Created and performed by Anoushka Zaveri.

What would anyone even faintly familiar with the Ramayana say if you told them that during their exile in the forest, Sita befriended Shurpanakha and was devastated when Ram cut off her nose? 

“The universe is random,
it’s man who gives meaning.” 

Or that the only reason Sita wanted to accompany Ram into exile was that she could already imagine the dreadful boredom awaiting her in the kingdom? 

Or that she willingly left with Ravan, leveraging the opportunity to explore the famous Kingdom of Lanka? 

Or that the women she encountered on her journey — from Mithila to Ayodhya to the forests of Dandakaranya and finally Lanka — were part of a secret sisterhood, into which Sita was eventually inducted by Mandodari? 

They would say, “You’ve got your Ramayana wrong.”

“If suffering with grace is a virtue, then resisting that suffering with grace
should also be a virtue.”

There would seem to be something wrong in either version – and that’s the glitch in the myth. 

Well, there you have it. That’s what Glitch in the Myth is about. Its quiet pièce de résistance is the bharatanatyam-infused storytelling, which creator Anoushka Zaveri performs singlehandedly, not just with grace, but with a palpable enjoyment of the self.

A solo act, this play brought forth a mischievous, dreamy, innocent, intelligent, and clever Sita, supported by a sisterhood spread across lands, but held together by a common string of looking out for her. 

Rooted in a religious epic, the play surprised me with its clever humour. Zaveri channelising multiple characters and voices, on top of her third language—dance—was the kind of performance that makes you truly visualise the years of training and rehearsal behind what we see live. 

The saffron times that we live in, I’m grateful that stories like Glitch in the Myth are being bravely given a stage by theatres like Prithvi Theatre and artists like Zaveri are practising what they’re preaching in the play, “You’ll anyway have to cross some fires in this life, you might as well cross some lines.”