The presence of Asif Currimbhoy is common in Indian English departments. Currimbhoy, as a playwright, is often considered to be the first authentic voice in theatre as his plays were meant for the physical theatre’s rigorous labour. His predecessors then like TP Kailasam, Mohit Chattopadhyay, and Sri Aurobindo, wrote plays that were lyrical and symbolic. This further aided his status as the foremost Indian English Playwright who achieved the right balance between the personal and political with drama. The unpopularity of his works now compared to a Girish Karnad or a Mahesh Dattani could be his privilege of an American education in the 1960s, when subcultures were gaining more traction and the related existential and absurd struggles reflected in Currimbhoy’s plays.
When Vijay Tendulkar, Safdar Hashmi, and Badal Sircar turned to the openness and perils of street theatre, Currimbhoy experimented with the frailties of the modern human condition with a fearless appetite. His plays are often cited as too blasphemous for the times in which they were written (and even today). They continue to offer a wide range of perspectives on the perils of passion and desire, modern existential highs and lows, escapisms of religion and spirituality, colonial and postcolonial trauma of growing cities, misdirected dissent and the spectacles of protest and unrest, civil and political disparities of our times, to name a few.
Performance of the fractured self
“How can I speak what must be danced? And how can I dance what I no longer feel?” – asks the tormented protagonist in The Dumb Dancer. In this psychological dance-play, a Kathakali performer loses his grip on the boundaries between his real self and the epic character he plays of Arjuna. The dancer’s obsessive immersion leads to a mental breakdown that culminates in institutionalisation. As the lines between Arjuna and the protagonist blur, his assigned psychiatrist also spirals by assuming the role of Draupadi. The play ends in violence of an almost ritualistic murder that is staged like a mythic climax. For Currimbhoy, dance is the trapdoor to a self that collapses under the weight of roles and their expectations.
Written in 1961, The Dumb Dancer now reads like a prophetic fable of the performative age. It anticipates a world where individual identity is over-coded by social, cultural, and even mythic roles. Gender collapses into performance, madness mimics transcendence, and the institutions meant to cure end up enacting the myth of a temporary ending. Currimbhoy’s treatment echoes the blurring masks of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Shaji N Karun’s Vanaprastham, but also a present day condition of many who crumble under unending performances of social, virtual, personal, professional, gendered, and other roles of mythical and idealized nature in the hopes of accepting a nirvana that has long left the world.
In India’s current status of increasing mental health crisis, performative masculinity, and the theatre of conformity, The Dumb Dancer remains painfully relevant. Currimbhoy wasn’t just staging psychodrama but a cracked mirror that shows our many images. The play opened in Cafe Lama – an off-off theatre in Greenwich Village when Currimbhoy was a student at the University of Wisconsin and a Rockefeller fellow. A year later, The Dumb Dancer was performed at the British Drama League Festival.
Political betrayal and institutional violence
In Inquilab, Currimbhoy stages an intergenerational implosion between a conservative and self-contained professor/father and his disillusioned and furious son. Prof Datta lectures on legality, stability, and democratic reason, while his son Amar wants to join every rally and revolution on the same campus. A familiar dynamic of not just parent-child differences within families but within the nation-state itself. What begins as intellectual resistance escalates into a full-fledged armed rebellion. This play is set during the Naxalite movement and explores how systems built to nurture inquiry, like university campuses, classrooms, and law, are the first to collapse with differences of ideology.
The tension between Amar and Prof Datta insinuates the slow unravelling of Indian campuses with protesting students and teachers. This can be seen parallel with the resentment that resistance often creates. Currimbhoy does not idealise rebellion – Inquilab warns how righteousness can curdle very easily into recklessness. Yet he’s equally suspicious of institutional peace, where he cleverly employs legal language to mask the collective ethical rot. While holding a father’s moral vulnerabilities, the common grounds between the father and son also reach a burnout with language, order, and affirmative actions or ethical learning and taking accountability. Protests also become a result of curation in these processes.
Goa by Currimbhoy is a political play that deals with the violent liberation movement of 1969 against Portuguese occupation. It critiques the hallucinations of liberation by placing a newly annexed Goa as a socio-realistic playground and examines the postcolonial condition through colourism and inherited prejudices. Skin becomes a colonial wound where even motherhood is refracted through the politics of “purity”. Though Currimbhoy counters this narrative through a native figure who refuses inferiority and reframes whiteness as an absence. “You may have white skin, but so also have albinos,” Krishna asserts to the Portuguese woman Miranda, who is ashamed of her daughter’s dark skin. These assertions end up disrupting colonial hierarchies by equating paleness with a lack of essence and not power. Goa stages the quiet violence of postcolonial othering within familial, racial, and national identities, refusing the illusion that political freedom alone can cleanse inherited shame. An influx of spiritual seekers, tourists, and opportunists in the play mirrors how easily liberation also becomes commodified. Currimbhoy refuses to romanticise Goa’s history or its transition; instead, he uses its landscape to show how cultural identity turns transactional in the face of state and spiritual power.
