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When Vijaya Mehta passed away, Marathi theatre lost not just a director, but also a living archive of what she called, without a trace of nostalgia-for-nostalgia’s-sake, “a fortunate generation.” Since June 30, 2026, while I have been reflecting on her work, one thing has become quite clear: hers was a mind that never stopped restlessly reinventing itself.

Mehta’s own image for this is the most useful key to her career: culture, she said, is like a pond in a forest. “We were all naturally swept up in this current of the artistic renaissance,” she said of post-Independence India, “We didn’t have to make a conscious effort to join it.” It is a humble way of describing an extraordinary confluence. Be it Ebrahim Alkazi holding his first workshop after returning from England; Ravi Shankar’s Kinnara and Sachin Shankar’s dance troupe; the studios of M.F. Husain, Akbar Padamsee and V.S. Gaitonde all housed under one roof at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute or a seventeen-year-old finding herself in the company of Ganpatrao Bodas, Nanasaheb Phatak and Keshavrao Date. Mehta insisted this was luck, geography, timing. 

But the legends that she alludes to – Vijay Tendulkar, Kishori Amonkar, Jitendra Abhisheki, Prafulla Dahanukar – gathered in what she fondly called the “Girgaon gang.” This suggests something more than just being at the right place at the right time: a capacity for finding and then holding onto serious collaborators and for turning friendship into a working method.

Rangayan and the courage to let go

That method found its first institutional form in Rangayan, the theatre movement she co-founded with Vijay Tendulkar,........

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