Ratan Thiyam

Edinburgh, August 1987. Festival season: the whole city is a stage, and audiences are spoilt, jet-lagged and hard to impress. Into a darkened hall walks a company from a place most of the crowd could not find on a map, to perform, in a language not one of them speaks, an episode from an epic most of them have never read.

The lights go out completely. Then a drum — a deep, barrel-bodied drum, struck with the palm, a heartbeat with a temper. Torchlight. Out of the blackness come warriors moving in formation, and their movement is like nothing the audience has a word for: not quite dance, not quite combat, staves and swords flashing in arcs that are obviously lethal and obviously choreographed at once. The formation tightens into a spinning wheel of men. At its centre, a boy. The wheel closes on him slowly, ceremonially, with terrible patience, while voices rise and fall in long ritual cadences. The boy fights. The wheel closes anyway.

Nobody in the hall understands a word. It does not matter — that is the astonishing part. The audience can feel exactly what is happening: elders have sent a child into a trap they built and could not unbuild, and are singing over him while it kills him. You have sat through art in a language you do not speak — a film, an opera, a grandmother's song — and felt the meaning arrive anyway, underneath the words. This is that, at full theatrical power. The play is Chakravyuha, the boy is Abhimanyu from the Mahābhārata, and the company leaves Edinburgh with prizes and reviews that theatres spend decades chasing.

Now travel the ten thousand kilometres home with them. Home is Imphal, capital of Manipur, in India's far Northeast: a green valley ringed by nine ranges of hills, closer to Mandalay than to Delhi. Home is also, in 1987, a state under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which gives the army sweeping powers of search, arrest and use of force; a place of curfews, blockades and power cuts, where rehearsals run on lamplight and a generator's cough. The actors who just conquered Edinburgh will go back to a compound on the city's edge that they built with their own hands, where they grow rice, keep the kitchen, sweep the stage and train from dawn — because their director believes a theatre, like a crop, must be raised from its own soil.

His name was Ratan Thiyam. This chapter is about what he grew.

The Life

Honesty about sources, first, though this time the problem is abundance rather than absence. Thiyam died fourteen months before this chapter was drafted, so the record is obituary-fresh — the July 2025 tributes in India's major papers and magazines, decades of interviews, and a serious scholarly literature, above all the American scholar Erin Mee's work on the movement he came to embody. But the small facts wobble: production dates drift by a year or two between sources, award years disagree, and his birthplace and parentage come down to us in slightly different tellings. Where the record wobbles, this chapter says so.

Begin with the place, because the place is the point. Manipur was a kingdom for centuries — its own script, its own classical arts, its own wars with Burma — before the British broke it in 1891 and kept it as a princely state. In the eighteenth century its king Bhagyachandra embraced Vaiṣṇavism, the devotion of Kṛṣṇa, and out of that meeting of Meitei ritual and Bengali devotion came two of India's glories: the Rās Līlā, the luminous classical dance of Manipur, and nata-sankīrtana, the ritual singing-and-drumming of the valley's temples, which UNESCO would eventually inscribe as world heritage. In October 1949, two years after Indian independence, the maharaja signed Manipur into the Indian Union — in circumstances Manipuris still debate — and the old kingdom became a centrally administered territory. Full statehood came only in 1972. By then, insurgencies had begun, and with them the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act — AFSPA, a 1958 law giving the army extraordinary powers of search, arrest and lethal force in "disturbed areas" — which settled over Manipur like weather and stayed for the rest of Thiyam's life.

Into that inheritance Ratan Thiyam was born on 20 January 1948 — five months after Indian independence, a year before the merger. His family were performers: his father is remembered as a distinguished guru of Manipuri dance, his parents as artists of the Rās tradition (so the accounts run; details vary). Most sources place his birth in Imphal; some say Nabadwip in Bengal, the Vaiṣṇava pilgrimage town with an old Manipuri colony, where his parents' devotional world naturally travelled. Either way, he grew up inside the tradition — the drums, the costumes, the discipline of gurus — without at first intending to join it. His first loves were solitary ones: he trained as a painter, and he wrote — poetry and fiction in Manipuri, published and noticed (accounts credit him with literary recognition in his youth; the specifics are hard to pin). Painter's eye, poet's ear: hold on to both. His theatre would be built out of exactly those two instruments.

In the early 1970s he did what every ambitious young Indian artist of his generation did: he went to Delhi, to the National School of Drama, the state-funded academy that was then the sun of Indian theatre. He graduated in 1974, formed in the era of its legendary director Ebrahim Alkazi — a regime of ferocious discipline, European stagecraft, grand proscenium productions of Greek tragedy and Mughal history. Thiyam absorbed all of it, and then did something almost nobody did: he turned around and went home. By his own account in later interviews, the training clarified what he did not want — an Indian theatre that was English drama in borrowed light. The discipline he kept. The direction he reversed.

