Street Theatre in India: From IPTA’s Revolutionary Plays to Jana Natya Manch’s Protest Theatre
On January 1, 1989, a street theatre group was performing a play called Halla Bol (Raise Your Voice) at a workers’ colony in Sahibabad, just outside Delhi. The play was about the exploitation of industrial laborers. Halfway through the performance, a group of armed men attacked the actors and their audience. The director and lead performer, a 34-year-old man named Safdar Hashmi, was beaten so badly that he died in the hospital the next day.
Two days later, his theatre group went back to the same spot and finished the play.
That single act — performing a play in the exact location where your director was murdered for performing it — tells you everything you need to know about Indian street theatre. This is not theatre as entertainment. This is not theatre as cultural enrichment. This is theatre as a political act so threatening that people have been killed for practicing it.
The history of street theatre in India is inseparable from the history of political resistance, social reform, and the ongoing struggle over who gets to speak in public spaces. It’s a history that runs from the anti-fascist movement of the 1940s through the communist organizing of the 1950s and 60s, the Emergency resistance of the 1970s, and the ongoing protest movements of today. And at every stage, the form has been shaped by practitioners who believed that theatre doesn’t need a building, a ticket booth, or a middle-class audience to be powerful.
The Roots: Why Theatre Went to the Streets
Indian performance has always had a relationship with open spaces. The traditional forms — Nautanki in Uttar Pradesh, Tamasha in Maharashtra, Therukoothu in Tamil Nadu, Jatra in Bengal — were all performed in open grounds, temple courtyards, and village squares. The idea of enclosing performance within a building is actually the anomaly in Indian theatre history, a colonial import that arrived with the proscenium stage in the 19th century.
So when political theatre moved to the streets in the 20th century, it wasn’t creating something new so much as reclaiming something old. The innovation wasn’t the location — it was the content and the intention. Traditional open-air theatre told mythological stories and reinforced community bonds. Political street theatre told contemporary stories and sought to disrupt the status quo.
The technical demands of street performance shaped the aesthetic. You can’t use subtle lighting when the sun is your light source. You can’t rely on sound systems in a noisy market. You can’t use sets when your stage is a traffic island. So street theatre developed a performance vocabulary built on the human body, the human voice, and the creative use of minimal props. It’s physically demanding, vocally challenging, and structurally tight — you have about fifteen to twenty minutes to grab an audience, tell a story, and make your point before they drift away.
IPTA: The Mother of All Indian Theatre Movements
The Indian People’s Theatre Association — IPTA — was founded on May 25, 1943, in Mumbai (then Bombay), and its creation was one of the most significant events in the history of Indian performing arts.
The Context: Fascism, Famine, and Freedom
To understand IPTA, you have to understand 1943. World War II was raging. The British were using India as a supply base and military staging ground. The Bengal Famine — one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the 20th century — was killing millions while the colonial government diverted food supplies to the war effort. The Quit India movement of 1942 had been brutally suppressed, and most of the Congress leadership was in jail.
The Communist Party of India, which had taken the controversial position of supporting the British war effort against fascism (while simultaneously criticizing colonial rule), was the only major political organization still operating legally. And its cultural wing decided that art could serve the anti-fascist cause.
IPTA brought together an astonishing collection of talent. We’re talking about people who would go on to become some of the most important figures in Indian culture: Balraj Sahni, Prithviraj Kapoor, Ritwik Ghatak, Salil Chowdhury, Utpal Dutt, Habib Tanvir, Shombhu Mitra, Dina Pathak, K.A. Abbas, and dozens more. These weren’t amateurs dabbling in political expression — they were serious artists who believed that art and politics were inseparable.
The Bengal Famine and Nabanna
IPTA’s first major theatrical production was Nabanna (Harvest), written by Bijon Bhattacharya and directed by Shombhu Mitra in 1944. The play dramatized the Bengal Famine — the starvation, the displacement, the indifference of the colonial administration.
Nabanna was performed in Calcutta and then toured through Bengal, and its impact was seismic. Here was a play about people dying of hunger performed for audiences who had watched their neighbors starve. It wasn’t reportage — Bhattacharya created specific characters with specific stories — but it drew directly from the reality around it. People wept during performances. Collection boxes raised money for famine relief. The play made the famine visible as a political failure, not a natural disaster.
