What Eetha, biopic on legendary tamasha artiste Vithabai, could mean for fading folk theatre genre

As anticipation builds around Shraddha Kapoor’s transformation into the legendary tamasha (Maharashtrian folk theatre) artiste, around painstaking recreations of lavani (traditional folk song and dance, performed to the beats of a dholki, which formed part of tamasha acts) costumes and the film’s dramatic teaser, the people who have spent decades carrying on Vithabai’s legacy have found themselves watching the spectacle from the sidelines.

For her children and grandchildren, this sudden resurgence of interest is both moving and unsettling. They have never known Vithabai as a cultural monument. They have lived instead with the practical consequences of inheriting her world: ageing stages, shrinking audiences, mounting debt, endless travel and the stubborn determination to keep one of Maharashtra’s oldest surviving tamasha troupes alive long after public attention moved elsewhere.

“We were approached a few years ago when the film was being planned,” recalls Vithabai’s 23-year-old grandson and legatee, Mohit Narayangaonkar. “One of the line producers, Anand Kale, asked us for old photographs and memories. We shared everything we could. But since then, despite repeatedly reaching out, nobody has told us anything. Now that even the teaser has been released, we’re hoping to see the film before it comes out.”

When contacted, Kale acknowledged that he had been liaising with the Narayangaonkar family but declined to answer questions about their concerns, saying those were matters only director Laxman Utekar (of Chhava fame) could address. The Federal made repeated attempts to reach Utekar on call and text messages, but received no response.

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The silence has left the family uneasy. While Mohit says they have been assured that Eetha presents both Vithabai and the performing community with dignity, there is still trepidation. “Only seeing the film will reassure us,” he insists. “If there is any unfair portrayal, there’ll naturally be questions.”

Without suggesting the filmmakers have acted in bad faith, the family accepts the biopic will not reproduce history scene for scene. Cinema, they recognise, has its own language. It compresses lives, rearranges chronology and heightens drama. Their concern lies elsewhere.

“My grandmother belongs to everyone now, except us,” Mohit says quietly. “We just hope audiences get to know the woman we knew, not only the legend. She was extraordinary because she was uncompromising, funny, stubborn, flawed and completely devoted to her art.”

His words point towards a larger question that stretches well beyond one film.

Who owns a cultural icon once cinema discovers her?

The question has become increasingly urgent as Bollywood turns to regional histories and forgotten cultural figures for its next generation of biopics. The debate is not simply about historical accuracy or artistic freedom. It is about who gets to shape public memory when lived history becomes popular culture.

For the Narayangaonkars, the answer will matter long after the closing credits. Because the story being adapted is not merely Vithabai’s. It belongs to an entire community of hereditary performers, travelling musicians, dancers, comedians, dholki players and backstage workers whose lives have remained largely invisible even as their greatest artiste prepares for a national audience.

Bollywood has rediscovered Vithabai just as the world that produced her is quietly disappearing.

For most audiences, Vithabai survives in fragments of folklore.

She is the woman who danced moments after giving birth. The lavani queen who could mesmerise thousands with a glance, a gesture or an improvised verse. The fearless performer who collected two President’s Awards and became synonymous with Maharashtra’s folk theatre.

Her family remembers someone altogether less mythical. “The child everybody talks about was me,” says Kailash Narayangaonkar, his laugh a mix of affection and resignation.

Now in his ‘60s and himself a lifelong tamasha performer, Kailash was born backstage during a performance at Shikhar Shingnapur in Maharashtra’s Satara district. Labour pains had begun while Vithabai was preparing to go on stage. According to family memory, she delivered her son behind the curtains while the orchestra continued playing outside. Moments later, she tightened her sari around her waist, tied on her ghungroos and walked back into the glare of the petromax lamps to finish the performance.

Over the years, the story has hardened into legend, shorthand for impossible resilience. For Kailash, however, it explains something much more ordinary about his mother. “People imagine she must have been endlessly affectionate because she was such a celebrated artiste,” he says. “But that wasn’t really her nature. Life had made her tough. Her deepest commitment was always to tamasha. Everything else, including us, had to find its place around it.”

There is no bitterness in his voice, only the understanding that the stage demanded a devotion few outside the profession can fully comprehend.

“The woman who walked back on stage after childbirth wasn't trying to become immortal,” he says. “She was responding to the brutal economics of travelling theatre. A cancelled performance meant unpaid musicians, disappointed audiences and another financial blow to a troupe already surviving from one booking to the next. What we now celebrate as heroism was, very often, necessity.”

Long before she became Maharashtra’s most celebrated Tamasha performer, Vithabai had inherited a life already shaped by performance.

Born in Pandharpur in 1935 into a family deeply rooted in tamasha, she grew up on the road, travelling from village to village with itinerant theatre companies that carried music, dance, poetry, satire and storytelling across rural Maharashtra. The troupe was not merely a workplace but an entire world; its own economy, school, family and home.

Within that demanding universe, Vithabai emerged as an artist of unusual authority. Her late husband, Maruti Sawant, too had been part of the same ecosystem, and had handled the troupe’s business.

