Nov 26 2026 to Nov 25 2026 5 p.m.

Where

Sabha Blr

No.44/A, Kamaraj Road, Bharati Nagar, Shivaji Nagar, Bengaluru 560042

Event Description

Writing Science Fiction Plays for the Indian Stage

A Conversation with Meghna Roy Choudhury and Abhishek Majumdar

Moderated by Anmol Vellani

After reading excerpts from their science fiction plays, two playwrights will converse on the nature of science fiction; why they chose to write speculative plays for the Indian stage; and whether they have been inspired or influenced by earlier Indian plays and performances in this genre. We will learn from them if writing science fiction for the theatre poses unique challenges. They will reference their own plays to demonstrate that science fiction is not a form of free-floating fantasy; it can, for instance, address moral dilemmas and ask searching questions about the political tendencies of our times.

Script Reading:

Juno 77 

By Abhishek Majumdar

In Juno 77, a woman disappears during a space mission. Her partner’s search takes him far beyond Earth, where time unsettles everything they believed they knew about love, duty, and family. When their paths cross again, each has lived differently and in different references of time since the separation. How should they now understand their obligations to one another?

Against this story, Juno 77 asks questions at the heart of moral philosophy. Does an intention matter more than its consequences? Can someone be held to a promise in circumstances no one could have imagined? What does it mean to forgive a person whose absence has shaped your entire life?

The play also considers how religion helps us live with such questions. Faith offers ways to think about time, sacrifice, suffering and the possibility of reunion. Yet those ideas can mean different things to people who have endured the same loss differently. Bringing space science into conversation with religious thought, Juno 77 asks how we make moral choices when our shared understanding of a life has come apart.  It seeks to examine the question of whether our loves and losses are meaningful or mere coincidence. 

Written and directed by Abhishek Majumdar, the play will be produced by Nalanda Arts Studio in Kannada and Hindustani versions. 

The Archive on the Wall 

By Meghna Roy Choudhury

The Archive on the Wall is a science fiction play inspired by holographic principle theory that explores memory, scientific thought, and political erasure, set inside a crumbling flat in contemporary Mumbai.

After her mother’s death, Aparna, a physicist turned archivist, returns to her childhood home to sort through her belongings. While scanning the old walls for data, she discovers that one wall retains more than structural history. It reacts. It hums. It remembers.

As the house approaches demolition, Aparna uncovers fragments of her mother’s political past, her own repressed memories, and traces of violence that were meant to disappear. She must confront what the wall has preserved and what she has chosen to forget.

The play asks what remains when history is erased, and whether memory can become an act of resistance.