Anmol is a theatre director, writer and arts consultant, as well as the founder and former executive director of the India Foundation for the Arts, an independent philanthropic organisation.

One of his recent plays, Apne Ghar Jaisa, produced by Ranga Shankara, has received both critical and popular acclaim. Following more than 25 performances in Bengaluru, the play will be staged in Mumbai between September 11 and 13, 2025.

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From philosophy to theatre – how did this journey evolve and how has it enriched you?

In truth, my fascination for theatre preceded my interest in philosophy. I grew up in a bohemian household, which was open to artists, writers and intellectuals at all hours of the day and night. Impromptu poetry recitals, classical music baithaks and play rehearsals were a regular occurrence at home. I had the good fortune of being exposed to the arts and ideas from a very early age.

It’s not surprising, then, that I began doing plays in college long before I elected to specialise in philosophy (for my Master’s degree at the University of Poona). Indeed, my years of studying and teaching philosophy in India in the 1970s ran parallel to my early work as an actor and director in the theatre. I also directed four productions in Cambridge — including three in a classroom, a library, and a garden respectively — because I was excited by the opportunity that the University offered to stage work outside conventional auditoriums.

I soon had to acknowledge, however, that philosophical questions did not come to me readily and naturally, and I worried about ending up as a bored, workaday college teacher. As I sat in dark libraries, feeling restive and depressed, it also became clear to me that scholarship was not my calling. 

But did I move away from philosophy because I became aware that theatre was my calling? Not really. While I did some theatre when I returned to Mumbai in 1983, it did not occur to me to pursue theatre professionally because that seemed possible, as far as I could tell, only with the kind of theatre that did not interest me.

Then, as luck would have it, I was given the opportunity to take charge of the Ford Foundation’s philanthropic endeavours in classical learning and theatre in South Asia. One of the highlights of the nearly three decades I have since devoted to developing independent arts philanthropy in India, has been the remarkable theatre artists I got to meet across India. Learning about their rich and diverse theatre ideas and practices broadened my understanding of the possibilities of drama and influenced my own stage work during the same period and later.

I continued to direct plays, although only now and then, during my busy years in the philanthropic sector. And after retiring from full-time work, my involvement in the theatre has expanded to include writing for the stage, designing lights, teaching theatre design, and conducting workshops for actors on such subjects as voice and speech, character building and script analysis.

Your play Apne Ghar Jaisa, an adaptation of Oldenberg, a play by Barry Bermange, revolves around everyday bigotry and its impact on the social fabric. What about the idea compelled you to adapt it?

The idea that prompted me to reimagine Oldenberg as a play set in today’s India is not found in the original work. Barry Bermange wrote Oldenberg in 1968 when anti-immigration sentiments had peaked in England. It is a play that explores xenophobia, the fear of the foreigner, and its corrosive consequences.

By contrast, everyone is a foreigner to everyone else in India, as one wag put it. The enemy, in other words, can be perceived to be within as much as outside our samaaj. The unspoken but deep-seated prejudices that we harbour about people who are ‘not like us’ can receive free rein due to public discord or political manipulation. The outcome can be dire, creating wider and eventually unbridgeable social fissures. I saw the possibility of rewriting Oldenberg as a meaningful play for present-day India, underscoring the destructive potential of othering people living among us.

In today’s increasingly polarised world, the social fabric feels more fragile than ever. What thoughts and feelings do you hope to leave audiences with, through the play?

Apne Ghar Jaisa (AGJ) confronts spectators with certain truths about the social world they inhabit, and asks them to reflect on where such proclivities, if unchecked, will take us as a people and a nation.

Which is not to say that my intention was to evoke a particular response from the audience. That, I feel, is a bad idea, destined to fail, not least because spectators at a theatre performance are extremely varied and can be expected to react in different and even unexpected ways to a play. (And so it has been with AGJ!) I can have only one spectator in mind when I take decisions about a play — myself.

Far from trying to direct audiences to react in one way or the other, AGJ creates many grey and unvoiced moments for spectators to fill with their own meanings. The play does not explain itself, which left some spectators dissatisfied. I wonder if people have become reluctant to read narratives for metaphorical or allegorical meanings partly because they now routinely feed on easily digested serials and films on OTT platforms.

What ideas and themes would you like to explore next?

After AGJ, I wrote and directed Innocence, a black comedy based on Franz Kafka’s The Trial. This play is also set in contemporary India because I felt that our country had begun to replicate the disturbing, nightmarish world of the novel — a world in which power is exercised inexplicably and arbitrarily, leaving individuals befuddled and helpless.

The obvious target of both these plays is our hard right political regime, which toils stealthily to undermine the founding ideas of the nation. Should the current dispensation become nerveless enough to show its true colours, and creeping authoritarianism turns into the naked exercise of unfettered power, what would it be like to live under its yoke? That may well be the question my next play will ask.