Eighty-year-old Kamalabai Shinde, who performed alongside Vithabai before packed audiences of Mumbai’s textile workers, still speaks of her with undimmed admiration. “She called me her kokila (cuckoo) because she loved my singing,” Shinde recalls, smiling at the memory. “People came because of Vithabai. She could hold thousands in the palm of one hand. Though she moved effortlessly between wit, sensuality, sorrow and social commentary, she’d simply brush aside praise.”

Recognition came early. Vithabai received the President’s Award twice, first in 1957 and again in 1990, honours that acknowledged her immense contribution to India’s folk culture.

Yet, like so many traditional performers, public acclaim rarely translated into financial security, recall those associated with her.

Prestige travelled much farther than prosperity.

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Decades after her death, the troupe that bears her name — the Vithabai Narayangaonkar Tamasha Phad (phad means troupe in Marathi) — continues to perform, not because the economics make sense but because abandoning it would mean abandoning generations of inherited knowledge.

Family members estimate that debts have, at times, climbed close to Rs 2 crore.

A typical phad has 20–30 people — dancers, musicians, actors, comedians, stagehands, cooks, drivers — everyone travelling, living and eating together for seven to eight months a year, as they move from one village show to another. Ticket prices are deliberately kept low, usually around Rs 100–200 in most villages (sometimes a little more for better-known troupes), because they're meant to be affordable for rural audiences. Even then, a full house doesn't necessarily translate into profits.

The troupe has to cover transport, fuel costs, food, wages, costumes, lighting and sound every single day. Many artistes survive on annual advances (uchal), which means they're effectively working through the season to repay those advances before taking another one for the next year. A couple of rain-hit or poorly attended shows can wipe out the gains from several successful nights.

Today, Kailash’s sons, Mohit and Rohit, juggle performances with the relentless work of organising bookings, maintaining vehicles, managing travel, paying performers and keeping the Vithabai Narayangaonkar Tamasha Phad, one of Maharashtra’s oldest surviving tamasha companies, on the road.

Their labour is almost entirely invisible whenever Vithabai’s legacy is celebrated. Public memory prefers moments of brilliance to the quieter work of preservation. It remembers the woman who returned to the stage after childbirth, but rarely the generations who have spent decades ensuring that the stage itself still exists.

Perhaps that is inevitable. Legends are easier to commemorate than institutions. But it also obscures the truth about Vithabai.

She was never a solitary genius who emerged from nowhere. She was the finest flower of a vast theatrical tradition that shaped her long before she transformed it in return. To understand why her story still matters, one must first understand the world that made her possible.

For many Indians outside Maharashtra — and, increasingly, for many young Maharashtrians too — lavani survives as a familiar image: the unmistakable beat of the dholki, the nine-yard sari, the flirtatious repartee, the rapid-fire lyrics that move effortlessly between romance, satire and social commentary. It is endlessly recycled by cinema, TV, reality shows and social media, where it has become instantly recognisable even to audiences who have never watched a traditional tamasha.

“But Tamasha was never just a string of lavanis,” says Patil. “We've remembered the spectacle and forgotten the theatre.”

That distinction is more than semantic.

Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee Chhaya Khutegaonkar recalls tamasha as a complete travelling theatre tradition in which music, poetry, dance, comedy, improvisation and political satire were woven into an all-night performance. Each segment — gan, gaulan, batavni, vagh and finally lavani — served a distinct dramatic purpose, carrying audiences through devotion, humour, storytelling and social criticism before the climactic dance.

“You didn’t go to the Tamasha only to watch dancers,” she says. “You entered another world.”

That world travelled.

For generations, hundreds of troupes crisscrossed rural Maharashtra, moving from village fairs to temple festivals, carrying musicians, actors, comedians, dancers, cooks, children, stagehands and livestock across the state. They arrived at dusk, erected makeshift stages under petromax lamps and performed until dawn before packing everything up and moving on to the next village.

Less a theatre company and more a travelling settlement, the performers lived, learnt, quarrelled, married, mourned and created together on the road.

But to romanticise tamasha as merely colourful folk theatre is to erase the conditions that made it necessary.

The form emerged not from royal patronage or elite salons but from communities pushed to the margins of Maharashtra’s caste order. For generations, performance was not simply an artistic calling but an inherited occupation, often the only livelihood available to families denied access to land, education and other professions.

“People speak of tamasha as though it naturally evolved as entertainment,” journalist and sociocultural commentator Mukund Kule says. “That strips away the history. Many of the communities that sustained it had little freedom to choose another life. Performance was tied to caste, to labour and to survival.”

The contradiction lay at the heart of the form.

The same audiences who applauded performers through the night often resumed rigid social hierarchies by morning. Women who commanded extraordinary authority on stage found themselves judged, desired and stigmatised beyond it. Their artistry was celebrated. Their social standing rarely was.

Vithabai understood those contradictions instinctively because she lived them.

The confidence audiences remember was not simply charisma.

It was armour.

Perhaps nowhere was that more visible than in her legendary wit.

Her daughter, Mangala Bansode, still laughs while recalling one exchange that has become part of Tamasha folklore.

