Pratibimb Theatre Company, a collective founded in Uttar Pradesh almost 50 years ago, recently delivered a powerful performance on a metaphorical retelling of Mahabharata in Gurugram. Over the years, it has staged powerful works by masters such as Badal Sircar, Vijay Tendulkar, and Girish Karnad. The play, titled ‘God’s Lioness’, directed by Satyabrata Rout, a former faculty member of the National School of Drama, tries to reinterpret Draupadi’s journey as a spiritual awakening, from victimhood to transcendence.
“The idea of 'God’s Lioness' emerged from my long engagement with the Mahabharata, not as a historical or mythological text, but as a mirror of human consciousness. I was not interested in a retelling of the epic, but on exploring its inner metaphysics, the emotional and psychological terrains of its characters who still live within us,” Rout says, with the same moral conflicts, greed, and gendered violence present in contemporary society.
The seed of the play lies in the silencing of Draupadi – this is something that has echoed through the centuries. Through the subtle use of light, masks and music, the play shows that Draupadi is not just a woman who has been wronged but a voice, suppressed, looking for justice in a man’s world. To Rout, Draupadi is a metaphor for human endurance.
Written by one of India’s youngest playwrights, Mrinal Mathur, the play transforms the battlefield into an inner war of consciousness. Mathur says that it explores the timeless relevance of Draupadi in today’s world.
The stylised gestures and movements inspired by Chhau and Kathakali enhanced the visual experience of watching the play on stage. They transformed emotions into physical poetry and connected the performance to “deep traditional memories”. Rout says: “For me, puppets and masks in 'God’s Lioness' are not just design choices; they are extensions of the soul. They help dissolve the boundary between the human and the divine, between actor and archetype. Through them, I try to evoke that metaphysical presence, which words alone cannot convey.”
The play does not focus on the events of the Mahabharata per se, but on the consciousness behind them. The story unfolds not on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, but within the human mind, where emotions such as silence, pain, and awakening coexist.
The director says it was “a re-experiencing of the epic through the inner eye. It stands apart because it doesn’t aim to recreate mythology; it seeks to rediscover the truth hidden within it. I don’t see 'God’s Lioness' as a reinterpretation of religion but as an artistic exploration of truth. The Mahabharata is not just a sacred text; it’s a living dialogue about human choices, courage, and conscience”.
Blending traditional Indian forms with contemporary storytelling is a delicate art, says the director; the challenge lies in keeping tradition alive without reducing it to ornamentation and giving modern expression depth without severing its roots. The aim was integration, not fusion, allowing forms like Chhau and Kathakali to breathe naturally within a modern frame. “This balance, though difficult, defines the beauty of Indian scenography, where the ancient and the modern merge into a single, timeless stage language,” he states.
