What is striking about MK Raina’s remarkable memoir is how little it is about his own theatre and film career. This is unexpected, given that Raina trained under the legendary Ebrahim Alkazi at the National School of Drama (NSD) in the late 1960s, graduated in 1970 with the Best Actor award, and subsequently has had a decade-long, successful career as a theatre director. He has directed several productions for the NSD Repertory Company, and for other repertories and theatre groups. He has led Prayog, an amateur theatre group in Delhi, for which he directed several productions. Among his most celebrated productions is Bhisham Sahni’s Kabira Khada Bazar Mein, which he first did with Prayog in 1981 and which has been revived every now and then subsequently. The most recent incarnation of the production is as a rock opera by the Delhi-based band Dastaan Live. There are many other landmark productions to his name, including a fabulous Punjabi-language version of Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle as Parayi Kukh, and Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug, which toured internationally as part of the Festivals of India in the late 1980s.
December 2022, volume 46, No 12