During a performance in Pune, Vithabai casually asked a fellow actor leaving the stage to “send in the Pathan”, the cue for the next character’s entrance. A man in the audience interrupted with a crude taunt of a sexual nature. Before anyone else could react, Vithabai pinned her gaze on him and made a retort that made the audience erupt. Though that heckler quietly disappeared, this memory also reveals something deeper, says Patil. “For a few hours every night, women who occupied precarious positions in the social order could command public space with language, intelligence and sheer force of personality. Their authority was temporary. Yet within the boundaries of the performance, it was absolute.”

That capacity to invert hierarchies made tamasha something richer than popular entertainment. It was also a space where power could be mocked, morality questioned and social conventions briefly turned upside down.

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Much of that complexity disappeared as lavani travelled into mainstream cinema.

Individual songs broke away from the theatrical structure that had once given them meaning. Their relationship with satire, especially the political kind, weakened. Their conversations with audiences vanished. What survived was an aesthetic — vibrant, sensual and commercially successful — but increasingly detached from the world that had created it.

Few resisted that transformation more stubbornly than Vithabai herself.

Even as audiences began demanding shorter programmes and film songs, she insisted on performing tamasha in its traditional sequence, recall those who knew her. According to Mangala, her mother believed the form possessed its own grammar, refined over generations and that reducing it to isolated dance numbers would ultimately impoverish it.

History offered her little comfort as cinema absorbed lavani, TV amplified it and social media multiplied it. Tamasha itself continued to recede. And yet that disappearing world — not the legend alone — is the real inheritance Vithabai leaves behind.

To remember her only as an extraordinary performer is to miss the larger story. The question is not simply who was Vithabai. It is why the world that made her possible has been allowed to fade from view.

Every generation retells its heroes. Theatre borrows from folklore. Literature reshapes history. Cinema, in turn, borrows from both. No culture survives unchanged. The question raised by Eetha, then, is not whether Vithabai Narayangaonkar’s life should become a film. It is what happens to a life once cinema becomes its principal storyteller.

That distinction matters because films do more than entertain. They become archives. While families preserve memory through stories, photographs and lived experience, cinema does so through images that reach millions. When those two versions diverge, it is almost always the cinematic one that endures. India’s recent fascination with biopics has repeatedly exposed that fault line.

Few examples illustrate it more clearly than Gangubai Kathiawadi. After the release of the 2022 film by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, starring Alia Bhatt in the lead role, descendants of the real Gangubai publicly objected to what they claimed was a sensationalised portrait that privileged myth over memory. Her grandson, Vikas Gowda, argued that the film foregrounded dramatic flourishes while overlooking what the family believed to be her defining work — her advocacy for sex workers, orphans and vulnerable children.

“They exaggerated and created fictional bits that’d shock and gain more eyeballs,” he had alleged. “We're poor and barely eking out an existence. How could we put up any fight against a powerful filmmaker? My grandmother fought all her life for everyone’s justice. Ironically, long after her death, she and her legacy were trodden upon and we couldn’t find justice.”

The point is not that filmmakers should surrender artistic freedom. The danger lies in allowing the cinematic version of a life to eclipse every other version, especially the memories held by the communities that continue to live inside those histories.

That is what gives Eetha a significance that extends far beyond one film.

It arrives at a moment when Hindi cinema has developed a growing appetite for stories rooted in Maharashtra’s history and culture. Maratha warriors, saints, revolutionaries and now, one of the state’s best known folk performers, and soon Olympian wrestler Khashaba Jadhav, are increasingly reaching national audiences through films mounted on a scale Marathi cinema itself has rarely been able to afford.

While the wider visibility is welcome, it also raises an uncomfortable question. Why do so many regional histories receive national recognition only after they pass through Bollywood?

Whether Eetha succeeds as cinema is, in some ways, the smaller question.

Its greater significance lies in something it has already accomplished. Long before audiences have watched a single frame, the film has brought Vithabai Narayangaonkar and, however briefly, tamasha, back into public conversation.

The challenge is what happens after the lights come up.

For the Narayangaonkars, that question is neither abstract nor philosophical. It is measured in bookings confirmed or cancelled, in diesel bills, in musicians who can still be paid, in audiences willing to sit through an all-night performance, and in whether a centuries-old troupe can survive another season.

Vithabai never stood alone, underlines Kule. “Behind every performance stood musicians, comedians, writers, dancers, dholki players, costume-makers, stagehands and generations of travelling families who built one of western India’s richest theatrical traditions.”

Yet, the conversation around Vithabai rarely extends to sustained support for travelling troupes, pensions for ageing performers, documentation of oral repertoires before they disappear, or serious efforts to teach tamasha as a complete theatrical tradition rather than merely as lavani dance.

“To celebrate Vithabai while forgetting them [the ecosystem around her] is to remember the flower while allowing the roots to wither,” says Kule.

The question Eetha leaves behind is not whether Vithabai deserves to be remembered — 24 years after she died in 2002. She always will. But whether the renewed attention surrounding her life can persuade audiences to look beyond the icon towards the living tradition she inherited, transformed and passed on.