‘Eetha’ and the long fade of the tamasha tradition in Maharashtra

The lusty whistling of the audience calling out her name drowns her howls as she pushes out her baby backstage. Though still in pain, her ears are trained on the dholki players and the pedal harmonium. The crowds can’t wait any longer. Minutes after undergoing labour, a sari tied tightly around her abdomen, she steps onto the stage.

The woman is Vithabai Narayangaonkar, one of Maharashtra’s greatest tamasha artists. She is played by Shraddha Kapoor in Laxman Utekar’s forthcoming biopic Eetha. The infant born in dramatic circumstances is Kailash Narayangaonkar, now 64 years old and still carrying the story that is inseparable from his mother’s legend.

The recently released teaser of Eetha begins with Kailash Narayangaonkar’s birth on June 3, 1962, in Shikhar Shingnapur village in Maharashtra’s Satara district. By capturing the relentless demands of an art form that often consumed the lives of those who sustained it, the teaser has reopened a conversation extending beyond cinema.

The Hindi movie, scored by Ajay-Atul, will be released on August 28 in cinemas. Like Utekar’s Chhaava (2025), Eetha is a Bollywood biopic of a cultural icon in Maharashtra.

Vithabai was born in Pandharpur on July 1, 1935, into a Dalit Mang family steeped in tamasha, the performance tradition that combines music, dance, satire poetry and social commentary. Vithabai rose through the travelling circuits of rural Maharashtra to become one of the most commanding figures the form has known.

Her powerful singing, lacerating wit and electrifying stage presence drew admirers from across the state. She received the Presidential medal twice, in 1957 and in 1990, for her contribution to folk culture.

Vithabai died on January 15, 2002. She devoted herself to tamasha with a ferocity that her children remember with pride and astonishment.

“My mother was never the soft, cuddly sort,” Kailash Narayangaonkar told Scroll. “That kind of unconditional love she reserved for her art. Nothing else came close.”

Several of Vithabai’s eight children followed her on to the stage, including her daughters Mangala Bansode – a legend in her own right – Malati Inamdar, Bharti Sonawane and the late Sandhya Mane. Kailash Narayangaonkar and his sons, Rohit and Mohit, run the Vithabai Bhau Mang Narayangaonkar troupe in challenging circumstances.

The clan is approaching Eetha with cautious hope. Mohit Narayangaokar said that apart from sharing a few photographs of Vithabai with producers Maddock Films and Kathputli Creations, the family members haven’t signed a formal contract for the adaptation.

Laxman Utekar and Maddock Films didn’t respond to queries by Scroll about the film’s treatment.

While accepting that Eetha will take “creative liberties,” Mohit Narayangaokar said, “We hope that the film remembers her as she was. My grandmother was extraordinary, but she was also unapologetically human.”

Vithabai was known as “Tamasha Samradni”, or the Empress of Tamasha. The adoring public knew Vithabai as much for her artistry as for her formidable repartee.

“People remember her stage presence for a reason – that energy and command cannot be taught,” Mangala Bansode told Scroll. “But nothing matched her razor-sharp tongue, which left people bloodied.”

The actor Nilu Phule once narrated an anecdote about Vithabai. During a performance, Vithabai told an actor exiting the stage, tikde pohchun ek Pathan paathav (send a Pathan when you reach there), to set up the next act. An audience member crudely called out, bai la Pathan lagto vaatata (looks like she needs a Pathan). Without missing a beat, Vithabai fixed her gaze on the heckler and improvised, send not one but two Pathans – one for me and one for his mother.

Mohit Narayangaonkar recalls another incident from 1981, when a fuel shortage made it difficult for travelling tamasha companies to sustain their tours. A delegation of artists approached chief minister AR Antulay through Vithabai.

“When he saw her in the delegation, he immediately sanctioned subsidised diesel for registered tamasha troupes,” Mohit Narayangaonkar said. “She’d never have used influence for herself, but it shows the kind of respect she commanded.”

That influence rested not only on fame but also on artistic conviction. Despite an abusive marriage and phases of severe hardship, Vithabai resisted the growing tendency to reshape tamasha and its adjacent form, lavani, according to cinematic tastes.

