and Sagar Rawal — bring to life a man about whom barely any documented information exists. Kabir Thakore's set design and Uday Mazumdar's music carry the Rajasthani folk texture, while Rajesh Mandloi's language work ensures the dialect rings true. The play does not attempt a conventional narrative. It is, as its own programme notes describe it, 'an astonishing flight of happiness, beginning with anand and ending with Anandghan.'