Habib Tanvir (1 September 1923 – 8 June 2009) was an Indian playwright, theatre director, poet and actor. With his company, Naya Theatre, he created a modern Indian theatre out of the songs, speech and performing skills of the village actors of Chhattisgarh. His play Charandas Chor is among the most widely performed Indian plays of the twentieth century.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Habib Ahmed Khan “Tanvir” |
| Born | 1 September 1923, Raipur, Central Provinces (now Chhattisgarh) |
| Died | 8 June 2009, Bhopal (aged 85) |
| State | Chhattisgarh |
| Occupation | Playwright, theatre director, actor, poet |
| Education | Morris College, Nagpur; Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, England |
| Founded | Naya Theatre (1959) |
| Notable plays | Agra Bazar, Mitti ki Gadi, Gaon ka Naam Sasural, Charandas Chor, Bahadur Kalarin, Hirma ki Amar Kahani |
| Awards | Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1969), Padma Shri (1983), Padma Bhushan (2002) |
| Spouse | Moneeka Misra |
Early Life
He was born in Raipur, where his father, who had come from Peshawar, had settled. He grew up hearing the folk songs of the Chhattisgarh countryside. He graduated from Morris College in Nagpur in 1944 and began a master’s degree at Aligarh. He started writing poetry under the pen name Tanvir.
Bombay
In 1945 he went to Bombay, worked for All India Radio and as a film journalist, and joined the Indian People’s Theatre Association and the Progressive Writers’ Association. When many of the association’s leaders were jailed, he found himself running it, and discovered that he could direct.
Agra Bazar
He moved to Delhi in 1954. For students of the Jamia Millia university he wrote and staged Agra Bazar, a play built around the eighteenth-century people’s poet Nazir Akbarabadi, set in a market and performed with the villagers of nearby Okhla, their goats and donkeys included. It broke every convention of the Delhi stage.
England and Brecht
From 1955 he trained in England, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Bristol Old Vic. He then travelled across Europe for a year, reaching Berlin a few weeks after the death of Bertolt Brecht, whose company’s productions he watched for months. He concluded that an Indian director had nothing to gain by copying the West and should work in his own people’s forms.
Naya Theatre
He founded Naya Theatre in 1959 with his wife, Moneeka Misra. His version of the Sanskrit classic Mrichchhakatika, called Mitti ki Gadi, used six folk actors from Chhattisgarh.
In the early 1970s he took the decisive step. He stopped making the village actors speak Hindi and let them work in their own Chhattisgarhi, improvising, singing and dancing in the manner of the Nacha, their traditional theatre. Gaon ka Naam Sasural, Mor Naam Damad (1973) was the first result.
Charandas Chor
Charandas Chor (1975), from a Rajasthani folk tale, is the story of a thief who makes four vows to his guru in jest, including never to tell a lie, and dies for keeping them. It won the Fringe Firsts award at the Edinburgh festival in 1982 and has been performed around the world. Shyam Benegal filmed it.
Among his later productions were Bahadur Kalarin, Hirma ki Amar Kahani, Dekh Rahe Hain Nain and Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya.
Under Attack
Ponga Pandit, an old Nacha satire on a hypocritical priest and untouchability, was performed by his company for years. From the 1990s Hindu nationalist groups disrupted its performances, and those of other plays, with violence. He went on performing under police guard.
Honours
- Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1969) and Fellowship (1996)
- Nominated member of the Rajya Sabha (1972–1978)
- Padma Shri (1983) and Padma Bhushan (2002)
- Kalidas Samman (1990)
He also acted in films, among them Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.
Personal Life
His wife, Moneeka, was his partner in the company until her death in 2005. Their daughter, Nageen, a singer, carries on Naya Theatre. He died in Bhopal in 2009.
Featured image: Habib Tanvir in November 2005. Photo by Sanjay Vaidya, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
