One sunny Calcutta morning in June, Baba called and asked, ‘Sara raat natok dekhte jabi?‘—Want to go watch an all-night play? I knew instantly what he meant. For years, Manish Mitra’s Urubhangam had sat on my bucket list, taking absurdly long to be ticked off. My answer was immediate. ‘It lasts almost seven hours, though,’ he warned, in the way fathers do—managing only to sell the experience harder. How could I say no to that? Could an audience truly be held rapt through an entire night? I had to find out.
Named after Bhasa’s ancient Sanskrit text from the second or third century CE, Urubhangam borrows only loosely from its source. Bhasa’s play retells a fragment of the Mahabharata—perhaps the greatest story ever told—placing Duryodhan at its centre and lending him an unexpectedly humane arc, deepening the tragedy at its heart. Manish Mitra’s Urubhangam, staged by his theatre group Kasba Arghya, is epic in a different way: it travels vast distances, folding in subplots, gathering regional retellings of the epic, and stitching together readings, dance, and music across nearly seven hours of unbroken drama.
At the Academy of Fine Arts, close to eleven on a sultry August night, I stood as sceptical as my parents and everyone else around me. Rather than filing into the theatre, we waited in a loose circle, peering over raised phones, sweltering in heat that refused to relent, melting like ice creams left out in the sun. On a small stage outside, classical musicians opened with an inaugural piece while the cast walked slowly to the centre of the circle, inviting us in with a ceremonial performance—an initiation into what was about to unfold. We followed them inside in restless, uneven queues, and the blast of air-conditioning settled our nerves at once. Manish Mitra, the play’s writer and director, admitted that staging something this long, through an entire night, and still expecting an audience, is sheer madness—and yet every year the audience answers with enthusiasm regardless. For some, this was their fifth or sixth Urubhangam, an annual pilgrimage by now. Perhaps the only fitting response to such a mad undertaking is madness, and perhaps, as Mitra joked, that particular madness runs in Bengali blood.
What makes Urubhangam impossible to look away from is, simply, the power of storytelling. This is a tale told and retold for millennia; no one truly knows when the Mahabharata was first composed—only the earliest surviving versions remain to us. And yet Manish Mitra and his group Kasba Arghya manage, somehow, to make it new again. One of the production’s most striking choices is that almost no actor is tethered to a single character. Each actor slips between several roles at once, switching seamlessly, carrying the story forward on the strength of that fluidity. Gender shifts instantaneously, species shifts too—body language recalibrated in a breath while the boundary between characters stays intact. For an actor in Urubhangam, the body is not merely an instrument; it is a loudspeaker, amplifying everything the performance has to say.
The grandeur of Urubhangam lies partly in refusing to be only a play; in scope it leans toward opera, toward dance-drama. The lighting stays modest, the set minimal and still. The musicians occupy the side of the stage throughout, their classical repertoire deftly composed, the percussion in particular extraordinary. Four intervals break up the night, each one animated by a performance on the outer stage that extends or deepens the act just concluded, layering the drama further. The choreography draws together Bangla folk forms such as Chhou and Jhumur with traditions like Kathak and Yakshagana from elsewhere in India. Like the Mahabharata itself, Urubhangam is pan-Indian in reach, absorbing regional modes of storytelling—Pandavani, the folk-singing style of Chhattisgarh—alongside regional retellings such as Tagore’s Karna-Kunti Sambad or the Tamil Mahabharata, in which Arjun and Ulupi’s son Iravan takes on an important role. Mitra recounted Iravan’s story and its significance to India’s transgender and hijra communities, in what became one of the evening’s most beautiful passages.
At its core, Urubhangam is a study of power and its corrosions. The antagonist is not Duryodhan but greed and jealousy themselves. As the Kuru dynasty rose toward glory, its fractures grew more visible; one way to read the Mahabharata is to trace those fractures as they widen through the narrative until the pillars of the dynasty finally give way. Power moves freely through questions of gender and sexuality here. The women of the story hold little political sway and are defined largely by despair, trauma, and grief. Dwelling on these patriarchal currents, Mitra asks why Draupadi—perhaps the strongest woman in the epic—never objects when Kunti orders her to be shared among all five Pandavas. The poets who shaped the epic offer no answer; instead, they give us only Draupadi’s gaze as the brothers accept the arrangement in a silence that might be relief. In the same vein, none of the epic’s valiant, virtuous elders so much as flinch when Dushashan attempts to disrobe Draupadi—power’s corruption laid bare. Flaws cling to every character in the Mahabharata like flies, making them more human than divine, more venal than infallible.
Like any text, Urubhangam has its faults. Its very scope, the source of so much of its strength, is also the source of its weaknesses. Just as one actor plays several roles, several actors sometimes play the same role, and the character grows uneven in the handoff. The Indian classical music fits the drama like a second skin, but not every musical experiment lands—the use of Rabindrasangeet (O je maane na maana, Je raate mor duarguli) among them. Mitra writes largely in Bangla, reaching occasionally for Sanskrit and English; the English, in particular, felt jarring, cracking the spell of a drama otherwise wholly absorbing. The Pandavani segment, though fascinating, ran longer than it needed to—not least because I couldn’t follow all of the Chhattisgarhi dialect. Giving Krishna no dialogue but only meaningful glances may be an artistic choice, but it’s one I questioned, given that Krishna speaks some of the most significant and consequential lines in the entire epic. None of these cracks proves fatal, though; if anything, they are what keep the drama alive.
As I watched the show, I also watched the audience in rapture. No one around me drifted to sleep. Not a single phone rang – a first in my theatre-going experiences. People flitted in and out of the theatre around the breaks, and returned on time. When Ekalavya sacrificed his thumb smilingly, when Uttara discovered Abhimanyu’s corpse, I saw tears catch at the corners of eyes nearby. The cast earned thunderous applause, particularly for Kaustav Gupta, who led the drama with incredible fluidity and skill; there was never a dull moment while Kaustav held the stage. During each break, I stepped outside the theatre, watched my city fast asleep, watched the blue sky catching a tinge of the blood spilt onstage.
Half an hour after the end of Urubhangam, as I gobbled up breakfast at Tiretti Bazaar, I thought of Duryodhan. What must he have felt lying on the battlefield with most of his family dead, his dreams of crushing the Pandavas as shattered as his thigh? When his life flashed before his eyes, did the flames of his lifelong jealousy fizzle into a smokescreen of regret? I thought of Krishna, who steered so many of the epic’s turning points with a politician’s precision—was there some flicker of humility in him as he accepted the curses of a grief-stricken Gandhari? I thought of Bhim, and how he must have carried, for the rest of his life, the memory of defeating Duryodhan only by breaking the rules of the brawl. These are the questions I carried home with me, the characters I still hold. Like all great art, Urubhangam sets such conversations in motion—and leaves its audience there, still thinking.
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