This was IPTA’s central insight: connect art to the immediate experience of the audience, and the art becomes a catalyst for political consciousness. Don’t preach at people — show them their own lives on stage, and let the outrage generate itself.
The Squad System: Taking Theatre Everywhere
IPTA organized itself into traveling cultural squads that moved through rural areas performing plays, songs, and dances. The format was flexible — a squad might perform a full one-act play, or just a few songs, or a combination, depending on the audience and the setting.
The squads took theatre to places that had never seen organized political performance: factory floors, mining camps, agricultural labor settlements, tribal areas. They performed in Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam — whatever language the audience spoke. The content addressed local issues: land reform, labor rights, caste discrimination, women’s exploitation, colonial economic policies.
The cultural impact was enormous. IPTA’s songs became folk songs — compositions by Salil Chowdhury and Hemang Biswas entered oral tradition and are still sung today, decades after their authors’ deaths. The visual style of IPTA posters and banners influenced Indian graphic design. The performance techniques developed by IPTA squads became the template for every subsequent street theatre movement in the country.
The Decline and Fragmentation
IPTA didn’t survive intact. The Communist Party’s internal splits — between those following the Soviet line and those following the Chinese line, between those favoring electoral politics and those favoring armed revolution — tore the organization apart in the 1950s and 60s. Many of IPTA’s most talented members moved into commercial cinema (Balraj Sahni, Prithviraj Kapoor) or mainstream theatre (Shombhu Mitra, Utpal Dutt), carrying IPTA’s artistic sensibilities with them but no longer working within the organization.
But IPTA’s legacy wasn’t the organization — it was the idea. The idea that theatre belongs in public spaces, that artists have a responsibility to engage with political reality, that performance can mobilize people — this idea spread everywhere. Every street theatre group in India, whether they know it or not, is an IPTA descendant.
Safdar Hashmi and Jana Natya Manch: Theatre as Resistance
If IPTA was the mother of Indian political theatre, Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theatre Front, commonly known as Janam) was its most dedicated child. And Safdar Hashmi was the person who made Janam matter.
The Making of a Street Theatre Revolutionary
Safdar Hashmi was born in 1954 in Delhi to a middle-class family. His father was a professor. He studied English literature at St. Stephen’s College — one of Delhi’s most elite institutions — and was active in student politics. He was smart, articulate, funny, and charismatic. He could have had a comfortable career in academia or publishing.
Instead, he chose street corners.
Hashmi joined Janam in 1973 and eventually became its driving force — writer, director, actor, and chief organizer. Under his leadership, Janam performed in working-class neighborhoods, factory gates, resettlement colonies, and construction sites across Delhi and its surroundings. The audiences were rickshaw pullers, factory workers, domestic servants, construction laborers — people who had no access to formal theatre and no reason to trust anyone from a St. Stephen’s background.
Hashmi won their trust by being genuinely committed. He didn’t perform for workers and then go back to an air-conditioned Delhi drawing room. He lived modestly, worked tirelessly, and treated his audience as equals. His plays were sharp, funny, and packed with information — they didn’t talk down to their audiences. They used humor and satire to make serious political points about wages, working conditions, police harassment, and corruption.
The Plays: Political Satire with Teeth
Janam under Hashmi produced a remarkable body of work. The plays were short (fifteen to thirty minutes), designed for street performance, and dealt with issues directly affecting the working poor.
Machine (1978) — about the exploitation of factory workers, told through the metaphor of workers as parts of a machine. The physical performance style was athletic and synchronized, turning the actors’ bodies into cogs and gears.
Aurat (Woman, 1979) — about gender discrimination and domestic violence. One of the first street plays to deal specifically with women’s issues, it was performed hundreds of times across north India.
Halla Bol (Raise Your Voice, 1989) — the play that was being performed when Hashmi was murdered. It dealt with the exploitation of workers by management with the connivance of local political power.
Raja ka Baja (The King’s Musical Instrument, 1989) — Hashmi’s last completed play, a musical satire about corruption and authoritarianism.
January 1, 1989: The Attack
The murder of Safdar Hashmi was not random violence. He had been warned. Janam’s performances in workers’ colonies around Ghaziabad and Sahibabad had annoyed local politicians who relied on keeping workers passive and disorganized. A street play that told workers they had rights and that they should organize — this was a direct threat to local power structures.
