The Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S. is pleased to welcome noted Indian playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar as a Brittingham Visiting Scholar during the week of October 3, 2005. As an author, theorist, critic, and polemicist, Mr. Elkunchwar has been an influential figure in contemporary Indian theatre for the past three decades. He writes originally in Marathi, a western Indian language with a continuous literary history since the end of the classical period in India, and nearly seventy-five million speakers today. Through widespread translation into multiple Indian and Western languages, however, his plays have gained a national as well as international presence, and they are now read, performed, and studied in various parts of the world. His work, and the public events during his visit, should have special appeal for students and scholars interested in comparative theatre, South Asian writing and performance, and the relationship of non-Europhone languages to English in a postcolonial culture.

Born in 1939, Mahesh Elkunchwar is the author of fifteen full-length and one-act plays, which belong broadly to the realist mode, but incorporate important elements of expressionist, existentialist, and absurdist theatre. Among these, Raktapushpa (Petals of Blood, 1972), Party (1976), Pratibimb (Reflection, 1972), Atmakatha (Autobiography, 1988), and especially Wada Chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion, 1985) are established classics of the contemporary Indian stage. Wada chirebandi was expanded into a trilogy titled Yuganta (The End of an Age) in 1994, and both the individual play and the sequence have also been performed in French and German. In bringing his drama to the stage, Elkunchwar has collaborated actively with leading director-actors such as Vijaya Mehta, Shreeram Lagoo, Amol Palekar, and Satyadev Dubey, all of whom have produced his plays and created major roles in them. Elkunchwar has also contributed to the Middle Cinema movement in India as an actor and screenwriter. He played the role of a Marxist activist in Akrosh (Rage), the groundbreaking 1980 film by director Govind Nihalani, and he wrote the screenplays for Nihalani's film adaptations of two of his plays, Holi and Party.

Elkunchwar's contributions to Indian theatre theory and polemic consist in his sustained critique of the "urban folk" movement, which advocates the revival of premodern indigenous performance genres for the creation of an "authentically Indian" theatre. In a cultural and political climate that favors anti-realistic traditional and folk forms and nonproscenium performance, Elkunchwar has argued for the importance of realism, the proscenium stage, and modern urban experience, both individual and social. He defines unpredictable human emotions and the complexity of human relationships as his chosen subjects, and invokes such modern Western precursors as Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, O'Neill, and Albee in his cosmopolitan drama.

Elkunchwar has regularly offered influential playwriting workshops at India's National School of Drama (New Delhi) and other academic institutions of theatre training, and has served as writer-in-residence at the national Film and Television Institute in Pune. Among his many national honors are the Homi Bhabha Fellowship (1976-78), the Sangeet Natak Akademi annual award for best playwright (given by the National Academy of the Performing Arts, 1989), the Maharashtra Foundation Award (1997), the Sahitya Akademi Award (given by the National Academy of Letters, 2002), and the Saraswati Samman, one of India's highest literary awards (2003).