Anupama Chandrasekhar

Anupama Chandrasekhar is an Indian playwright.

Quotes

• I have been asked so many times, mostly by men, ‘Why don’t you write comedies, or plays that celebrate India?’…I tell them: on the day that these things don’t happen any more, I will happily start writing bedroom farces.
  • On her drive to write about controversial topics in “Sex tapes and acid attacks: Anupama Chandrasekhar, the playwright shocking India” in The Guardian (2019 Oct 28)

• It was not a one-off incident. It has happened over and over again since, and has just become more gory, more brutal. But you can sense the media fatigue around the reporting of crimes against women. If it happens outside of the cities, it’s just another incident. The candlelit vigils don’t happen for women in small towns and villages.
  • On the sexual violence that still persists after the Delhi bus gang rape of 2012 in “Sex tapes and acid attacks: Anupama Chandrasekhar, the playwright shocking India” in The Guardian (2019 Oct 28)

• There’s a charge and immediacy to theatre that I don’t find in any other medium. It’s an artform in the present tense, a medium tailor-made to explore the world you live in NOW…
  • On choosing theater as her medium in “AN INTERVIEW WITH ANUPAMA CHANDRASEKHAR” (Nightwood Theatre; 2014 Jan 10)

• A woman playwright’s job and skill-set are the same as a male playwright’s. Yet I’m aware that fewer female playwrights are staged compared to men - in India, and perhaps across the world. There are fewer women directors in my country than men, and hardly any governmental support to theatre. Both contribute to this unhealthy gender imbalance…
  • On female playwrights in India in “AN INTERVIEW WITH ANUPAMA CHANDRASEKHAR” (Nightwood Theatre; 2014 Jan 10)