Nautanki Nani: Of Nonverbal Plays & The Bard

Nautanki Nani is back with some answers to your questions! This month, she's talking both classic and contemporary... she's a theatre aficionado, the tough love friend and now, resident agony aunt.

Dear Nautanki Nani, I went to watch the Far Post, and it was beautiful, but I didn't understand much, could you help decipher what it meant? So, we went to The Far Post expecting a neat little package of words to hand us meaning, and instead, we got masked figures, movement, and silence—and now we’re wondering why it didn’t all click? Well, here’s the thing: words aren’t the only way theatre speaks.

The Far Post isn’t some cryptic puzzle; it’s actually quite direct—if you’re willing to tune in differently. It follows a woman (an old friend of mine, Postman Aunty) delivering letters across the highlands of Sikkim, encountering isolated figures in a stark, subterranean world. Some performances even feature a live band from Sikkim playing alongside—the Sofiyum Lepcha Band—adding another layer of immersive storytelling. There’s a bit of text here and there, some letters read out—in Lepcha, no less—another language at some remove for most Mumbaikars. But for the most part, it invites you to waft—yes, waft—through the rhythms of her journey. Walking, biking, delivering messages of the heart—it’s all there, just not in neatly spelled-out sentences.

So, maybe the problem isn’t the play, but how we’ve been conditioned to expect theatre to spoon-feed us meaning through dialogue. As I said, theatre isn’t just about words—it’s about what’s felt, seen, and intuited. It’s also movement, behaviour, silence, abstraction. The Far Post asks you to sit back, trust the ride, and let meaning wash over you in a different way. You don’t have to love it, but you might just surprise yourself if you meet it on its own terms.

Dear Nautanki Nani Why is Shakespeare performed so much in India? Every time I'm on Bookmyshow I end up stumbling on to a new adaptation of one of his classics. I'm curious... what's the deal?

Oh, Shakespeare in India is like that designer bag people carry—not always because they need it, but because it looks good. It’s everywhere, performed constantly, so it’s great that you are asking why? Sure, his stories of revenge, power struggles, and tragic lovers, fit neatly into Indian story-telling traditions. And yes, the British drilled Shakespeare into our education system so hard that we never really shook him off. But let’s be honest, a lot of Shakespeare in India is something theatre groups do because it signals artistic legitimacy. It’s less about what the plays say and more about proving that you can do them.

And that’s ironic because Shakespeare wasn’t writing for elites; his plays were the masala entertainers of his time. His audience was a mixed bag—from the masses to the merchants—and his writing reflected that. The poetry, the puns, the ribald jokes, the wordplay, all of it was meant to land with people who weren’t sitting around analyzing iambic pentameter. But somewhere along the way, we put him on a pedestal, treating his plays like sacred texts instead of what they are—lively, often outrageous performances. In India, this has created a bizarre situation where actors can deliver a Shakespearean soliloquy with stunning fluency—intonation, pauses, tragic sighs all in place—but if you ask them what they just said, they’d struggle to explain. With some exceptions, of course.

Now, you might argue that Shakespeare’s influence is everywhere in India, even in Bollywood—the family feuds, the mistaken identities, the fateful rivalries. But does that mean we know Shakespeare? Those tropes have always been part of Indian storytelling, and they’ve made their way into cinema with no real nod to the Bard—except, of course, when Vishal Bhardwaj decides to have some fun. So yes, Shakespeare is widely performed in India, but his importance? That’s mostly an inherited colonial hangover, dressed up as high art, performed more for prestige than for genuine engagement. And let’s not forget—the ticket sales don’t hurt either.