In 1976, back in Imphal, he founded the Chorus Repertory Theatre. He acquired a patch of land on the city's outskirts — a couple of acres by most accounts — and the company built its home on it themselves: stage, workshops, living quarters, over the years even a pond and paddy. What happened on that land for the next half-century is the next section.

The institutions came to him, on his terms. The Sangeet Natak Akademi — India's national academy for the performing arts — gave him its award for direction in 1987. In 1987–88 he was appointed director of the National School of Drama itself, the youngest ever by some accounts — and resigned within about a year and went home to Imphal; he was polite about the reasons, but the pattern spoke. The Padma Shri came in 1989; the Kalidas Samman, Madhya Pradesh's high honour for the arts, in the 1990s (sources differ on the year); the Akademi's Fellowship — its highest honour — in 2012 by most accounts. From 2013 to 2017 he chaired the National School of Drama's governing society (titles vary in the record), again running Delhi's flagship from a desk he refused to move to.

His last years were shadowed. In May 2023, ethnic violence broke out in Manipur between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities and continued through his final years, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands; obituaries record that he spoke of it with open heartbreak, an old man watching his valley burn. He died on 23 July 2025 at a hospital in Imphal — after a period of illness, by press accounts — aged 77. Manipur declared state mourning, by report; tributes came from the Prime Minister, from every theatre in India, and from stages abroad that had never needed a translator to understand him.

The Great Work

The company as gurukul. Understand first what the Chorus Repertory Theatre actually was, because nothing like it existed in Indian theatre and very little like it exists anywhere. It was not a troupe that assembled for rehearsals. It was a residential commune on the gurukul model — the old Indian pattern of students living with a master, learning by total immersion — where actors joined young and stayed for years, often decades. Before an actor carried a role, he or she trained: in thang-ta, the Meitei martial art of sword (thang) and spear (ta), whose spinning, low-slung attacks became the company's signature movement; in pung drumming, the barrel drum of Manipuri ritual; in nata-sankīrtana singing and its long devotional cadences; in Manipuri dance; in wari leeba, the classical art of storytelling. And alongside the training, the actors ran the place — by the attested lore of every visitor who wrote about the compound, they farmed its land, cooked its meals, built and repaired its buildings, sewed its costumes and forged its properties. Thiyam's logic was severe and simple: an actor who has grown the rice he eats and built the stage he stands on holds the stage differently. The company stayed small — a core of a dozen or two — and poor, and permanent. In a profession of freelancers, he built a monastery.

The grammar of the stage. What did the training buy? Go back to that Edinburgh hall and slow the memory down. A Chorus production begins, almost always, in darkness — real darkness, held longer than a Western audience expects, until the eye surrenders. Light arrives as fire or as a single sharpened beam; Thiyam, the trained painter, composed the stage the way painters compose — masses of colour (deep reds, golds, blacks), cloth used architecturally, banners and canopies that turned bodies into landscape. Sound arrives as drums and voices, rarely as recorded anything. And time itself is different: the tempo is ritual tempo, processional, unhurried, punctured by sudden thang-ta velocity — stillness, stillness, then steel. The words, in Meitei (Manipuri — a Tibeto-Burman language of under two million speakers, admitted to India's official Eighth Schedule only in 1992), function as incantation: pitch, rhythm and breath carry the feeling, and the surtitles, where they existed, were almost beside the point. He said as much, repeatedly, in interviews — that his language was not a barrier but part of the music, and that theatre's real text is the image. That is why Tokyo wept and Edinburgh cheered without understanding a sentence: he had rebuilt theatre on the parts of it that are older than translation. Critics coined a word for the school he led — the "Theatre of Roots," the post-independence movement to decolonize the Indian stage by returning to its own performance traditions — though Thiyam himself, by report, wore the label warily. Others theorized roots. He had them.

Chakravyuha: the boy in the wheel. His most famous production, first staged in 1984, takes one episode from the Mahābhārata: Abhimanyu, the teenaged son of Arjuna, knows how to break into the chakravyūha — the wheel-shaped battle formation — but not how to break out. His elders send him in anyway. The wheel closes; the boy dies; the men who sent him mourn magnificently. In Thiyam's staging the formation itself became the star — warriors wheeling in thang-ta discipline, the trap made visible, beautiful and obscene at once. And he was explicit, in interviews, about what he was staging — a reading critics shared: Manipur's own young men, sent by their elders into wheels they could enter but not leave — insurgency, counter-insurgency, unemployment, the gun. The production said no of this aloud. It did not need to. Chakravyuha became the most-travelled Indian production of its era, touring the world for decades and taking prizes at Edinburgh in 1987; a boy dying in a closing wheel, it turned out, was legible on every continent.

