In 1953, a young woman played Desdemona in a college production of Othello in Mumbai. Legendary theatre director, Ebrahim Alkazi, who was in the audience later invited her to join his theatre group. That young woman was Vijaya Mehta, and it marked the beginning of a bond with theatre that lasted a lifetime. She passed away on June 30 at the age of 91.Born Vijaya Jaywant in Vadodara on November 4, 1934, to parents who were members of the Theosophical Society, she grew up surrounded by the world of Indian cinema and yet remained untouched by its allure. Nalini Jaywant and Shobhna Samarth were her aunts. Nutan and Tanuja were her cousins. Through her first marriage to Harin Khote, Durga Khote was her mother-in-law. Mainstream cinema was practically a family inheritance. Yet, she turned her back on it and chose theatre, which was tougher and less glamorous.
Ebrahim Alkazi
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Under Alkazi’s mentorship and later Adi Marzban (Parsi theatre’s finest writer-director), Vijaya sharpened a craft that would go on to reshape modern Marathi theatre. In the early 1960s, she co-founded Rangayan in Mumbai alongside playwright Vijay Tendulkar and actors Shriram Lagoo and Arvind Deshpande. Rangayan pushed against the conventions of a stage — that leaned heavily on mythology and spectacle — and introduced audiences to a more rigorous, contemporary kind of storytelling. Vijaya directed some of the defining productions of her generation: Sakharam Binder, Hayavadana, Ghashiram Kotwal, Wada Chirebandi and Purush, which went on to have over 1,500 shows.
