On legacy, wild flowers, and the plays that haven't been written yet
Vivek Madan will tell you, without embarrassment, that he has always been more interested in the "why" than the "how." Not tips and tricks. Not techniques. Not short-term workshops where people leave with a toolkit and no idea what to build. The idea of consistently, sustainably building capacity for skill, for critical thinking, for research, the why of what you're doing rather than the how. He offers it early, almost as a disclaimer. Everything that follows grows out of it.
He is the kind of person who, when he decided to name a playwriting fellowship after Girish Karnad, first wrote to the family. He knew Raghu Karnad; it felt wrong not to, he says. Saras Karnad asked careful questions such as what the project was, who it was for and then gave her blessing with a condition: let the name not preserve a legacy, but enable others. That framing holds the fellowship in place. There is a memory attached to that name too. Some years ago, Karnad called out of the blue to invite him to a reading of his last play, Crossing to Talikota, at the Bangalore Literature Festival. He couldn't make it. But the call stayed—the fact that Karnad had been quietly watching, had noticed, had reached out. He recalls his words "Congratulations, thank you, I really enjoy your work." A small act of generosity, given without occasion. The fellowship is, in part, an attempt to pass that feeling forward.
The fellowship is called Kusumaale, a word suggested by facilitator Lakshman KP, drawn from the Billigiri Rangana Kavya, oral poetry rooted in the Soliga tradition where the Eastern and Western Ghats meet. In that landscape, flowers run through every song, every invocation. Sojugada Sooju Mallige is from there. So is this word. Kusumaale means a garland of wild flowers, gathered by hand, by the people closest to the ground. The word carries a caste history, it belongs to those who gather, not those who buy. For Lakshman, the name carries one more meaning: theatre is for people. They complete the circle. A people's word, for a people's art.
This often meant undoing instinct. In a literary culture steeped in epics and inherited forms, many arrived with mythological or historical frames already in place. The pedagogy asked, quietly but persistently: why this story, and why now? What is your connection to it? Without that, the work remained illustrative. With it, something shifted away from archetype towards specificity,and from argument towards experience.
It didn't land immediately. Some resisted it. They had been comfortable in their existing frames; setting them down felt like starting from nothing. But slowly, they went back to their own worlds. Every writer has a world they can excavate. And within the first few days, that shift began to happen.The process was built to hold that shift. A structured beginning with exercises in character, world, and scene gave way to something more responsive. Individual mentorship, constant feedback, an insistence on dialogue over instruction. The pedagogy was fixed in advance. It also evolved in the room, reading applications, understanding who was present, restructuring constantly so everyone left with confidence and craft. It is less about how excellent the pedagogy is, Lakshman says, and more about how it sharpens a writer's voice.
What also helped was simply being in the room. As Irawati puts it “writing is essentially isolating; and theatre is fundamentally a community exercise . To see a whole bunch of diverse people invest in your vision is a luxury.” Lakshman describes it differently. He says “you’ll be living with the stories constantly. Somebody comes to you with a story and suddenly someone else tells you another story and you are in a completely different world. The neighbourhood is so rich and fertile. I miss that”.
Nine plays went through the fellowship. Five were selected for full production. Four were not. The disappointment was real. All four will still be presented as rehearsed readings. The value of the process was never reducible to selection. The larger point is time. The effect of a residency isn't in the play you write inside it, or immediately after it. It's in the third or fourth play after, when the learning has become instinct. Like driving: eventually you stop thinking about the clutch. You find your own way. And when you start breaking rules to suit yourself, that's when you've mastered it.
The Kusumaale inaugural event adds one more thread. Lakshman KP ran a four-day writing workshop for 13 and 14-year-olds from Gubbi Libraries and a government school on Kanakapura Road. Their short scenes are wild, unpolished, honest and will be directed by Balaji Manohar and performed alongside the fellows' work. The logic is straightforward and long-sighted at once. These 14-year-olds are the writers of tomorrow. In 10 years they will be 25. They will be in Kusumaale 2036."
The project itself grew out of something impersonal. It was a gap in a database. When Bhasha Centre's Drama Library began archiving unpublished scripts from across India, the picture that emerged was as much about absence as presence. Whole regions like Karnataka, West Bengal, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and more were almost silent on the page when it came to contemporary written plays. People were writing everything else. Books, short stories, films, songs, poems. But not plays. That was surprising, given the richness of the theatre traditions. Kusumaale and other programs at Bhasha centre were designed as a response not so much to produce plays as to cultivate the conditions in which they might grow.
Thirty-nine applications came in from across Karnataka. A striking number were mythological adaptations. Karna retold through a feminist lens, a classical story reimagined through caste. In one conversation, an applicant explained the appeal with disarming honesty: "Because I don't have to do the work of making the characters. They're already there. I just put them in new situations." Not wrong. But that's the game you're playing.
So the fellowship's central provocation became a single question, driven into every session by dramaturge Irawati Karnik: What is the play only you can write? The emphasis on "only” is where it unlocks. Not what you can write, or should write, but what exists nowhere else because no one else has lived exactly where you have. Your colleagues. Your neighbours. The person at the shop down the road. There are stories in all of these lives. So what is the one only you can write?
It's not about issue-shopping, she insists. It's about a writer's relationship with the world such as personal, philosophical, political and finding the narrative that can hold that relationship. Many early drafts leaned into issues such as patriarchy, caste, gender inequality, poverty. Again and again, the stage carried the playwright's opinion while the characters illustrated it. This is not a documentary. The intervention was not to move writers away from their concerns, but closer to their own relationship with them.
The second residency brought a different revelation. Actors entered the process. For the first time, playwrights watched their characters breathe. Voices, mannerisms, rhythms and the text began to move. The plays became something more than what was on the page.
The eleven people who made that journey are worth pausing on. A farm owner from Dharmasthala, a PhD researcher in contemporary Kannada theatre, a Ramnagaram-based director, a Ninasam graduate who codes for a living, a software professional, a retired infectious diseases specialist. Seven women and four men. The selection, he insists, was purely on merit. But the diversity of the outcome came from the diversity at the top. Build the right room, and the rest follows.
The structure of the fellowship is not something Madan claims to have invented. He
participated in StageRite in 2001, a collaboration between ART (Artists Repertory Theatre, Bangalore) and the Royal Court Theatre in London. He was festival director of the final edition of Rage Productions' Writers' Bloc in 2016. When he began designing Kusumaale, he called Rage and asked: what worked? What didn't? "We are part of a history, part of a continuum," he says. "Too often we say we have to cut all ties and come up with something of our own. But you cannot ignore what came before." Just as those programs made it easier for him, he hopes Kusumaale makes it easier for whoever comes after.
He also built the next generation of teachers into the room. Two younger practitioners, Sathwik NN and Yeshaswini Channaiah, sat alongside senior facilitators Irawati Karnik and Lakshman KP, to observe, to plan, to understand how the room works when it works. In five or six years, he hopes, they will be running programs of their own.
Near the end, he returns to Descartes, the version most people leave out. Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. "People excised the doubt entirely," he says. "They said, 'I think, therefore I am.' No. It starts with what I don't know." Doubt, for him, is not a weakness but a method. A way of staying curious, of remaining open to being wrong.
And so somewhere in Bengaluru, nine new plays exist that didn't a year ago. Fourteen-year-olds are learning that their lives are worth writing about. A drama library is taking shape. A garland of wild flowers keeps growing and somewhere in it are the plays that haven't been written yet. The gardener tends every patch anyway.
