About
To create a modern Indian theatre rooted in the folk performance traditions of the people, uniting rural and urban performers in a new theatrical language.
Naya Theatre, founded in 1959, is a professional touring company that has performed continuously across India and abroad for over six decades. Founded by the playwright, director and poet Habib Tanvir with his wife Moneeka Misra, the company began in Delhi and moved its base to Bhopal in the 1990s. Its core actors came from among the highly talented folk performers and singers of rural Chhattisgarh, but rather than staging traditional folk theatre, Habib Tanvir drew on sources as varied as Bertolt Brecht, classical Sanskrit dramaturgy and India's village folk theatre to forge a wholly new modern Indian theatrical idiom, most famously in Charandas Chor.
After training at RADA and the Bristol Old Vic in Britain and absorbing the influence of Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble, Habib Tanvir returned to India to build a theatre of the people. From 1959 he worked with folk actors from Chhattisgarh, letting them perform in their own Chhattisgarhi language and drawing on the region's nacha tradition of dance, music and improvisation. His Charandas Chor won the Fringe First at the Edinburgh International Drama Festival in 1982 and was later named among India's sixty best works since independence. Tanvir received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1969), the Padma Shri (1983), the Kalidas Samman (1990), the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship (1996) and the Padma Bhushan (2002), and served in the Rajya Sabha. Since his death in 2009 the company has been led by director Ramchandra Singh, himself a Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee for folk theatre, who joined Naya Theatre in 1992.
Naya Theatre is one of the most important institutions in the history of modern Indian theatre. Through it, Habib Tanvir pioneered the theatre of roots movement, demonstrating that India's folk performance traditions could be the foundation of a serious contemporary theatre, and influencing generations of directors after him.
[Atlas Perspective] Profiled as an Institution (Operator) in the Theatre field. Naya Theatre's repertoire (Agra Bazaar, Charandas Chor, Jin Lahore Ni Vekhya, Raj Rakt, Konark and others) connects folk forms such as nacha and pandavani to the modern stage. Founder Habib Tanvir was a Padma Bhushan awardee and Rajya Sabha member; current director Ramchandra Singh is a Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee.