A nuanced review of Nayika Bhoomika, a Tagore-inspired dance drama exploring women’s inner lives through powerful performances.
Nayika Bhoomika
When Nayika Bhoomika opened at St Andrew’s Auditorium on January 9, it arrived with an argument: Tagore’s women are not props to be admired from afar but inner lives to be attended to. The evening, a continuous, four-part dance drama drawing from Chokher Bali, Chandalika, Kabuliwala and Maan Bhonjon, mostly makes good on that claim. It is a production of scale and taste, and it contains, quietly and insistently - two performances that will stay with you: Indrani Mukerjea’s and Subrat Panda’s.
Mukerjea has been visible on stage before; her Chitrangada last year, produced by her company Indrani Mukerjea Enterprise (IME), was a brave first public step into Tagore as performer-producer. What felt different on this night was a new discretion in her craft. Gone were the broad gestures of someone finding their theatrical footing; in their place was a controlled economy: a look held a beat longer, a micro-shift in weight that did more than a sentence of dialogue could. As Binodini in Chokher Bali and later as Giribala in Maan Bhonjon, Mukerjea takes up space without needing to fill it. She allows rage and tenderness to be partial and messy; she lets silence do its work. That willingness to accept ambiguity, and to refuse tidy moral framing, is the performance’s real achievement.
If Mukerjea anchors the evening, her co-star and IME’s newly acquired talent, Subrat Panda supplies its moral gravity. Whether as Mahendra’s taut, self-protective presence or as Gopinath’s quieter contradictions, Panda is steady in a way the show needs. He never overwhelms the frame but he deepens it: a soft line of understanding between him and Mukerjea’s Binodini becomes one of the night’s most telling exchanges. IME’s investment in a talent like Subrat feels vindicated here; he reads like an artist on the rise, someone who can carry supporting weight yet find moments that make you look up and listen.
There is praise too for Aakriti Sharma. Her turns, small but stubbornly precise, give certain sequences their human heartbeat. In scenes that could have dissolved into stylised motion, Aakriti brings clarity so the audience understands where the characters’ choices start and where they fracture. That sort of specificity is rare in ensemble work that privileges form; she offers it as a quiet corrective.
The company as a whole is impressive: Madhumita and Tony Chakraborty’s choreography is disciplined, Santanu Bhattacharya’s score is measured rather than theatrical, and the Khanika Choir lends choral texture at just the right moments. The production’s ambition is plain in its scale, in the backdrops, the costuming and the confident way tableaux move into one another without applause breaks. and that grandeur mostly serves the material, giving Tagore’s quieter moments room to breathe.
But the evening is not without its blemishes. The Chandalika segment, for all its textual potency, did not land as cleanly as the others. At several points the auditorium shifted; a few viewers lost focus and shuffled in their seats. This is not to say the directing was wrong; the idea of rendering caste and awakening through movement is sound, but the casting and tonal calibration for that particular segment felt off. The central performance there needed a different register, a presence that could immediately claim the audience’s attention in the tighter, more intimate beats of the play. A re-casting or subtle reworking of that section would likely restore the evening’s momentum.
Technically, the production is often elegant; yet there were moments when lighting undercut performance. In scenes that required close emotional reading, faces sank too readily into shadow, and the subtleties of expression, the tiny catch in a performer’s eye, a mouth’s half-turn, were lost. For a show that trades so often in the politics of the look and the stillness, that is a material flaw worth fixing.
Still, such caveats hardly spoil the larger impression. Nayika Bhoomika is serious theatre, not a tribute act. It is pushing a formal proposition - that Tagore’s short narratives can be braided into a single evening of dance and thought - and, for the most part, it succeeds. Indrani Mukerjea has moved decisively forward from her debut reckoning; Subrat Panda proves IME right to back him; Aakriti Sharma confirms the company’s eye for detail. With a small tightening in casting and a clearer light plot, this work could feel even more inevitable.
The production moves next to New Delhi on January 18. For now, Mumbai has witnessed a show that asks for patience and rewards it: in a city that often prefers the immediate, Nayika Bhoomika insists on the lasting.
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