KAUMUDI

Kaumudi (Moonlight) is about a rite of passage. Using the moonlit timeless night on

which Krishna delivered knowledge to Arjuna as its central trope, the play explores the dynamics between an estranged father-son duo who play Ekalavya’s ghost and

Abhimanyu respectively, in a theatre in late 1960’s Allahabad, over three days―the last three performances of a great actor who has nearly lost his sight, and in so doing, the play brings to light the ghosts of caste-based injustices, the passing over of knowledge from a father to a son, a thespian to an upstart, the banality and beauty of art, and how an efficient mode of production ultimately replaces a lesser efficient mode. The play is inspired by two texts―Anand’s Malayalam novel ‘Vyasam Vigneswaram’ and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Blindness’.