Chowdhury makes her actors speak less and emote mostly with the body. “Not wordy text, but emotions, which are universal, are the muse of my plays,” she says. Theatre has earned Chowdhury fame, not money. Yet, the love for it keeps her going. “Theatre doesn’t earn me a living, I am my own typist, manager, and administrator. But the desire to bring on stage a glimpse of what is below the surface never satiates,” she philosophises.

Theatre, however, happened to Chowdhury by accident. Raised in England till she was in Class VI, Chowdhury’s family then moved to Amritsar, which she calls “provincial”. “There was a lot of religion there. I literally lived in and out of gurudwaras,” says Chowdhury, whose doctor father was a pious man. She had no inkling of theatre, until the National School of Drama founder and later Chowdhury’s teacher, Ebrahim Alkazi, brought Othello and Jasma Odan to Amritsar in 1971.
As a backstage volunteer and a “residue of post-colonialism”, Chowdhury saw in theatre a new, free world, where there was an ease between sexes and space for thoughts. In 1975, she enrolled at the NSD to study acting.
But there, she found acting too limited and realised that direction was her forte. Before she could do anything about it, she got married and moved to Mumbai. There, she, along with thespians Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, formed the theatre company Majma. Her husband’s job then took her to Bhopal in 1980, where she joined Bharat Bhavan and was involved with folk theatre under B.V. Karnath’s guidance.

... contd.