Uttar-Priyadarshi: the emperor's remorse. In 1996 came the other pillar. Uttar-Priyadarshi ("the final beatitude of Priyadarśī") is built from a Hindi verse play by the poet Agyeya, and its subject is this book's thirty-sixth life: Aśoka (chapter 36), the emperor who conquered Kalinga at the cost of a hundred thousand lives and then spent his reign atoning in stone. Thiyam staged the remorse as ritual descent and ascent — a hell of the emperor's own making, prisoners and torturers in choreographed torment, crimson banners, ranks of monks, the drums driving Priyadarśī ("of gracious mien," the name Aśoka's own edicts use) from blood to peace. Staged from a valley full of soldiers, a play about a king discovering that victory is a form of defeat required no footnotes. It became his most-performed work abroad — Japan took it to heart especially — and its closing image of a man laying down the sword did more work in forty seconds than a shelf of conflict-resolution literature.

The Manipur trilogy: grief made visible. If Chakravyuha was Manipur in metaphor, the cycle critics call his Manipur trilogy — usually counted as Wahoudok ("Prologue"), Hey Nungshibi Prithivi ("My earth, my beloved world") and Nine Hills, One Valley (2006), though tellings of which three vary — brought the grief closer to the surface. The last title is simply Manipur's geography: nine hill ranges around one valley, the hills and the valley being also the state's ethnic fault line. In these works old men in white confer with ancestors, lamps float in darkness, mothers keen over the land itself; the dramaturgy leans on Meitei cosmology and funeral ritual, and the subject — never named, always present — is a homeland eating its children. He insisted in interviews that he was not a political playwright, and he was right in the narrow sense: no party, no policy, no slogan ever crossed his stage. He staged consequences. Art made inside the emergency, not commentary lobbed at it from a safe city — that is the difference between Thiyam and almost everyone else who made work "about" conflict, and audiences could feel the difference even when they could not have explained it.

The classics, re-rooted. Around the pillars stood a lifetime of proof that his form could hold anything. Early on he staged Sanskrit drama — Karnabharam, Bhasa's one-act on the burden of Karna, was among the productions that proved the Theatre of Roots could serve the oldest Indian dramaturgy (his stagings of Bhasa date to the late 1970s and after; dates vary). He staged Kālidāsa (chapter 57) — a Ritusamharam built from the poet's cycle of the seasons — and he staged Europe on his own terms: Ibsen's late, strange When We Dead Awaken around the Ibsen centenary of 2006, and a Manipuri Macbeth around 2014, witches and usurper folded into Meitei ritual as if Shakespeare had written for the pung drum. The festivals of Europe and Japan kept calling for four decades. And with the touring came the argument that follows every artist who carries a local form to a global market: some scholars — Rustom Bharucha most persistently among them — asked whether such spectacles fed Western festivals an exotic, ritualized "India," gorgeous and consumable. The charge deserves stating fairly, and so does his answer, given across many interviews: exoticism is someone else's costume, and these were his own clothes — the drum, the sword and the ritual were not sourced for effect but inherited, trained into his actors' bodies over years on land they farmed. You may weigh the debate yourself; his audiences at home in Imphal, who needed no programme notes, mostly declined to see a problem.

Before & After

Backward, first, along this era's own seam. The previous chapter ended with Jockin Arputham (chapter 263) teaching slum dwellers to count their own shacks; the era's artists open with a man who taught actors to count their own beats — the same refusal, transposed into art: dignity begins when the periphery stops waiting for the centre's permission. The deeper root runs into the hills above his valley: Rani Gaidinliu (chapter 228), the Naga prophetess-rebel jailed at seventeen, fought the empire to preserve the Northeast's indigenous lifeways — and the culture she went to prison defending, Thiyam's generation transfigured into art the world queued to see. That is the Northeast's thread in this book: Gopinath Bordoloi (chapter 211) secured the region's place in the republic's politics; Bhupen Hazarika (chapter 246) carried its voice into the nation's songs, the ferryman of Assam's rivers as Thiyam was the drummer of Manipur's valley — the artist-predecessor who proved the Northeast could address all of India without asking Delhi to translate. And behind Thiyam's own craft stand two lineages he fused: his parents' Rās Līlā and sankīrtana inheritance, and the Alkazi-era National School of Drama, whose European rigour he absorbed, reversed and outgrew. Beside him, name the fellow-travellers of the Theatre of Roots, none of whom appear elsewhere in this book: Habib Tanvir with his Chhattisgarhi folk actors, B. V. Karanth with his Yakshagana-steeped music-theatre, K. N. Panikkar working from Kerala's Kutiyattam, and the playwright Girish Karnad, whose myth-soaked texts gave the movement much of its repertoire. The movement had many theorists; Thiyam was its standing proof.

