A happy child with a streak of sadness. A warm yellow light with a cool, blue undertone. A stage brought to life as the village of Vrindavan. The sounds of a mischievous child laughing. A mother: absent in body and stage presence but haunts Achyuta and the play.
On 13th February, Maiyya, the first one-woman Hindi play at Ashoka University was performed at the Black Box Theatre. Adapted from the Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree’s novel, Mai, the play was directed, written, and starred Suhaani Gala (UG’26). Shree was also present in the audience and was visiting the university for a lecture.
When asked how she felt about Shree being in the audience, Gala told The Edict, “When I was in the moment performing, I didn’t care”. Gala saw Shree as an audience member and did not think about whether she was going to like it or whether she had adapted it wrong. “I had conviction in the way I had done it,” she said.
The idea and script emerged from a Critical Thinking Seminar—English Vinglish—Gala took in the Monsoon’24 semester, where Shree’s Mai was an assigned reading. An Independent Study Module on mothers that she pursued simultaneously further developed the initial idea. Gala drew from personal experiences and decided to adapt a character-heavy novel as a one-woman play.
The form of a play allowed Gala to place the audience in the position of the mother—the mother who does not reply, the mother who does not speak. Despite the novel spanning across the daughter’s lifetime, the play was localised to when she is a child. This choice was made to illustrate that, while the protagonist grows up in the novel, the experience of daughterhood is not fundamentally different as she ages.
Not only did Gala take the liberty of changing the name of the character but also the name of the text, from Mai to Maiyya. This creative decision was made to cement the location of the play in Vrindavan, which ties into the script’s references to the God Krishna.
Achyuta truly brought to life the stage and the audience through the interactive medium of the play. The Vrindavan accent animated the character through small inflexions, such as ka instead of kya (why), kaha ki instead of kyu ki (because), s instead of sh. Body language was as important as spoken language, with Gala modelling it based on her own younger sister, who was fondly called a “rubber band” at home for how she moves, “It's almost as if there's no agency in one's own body. You're getting pulled in all directions.” More than that, the seamless interaction with the audience was done with the intention of bestowing the audience with a sense of responsibility, much like a mother feels with a child.
Although this was a one-woman production, Gala was supported by a dynamic team, curating the light, sound, set, and managing the production. One of the first people Gala approached was Ananya Rajaram (ASP’25), who was the production manager.
Rajaram described her role as “the overseer of things,” trying to be as honest as possible with all the teams to ensure coordination. She felt “privileged” to be part of a one-woman show, which is what kept her “driven.”
The World of Vrindavan
The elaborate set, weighing about eighty kilograms, consisted of a balcony, swing, charpai, prayer altar, and rangoli. The props used were a trunk, lehenga (skirt), book, letter, radio, trophy, medals, dupatta (scarf), blanket, matkas (pots), makhan (butter), agarbatti (incense), pooja thali (prayer plate).
These props were created by a large team of ten led by Sayona Chachra Pahwa (ASP’25). The team included Varleen Kaur (UG’26), Faiz Mitra (ASP’25), and Arayna Dasgupta (ASP’25). On the art team were Snigdha Dhameja (UG’27), Ananya Pendharkar (UG’27), Andrea Fernandez (UG’26), Neeraja Srinivasan (ASP’25), and Shrshti Santosh (UG’27).
“Since it was a one-person play, the set had to be large and elaborate,” Pahwa tells The Edict, “the point was to make the set so dynamic that the audience always had something new to look at.”
The set was not only elaborate but functional as well. The swing, Achutya used, was modelled after paintings of Radha and Krishna were made of plywood and suspended on ropes. The centrepiece, however, was the staircase Achutya climbed, usually to talk to Krishna, serving as both an elevated platform and altar of sorts. A point of contention before the play was the rangoli—made of flowers—which served as both a part of the setting and as a playful prop. Pahwa, finally, insisted on the rangoli to fill the empty space on stage and to add to the interactive element of the production.
Listening to Achyuta
Madhavan Jayakrishnan (ASP’25) and Aditya Padinjat (ASP’25) on sound were not familiar with Devanagiri and had not read Mai, which, surprisingly they say, worked to their advantage. After watching three runs of the play, the two decided that they wanted to make the character stand out by using diegetic sounds and echoing her voice at certain parts, to make the child seem “larger”. They had the same impulse with the microphones, keeping Gala miked throughout the entire show, making for a very intimate experience for the audience.
Wanting to make the tone of the sound playful, they attempted to modernize Gala’s initial vision of Bhajans while still working with traditional sounds. For instance, in the scene where Achyuta steals the butter, manjeera sounds were used to highlight the mischief of the character and scene.
A Blue Light
One of the most striking features of the play was the almost magical blue light that illuminated the stage when the protagonist was speaking to Krishna, making the God feel like a phantom presence.
Behind the lights were Gopika Sunil (UG’26) and Purujit Banwasi (ASP’25). “We were focused on themes like divinity and something almost trance-like, something out of this world. Which is why we chose the multicoloured blue with the yellow just on the body, as well as various silhouette spots,” Sunil tells The Edict.
The Krishna lights, she said, were based on where the performer was looking to shift the audience’s gaze to that direction using a fresnel light. What was challenging for the two was working with an elevated space, which was the staircase. For this, they devised the lightbulb, “We wanted something on the platform. We already had lights that were lighting up the platform, but we thought it would be nice to add something else, something different, a new type of light,” adds Sunil.
(Edited by Srijana Siri)
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