From putting together Punjabi theatre in the 1980s to training Bollywood actors for Deepa Mehta’s film based on her play, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhury has come a long way
When Amol Palekar saw The Suit in Mumbai last month, he almost immediately booked a flight to Chandigarh to meet the play’s director, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhury. Palekar got more that just a tête-à-tête with Chowdhury. He returned to Mumbai, armed with the idea of doing a retrospective of her works at the Pune Theatre Festival next year.
But Chowdhury is in no mood to celebrate her glorious thespian past that has spanned over 30 years, led to the production of several plays and saw her winning a Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 2003. She would rather look at the retrospective as a starting point for a new idea, a fresh story. “The more you see, the bigger is the world of the self you enter,” she reasons.

Theatre, Chowdhury believes, is a process. And the final product—the play on the stage—evolves with time. “As I evolve, so does my treatment of a play,” she says. For instance, Nagamandala, the play based on Kannada folk tales that she directed in 1989, was “reinvented” in 2005. It has been re-jigged again as the plot for Deepa Mehta’s film Heaven on Earth, which releases later this year. Chowdhury doesn’t change the story, only its treatment and the acting.  She conducted acting workshops in Toronto for Heaven on Earth’s cast, which includes actors such as Preity Zinta and Seema Biswas.

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