I wish we had this in India.

I caught myself saying something the other day — almost without thinking — “I wish we had Broadway here.” I think I meant the scale, the polish, the kind of spectacle you associate with Broadway theatre. It felt like a harmless thought, almost aspirational. But the more I sat with it, the more it started to feel incomplete. Because it wasn’t entirely true.

It made me pause and ask a slightly uncomfortable question — do we actually not have musical theatre in India, or have I just been trained to recognise only one version of it?

Because when you look even a little closer, it’s all around us. Forms like Yakshagana carry music, performance, costume, drama, storytelling — everything we claim to admire in global theatre. But they exist in a completely different rhythm. They’re not designed for a quiet, seated audience in a controlled environment; they’re alive, expansive, often unfolding in community spaces, shaped by mythology and collective experience. They don’t try to be contained — and maybe that’s the point.

That’s when I realised that this isn’t just about art — it’s about context. Every environment creates its own form of expression. Broadway didn’t just appear as an aesthetic; it evolved within a very specific ecosystem — economic, cultural, architectural. And India built its own systems, ones that didn’t prioritise the same kind of structure or packaging, but carried just as much depth.

But here’s where it got more interesting for me.