#PastForward: Sharanya Ramprakash's journey through theatre's living archive

In an age where virtual reality is becoming our lived reality, theatre remains the one art form that survives not by speeding ahead, but by looking back. It is a living archive — stories passed from body to body, voice to voice, generation to generation. Bengaluru, with its restless creative pulse, shelters one of the country’s most vibrant theatre ecosystems. And few artists embody this Past Forward spirit as vividly as Sharanya Ramprakash.

An actor and director, Sharanya’s journey began in 2006 as a co-founder of Dramatist Anonymous (Dramanon), one of the city’s earliest English-language theatre troupes. Years later, Akshayambara — a genre-defying work in which she both acted and directed — became a turning point. An INLAKS scholar and a member of the Lincoln Centre Director’s Lab, Sharanya stands at the crossroads of memory and reinvention, reaching back to ‘what was’ while reshaping ‘what can be.’

Sharanya’s own life unfolded across shifting geographies. “My father was in the forest department, so we got transferred a lot. And wherever I go, I would go and join the theatre — whether I knew the language or not or had friends or not. Theatre has always had this capacity to bring people together. It felt like a place everyone can belong in,” she says. But belonging also came with questions. Whose stories belonged on stage? Whose voices had been allowed to survive?

As she faced creative resistance and stepped into Akshayambara — where she played a man — Sharanya found herself drawn into an unexpected confrontation with history. “What did the women before me do?” she asked. The answers were scattered: fragments of names, anecdotes, half-remembered performances. But the search reshaped her. She discovered an entire lineage she had never been taught to claim — women whose contributions had been sidelined, whose presence was treated as a footnote, whose histories survived only in whispers.

“As a 10-year-old, I secretly admired actress Umashree in all those Rajkumar films — always the comic side character, the clown who could speak truth because no one took her seriously — while the heroine, whom we were taught to emulate, felt like a role that required annihilating my own personhood,” she tells us. What she once admired in secret became a compass. Through Umashree’s so-called ‘vulgarity,’ she found honesty, irreverence and permission. If the past gave Sharanya a lineage to reclaim, Bengaluru gave her the ground to grow it. “The city as a contemporary landscape — its institutions, its contradictions, its people — has shaped so much of how I do theatre,” she says. Mount Carmel College, an erstwhile all-women’s space where it was natural for women to play every role; Manipal University and the Yakshagana Kendra in Udupi; Neenasam, where so many of her performances found their shape; and Ranga Shankara, the city’s beating theatre heart — each space formed a different layer of her artistic vocabulary. These were not just venues or schools but ecosystems: translators, activists, researchers, supporters who fed her practice from completely different fields. “There is something about being in a space like Bengaluru that makes me a very particular kind of Bengaluru theatre maker,” she says. “I place my work very much within the city’s imagination.”

“Recently, I was searching on women’s performance histories and suddenly my own work showed up

in the results,” she says, laughing at how ‘old’ and ‘experienced’ it made her feel. Yet the moment was profound — a reminder that lineage is not static. As forgotten performers

once called out to her, her work now joins the archive that future artistes might look toward when they need courage or direction. “We stand on each other’s shoulders,” she says. “That’s what theatre is — community, ancestry and listening to each other’s voices. I’m just glad to add mine to the list.”

If Sharanya honours the past by carrying it forward, she also looks to the future with clarity. In a world obsessed with AI-generated music, performances and personalities, she sees theatre not as outdated but as essential. “Theatre is still a small, community-driven, democratic space,” she says. What keeps theatre alive is something algorithms cannot replicate: the charge of one human witnessing another. The embodied truth of presence.“A stage cannot lie,” she concludes.

(Written by Prishita Tahilramani)