In The Captives, the rotting ideals and ethics get more global. A war play set at the Indo-Chinese border charts the internal conflict of Hasan, a loyal Indian Muslim soldier caught between patriotism and communal identity. He has been betrayed by both the state and himself. In an intense moment, he decides to release a captured Pakistani soldier, Aref, out of a warped sense of brotherhood. There are decisions and questions that remain unanswered. Who killed whom and does any of it even matter when everyone is caught in a theatre of smoke and mirrors? It is a classic resignation that underscores most of Currimbhoy’s dramatic conflicts which he usually resorts to for resolution through violence.
Thorns on a Canvas takes an aim at the corruption of state-sponsored art and elite institutions. Celebrating dissent as polished, defanged, and most importantly docile, Currimbhoy portrays the widening disparities and innate hypocrisy that proliferate in our cities and how the real artist is the one who is the most easily disposable. The play critiques the patronage system and the complex ways in which it continues to haunt.
Abbé Faria complicates this further by unmasking the manipulations of faith and religion by showing how spirituality and psychology can be used as reliable forms of control. In Abbé Faria, Currimbhoy stages a descent into spiritual exile. Born of a forbidden union between a monk and a nun, Abbé is haunted by guilt over his mother’s abandonment, his father’s death, and his own persona. Trained in theology but rejected by Christian institutions and alienated from his homeland, he becomes double exiled to be branded as “mysterious” and “anti-Christian.”
Abbé, who turns into mesmerism as both rebellion and refuge, gets entangled in experiments with hypnotism that are not seen as healing but sinful. A spectacle of colonising oneself after being rejected, Abbé ends up in an asylum. He is no longer a dangerous threat to anyone and has been neutralised. The death of Abbé is the tragic silencing of dissent. “How much humanity is needed,” Abbé asks, “to make any condition supportable?” Currimbhoy offers unusual redemption after exposing a society that punishes those it wounds and the silence of their death as an ironic act of attaining a “peaceful ending”.
Currimbhoy’s political plays do not deliver verdicts. They stage a crisis of belief, memory, and justice. They remind us that India’s problem is not a lack of or misdirected dissent but how dissent gets mistaken for disease as protests get pathologised or worse, aestheticised and anaesthetised.
Sanitised dissent and the art of censorship
If Asif Currimbhoy were writing today, his plays would most likely never get the green light for even a practising space before staging a production. The gatekeepers of any sponsorship culture would not have to think harder on this front because they have to ensure the sanity of maintaining mainstream norms or dogmas.
The Doldrummers, written in 1960, was banned in Indian and is perhaps Currimbhoy’s most direct attack on urban apathy, youth disillusionment, and the mimicry of Western decadence. Set in a single setting of old Bombay’s shacks, the play follows a group of young intellectuals, drifters, and rebels spiralling into drugs, sex, and abstract debate – a theatre of empty gestures and self-styled rebellion. The play doesn’t glorify this chaos but indicates it. The characters talk of revolution but perform decay. They are not rebels but echoes of a revolution they never got to see or know about. Currimbhoy uses these characters to ask: when rebellion loses touch with reality, is it still dissent or just theatre for the bored elite?
Currimbhoy’s artistry is a spectral presence in niches of contemporary Indian theatre and Humanities departments. His plays Goa and The Doledrummers remain the most prescribed pieces in Master’s syllabi despite their out-of-print status.
Even to academically engage with his works is a labour that demands close reading and an implied understanding of the contexts he broaches. In an indifferent world post Indian independence, Partition, Naxalite movements, liberalisation and the postcolonial hangover of our cities, he was the lad who called out the Emperor’s nakedness.
The theatre of curated resistance is what we see in the stand-up circuits where comedians like Kunal Kamra are often called anti-national, and are demonised and erased. Currimbhoy realised this soft censorship while creating separate spectacles in his plays, reminding us that censorship need not always warrant a ban or trouble but a cleverly redirected spotlight that often doesn’t require even dialogue. Currimbhoy will only give us discomfort; bodies that keep resisting and revolting, institutions that are decaying, fragmenting minds and a steadily declining humanity.
He was not interested in virtue of any kind and ensured to expose every character's fallibilities and susceptibilities with no mercy. Ergo, Currimbhoy’s plays remain unread amongst the faint or lighthearted. In present-day India, where any joke might be deemed “offensive”, student protest marches are rebranded as riots, and intellectuals are incarcerated without any real reason, Currimbhoy becomes more relevant as he never pretends to heal in an innately sick and inherently flawed world driven by only self-interests.
Vibhu Vasudev is a former lecturer of Literature and Writing based in Bengaluru and Kerala.
