Nayika Bhoomika
If the last few months taught Mumbai anything, it was this: when a production is made with patience and care, audiences return. After three well-received showcases of Chitrangada - Ek Sashakt Naari, Indrani Mukerjea Enterprise now opens a new chapter. Nayika Bhoomika, a four-part musical drama drawn from Rabindranath Tagore's short fiction, premieres on January 9, 2026 at St. Andrew's Auditorium - and it arrives with a cast and creative team chosen to bring the stories as close to the audience as possible.
The cast and talent IME is foregrounding - which comprises of actors Indrani Mukerjea, Maninee De, Aakriti Sharma, and Subrat Panda, as well as directors Madhumita and Tony Chakraborty - reads as both a promise and an invitation. Mukerjea remains the production's heartbeat: in front of the house as performer and behind the scenes as producer. Maninee De joins in a visible role that brings theatrical poise and experience; Aakriti Sharma, who the company has highlighted as a noteworthy young performer, adds a fresh and intimate presence to the stage. Subrat Panda appears as part of IME's developing talent roster - a deliberate choice by the producers to mix established names with rising performers and give stage experience to artists on the rise.
Nayika Bhoomika stitches together four of Gurudev RabindranathTagore's stories - Chokher Bali, Kabuliwala, Chandalika and Maan Bhanjon - each selected for the particular way it reflects a facet of womanhood: desire and its consequences, exile and longing, caste and dignity, and the small architecture of pride and humility. Rather than collapsing the tales into a single message, the production treats each as a distinct chapter in an ongoing conversation about agency, choice and the emotional complexity of women's lives.
Mukerjea frames the production plainly: "Tagore wrote people, not types. For me, Nayika Bhoomika is an invitation to listen - to the pauses, to the private decisions that change a life, and to the ways in which women in these stories claim their own language. We are not translating Tagore into shorthand. We are letting him speak in a way that today's audiences can sit with and understand."
Directors Tony and Madhumita Chakraborty continue the approach used in Chitrangada - a choreography-driven drama that leans on mood, movement and a spare, evocative score rather than theatrical excess. The creative brief is simple: give each story room to breathe. That means music that underlines feeling more than it narrates, movement vocabularies that draw from tradition but are not literal recreations, and stagecraft that frames characters rather than distracts from them. The production is also underscored by original music composed by Shantanu Bhattacharya, whose restrained, emotive score weaves the four Tagore narratives together with quiet continuity.
IME's assembling of cast and crew also reflects a strategic impulse at IME: to build repertory work that deepens as it travels. Subrat Panda's inclusion as a named IME artist signals how the company wants to develop talent internally, giving new performers a professional context that pairs them with established collaborators. Likewise, Maninee De and Aakriti Sharma's involvement is intended to broaden the show's appeal across generations while preserving the play's emotional seriousness.
For audiences who tracked Chitrangada, Nayika Bhoomika should feel like a logical, but different, next step. Where Chitrangada focused on a single mythic woman, Nayika Bhoomika multiplies perspectives, offering four short, concentrated studies that together form a larger view of women's interior worlds.
Mukerjea, who has been shaping IME's slate as much as she has been stepping onto stages, puts it another way: "We're trying to build repertory work that keeps growing. Nayika Bhoomika is part of that project⦠a set of stories that ask us to be patient and to listen. If theatre can make people sit quietly with a thought, it has done something useful."
With tickets already on sale on BookMyShow and a January 9 opening date fixed, Nayika Bhoomika is being positioned as both a cultural event and an ongoing conversation, one that will likely invite viewers to return, discuss, and see how classical texts can be pressing and immediate, when treated with respect and care.
