Anuradha Kapur's 'Virasat' arrives as a quietly devastating theatrical intervention, staging Mahesh Elkunchwar's Wada trilogy in a way that strips away any easy sentimentality about family, lineage or cultural inheritance. Presented at Delhi's Sunder Nursery, the production uses the physical and emotional architecture of the old wada to examine what happens when a household, and by extension a society, mistakes preservation for survival.
Rather than treating the trilogy as a museum piece, Kapur reimagines it as a living argument about decay. The result is a production that feels both intimate and political: intimate because it is rooted in the slow unravelling of a family's internal world, political because it asks what is lost when communities cling to inherited hierarchies long after their practical and moral authority has collapsed. In Kapur's hands, the old house is not merely a setting. It becomes a pressure chamber in which memory hardens into burden.
The Wada As Warning
Elkunchwar's writing has long been recognised for its unsparing examination of the Marathi middle class, especially its anxieties around status, gender, property and decline. 'Virasat' draws on that legacy but sharpens its contemporary relevance. The production does not present the past as a stable repository of values waiting to be defended. Instead, it shows how the past can become a trap when it is protected for its symbolic comfort rather than its living usefulness.
That distinction is central to the force of the staging. The title itself, meaning inheritance, signals a double meaning: what is passed down is not only property or memory, but also the moral failures embedded in a family's habits. Kapur's interpretation suggests that inheritance can be corrosive when it is accepted uncritically. The old order in the play is not dignified by age; it is exposed by age.
The production's setting at Sunder Nursery adds another layer to this reading. The venue's historical atmosphere amplifies the tension between preservation and stagnation. In a space associated with heritage and restoration, 'Virasat' asks whether the act of conserving the past can sometimes conceal a refusal to confront the present. The answer the production offers is uncomfortable: yes, and at great cost.
Modernity's Uneven Promise
What makes 'Virasat' especially resonant is that it does not simply celebrate modernity as liberation. Kapur's staging is too intelligent for that. The production understands that modernity can be alienating, uneven and morally compromised. Yet it also insists that the alternative is not innocence, but paralysis. The old world in Elkunchwar's trilogy is not redeemed by its endurance; it is revealed as increasingly untenable.
This is where the production's emotional intelligence becomes most apparent. It does not reduce the conflict to a simple binary between tradition and progress. Instead, it shows how people remain attached to structures that no longer serve them because those structures still offer identity, authority and the illusion of continuity. That attachment is painful to watch because it is recognisable. Families, institutions and societies often prefer familiar decay to uncertain renewal.
Kapur's direction appears to understand that the deepest tragedy in such stories is not collapse itself, but the refusal to recognise collapse while it is happening. 'Virasat' therefore functions as both drama and diagnosis. It observes the slow erosion of a world that cannot adapt, while also questioning the assumption that change automatically produces improvement. Modernity may break old forms, but it does not guarantee moral clarity or social justice. Still, the production argues, the inability to move is its own form of defeat.
A Sparse, Exacting Theatre
The production's power lies in restraint. Rather than overwhelming the audience with theatrical excess, it appears to rely on precision, atmosphere and the cumulative weight of silence, gesture and domestic tension. That approach suits Elkunchwar's material, which is less interested in spectacle than in the psychic weather of a family in decline. The audience is invited not to admire ruin, but to feel its claustrophobia.
In that sense, 'Virasat' is a serious work of cultural interpretation as much as performance. It repositions the Wada trilogy for a contemporary audience without flattening its complexity. It also resists the temptation to turn heritage into a comforting aesthetic. Instead, it asks a harder question: what exactly are we preserving when we preserve the past, and who pays the price when we refuse to let it go?
The answer, in Kapur's reading, is that inheritance without renewal becomes a form of self-harm. 'Virasat' does not deny the emotional pull of the old world. It simply refuses to romanticise it. That refusal gives the production its authority, and its sting.