A bare stage hums with intellectual tension and questions of belonging. In The Trial of Abdus Salam, Bengaluru-based playwright-director Nilanjan P Choudhury distills the life of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim scientist to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, into a taut, two-character confrontation, performed by Krishna Hebbale and Harish Seshadri.
Born in Pakistan in 1926, Salam rose to global acclaim even as his homeland erased him, because he belonged to the Ahmadiyya sect. “The Ahmadiyya community has been declared non-Muslims or heretics in Pakistan, through constitutional amendments in 1974,” Choudhury notes. “Salam was deeply wounded by the way orthodox leaders mistreated him.”
The play frames this through an imagined bureaucratic trial over Salam’s burial rights, turning history into moral pressure. What elevates the work is its fearless embrace of science as action: a staged demonstration of parity violation becomes a moment of theatrical discovery. “I have gone beyond just mentioning the concept and actually shown an experiment,” Choudhury says.
The influence of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen is evident, but Choudhury’s voice is his own—urgent, humane, and political. Salam’s life, he argues, matters now because it rejects binaries: “He combined deep rationality with strong faith, without seeing them as contradictory.” Part of a science-theatre trilogy, the play also honours Salam’s institutional legacy, such as International Centre for Theoretical Physics.
In just 90 minutes, the play becomes an act of reclamation—of a scientist, of reason, and of the idea that knowledge can outlast borders, prejudice, and silence.