My research spans theatre and performance studies, cultural history, archives, intercultural performance, heritage, and cultural policy. I have led and collaborated on major funded research projects, including an ICSSR-funded national study on the economic and livelihood impact of COVID-19 on India's performing arts sector and an India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) study on the long-term impact of the Strategic Management in the Art of Theatre (SMART) programme. As a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow at New York University, I researched intercultural exchange, community identity, and cultural value in performance.
I am the co-editor (with Ashutosh Potdar) of Performance Making and the Archive (Routledge India, 2021), a volume that brings together scholars and practitioners to examine the relationship between archival materials and contemporary performance-making. The book explores how archives can function not only as repositories of history but also as creative resources for artistic research, dramaturgy, and performance practice.
I edited this book, written by Kumudini Arvind Mehta, as a project commissioned to me by Sahitya Rangbhoomi Pratisthan and Mr. Ashok Kulkarni. The book traces the journey of theatre in Bombay from early amateur performances at Bombay Green, now Horniman Circle, in the late eighteenth century, to the emergence of professional theatre in colonial Bombay. I gave the manuscript its present shape by updating citations, incorporating recent research, and adding images of former theatre districts wherever relevant.
This book examines theatre and performance in colonial India through questions of experience, freedom, modernity, institution-building, and national subject formation. Focusing on Bombay and Calcutta in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it traces the emergence of “Indian theatre” from Orientalist discourse to colonial-native theatre practices, swadeshi jatra in Bengal, and the Indian People’s Theatre Association in Bombay. It also analyses the 1956 Drama Seminar organised by the Sangeet Natak Akademi and its role in shaping post-Independence ideas of Indian theatre and national culture.