For 13 years, a small drama institute in a bylane of Mumbai’s Girgaum neighbourhood has churned out some of the most skilled young artists in India’s contemporary theatre industry – actors like Adarsh Gourav, Srishti Srivastava and Hrishabh Kanti, directors like Mallika Shah and Trinetra Tiwari, and writers like Khushbu Baid, among others.
The institute, Drama School Mumbai (DSM), was set up in 2013 to fill a gap that co-founder Jehan Manekshaw felt strongly about: the city, India’s theatre capital and a magnet for thousands of aspiring actors, did not have many professionals trained formally in the craft of theatre. In rehearsal rooms and theatre groups, he repeatedly came across actors who were learning on the job and lacked thespian rigour.
Manekshaw had already earned acclaim as a theatre educator and a director for international productions like Othello in Kannada, and a Japanese-language Eklavya. He co-created DSM as a new platform for drama training – a conservatory for young artistes to get a one-year postgraduate degree in theatre, training under a range of trained professionals. DSM alumni are now sought after in the theatre, film and television industries, with many building successful careers in acting, writing, directing, music, set-design, puppetteering and more.
As DSM’s courses began to attract applicants from across urban, rural and tribal regions of India, Manekshaw and his team realised they needed to be more inclusive: the school could not turn away talented and passionate students just because they couldn’t afford to pay for the course. In response, they began waiving or subsidising fees for promising applicants in need of monetary support.
Today, 48% of DSM’s 263 alumni have received some kind of financial aid. As further support after graduation, the institute also offers grants of Rs 1 lakh each to selected alumni to fund their own small-scale theatre productions.
Manekshaw’s vision, however, is to systematically expand the nature of support offered to students and alumni to make theatre more diverse, inclusive and affordable for everyone – both artists and audiences. It aligns with the Godrej Foundation’s vision to ensure that talented and gifted individuals, no matter what their circumstances, get support and access to opportunities that allow them to grow and thrive.
In this interview, we spoke to Manekshaw and Irawati Karnik, DSM’s academic head, about the need to support high-potential artists and why funding theatre is crucial for the health of society.
Why is funding theatre so important?
Karnik: It’s a bit like why it’s important to fund scientific research. There are no immediate returns, but it leads to a long term improvement in the standard of cultural and artistic discourse. Everything gets affected by the quality of theatre in a place. Supporting theatre training doesn’t only churn out theatre artistes. It churns out articulate people, clarity in thinking, learning how to imagine better, leadership, entrepreneurship, creativity, empathy, working with diversity. All of these things add to productivity in society. Anybody would benefit from some amount of theatre training, not only those who want to become actors.
Manekshaw: The arts and culture need to be supported not because they’re an aesthetic form to be enjoyed, but because they are a necessary social health indicator for society. If you think of yoga as a knowledge system, the practice of which improves your mind, body and soul, then I would say that engagement in theatre improves the social mind – not just those participating in it but also those watching it. Society and government should invest in theatre because there are enough studies to show that access to democratised art and culture builds participatory democracy, individual agency, and gives people the confidence to become more proactive architects of their own destiny.
What kind of support do talented artists from disadvantaged backgrounds need?
Manekshaw: We would like everyone with talent and passion to get the opportunity to study at DSM. But when someone comes from a very low-income household, asking them to pursue an artistic dream in a field that does not pay much almost feels irresponsible. They need to be able to earn for their families urgently, and theatre is an uncertain sector with no guarantee of when one can start making money.
This is why we are building a DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) programme that aims to give 35% of our students full scholarships. The endowment would cover not just their tuition, accommodation and living expenses but also an internship stipend for one year after graduation. This would allow them to send money home to their families while they begin building their careers.
You have a distinct vision for a theatre district in Mumbai. What does building a robust ecosystem for theatre look like?
Manekshaw: We run DSM from the premises of the Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh, which was established in Girgaum in the 1930s and has been a centre for Marathi literature and theatre in the city. In fact the whole of Girgaum area was once a vibrant cultural centre for Mumbai’s Gujarati and Marathi elite. One of our dreams is to rejuvenate this centre [the Marathi Sahitya Sangh] into something like London’s Lyric Hammersmith theatre, and then build a special theatre district in the heart of south Mumbai, incorporating other stages in this area like the Tejpal and Birla halls, Sophia Auditorium, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and Opera House. We could partner with industrial houses and create a youth theatre space that is accessible not only to affluent audiences but to ordinary people. The bigger vision is to then take the best of this theatre to smaller cities across India too.
DSM is already a first step towards building this ecosystem of better plays, theatre spaces, and audiences. The second step is to have a content incubator. We already have our Niloufer Sagar Alumni Production Grant, which funds alumni theatre productions through Rs 1 lakh grants. The dream is to incubate 30-50 such small productions every year, and then give bigger grants to a smaller number of large-scale productions through mentored incubation. Ultimately, we want DSM to do for performing arts what the IITs are doing for technology and what IIMs are doing for management in India. And all of this requires patronage.
