From margins to centre stage: A theatre programme lending voice to the unheard

Though she was introduced earlier to the world of theatre by an NGO, Kumari got her first experience of professional training only in 2025 when a group of theatre practitioners in Delhi kicked off a programme titled Bargad.

Possibly a one-of-its-kind initiative, Bargad reaches out to performers from historically marginalised communities — tackling gender, caste and class hierarchies — and offers them a “fully-funded, six-month intensive theatre training programme”.

Birth of an initiative

Bargad is the brainchild of the Guild of the Goat, a theatre company, and Incentive Foundation, an organisation that works in semi-rural India to address structural barriers to access and opportunity.

Among the theatre practitioners who have pushed Bargad are familiar names of the stage, such as Amba-Suhasini K Jhala, Anirudh ‘Rudy’ Nair and Sanyukta Saha of Aagaaz Theatre Trust, and Shambhavi Singh, the founder of Oddbird Theater.

“The programme was born out of questioning the relevance of theater and what space it occupies in our world today. For theatre to continue to exist and have a meaning, it is vital that the audiences who engage with theatre in spaces across the city change. We believe that if we shift who has access to telling the stories and, therefore, the kind of stories being told, the audiences coming to engage with them will change too. The ecosystem will start changing,” says Nair.

Under the programme, talented performers from across communities find their footing in the world of stage under the training of India’s top theatre personalities, such as Lakshmana KP, Diya Naidu from Bengaluru, Hetal Varia and Sapan Saran from Mumbai, Neel Chaudhuri and Anuradha Kapur from Delhi, to conduct sessions and provide mentorship support.

Story of a sanitation worker

Their latest presentation is a two-day run of the play, Hawa Mahal, at Oddbird Theatre, which kicks off Saturday. The play revolves around the life of a sanitation worker who wishes to give his daughter a future beyond the work and caste boundaries that have shaped his own life.

How are such ideas born? “At Bargad, we are given a performance-making challenge every week. For our final performance-making challenge, we were asked to put up a play on ‘What matters to you’. A team member said, ‘Most of us are children of sanitation workers… so why don’t we tell a story about that?” recalls Anjali, a theatre educator who has learned more than storytelling from Bargad. “I used to always be unsure about myself. Once I joined this programme, I realised that it’s alright to be imperfect,” she says.

During the extensive research for the play, the group discovered a detail nobody talked about any more. “When sanitation workers enter a sewer, they are surrounded by toxic gases. This affects them so, as soon as they come out, they drink Limca. Hamara natak isi ke around gloomta hai ki kaise ek glamour wali duniya aur ek sanitation worker ki life judi hui hai (This is what our play is about — how the two worlds intermingle),” says Anjali, adding that preparation for the play included reading ‘Annihilation of Caste’ by Dr BR Ambedkar.

She adds, “Hawa Mahal is prepared under ‘Bargad ka Chabutra Grant 2025’. Without this grant, our story would have been just an idea we wished to work on.”

In the first year, Bargad received 75 applicants for 14 spaces. In the second year, there were 200 applications.

“Right now, we are about a week away from the first official closing of the application deadline. We have about 78 applications. This will, probably, double because 90% of applications come in the last week,” says Nair.