Anuradha Kapur’s Virasat reimagines Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Wada trilogy

A visceral, three-hour tour de force, Virasat distills Mahesh Elkunchwar’s iconic Wada Trilogy into a poignant saga of a feudal family decaying from within. It is a powerful allegory that speaks fluently to the present, capturing how the slow erosion of human values and environment continues to shape our world today.Director Anuradha Kapur reimagines her 2013 experiment with a hyperrealistic arena, set by scenographer Deepan Sivaraman, at New Delhi’s Sunder Nursery, doing away with the traditional stage to immerse the audience in a living, breathing landscape. As the audience watches a family suffer from the gradual loss of their land and history while surrounded by the lush biodiversity of a beautifully-restored Mughal-era park, the contrast haunts.Old timers remember the 2013 staging as a critically-acclaimed experience that proved Elkunchwar’s sprawling trilogy could be condensed into a single evening. But it unfolded within the controlled institutional walls of the National School of Drama (NSD) Repertory Company. The performance, at Sunder Nursery, however, completely breaks free from those institutional constraints. Commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and rebuilt with a fresh cast, the production sheds its guise as an experiment. Anuradha, along with Sivaraman, creates spatial dramaturgy in which the physical environment actively tells the story. The Saturday performance had to be stopped midway as the monsoon played spoilsport. On Sunday, the simulated birdsong found an acoustic duet with Delhi’s evening parakeets, and the heavy air carried the aroma of the kitchen fire straight into the audience, turning the tragedy into a lived-in reality. Through the Deshpande clan’s unfolding saga, Anuradha charts the turbulent transformation of post‑independence India. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement In this immersive setting of the wada — a sprawling ancestral mansion — the audience sits on all four sides of it, merely feets away from the actors. Sivaraman forces you to become an uninvited guest inside the Deshpande family’s intimate domestic bubble. It makes you feel you are trapped in the roomas the events unfold.The play opens in the 1970s, in Dharangaon, when the Deshpande family has just cremated its patriarch, Tatyaji, resulting in a bitter resentment that immediately fractures the household. The Deshpandes possess stature, but lack the actual liquidity to even pay for the patriarch’s funeral rites. Bhaskar, the eldest son, grows bitter because he stays behind to manage the crumbling estate, while his younger brother, Sudhir, leaves to Mumbai seeking a job.While the brothers fight over the inheritance and the family’s gold, their sister Prabha, waits in vain for an education she is keen to pursue. The women are trapped in the kitchen, their lives reduced to a repetitive routine of cooking and cleaning as the hypocritical men try to lure them with greed for gold, turning them into foot soldiers in their own petty wars while keeping the facade of feudalism intact. The hypnotic night scene, where Bhaskar offers his wife the ancestral gold jewellery box, captures the disintegration of feudal morality and how material greed overrides familial bonds.As the feudal path completely disintegrates, Bhaskar’s son Parag inherits the burdens of the land, joining hands with market forces that exploit his needs for profit. Instead of breaking free, Parag gradually hardens, giving us hope that humanity survives the apocalypse. His wife, Nandini, represents the emergence of the modern, self-actualised Indian woman who actively subverts the suffocating patterns of the household. The play begins with the patriarch’s cremation, which instantly splinters the family. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement Between the lines, through the Deshpande family’s generational saga up to the 1990s, Anuradha maps the painful transformation of post-Independence India. The collapse of a single rural Brahmin household serves as a symbol for the fading of feudal systems, agrarian distress, environmental crisis, and the dawn of predatory capitalism that moves in sync with patriarchy.The play doesn’t project standard heroes. Instead, domestic disputes and rhythmic daily routines collide to give it the shape of an epic. The domestic grind of bathing, changing the sacred thread or adjusting a sari connects seamlessly with the desperate attempt to wash away the family’s encroaching moral taint. The house feels like a black hole that swallows individual ambitions. While characters, such as Prabha and Anjali, yearn to escape, the structure drags them back into the unending labour of keeping the household running and the architecture of patriarchy in the wada intact.Like Elkunchwar, Anuradha ensures the most profound truths are not shouted in thin air. She expects the audience to find them between the lines. It is a welcome relief from the essays that are thrown at us from various creative stages these days in the name of entertainment. It is a joy to discover the truth in the pauses of an accomplished cast that lives the text. For instance, the play captures the psychological paralysis of a generation that cannot let go of its perceived superiority. Bhaskar, immaculately depicted by Yash Yogi, clings to old structures, while Himanshu Kohli as Sudhir effectively brings out the everyday dilemmas of a son who left the village to build a better life in the city. Sajida Saji powerfully captures the plight of aging women in households we all grew up watching, who do not defend men’s hypocrisy, blinded by conditioning. They defend it because they have no other world to belong to. The younger generation, depicted through the chameleonic Ajit Singh Palwat’s Parag, becomes lumpenised and transactional as capitalist mores invade the village. The escalating agrarian distress and drought in the text serve as both a physical reality and an existential condition. Uma Katju, as Prabha, embodies this gradual diminishing of the spirit.The characters don’t speak in the distinct Maharashtrian cadence of the text. The linguistic shift to North Indian dialects creates dissonance at times, pulling the audience slightly out of the carefully-constructed Vidarbha setting.In condensing the trilogy, the narrative inevitably suffers from sudden jumps. The final act takes a stylistic turn, becoming heavily symbolic and philosophical, a shift that breaks away from the grounded progression of the said and the unsaid that Anuradha established so meticulously in the beginning and followed well past the halfway point.That said, it is hard to look away from this hypnotic mirror to our times to the very end.