EPIC ROCK

Lillete Dubey's Jaya! The Victory! is a rock musical based on the Mahabharata

- Peter Griffin

Despite the ubiquity of music in Indian life, and a rich heritage of music in drama, contemporary Indian theatre has staged few home-grown musicals; even fewer with an English libretto. Among those very few was Lillete Dubey’s 1990s production of Sandeep Kanjilal’s retelling of the Mahabharata, Jaya! The Victory! It ran for 40 shows before it closed. And in the months of putting it together, “I must have aged two years,” says Dubey over the phone, on the way to rehearsals of her current production of… the same play.

Bringing Jaya back isn’t a recent impulse, she says; she had got permission from Kanjilal’s daughters as far back as 2013, and plans to do it in 2016 (Primetime Theatre’s 25th anniversary) and 2021 had had to be shelved.