The magical Surabhi

A toddler crawls across the stage while his mother, dressed as a demoness, rushes to retrieve him. There is nothing odd about this scenario to the audience. It is a typical organic moment in Surabhi Theatre, a renowned family-based touring company from Andhra Pradesh with a history spanning over 140 years. A theatre that draws on techniques of popular theatre, blending mythological tales like ‘Keechaka Vadha’ and ‘Maya Bazar’ with proscenium-style presentation. A hybrid, skill-intensive popular theatre that preserves tradition and modernity with technical wizardry and artistic prowess.

‘Maya Bazar’, a much talked about play, performed by Surabhi, is certainly not a museum piece but a living vital theatre experience. It remains a defiant counter-culture, proving that as long as a group of people can gather in the dark to watch a painted cloth rise and a human being fly, the magic of theatre remains undefeated.

Many years ago, I had seen the show at Kamani Auditorium in Delhi and was awestruck by the combination of myth, romance and technical ingenuity. Flying curtains, fire, rain and appearing and disappearing painted backdrops — it was pure magic. A few years later, I had the opportunity to see it once again at the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFOK).

When the lights dim in the auditorium, we experience gods slice through the air, watch dragons spew fire, and witness a painted curtain roll up and instantly rewrite the geography of the stage — from a forest, to a cultivated garden, streets, celestial scenes and boudoirs. The range is mind-boggling. The painted images are opulent and richly detailed. They become a visceral reminder of why such magical theatre still survives — it has pulse, life and heartbeat.

When we see traditional art forms today, we usually expect a museum piece — something fragile, struggling and out of touch. But Surabhi catches you off-guard because they aren’t trying to be a dusty heritage act. They are entertainers, and they’ve been operating like a self-contained family business since 1885.

In an era dominated by hyper-realistic digital visual effects and streaming algorithms, the survival of a 19th-century theatre company seems anachronistic. Yet, travelling across India to national platforms, Surabhi Theatre continues to evoke a rare, communal sense of wonder.

Founded in 1885, Surabhi is India’s last surviving large-scale, family-run touring repertory. It represents not just a theatrical style, but a unique socio-cultural ecosystem where life and art overlap. However, behind the onstage illusions of flying deities and fire-spewing demons lies a complex contemporary reality marked by severe economic precarity, infrastructural shifts, and an ongoing battle for cultural relevance.

Founded by brothers Vanarasa Govinda Rao and Vanarasa Chinna Ramaiah in the village of Surabhi Reddivaripalli (Andhra Pradesh), the troupe evolved from tholu bommalata (traditional leather shadow puppetry). Recognising a shift in 19th-century audience preferences toward live human spectacle, and highly influenced by the grand, illusionist aesthetic of touring Parsi theatre companies — the founders replaced their leather puppets with live actors.

Their debut performance of ‘Keechaka Vadha’ broke rigid societal taboos by casting women in female roles. As the family expanded, daughters and sons-in-law established branches, peaking in the mid-20th century with nearly 50 to 60 distinct mobile troupes comprising thousands of artists. Operating as a nomadic republic, these troupes would enter a town, erect massive, temporary thatched-roof amphitheatres, and perform classical padya natakam (verse drama) drawn from the Ramayana and Mahabharata for months at a time.

The defining characteristic of Surabhi is its status as a family that self-manages every aspect of production. The community acts as its own carpenters, painters, lighting technicians, costume designers, and musicians.

Furthermore, Surabhi pioneered highly sophisticated stage illusions achieved through manual engineering. To create the illusionary effects on stage, there existed a complex network of hand-operated ropes and wooden pulleys hidden in the rafters that allowed actors portraying gods to fly seamlessly across the proscenium. They also set up chemical flashes and hidden smoke devices that simulated fire-breathing monsters, creating illusion upon illusion like a grand magic show.

The most dramatic device was the many-layered, hand-painted canvas curtains that drop simultaneously to instantly execute complex scene changes before a live audience. Theatre director Anuradha Kapur describes the Surabhi stage as a “floating space” meticulously assembled yet illusionary, a “place without a place”.

This traditional grammar proved remarkably flexible. In the late 1990s, legendary director BV Karanth collaborated with the Surabhi family to direct a Telugu adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘The Good Woman of Szechwan’ (titled ‘Basthi Devatha Yaadamma’). Karanth successfully fused Brechtian Marxist alienation with Surabhi’s hyper-immersive style, using their signature flying pulleys for Brecht’s descending gods and traditional padya natakam singing for the socio-political commentary.

The collaboration demonstrated that Surabhi’s old-school stagecraft was not a rigid relic, but a highly adaptive, robust vocabulary capable of handling modern avant-garde drama. The result wasn’t a compromised version of either style; it was an explosion. It proved that Surabhi’s ‘old-school’ tricks weren’t just for ancient myths. They were a flexible language that could handle complex Brechtian ideas effectively.

The classical nomadic model — moving from village to village and living in makeshift tents — has become financially and logistically unviable due to soaring real estate costs and changing civic regulations. Today, the core of the tradition is anchored by the Sri Venkateswara Surabhi Theatre under the leadership of sixth-generation artists like Surabhi Jayachandra Varma. The community has largely transitioned from a nomadic existence to a sedentary one, centred around Surabhi Colony in Serilingampally, Hyderabad. Approximately 60 to 70 family members live here communally, maintaining a shared kitchen, workshop, and rehearsal space.

That’s why seeing them at ITFOK hits so hard. They aren’t surviving just because of nostalgia. They survive because their stagecraft — the ropes, the pulleys, the painted canvas — is a living, breathing machine that can still make an audience hold its breath in a way a smartphone screen never will.

What we are looking at is the original, low-tech VFX — an extraordinary marriage of physics and imagination. There are no green screens here. Instead, you have an actual network of real ropes and pulleys hidden in the shadows of the ceiling, lifting actors into the heavens. There is an organic alchemy in their fire-spewing demons and the simultaneous dropping of hand-painted curtains that alters time and space in a single heartbeat.

At one point, 60 distinct family troupes were wandering the country, erecting temporary theatres out of nothing, staying as long as the audience demanded it. It’s an ecosystem where the family does everything: they act, they cook, they stitch, they build, and they engineer. Their children don’t learn theatre; they inherit it, transitioning from sleeping in the wings to embodying epic heroes from mythology.

I wish that drama schools in India would weave into their syllabus the creation of illusion on the stage by learning from the masters. A network of unseen, hand-operated ropes and wooden pulleys could induce the magic that we are all searching for. The hidden smoke devices that allow demons to spew actual fire could be added to the academic and creative toolbox of theatre training.

Surabhi occupies a contradictory space in modern Indian culture. On one hand, it receives significant institutional reverence, with invitations to prestigious platforms like the Bharat Rang Mahotsav and ITFOK, alongside major national accolades. On the other hand, this cultural prestige rarely translates into systemic financial security, leaving them to constantly battle low-ticket yields and the high cost of maintaining vintage stage machinery.

While writing this article, I wondered how to ensure this magical theatre does not become a mere footnote in history. It cannot rely on nostalgia alone. Instead, corporate entities and premier schools of drama must actively step in — not just to archive it as a museum piece, but to inject the capital, curriculum validation, and modern infrastructure required to make Surabhi an alive, pulsating, and self-sustaining genre of living theatre.

— The writer is a theatre director