Forward, the thread stays in the hills and runs to the book's last page. Easterine Kire (chapter 284) would do for Naga letters what Thiyam did for Meitei performance — build a literature the mainland could no longer decline to read. And there is a rhyme the roster planted long ago and this chapter happily pays: Manipur, a state of barely three million people that India's newspapers mostly cover as a security problem, gave the republic its greatest theatre-poet — and will close this book, at chapter 300, with a boxer, a Kom farmer's daughter from the same valley. One small, wounded place; the nation's stage and the world's ring. The global rhyme is real, too: Thiyam belongs with the twentieth century's great theatre monastics — Grotowski in Poland, Suzuki in Japan, with whom he shared festivals and mutual regard — directors who withdrew from the metropolis to train actors' bodies toward something older than realism. Among them, only Thiyam did it inside a live emergency, in a language the world had never heard.

Why It Still Matters

Start with the argument every ambitious Indian outside the metros is having this decade: build where the market is, or build where your roots are? The entire gravity of Indian culture — funding, festivals, critics, commissions — pulls toward Delhi and Mumbai, exactly as it pulled in 1976. Thiyam is the standing counter-example: he took the capital's best training, went home to one of the republic's most neglected corners, and made the world come to him. Every filmmaker shooting in their own dialect, every founder building from a small city, every designer mining a grandmother's craft instead of a moodboard is walking a road he metalled. The lesson is exact, and it is not "stay home." It is: depth beats location — a form dug from your own soil, executed to world standard, travels further than fluent imitation ever will.

Second, language. India runs a perpetual, anxious argument about whether its "small" languages can carry serious modern art or must yield to Hindi and English. Thiyam settled it in the only court that counts. Meitei — under two million speakers, in the Eighth Schedule only since 1992 — filled halls in Edinburgh, Tokyo and Moscow for forty years, untranslated. Every Indian language now streaming its cinema and literature to the world stands on that proof.

Third, the harder lesson: what art can do inside catastrophe. Manipur since 2023 has been the kind of news that numbs; Manipur for most of Thiyam's life was a slower version of the same news. His answer was neither propaganda nor escape. He built an institution — durable, disciplined, employing and training its people — and made work that told the truth at the level of grief rather than the level of blame, which is why it never dated and no faction could conscript it. In a country, and a world, where every conflict instantly becomes content, the Chorus Repertory Theatre remains a model of a third way: presence. He stayed. That was the work, and the work argued that a wounded place is not only a problem to be managed but a culture to be continued.

And when he died in July 2025, notice what was mourned — not a celebrity, but a proof. The tributes from Delhi were warm; the mourning in Imphal was structural, a state grieving the man who had made its name mean something other than trouble. Institutions that outlive their founders are rare in Indian culture. His compound on the edge of Imphal, drums still training the next generation, is now the test of the whole experiment.

Over to You

Thiyam's refusal of Delhi made the work possible — and kept it two thousand kilometres from India's biggest audiences, critics and funders. Did the refusal concentrate his art or ration it? Where is the line between rootedness and isolation?

A Tokyo audience weeps at Uttar-Priyadarshi without understanding a word. Is that theatre's deepest communication, or a beautiful misunderstanding — and does the exoticism charge dissolve, or sharpen, once you admit the audience cannot check the meaning?

Chakravyuha never names Manipur, AFSPA or any insurgent group; it stages a boy dying in a wheel. Is metaphor braver than documentary — harder to censor, longer-lived — or is it a way of being political while risking nothing nameable?

The gurukul commune asked for years of training, farm labour and near-total devotion to one master's vision, for little pay. In any other industry we might call that exploitation; here it produced art of the first rank. Can the model be defended today — and would you let your own child join?

Where to Go Next

Start with the source: the productions themselves — filmed recordings and extended excerpts of Chakravyuha, Uttar-Priyadarshi and Nine Hills, One Valley circulate through the Sangeet Natak Akademi's archives, Doordarshan programmes and festival recordings online. Watching is slow, dark and blazing by turns — give it ten patient minutes and the tempo recalibrates you; no subtitles required, which is the whole argument.

A modern way in: Erin B. Mee's Theatre of Roots: Redirecting the Modern Indian Stage (Seagull, 2008) — the standard scholarly account of the movement, with Thiyam at its centre; best for readers who want the debate (including the exoticism argument) laid out fairly. Her anthology DramaContemporary: India (2001) opens the wider field of modern Indian playwriting in English translation.

The thread forward: from the poet of the Imphal stage to the poet of the Bombay gutter. Chapter 265 is Namdeo Dhasal — Dalit Panther, co-founder of a movement that took its name from Oakland, and a writer who dragged Marathi poetry into the brothel lanes of Kamathipura and made it stay there until it looked. Thiyam made beauty from a wound with ritual and fire; Dhasal, born a year after him, made poetry from a wound by refusing to make it beautiful at all. The era's angry poets have the floor.