The first festival known as Bharat Rang Mahotsav (BRM) in 1999 showcased the rich traditional and contemporary regional theatre of India through sixty plays. The number of plays increased to 83 in 2000 and 85 theatre groups participated in the 2001 BRM opened by the President, ShriK.R.Narayanan. An attractive and comprehensive 30-minute film on the history of the NSD and the previous three festivals was screened at the press conference called by the NSD.

    The Director of the National School of Drama, Shri Devendra Raj Ankur, India’s premier theatre institution established in 1959 in his curtain raiser,
said that like the Avignon Festival in France, the Edinburgh Theatre
Festival and other international film and theatre festivals, the Bharat
Rang Mahotsav (BRM) will be held during a fixed time each year. This will enable national and international companies to pre-plan participation. The dates this time have been set from 16 March to 8 April. A former NSD director, Shri Ram Gopal Bajaj, under whose administration the first three BRMs were successfully convened, added that going beyond fixed dates and giving the fest an international hue, it is aimed that the festival be expanded to embrace the spirit of a theatre village where shows run round the clock as it happens in Avignon, Edinburgh and other such international events elsewhere.

 
    In 1975 the NSD became an autonomous organisation fully financed by the Department of Culture, Government of India. The scope and reach of the NSD has widened beyond the initiatory three-year training programme in Dramatic Arts to include a permanent touring repertory company manned by NSD graduates that stages musicals, realistic plays and comedies in Hindi adapted from Indian and foreign languages. Another successful NSD venture is the mobile Sanskar Rang Toli comprising a company of adult actors staging plays for children.

    One of the most attractive and valuable aspects of the previous two
festivals was an open house interaction with an eminent theatre
personality. The face-to-face with director Habib Tanvir in 2002 was more rewarding as it was preceded by a week -long exposition of dramas from his repertoire of Chhatisgarhi plays including the classic Charan Das Chor. Last year B.V.Karanth, director from Karnataka who has made the entire Indian theatre his playground, regaled audiences with live excerpts from the rich fund of musicals he has directed. Just the musical score he composed for Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana, a drama on fractured identity, is sufficient to place him on the map of Indian theatre.

    The decision to highlight the theatre of one zone at each BRM will provide viewers an overall picture of the evolution and status of drama in the area. This year the focus is on theatre from the North- East and West Bengal. There are 11 plays in Bengali, 5 in Assamese, 4 in Manipuri and one each in Mizo and Arunachali. The last two plays are the products of the extension programme conducted by the NSD. The prestigious interaction on the concluding day of the festival will feature an NSD graduate, Ratan Thiyam, playwright and director from Manipur. His epochal play Chakravyuha has been staged all over the world to great acclaim. His troupe will round up the festival with Kalidasa’s Ritusamaharam followed by the face-to-face episode on 8 April 2002.

    Among the landmark productions to be staged is Arun Mukhjerjee’s Bengali play Jagannath which has been running for 25 years.  By a strange coincidence Arun’s son, Gautam, makes his debut at the festival with his version of Teesta Paarer Brittanto. The highly respected iconoclast, H.Kanhailal, from Manipur showcases the talent of his wife, the Sangeet Natak Akademi winning actress, Sabitri, in a new play Border. Usha Ganguli brings Mukti and Gautam Haldar returns with a solo performance Nagar Keertan.

    As in the past the 4th BRM boasts a fair number of solo acts by male and female performers. Maya Krishna Rao’s multilingual A Deep Fried Jam promises to be entertaining. Rita Ganguly will present a tribute to her guru Begum Akhtar. Harvinder Kaur, Lushin Dubey, R.Nalini, Rajshree Wad, Amita Udgata (all Hindi) are other soloists at the BRM. Not to be missed is Dancing With Father, a solo performance about a mentally challenged boy’s relationship with his father. It is a brilliant enactment by Israel’s Yitzhak Weingarten. There is one show on the afternoon of 22 March.

    In the forty years of its existence the NSD has turned out some 650 theatre directors. No wonder then that the festival features 60 NSD graduates’ works. Amongst the better-known alumni, Naseeruddin Shah returns with another Manto and Ismat Chughtai stories’ enactment in the narrative format. Waman Kendre stages Tee Phulrani, a Marathi version of G.B.Shaw’s Pygmalion, B.Jayashree brings Chitrapata in Kannada, Dulal Roy stages Hamlet in Assamese.  Ram Gopal Bajaj, Suresh Bharadwaj, Sanjay Upadhyaya, Bapi Bose and Bipin Kumar - all from the NSD stable - bring new works.
Acclaimed by critics and a hit with audiences, Neelam Man Singh Chowdhry brings her new Punjabi play An Unposted Love Letter featuring Raminder Kaur.

    The festival is a sagacious blend of plays by experienced, acclaimed and awarded directors and experimental work by young theatre workers. Newcomers will vie for an audience – 8 venues and all shows starting at 6.30 or 7.00 PM –and attention with old timers like Barry John who comes up with a new play after a very long time. It’s All About Money, Honey is the product of Barry’s Theatre Academy- IMAGO. Habib Tanvir offers Veni Samhar in Hindi
and classicist director from Kerala; K.N. Panikkar presents Kallurutty in Malyalam and Pratima in Sanskrit.

    Street Theatre, hitherto present by default, finds a special niche in the
BRM. The lawns of Bhawalpur House will host local street theatre groups like Jan Natya Manch, Nishant, KMCollege Players and Mukhota for hour-long performances between 5 and 6.00PM every day from 24th March. These open air performances will be like curtain raises for the following shows at NSD’s five theatres- Abhimanch Auditorium, Sammukh Studio, Bahumukh, the open air Vrikrishtmadhyam (all situated in Bhawalpur House), Meghdoot (open air), Studio Theatre (both inside Ravindra Bhavan),the Kamani and Shri Ram Centre Halls situated around the Mandi House roundabout.
Scribes have long been agitating for some interaction with BRM
participants who come to Delhi from far- flung areas: a special hall in
Bhawalpur House, Antarmukh, has been earmarked for Press Meets. The time for these encounters of the close kind has been fixed for the afternoon hours between 3.30 and 5.00PM.