On July 15, we celebrate the birth centenary of a quiet revolutionary — Badal Sircar. A man who, through theatre, chose to shake the very foundations of performance practice in India. A thinker, a playwright, a performer, a reformer. And, for me, a beacon.

My own journey with Sircar’s work began not on stage, but behind it. As a young theatre practitioner and a lighting designer still fumbling with gels and gobos, I encountered a photocopied script of ‘Evam Indrajit’ left backstage after a college festival. I didn’t know then that I had stumbled into a world that would remain with me — dense, poetic, angry, political, and, above all, human.

I knew Sircar’s name long before I read any of his plays. My father, the late GS Channi, was a passionate pioneer of community and street theatre in Chandigarh — working in city squares, campuses and neighbourhoods to engage people directly. In the late 1970s, he invited Badal Sircar to conduct a workshop with his theatre group here. Though I wasn’t yet born, I grew up hearing my father speak with quiet wonder about how Sircar dismantled the line between actor and audience, turning theatre into a political conversation.

Badal Sircar was born in 1925 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), a city that would remain central to his life and politics. His early life was marked by a peculiar duality — he trained as a civil engineer and later pursued town planning in England, but returned to a country hungry for social transformation. The theatre, he realised, would be his real city to plan and build. And in it, he drew new maps.

Sircar’s theatre was never about escape; it was about engagement. While mainstream Indian theatre in the ’60s was often encased in proscenium polish or mythical grandeur, Sircar turned his attention to the streets, courtyards and terraces. He called it Third Theatre, a theatre that existed between the State-sponsored First Theatre (institutional, elitist) and the popular Second Theatre (commercial). His was a people’s theatre. No lights, no raised stage, no ticketed entry. Just actor and audience. Just truth and provocation.

I remember the first time I saw ‘Spartacus’, not in a theatre, but in a narrow alley of North Kolkata during a winter residency. It wasn’t just a play, it was a gathering. A circle. No elevated stage, no lighting cue sheets. And yet, the emotion was searing. A teenager, standing barely 5 feet from the actor playing Spartacus, screamed, “Amra Spartacus!” (We are Spartacus!) That chant has stayed with me.

The brilliance of Sircar’s writing lies in its resistance to resolution. Plays like ‘Evam Indrajit’, ‘Pagla Ghoda’, ‘Baki Itihas’ and ‘Michhil’ refuse to give easy answers. His characters circle around meaning, wrestle with identity, speak in poetry and silence alike. But more than that, they reflect us. In Indrajit’s alienation, we find our own; in the restless voices of the four men in ‘Pagla Ghoda’, we hear our hypocrisies echo.

Over the years, I have had the privilege of lighting several of his plays, directed by very talented directors, sometimes within traditional proscenium spaces, and sometimes — more fittingly — out in the open, where the actors and audience dissolve into each other. Sircar’s scripts resist ornamental lighting. They prefer the bare, the raw, the honest. Often, I’ve felt that my role was simply to stay out of the way — to let his words burn bright on their own.

What’s most profound about Badal Sircar is not just that he changed how theatre looked, but that he changed who it was for. His group, Satabdi, would travel across villages, performing in schoolyards, factory compounds, and open maidan grounds. And unlike many of his contemporaries, he stepped away from salaried jobs, awards, and the lure of global circuits to live with theatre as daily labour. That choice — the fierce commitment to autonomy — makes him more than a playwright. It makes him a movement.

And like all great movements, his wasn’t just outward — it was inward too. There’s something deeply introspective in his work. A searching. A questioning of the self. Perhaps that’s why, in today’s age of distraction, Sircar feels even more urgent. In an era where theatre often becomes a spectacle, his Third Theatre reminds us to return to the essentials: the body, the voice, the conscience.

As someone working in the field of stagecraft, I often meet young practitioners who ask: in an age of technical advancements in theatre, why does Sircar matter? I tell them this: because he believed that theatre can speak the truth to power without needing to amplify itself. Because he reminded us that art must be lived, not just performed. And because his work continues to offer a blueprint for resistance — quiet, powerful, grounded.

I often wonder what Sircar would have said about today’s world — polarised, digitised, commodified. And yet, I suspect he would have done what he always did — gathered a few young actors in a circle, recited a few lines of poetry and begun.

On this centenary, I am filled with gratitude — for the scripts he wrote, yes, but more for showing us the warmth of community. For his work through the city streets, for the chalk circles drawn on concrete floors, for the politics woven into lullabies.

To those of us who carry lights into darkened halls, who believe in stories told without permission, Badal Sircar is not a memory, he is a method. And as long as there is someone ready to speak truth with bare feet on bare earth, his theatre will live on.

Happy 100th, Badal Da. Your voice still echoes and we are still listening.