When I moved from Bhopal to Chandigarh, my teacher BV Karanth told me that theatre must be regional, vernacular and local. I was diffident about working in Punjabi theatre. It had been unfairly lumped together with the double-meaning commercial comedies staged in Delhi, which came to be known as ‘Sapru House Theatre’. English theatre sat comfortably at the top of the food chain, and Hindi theatre was the safe runner-up. Why was regional theatre treated as a second-class citizen? Is our cultural map rigged by a silent, snobbish hierarchy of languages? Colonialism handed the baton to English; Independence passed it…
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