'Freedom, for Kadambari, was not about flying away—it was about having the right to be heard,' says Meghna Roy Choudhury
In her new play Kadambari, writer-director Megha Roy Choudhury steps beyond the scandal and sorrow often tied to Rabindranath Tagore’s sister-in-law, reframing her as an intelligent, grounded woman whose voice was silenced by history. Staging at The Studio, Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), the production blends a bilingual narrative, meticulous research, and a deeply personal lens. In conversation with Indulge Express, she shares her journey of reclaiming this forgotten voice.
Kadambari Devi’s story is often framed through the lens of tragedy and scandal. How did you approach reframing her life in a way that honours her complexity?
It began during the pandemic when I came across what was claimed to be Kadambari Devi’s suicide note—only to later realise it was fictional. Being a probashi Bengali, I grew up hearing my parents speak about her, and never once did I feel she was a weak woman who would end her life merely because Rabindranath Tagore—her closest companion—married, leaving her isolated in her own lonely marriage.
This pushed me to understand who Kadambari truly was, and why her voice has been absent from the narrative despite her influence on Tagore’s literary journey.
Her relationship with Tagore has often been sensationalised, and that angered me. Only the two people involved truly know the nature of their bond—outsiders have no right to label it. I visited Jorasanko Thakurbari, but many materials were unavailable. All this compelled me to create the play Kadambari—to discover and present who she was through my art.
You’ve chosen to tell this story in Hindi and English. How did language shape the way you reached non-Bengali audiences without losing its cultural soul?
I must thank theatre-maker Abhishek Majumdar, who joined me on this journey and asked why I was so agitated—was it because of how Tagore immortalised Kadambari, or the way readers have remembered her? He encouraged me to first write in Bengali, so I did.
In the final version, I retained about 30% of the dialogues in Bengali and wrote the rest in Hindi. I couldn’t imagine Tagore and Kadambari conversing in Hindi, so I kept their interactions in Bengali, with subtitles. This was challenging because, except for one, all my actors are Hindi-speaking non-Bengalis, but we worked hard on the accents. This way, the story remained authentic yet accessible.
As both the writer and the director, how did you balance the intimacy of your vision with the collaborative demands of theatre-making?
Once I finish writing a script, I don’t cling to it—otherwise, I’d miss out on the richness of the actors’ interpretations. Theatre-making is collaborative, and above all, an actor’s medium. When actors began adding their inputs, we built the world together, and that became my focus as a director.
It was particularly interesting for Hrishabh Kanti, who plays Tagore, because audiences already have a fixed image of him from photographs. In contrast, there are barely two photographs of Kadambari, which gave Ipshita Chakraborty Singh, who plays her, the freedom to create the character entirely through performance—unburdened by visual references.
With the play releasing around Independence Day, how do you see Kadambari’s journey as a reflection on freedom—both as a woman and as an individual?
I’ve often tried to imagine what she might have felt if she were alive today. Growing up as a Bengali and reading Tagore, I believed he was one of the finest writers of women. His works—like Streer Patro—gave me goosebumps for how deeply he captured women’s emotions. But in researching Kadambari, I realised her voice had been muted.
I wanted to know how a muse might see herself if she had been immortalised but never heard. I was tired of the clichéd portrayal of women yearning only to “fly” as a metaphor for freedom. Kadambari, I believe, was grounded—educated after marriage in the Tagore household, intelligent, and eager for an independent identity. Yet she was confined to the antarmahal, in loneliness. Even her name was changed—from Matangini to Kadambari. Her struggle for freedom lay not in escape, but in the fight for intellectual and emotional selfhood