Fifty-four years ago, a war reshaped our subcontinent. In December 1971, India and Pakistan fought a brief but decisive conflict that led to the creation of Bangladesh. In military terms and on paper, it was a clear victory, in fact, one of India’s most celebrated. But wars are rarely so straightforward, are they? For every story of triumph, there are a thousand of separation, of hunger, and of grief.
That tension between victory and loss, between pride and silence, is what 1971 War: ஒரு வெற்றி தோற்கடிக்கப்பட்டது (A Victory Defeated), TheatreKaran’s new Tamil play, directed by Raghavendr and Sabarivas, and curated by Major General Indrabalan (Retd.) hopes to unravel.
“Everyone knows World War I or World War II,” says co-director Sabarivas, “but when we asked people about 1971, most had little or no knowledge. That silence itself felt like a tragedy. This war reshaped our region, but the human voices were left behind.”
For Raghavendr, the starting point was never the battlefield. “I wasn’t drawn to strategy or maps. I was drawn to people, the soldiers, their families, the civilians of Bangladesh, the leaders carrying the impossible weight. The war is the backdrop, but the play is really about the human side of it.”
The title, ஒரு வெற்றி தோற்கடிக்கப்பட்டது, captures this duality. A war that ended in spectacular victory also left behind scars, silences, and unanswered questions.
For Major General Indrabalan, who grew up in the shadow of that war and whose father served on the frontlines, curating this play was an act of both memory and responsibility.
“India lost over 4,000 soldiers,” he recalls. “Thousands more were disabled for life. These costs are rarely remembered. We celebrate medals, but the unsung heroes, the ones who returned without recognition, also carried extraordinary courage.”
His task was daunting, to compress the scale of 1971 into 80 minutes of theatre. “We had to create characters who could stand for many. One soldier for all soldiers, one mother for all mothers, one leader for all leaders. That was the only way to honour them without losing honesty.”
The General also frames the play as a question for today: What happens when the sacrifice of soldiers is diluted by shifting politics or forgotten entirely? The relevance is hard to miss in a world still marred by wars, from Gaza to Ukraine, where human lives are measured against lines on a map
TheatreKaran’s actors speak of the project less as ‘performance’ and more as ‘borrowing’ lives.
Yuvasree plays a Bangladeshi civilian who takes up arms in the Mukti Bahini movement, a guerrilla resistance movement during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. “My character is not a trained soldier,” she says, “just an ordinary woman pushed to fight. I wanted the audience to feel her fear and hunger, but also her courage.”
Namritha, portraying Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, studied hours of archival interviews. “She was much younger than the generals around her, often doubted, but she carried herself with remarkable conviction. I wanted to bring out her humanity, the loneliness of someone making decisions that would alter millions of lives.”
Raagul, playing a Sikh captain inspired by real-life hero Nirmal Singh Heera, drew from both research and his own family’s military history. “Behind every uniform is someone’s son, brother, father. Soldiers are not just fighters, they’re human beings carrying emotions as heavy as their battles.”
Unlike books or films, theatre insists on presence. The audience breathes the same air as the soldier on stage, feels the pause, the silence, the grief in real time. As German theatre practitioner and playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” In that sense, 1971 War: ஒரு வெற்றி தோற்கடிக்கப்பட்டது does not merely retell history; it challenges us to confront how we remember it, what we forget, and why those silences matter. We want people to cry, not just for lives lost but for the silence that hid these stories,” says Sabarivas.
The timing of the play, in the 79th year of India’s Independence, adds another layer. As bombs continue to fall elsewhere in the world, the production asks what it means to revisit a war from half a century ago. Perhaps it is a reminder that behind every conflict, then or now, there are always human beings and our dreams, fears, endurance, and suffering.
In a world still fractured and ridden with conflict, this play offers no easy answers but a stage where history breathes, where human voices linger, and where audiences are asked to sit with the complexities of freedom and inconvenient truths.
Rs 200 onwards. From 5 pm onwards. On 24 August. At Narada Gana Sabha, Alwarpet.
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