Vijaya Mehta: Remembering the director who created generations of actors
In 1953, a young woman played Desdemona in a college production of Othello in Mumbai. Legendary theatre director, Ebrahim Alkazi, who was in the audience
In 1953, a young woman played Desdemona in a college production of Othello in Mumbai. Legendary theatre director, Ebrahim Alkazi, who was in the audience later invited her to join his theatre group. That young woman was Vijaya Mehta, and it marked the beginning of a bond with theatre that lasted a lifetime. She passed away on June 30 at the age of 91. Born Vijaya Jaywant in Vadodara on November 4, 1934, to parents who were members of the Theosophical Society, she grew up surrounded by the world of Indian cinema and yet remained untouched by its allure. Nalini Jaywant and Shobhna Samarth were her aunts. Nutan and Tanuja were her cousins. Through her first marriage to Harin Khote, Durga Khote was her mother-in-law. Mainstream cinema was practically a family inheritance. Yet, she turned her back on it and chose theatre, which was tougher and less glamorous. Under Alkazi’s mentorship and later Adi Marzban (Parsi theatre’s finest writer-director), Vijaya sharpened a craft that would go on to reshape modern Marathi theatre. In the early 1960s, she co-founded Rangayan in Mumbai alongside playwright Vijay Tendulkar and actors Shriram Lagoo and Arvind Deshpande. Rangayan pushed against the conventions of a stage — that leaned heavily on mythology and spectacle — and introduced audiences to a more rigorous, contemporary kind of storytelling.
Vijaya directed some of the defining productions of her generation: Sakharam Binder, Hayavadana, Ghashiram Kotwal, Wada Chirebandi and Purush, which went on to have over 1,500 shows. For Mohit Takalkar, one of Marathi theatre’s most respected contemporary directors, Vijaya’s significance was both personal and professional. “She would watch my plays, which was huge for me,” he recalls. “When she gave feedback, it was not like a mentor, but like a conversation between one director and another. There was no sugar coating.” “She had an amazing vantage point between the experimental and the commercial and she just kept pushing it”Mohit Takalkar What Takalkar admired most was her refusal to choose between rigour and accessibility. She worked with the most demanding playwrights of her generation — Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Chintaman Tryambak Khanolkar, Jaywant Dalvi and Girish Karnad — and found ways to make their work reach an audience without diminishing it. “She had an amazing vantage point between the experimental and the commercial and she just kept pushing it,” he says and points out a scene in Wada Chirebandi as the clearest evidence of what made her irreplaceable as a director. “The most iconic scene when Vahini wears all those ornaments is an absolutely goosebump-inducing moment in modern Marathi theatre. I have watched four productions of Wada Chirebandi and none of them had that impact.
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