Storytelling

Drawing on my two decades of experience as an amateur theatre artist with the Renegade Arts and Theatre Society in Bangalore, I adopt a range of theatre-based practices in my teaching. These include organizing workshops based on Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed pedagogy, and readings of my self-scripted plays on conflicts and disasters in South Asia, written in the documentary/verbatim theatre style and drawing on primary and secondary research. 

My first play, We All Live in Bhopal, on the first thirty years of the struggle for justice following the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster has been produced/ performed/ read over 50 times in theatre venues and universities in India, the US and the UK. I have also written two other plays on conflicts in South Asia. The first, Nations is play about the thirty year civil war in Sri Lanka and the second, Homeland explores the competing narratives of the meaning of 'home' in contemporary India. This play was also rewritten as an audio play.

I have been invited to use these plays as teaching tools at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Leeds, King's College London and Trinity Western University in Canada.  I have written about the benefits of using play readings in the teaching of politics and international development in an upcoming article for Politics. We All Live in Bhopal is a also a case study for an upcoming paper in the special issue 'Bhopal at 40: Remembering and storytelling' in South Asian Review which seeks to explore how the disaster has been represented, in cultural productions over the past 40 years. You can read more here:

1. The Scene is Set, The Hindu

2. Play on Bhopal Engages in Live Debate, The New Indian Express

3. A Tragedy Revisited, The Hindu

4. Talking about Bhopal and Beyond, The Times of India

Please contact me if you want to host a reading at your institution.