The attack came from men associated with a local Congress party politician. They arrived with guns and iron rods. They beat Hashmi, his wife Moloyashree (who was injured and continued performing in subsequent years), and several audience members. A worker named Ram Bahadur, who tried to protect the performers, was also killed.
Hashmi died on January 2, 1989. He was 34 years old.
After the Murder: Theatre Refuses to Die
The response to Hashmi’s assassination was extraordinary. Theatre groups across India staged performances in his memory. Artists, writers, and intellectuals organized massive demonstrations. The political establishment was forced to respond — the politician linked to the attack was eventually arrested (though the case dragged through the courts for decades).
Most importantly, Janam went back to Sahibabad on January 4 and performed Halla Bol at the exact spot where Hashmi had been attacked. Moloyashree Hashmi, still bearing injuries from the attack, led the performance. The audience that gathered was larger than the one that had witnessed the attack. The message was clear: you can kill the artist, but you cannot kill the art.
Janam continues to perform today, making it one of the longest-running street theatre groups in the world. Under Moloyashree Hashmi’s leadership, the group has expanded its repertoire to address issues like communalism, globalization, women’s rights, and environmental degradation. They still perform in working-class areas. They still don’t charge admission. The tradition Safdar built is very much alive.
Badal Sircar: The Third Theatre
No discussion of Indian street theatre is complete without Badal Sircar, the Bengali playwright and director who theorized and practiced what he called the “Third Theatre.”
Rejecting Both Traditions
Sircar (1925-2011) started as a conventional playwright working within the proscenium tradition. His early plays — Evam Indrajit (1963), for instance — were performed in proper theatres for middle-class audiences. But by the 1970s, he had become deeply uncomfortable with this model.
His discomfort was political and aesthetic. The proscenium theatre, he argued, was inherently exclusionary. It required a building, which meant rent. It required electricity, which meant infrastructure. It required tickets, which meant only the middle class could afford to attend. The entire economics of conventional theatre ensured that the people who most needed to hear challenging ideas would never encounter them.
But he also wasn’t satisfied with conventional street theatre, which he felt was often crude propaganda — more concerned with delivering a political message than creating genuine theatrical art. The sloganeering tendency of some street theatre groups bothered him. Political theatre didn’t have to be aesthetically impoverished.
The Third Way
Sircar’s Third Theatre was an attempt to find a space between the proscenium and the street. He stripped away everything that created barriers between performer and audience: stage, lighting rigs, sound systems, costumes, props. His group, Shatabdi (founded in 1967), performed in parks, courtyards, community halls, and open grounds. The performers wore their everyday clothes. They used their bodies, their voices, and sometimes simple objects — a stick, a cloth, a chair — to create theatrical worlds.
The style was physically demanding. Sircar developed exercises and techniques (influenced by Grotowski and yoga) that trained performers to use their bodies with precision and expressiveness. The acting wasn’t naturalistic — it was heightened, stylized, and often collective, with the ensemble moving and speaking as a single organism.
The content was Sircar’s, and it was good. Plays like Bhoma (1974), Michhil (The Procession, 1974), and Stale News (1975) dealt with poverty, political violence, and social apathy. But they weren’t agitprop. They had nuance, ambiguity, and artistic integrity. Sircar proved that you could be politically committed and aesthetically sophisticated at the same time.
The Contribution
Sircar’s lasting contribution was theoretical as much as practical. His writings — particularly his book The Third Theatre — articulated a philosophy of performance that influenced generations of Indian theatre workers. His key arguments were that theatre must be free (no tickets), that it must go to where people are (not wait for people to come to it), and that it must respect both its audience and its art form.
He also demonstrated that street theatre could be quiet. Not every outdoor performance needs to be a shouting match. Some of Sircar’s most powerful work was almost meditative in its stillness — bodies moving slowly in a park at dusk, voices barely above speaking volume, the audience drawn in by the intensity of the performers’ concentration rather than pushed back by volume.
The Student Theatre Movement
Indian universities have been incubators of street theatre since the 1970s. The combination of political awareness, youthful energy, and limited budgets (students can’t afford to rent theatres) makes campuses natural ground for street performance.
The JNU Factor
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi has been the epicenter of student political theatre for decades. The campus culture — intensely political, genuinely diverse in caste and regional composition, ideologically charged — produces a steady stream of performers and groups who take their work off-campus into the wider city.
