If Ratan Thiyam built the cathedral of Manipuri theatre, Heisnam Kanhailal built its open field. His work felt more like a ritual happening in your village than a performance staged in front of you. Bare feet on earth. Bodies leaning into wind and grief. Almost no text. Almost no set. And yet the political punch was unmistakable.
He called it the Theatre of the Earth.
Who was Heisnam Kanhailal?
Heisnam Kanhailal was a Manipuri theatre director, founder of Kalakshetra Manipur (the company, not the Chennai institute), and one of India’s most uncompromising political theatre makers. He was born in 1941 in Imphal and passed away in 2016. He received the Padma Shri in 2004 and the Padma Bhushan in 2016. His wife, the actor Sabitri Heisnam, is widely regarded as one of the greatest stage actors India has produced. They worked together for over five decades.
What is Kalakshetra Manipur?
Kalakshetra Manipur is a small repertory theatre company founded by Heisnam Kanhailal in 1969 in Imphal. It is not connected to the Chennai Kalakshetra. The company is residential, ensemble based, and rooted in Manipuri folk life. Kanhailal often described it less as a theatre and more as a community of bodies trying to remember how to feel something honestly on stage. The training was physical, ritual, and almost monastic.
His philosophy: Theatre of the Earth
Kanhailal rejected most of what proscenium theatre took for granted. No raised stage. Minimal text. No grand sets. Performances often happened in open fields, courtyards, or simple village halls. Actors trained their bodies to hold extreme emotion through breath, posture, and stillness rather than through dialogue.
He used to say the audience needs only one thing from a performer: a real body, willing to fully feel what it is performing. Everything else is decoration.
The famous play: Draupadi
His most controversial and most powerful production was Draupadi (2000), an adaptation of Mahasweta Devi’s short story, performed by Sabitri Heisnam. The play ends with Draupadi standing nude in front of her tormentors, refusing the dignity-by-clothing they offer her, daring them to see what they have done. It was a devastating piece of political theatre. Some performances were stopped by authorities. Some were threatened by activists. Sabitri performed it anyway, for years.
It remains one of the most cited examples of brave political performance in modern Indian theatre.
Other notable productions
- Pebet (1975), an animal allegory of cultural assimilation in Manipur
- Memoirs of Africa (1985)
- Karna (1997)
- Dakghar (Tagore’s The Post Office), revisited multiple times
- Migi Sharang (2008), a haunting meditation on missing persons
Sabitri Heisnam, the actor at the centre
You cannot talk about Kanhailal without talking about Sabitri. She is the actor on whom most of his major work was built. Her stage presence is famously elemental: a single breath can fill a hall, a small shift in her shoulders can change the meaning of a scene. She received the Padma Shri in 2008 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. Many young Indian actors travel to Imphal specifically to watch her work.
Why his work mattered politically
Manipur has spent decades shadowed by AFSPA, insurgency, encounter killings, and the long protest of Irom Sharmila. Kanhailal’s theatre lived inside that reality without pretending otherwise. He made plays about women’s bodies and state violence. About cultural memory and assimilation. About the everyday grief that sits in a community under permanent siege. He did not write op-eds. He made theatre that did not let an audience leave the room unchanged.
His influence on Indian theatre
Directors and performers who have studied Kanhailal’s work read like a who’s who of serious Indian theatre over the past three decades. Many emphasise three lessons they took from him:
- Trust the body more than the script.
- If you have nothing real to say, do not stage anything.
- Stay close to the ground. The earth holds older stories than the page.
How to learn more
Sangeet Natak Akademi and the Manipur State Kala Akademi maintain archives of his work. Several documentary films on Kanhailal and Sabitri Heisnam are available, and his writings on the philosophy of Theatre of the Earth are still circulated among theatre students in India.
The short version
Heisnam Kanhailal proved that political theatre does not need to shout. It can be a barefoot actress on red earth in front of fifty villagers, and it can rattle the country. His work, and the actor at the centre of it, deserve to be remembered well past their own lifetimes.
For more, read about Northeast India’s hidden theatre traditions, and our piece on India’s National School of Drama.