Tamas: Where the Stage Becomes a Mirror

A personal essay on the NSD Repertory Company's production at the Summer Theatre Festival

The opening scene told me everything I needed to know. Before a single word was spoken, the set announced itself — grand, layered, a visual feast of the kind that the National School of Drama Repertory Company has made its unmistakable hallmark. And then the music began. Not from some invisible corner of the wings, but loud and emotive singing from the actors themselves, on stage — music so carefully chosen and so organically woven into the fabric of the narrative that it ceased to be accompaniment and became the play's very bloodstream.

I had been wanting to encounter Tamas for a long time. Bhisham Sahni's novel had sat on the edges of my reading life, always deferred; the celebrated television series with Om Puri had similarly eluded me. So when the NSD Repertory Company staged Vibhajan Vibhishika — Tamas as part of their Summer Theatre Festival, it felt less like watching a play and more like finally keeping a long-overdue appointment with a part of our history.

Powerful acting and strong casting are, with the NSD, almost a given. These are professionals shaped by years of rigorous training and then honed further by the demands of a performing repertory company. But where this production scaled genuinely newer heights was in its theatrical imagination — in its daring choices of form and staging. There is a scene where three actors, dressed identically, impersonating the same person, emerge simultaneously from different directions, converging on one of the protagonists. The effect is not merely visual — it is psychological, almost hallucinatory. Fear, worry, mental unraveling: the protagonist conveyed all of these at once, and the staging made you feel each one separately. Brilliant.

Then there were the mob scenes. The easy choice would have been noise — shouting, chaos, the full volume of human violence. Instead, the directors chose silence. The cries and clashes of rioting crowds were rendered through violent, contorted movements of hands and faces — a choreography of horror without sound. Sometimes the noise began and then was drained away into an unbearable quiet. The choice was deliberate, and it was devastating.

The use of props was, as one would expect, precisely calibrated: swords when the moment called for them, guns when a shot had to be fired, sticks to make a point. Nothing excessive, nothing absent.

I come to Partition-themed work with a particular personal weight. One of the first plays I performed in Delhi — at the India Habitat Centre — was Kharashein, written by Gulzar. That encounter shook me. The violence and brutality with which human beings can turn upon one another in the grip of a communal frenzy — the fire, the blood, the gore — seemed almost unthinkable. It marked me.

But Tamas does something more unsettling than depicting violence. It exposes the architecture behind it. It shows, with unflinching clarity, that the riots are rarely as spontaneous as they appear — that there are engineers, profiteers, and political orchestrators working in the shadows. A quiet bedtime conversation between the British Deputy Commissioner and his wife. A petty squabble between political leaders. A local strongman pulling strings from a distance, for purposes that have nothing to do with God, religion or culture. The audience is made to see this slowly, through accumulation — a hint here, a gesture there — and the realisation creeps up on you like cold water.

And the people who actually die, who lose their homes and families and everything they have — they believe they are fighting a righteous battle. They feel they are acting on God's will, or their community's honour, or their own wounded pride. They have no idea they are pawns. They have no agency. That is the most unbearable thing Tamasforces you to sit with.

Tamas — darkness — is the right word. But Sahni's darkness, as rendered on this stage, comes in two registers. First it erupts: violent, volcanic, like molten lava pouring out of the crater of a riot. And then, when the lava cools, you see what remains — not clean ash, but something far worse: the dark, stagnant waste water that surrounds us always, filled with the organic and inorganic debris of our own nature, our own capacity for complicity and silence.

Go. If the NSD Repertory Company's Summer Theatre Festival is still running, go. If it is not, watch for the next one. These are plays that do not merely entertain — they insist, quietly and powerfully, that you look at yourself