JNU students have formed multiple street theatre groups over the years, performing at protest sites, worker colonies, and public events. The university’s political culture means that theatre isn’t extracurricular — it’s part of how political arguments are made and contested. Different ideological groups have their own theatrical traditions and styles, and performance competitions between factions are as much about political positioning as artistic merit.
Beyond JNU
Student street theatre isn’t just a JNU phenomenon. Virtually every major Indian university has some form of political performance tradition. Hindu College, Kirori Mal, Miranda House (all in Delhi University), Jadavpur University in Kolkata, the Film and Television Institute (FTII) in Pune, JMI in Delhi — all have produced significant street theatre work.
The annual college festival circuit also sustains street theatre. Competitions like Mood Indigo (IIT Bombay), Rendezvous (IIT Delhi), and various regional festivals include street theatre categories that attract teams from across the country. Some of the performances are remarkable — tightly choreographed, politically engaged, and performed with an intensity that professional actors would envy.
The Training Ground
Many of India’s most important theatre practitioners got their start in student street theatre. The experience of performing in hostile environments (not everyone appreciates political theatre in their neighborhood), with no resources, to audiences who can simply walk away — this is training you can’t get in a drama school. It teaches you to grab attention fast, to make your point clearly, to use your body as your primary instrument, and to respect your audience’s time and intelligence.
Modern Street Theatre: What’s Happening Now
Street theatre in India isn’t a historical artifact — it’s a living, evolving practice that continues to respond to contemporary issues.
Issue-Based Performance
The current generation of street theatre groups addresses a wide range of issues: gender violence (particularly after the December 2012 Delhi gang rape case, which triggered a massive response from theatre groups), environmental degradation, communal violence, caste discrimination, LGBTQ+ rights, and workers’ rights in the gig economy.
Organizations like the National Street Theatre Festival (organized annually) bring together groups from across the country, providing a platform for sharing work and techniques. State-level festivals in Kerala, West Bengal, Maharashtra, and Karnataka sustain regional traditions.
The Digital Pivot
The COVID-19 pandemic forced street theatre — which is fundamentally about physical proximity and shared public space — to confront the digital world. Some groups experimented with online performances, streaming shows on YouTube and social media. Others argued that digital performance betrayed the essential principle of street theatre: meeting people where they are, in their physical space.
The pandemic also generated new content. Groups created pieces about healthcare worker exploitation, vaccine inequality, migrant worker displacement (the images of lakhs of workers walking home during the first lockdown were themselves theatrical in their devastating visual power), and the digital divide in education.
The Challenge of Relevance
Street theatre in the 2020s faces a genuine challenge: in a world where everyone has a smartphone and political content floods social media feeds, what is the unique value of a live performance on a street corner? Why should someone stop and watch fifteen minutes of political theatre when they can watch a two-minute Instagram reel on the same topic?
The practitioners I’ve talked to have a consistent answer: embodiment. A live performance creates a shared space of attention that no screen can replicate. When an actor is sweating in front of you, performing a character who looks like your neighbor, telling a story that echoes your daily experience — that creates a connection that a video cannot. The body in space, the voice in air, the eyes meeting eyes — this is primal human communication, and it retains its power even in the age of algorithms.
Whether they’re right — whether street theatre can continue to hold its audience against the pull of digital media — is one of the most interesting open questions in Indian performance today.
What Street Theatre Teaches Us About Indian Democracy
Street theatre in India is not just a theatrical form. It’s a democratic practice. It embodies the right to assemble, the right to speak, and the right to challenge power in public space. When a group of young performers takes over a corner of a busy market and starts performing a play about police brutality or industrial pollution or caste violence, they are exercising rights that millions of people fought and died for.
That Safdar Hashmi was killed for doing this tells you how threatening it can be. That his group went back and finished the play tells you how necessary it is.
Indian street theatre doesn’t ask for a polite audience. It doesn’t provide comfortable seats. It doesn’t serve interval drinks. What it provides is something more valuable: the experience of hearing uncomfortable truths spoken out loud, in public, by people who believe that saying them matters more than personal safety.
As long as there are things that need to be said and public spaces in which to say them, Indian street theatre will survive. It has earned that survival the hardest way possible.