Behind-the-scenes stories, directorial notes, and reflections on 35 years of theatre.
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Abbas Abdul Ali Vasi dropped out of school in the second grade. He died on a Mumbai street at sixty-six. In between, he wrote the poetry that made him the Ghalib of Gujarat. The play has been running for twenty years.
In a world dominated by screens, live Hindi theatre remains one of the most powerful ways to hold a mirror to Indian society.
From Master Phoolmani in 1999 to Clean Bold in 2025, a look back at the productions, people, and moments that defined Ideas Unlimited.
When the Indian Military invited us to perform at the Siachen base camp, we said yes without hesitation. Here’s what happened next.
The story behind one of our most popular plays — imagining what would happen if Karl Marx visited a chaotic Mumbai neighbourhood. Twelve years and counting.
At eighteen, Ruttie Petit defied her family, her faith, and Bombay society to marry Muhammad Ali Jinnah. By twenty-nine, she was dead. Ideas Unlimited’s Gujarati play recovers her story.
Staging the same play in Gujarati, Hindi, and Marathi taught us more about India’s linguistic soul than any textbook ever could.
Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s Every Brilliant Thing has been performed in over 80 countries. When Satchit Puranik adapted it into Gujarati and RJ Devaki stepped on stage, something shifted.
A man is taken to court for being happy. His crime: contentment in a world that demands ambition. Ideas Unlimited’s Kaagdo asks the question nobody wants answered.
India’s first female doctor died at twenty-two. A hundred and thirty years later, Manasi Joshi stands alone on a bare stage and asks: has anything changed for Indian women?
A thousand years before Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a Jain monk named Siddharshi wrote the world’s first allegorical novel. Ideas Unlimited brought its 16,000 verses to life on stage.
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He authored 178 books, served as Sheriff of Mumbai, got arrested for a short story, defied Bal Thackeray, and never apologised to anyone. The play that brings Gujarati literature’s most controversial writer to the stage.
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Everyone knows Maharana Pratap. Almost no one knows the man who made his resistance possible. Ideas Unlimited’s Hindi historical drama recovers the extraordinary story of Bhamashah.
He left no autobiography, no monastic record, no portrait. He wandered the forests of Rajasthan singing padas that crossed every sectarian boundary. His name means ‘cloud of bliss.’ Ideas Unlimited staged the life of Avdhoot Anandghan from nothing but oral tradition and song.
A 5th-century king receives the fruit of eternal life and gives it to the woman he loves. What follows is betrayal, renunciation, and three Sanskrit texts that shaped Indian philosophy for fifteen centuries. Ideas Unlimited staged it in Gujarati in 2010.
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Married at fourteen. India’s first women’s magazine editor. Invited to the Parliament of World Religions before Vivekananda. Dead at forty. The story of Manilal Dwivedi, the man Gujarati literature is named after.
In 2008, Ideas Unlimited brought Rabindranath Tagore’s fierce allegory of institutional rigidity to Kolkata’s Tagore Festival — in Gujarati. The story of how a nearly-forgotten adaptation by Gandhian intellectuals found new life on stage.
He recalled his past lives at seven, performed a hundred simultaneous tasks at nineteen, answered Gandhi’s deepest spiritual questions by letter, and died at thirty-three. Ideas Unlimited’s Gujarati play recovers the man behind the Mahatma.