Several troupes embraced film songs based on lavani and abbreviated performances. Numerous Marathi films explored the world of tamasha. But Vithabai remained committed to the form’s traditional structure, Mangala Bansode said.

“She was strongly opposed to the cinematic appropriation of lavani,” Bansode added. “She insisted on the traditional repertoire of gan, gaulan, vagh and bol-batavni. She wanted audiences to experience tamasha in its complete form.”

Before Eetha, Vithabai’s life inspired the Marathi play Vitha, by Shantanu Ghule, as well as a Marathi biopic, also titled Vitha. Directed by Pundalik Dhumal and starring Urmila Kanetkar in the lead role, the movie was completed over a decade ago but never released.

“I made the film after speaking to the family, but I could not release it because of a personal problem,” Dhumal said. “I am happy that Laxman’s film is coming out. Vithabai deserves all this and so much more for her stellar contribution to Maharashtra’s folk performing arts.”

Vithabai’s authority on the stage existed within a world that has long occupied an uneasy place in Maharashtra’s cultural imagination. Eetha arrives at a time when tamasha find itself suspended between heritage and neglect, preservation and appropriation, celebration and embarrassment.

“While Tamasha provided livelihoods for Tamasha people and granted some independence to Tamasha women, it also stigmatized them as inherently ashlil [vulgar] – these were the double binds of liberation and subjugation,” Shailaja Paik writes in The Vulgarity of Caste – Dalits, Sexuality and Humanity in India. Paik’s study of women in tamasha includes conversations with Mangala Bansode about the harsh realities of the touring circuit.

Paik also quotes from an interview with Vithabai in 1980, about a tamasha festival held in Nashik: “The venue hosting Tamasha artists did not have basic water facilities… The place where all people urinate, defecate – that is where we cook, eat and along with our young children sleep in in the bitter cold.”

Tamasha and lavani came out of the experiences of Maharashtra’s most oppressed communities, writer and commentator Mukund Kule pointed out. “For many Dalit castes, performance was not entirely a matter of choice,” Kule said. “Communities were expected to sing, dance and entertain dominant castes within a deeply unequal social order.”

It is impossible to separate the history of tamasha from caste, Kule observed.

“The people who created and sustained the form were rarely allowed to move beyond those social boundaries,” he added. “The women who performed lavani occupied an even more complicated position. Their bodies were controlled, commodified and judged. Urban elites later dismissed the form as vulgar because of its sensuality. Yet, tamasha has always been far more layered than that. It questioned social norms, accommodated fluid identities and gave marginalised communities a voice.”

While Eetha might refocus attention on tamasha, there are concerns over the possible Bollywoodification of a complex tradition.

“Eetha has simply become the latest in Bollywood’s growing appetite for Marathi history, icons and cultural memory,” Mukund Kule declared. Laxman Utekar’s Hindi-language Chhaava, about Chhatrapati Sambhaji, was a monster success, especially in Maharashtra. “There is clearly a rush to Hindi-fy Marathi content and it appears to be working at the box office too,” Kule added.

Cinema has gradually extracted lavani from the world that produced it. The dance survives, even as the platforms that nurtured it have diminished. Tamasha too has been eroded by television, migration and shrinking rural venues. Touring is costly, audiences have aged and the descendants of tamasha artists increasingly seek more secure livelihoods.

Many young Maharashtrians can recognise a lavani tune but have never seen a tamasha performance. Yet, the form refuses to disappear.

Dance schools in cities teach lavani. Younger performers reinterpret the form through feminist and experimental lenses. Cultural festivals continue to programme lavani. Social media has carried lavani far beyond the dusty fairgrounds where it once flourished.

Questions linger about who tamasha is for today. The hereditary performers who carried it from village to village? Urban choreographers? Television producers? The film industry? The state?

Somewhere beyond the cinema halls, on modest stages lit by tube lights and powered by ageing generators, tamasha still plays to thinning crowds. The dholki still sounds. The songs still rise into the night. The audience, however small, is still waiting.