Colours can be political. Black for protests, white for peace. White for funerals in the east, black for funerals in the west. Colours can also suggest desire. Deep red for seduction, ochre for summer and green for envy. At the heart of artist and theatre director Amitesh Grover’s Mehroon – a word astoundingly difficult to translate even though it has been used to convey maroon – is the conundrum of insatiable desires stacked like a palette of maroons.
Written by Sarah Mariam in Hindustani, Mehroon, which opened the IHC Theatre Festival 2025, weaves questions of love, desire, identity, and gender with ideas of sisterhood, independence and creativity. It is as much a musical delight — composed by the brilliant Garima Diwakar and driven by a chorus of actor-singers including herself — as a complex portrayal of suppressed sexualities with a comical/philosophical/melancholic interference every now and then.
The play begins with the arrival of a newly-widowed woman at an ashram, played by the inimitable Ipshita Chakraborty Singh, in what could have been the beginning of a dreary life. But instead, she steps into a world where her realities weave a web of fantasies and her craft takes form, quite literally.
The women our protagonist meets at the ashram are wrapped in endless yards of maroon. She arrives in white but sheds it for that colour. Amanjeet Proch, Debashree Chakraborty, Shruti Mishra, Silpi Dutta and Garima Diwakar carry their own stories as women at the ashram, punctuating the scenes with their incredible acting-singing combo. The song “Registaan ke watan mein, har raet ke kann mein” (In the land of the desert, in each grain of the sand) lingers for days due to its choral brilliance.
As the new entrant begins to unwrap her life, she speaks of wet earth — as someone belonging to the Kumhar community who are experts in pottery — but has never been fully allowed to work with it. But here, there is room for craft, and imagination, and the backing of a sorority.
She begins to play with the clay to sell statues in the market at first, but then begins to sit with the shapes, nurturing her yearnings for companionship. The miniature statue, or putla, begins to take form soon as she whispers something to it. She contours each form relying on the wilderness of her mind, spends hours at night sculpting a different body, which eventually takes the human form every time — played by Ajit Singh Palawat.
Chakraborty Singh’s depiction of the character sways between fantasies/aspirations and reality and she traverses each with ingenuity. At the beginning, the maroon, representing freedom, is heavy. A reminder that independence comes at the cost of choice, which, if exercised with caution, can untie knots of oppression and subvert reality. “Mehroon ka bhaar uthaana seekh lo, phir lutf hi lutf hai” (learn to carry the weight of the maroon, there is only pleasure after). Kanchan Ujjal, who designed the costumes, seems to have made a conscious choice to pick shades of maroon rather than sticking to one kind of fabric or hue.
The play blurs boundaries of dreams and reality. However, it also drives home the message that the agency to confine something to a boundary, or let it run amok, both lie within ourselves. Mehroon is not an easy work to watch with the range of emotions it carries, especially for women. It can even be confusing to watch, given the detailing combined with the sharp sway of emotions. However, it is a necessary work in contemporary theatre, which helps a lost viewer navigate.
The IHC theatre festival is on at the India Habitat Centre till September 28, featuring 14 plays.
