The Necropolis Trilogy

In this captivating collection, the iconic playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar transcends the boundaries of time and space. In exquisite prose, he creates his own space-time, his own universe where characters from mythology, history, literature, paintings, dreams, imagination, and his own life coexist in an ever-present ‘now’ that seamlessly blends the past, present and future.

Bound together by an invisible yet tenacious thread, the three masterpieces delve deep into the relationships between man and man, man and art, man and life, and man and death. Eyes on eternity, Elkunchwar destructures and restructures time and space in breathtaking style.

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“Hauntingly beautiful like the fragment of a melody, The Necropolis Trilogy is a dense and rich creation, full of undiscovered meanings. It has a strange, majestic, epic sweep that encompasses time and space. Elkunchwar also shares his more personal, deeply felt, intimate moments with lovers, family and friends. The Necropolis Trilogy offers us a rich, teeming universe.”
Amal Allana
Theatre Director & Author of Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive

“Philosophy is alive, with the sound of music, a series of interludes and background murmurings of the Partition (of all varieties), in Mahesh Elkunchwar’s metatextual Necropolis Trilogy. The only thing that remains constant is music. As a woman tells us, ‘I am madhyam in Raga Bhoop and nishad in Raga Darbari. That is against the rules, against nature. Moreover, they said that if I stay among them, I will desecrate their divine, pure music and destroy it.’ And it is this cry that echoes throughout The Necropolis Trilogy.”
Ramu Ramanathan
Playwright, Director, Poet

“These essays—indeed, Mahesh Elkunchwar’s writing extends and reinvents the term to the point where we would need a new term—are worlds in microcosm, each one amplifying our sensory horizons, our sense of time and memory, and blurring the line between memoir and fiction. The Necropolis Trilogy breaks new ground formally and has a richly multilingual fabric that sets aside all purist notions of language. It weaves childhood memories with the epic tremors of nations and states in transition. Sarabjeet Garcha’s translation conveys the atmospherics of and the granular shifts within each text with finesse.”
Ranjit Hoskote
Author of Icelight & To Break and To Branch

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Mahesh Elkunchwar is an iconic playwright and screenwriter. His plays, written in Marathi, have been translated and staged in most Indian languages, as well as English, French and German. He has lectured at the University of Nagpur and served as a visiting teacher at the National School of Drama, New Delhi. In 2001-2, he also taught at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. He is a Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the Saraswati Samman, the Kalidas Samman, the Brittangham Fellowship (University of Wisconsin, USA), and the Homi Bhabha Fellowship.

Sarabjeet Garcha is a poet, translator, editor, and publisher. His five books of poems include All We Have and A Clock in the Far Past, in addition to a volume each of poems translated from Marathi and prose translated from Hindi. He has received the Fellowship for Outstanding Artists from the Government of India, the International Publishing Fellowship from the British Council, and the inaugural Godyo Podyo Probondho Award. His poems have been translated into German, Spanish, Russian, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi and Hindi.