There was darkness on stage. As the sound of waves grew louder, Kathak dancers emerged, embodying the fluid movements of a river. Staged on November 5 at The LaLiT New Delhi, ‘Yeh Sheher Nahin Mehfil Hai’ was a theatrical-dance production that traced Delhi’s journey through the eyes of the Yamuna. From Indraprastha to New Delhi, it told the story of a city through the perspective of its sole perpetual witness—the river. Performed by Kathak exponent Shivani Varma and produced by Delhi-based cultural organisation Sopaan, the production celebrated the city’s enduring spirit and its evolution through centuries of rebuilding, while remaining a centre of art, culture, poetry and romance.
This time, the evening was conceived as an immersive experience. With wave projections transforming the ballroom into the banks of the Yamuna, the audience was drawn into the river’s world. Beginning with the mythical descent of Yamuna to earth, the performance travelled through the eras and empires that shaped Delhi. First came Indraprastha, from the Mahabharata, situated on the river’s banks. The mood turned fierce with the arrival of Razia Sultan before becoming vibrant with Shahjahanabad, the city’s golden age of poetry, art and culture. The narrative then moved through colonial rule and Partition, eventually returning to the Yamuna’s troubled present.
When she first envisioned the production in 2016, Varma felt that while settlements traditionally grew around rivers that sustained them, Delhi had treated its river like a “pariah”. “It has become a polluted shadow of itself,” she says. The Yamuna’s deteriorating condition, its waters obscured by thick haze and chemical froth, had become the impetus for the production.
Kathak lent itself naturally to this narrative. As Varma embodied the river, the fluidity of the classical dance form mirrored the movement of water. “A river of the north, a dance of the north—they speak the same language,” she says. Yet, despite the strength of the concept, the choreography began to feel repetitive as the performance progressed. The dancing, too, did not consistently rise to the standard one had come to expect of Varma. Given her command of the form, there were moments when the execution felt less assured than the idea demanded, leaving the production short of its full artistic potential.
As the performance drew to a close with an urgent appeal to conserve the Yamuna, stage fog slowly spread into the audience, bringing the river’s polluted reality uncomfortably close. It was an effective theatrical device, making the audience experience, however fleetingly, the contamination that had become part of the river’s existence. Ultimately, ‘Yeh Sheher Nahin Mehfil Hai’ was both an ode to the Yamuna, which had witnessed Delhi’s passage through centuries, and a reminder of how much of that history stood threatened by our neglect.
