In 1953, a young woman played Desdemona in a college production of Othello in Mumbai. Legendary theatre director, Ebrahim Alkazi, who was in the audience later invited her to join his theatre group. That young woman was Vijaya Mehta, and it marked the beginning of a bond with theatre that lasted a lifetime. She passed away on June 30 at the age of 91.
Born Vijaya Jaywant in Vadodara on November 4, 1934, to parents who were members of the Theosophical Society, she grew up surrounded by the world of Indian cinema and yet remained untouched by its allure. Nalini Jaywant and Shobhna Samarth were her aunts. Nutan and Tanuja were her cousins. Through her first marriage to Harin Khote, Durga Khote was her mother-in-law. Mainstream cinema was practically a family inheritance. Yet, she turned her back on it and chose theatre, which was tougher and less glamorous.
Ebrahim Alkazi
| Photo Credit:
KRISHNAN VV
Under Alkazi’s mentorship and later Adi Marzban (Parsi theatre’s finest writer-director), Vijaya sharpened a craft that would go on to reshape modern Marathi theatre. In the early 1960s, she co-founded Rangayan in Mumbai alongside playwright Vijay Tendulkar and actors Shriram Lagoo and Arvind Deshpande. Rangayan pushed against the conventions of a stage — that leaned heavily on mythology and spectacle — and introduced audiences to a more rigorous, contemporary kind of storytelling. Vijaya directed some of the defining productions of her generation: Sakharam Binder, Hayavadana, Ghashiram Kotwal, Wada Chirebandi and Purush, which went on to have over 1,500 shows.
Vijay Mehta with actors Nana Patekar and Vikram Gokhale during the launch of her book Zimma.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
For Mohit Takalkar, one of Marathi theatre’s most respected contemporary directors, Vijaya’s significance was both personal and professional. “She would watch my plays, which was huge for me,” he recalls. “When she gave feedback, it was not like a mentor, but like a conversation between one director and another. There was no sugar coating.”
“She had an amazing vantage point between the experimental and the commercial and she just kept pushing it”Mohit Takalkar
What Takalkar admired most was her refusal to choose between rigour and accessibility. She worked with the most demanding playwrights of her generation — Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Chintaman Tryambak Khanolkar, Jaywant Dalvi and Girish Karnad — and found ways to make their work reach an audience without diminishing it. “She had an amazing vantage point between the experimental and the commercial and she just kept pushing it,” he says and points out a scene in Wada Chirebandi as the clearest evidence of what made her irreplaceable as a director.
In the early 1960s, Vijaya Mehta co-founded Rangayan in Mumbai alongside playwright Vijay Tendulkar.
| Photo Credit:
Shailendra Yashwant
“The most iconic scene when Vahini wears all those ornaments is an absolutely goosebump-inducing moment in modern Marathi theatre. I have watched four productions of Wada Chirebandi and none of them had that impact. That is where a director like Bai (as Vijaya was fondly referred to) comes in.” The writing alone, he says, does not create such a moment. The director does.
Vijaya Mehta’s five best plays
Sakharam Binder
Hayavadana
Ghashiram Kotwal
Wada Chirebandi
Purush
In 1973, her collaboration with East German director Fritz Bennewitz on Ajab Nyay Vartulacha, a Marathi adaptation of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, brought Indian theatre to the Brecht Festival in Berlin. She introduced Indian audiences to the absurdist theatre of Eugene Ionesco. She understood that great theatre has no borders and she spent her career working on that belief.
It was as chairperson of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai that Vijaya took that thinking further. Under her leadership, NCPA became a meeting point for some of the most significant theatre personalities of the 20th century — Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba, Ariane Mnouchkine, Jerzy Grotowski and Richard Schechner — all brought their work to Mumbai, conducted workshops and training programmes. Vijaya attended many of them herself.
Takalkar credits her three short books based on her lecture series, on rhythm, movement, music and space as essential reading for anyone stepping onto the stage. “I always go through them before a workshop. It is like reading Peter Brook’s The Empty Space. My copies are full of markings,” he says.
Vijaya forayed into cinema relatively late. Her first feature, Rao Saheb in 1985, won her the National Film Award in the Best Supporting Actress category. Pestonjee followed, as did roles in Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug and Govind Nihalani’s Party. In each of them, she carried the same precision and emotional intelligence she had spent decades building on the stage. She also wrote her autobiography, Jhimma (translated into English as Abode of Colour), which offer readers a rare, candid account of the evolution of modern Indian theatre.
The honours too accumulated steadily — the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Direction in 1975, the Padma Shri in 1986, the META Lifetime Achievement Award and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Tagore Ratna in 2012.
But her real legacy was the people she shaped — Nana Patekar, Ashok Saraf, Neena Kulkarni, Vikram Gokhale, Reema Lagoo and Bharati Achrekar — among others who passed through her orbit and emerged as better artistes. She leaves behind a body of work that will outlast the grief of her loss. What she also leaves behind is a way of approaching the stage with honesty and complete seriousness. That is a formidable legacy to uphold.
Published – July 07, 2026 05:15 pm IST
