Saumya Joshi

Joshi finished his BA at H. K. Arts College in Ahmedabad in 1993 and his MA at Gujarat University in 1995, and then walked straight back into his own college as a professor of English literature. He held that post for sixteen years.

The plays were being written the whole time. He founded Fade-In Theatre in 2010 with a group of younger theatre people and finally resigned the teaching job in September 2011, at thirty eight, which is a strange age to bet on a Gujarati stage career and the strongest evidence available that he was not bluffing.

He had debuted with Rami Lo Ne Yaar!, but the play that fixed his name was Dost Chokkas Ahin Ek Nagar Vastu Hatu, a musical black comedy built on the 2002 Gujarat riots. Writing a comedy about that, in Gujarati, in Gujarat, within a few years of it happening, is a decision most writers would have talked themselves out of. The Week put him on its list of fifty rising stars of India in 2003.

Aathma Taaru Nu Aakash followed and became the first play from Gujarat selected for the Prithvi Theatre Festival in Mumbai, in 2005. That is a border crossing that Gujarati theatre had been trying to make for decades, and it happened on a script by a working college lecturer.

Greenroomma came out in 2008 and it remains the only collection of poems he has published. Eighteen years later there is still no second book.

What is in it explains the restraint. The people in those poems do not have a stage: a sex worker, a boy working the Sivakasi fireworks factory, a labourer taking shade under the sack he carries. Joshi writes across ghazal, nazm, geet and free verse without settling into any of them, which is a poet's way of saying the form should follow the person, not the other way round. One book that people still quote beats six that nobody does.

102 Not Out started as his Gujarati play about a 102 year old man determined to outlive a record. Umesh Shukla filmed it in Hindi in 2018 with Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor playing father and son for the first time, and Joshi is credited as the writer. It reported a worldwide gross of about Rs 115.3 crore.

Hellaro is the other one. Joshi wrote the dialogues and all four song lyrics, with Mehul Surti composing. The film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film at the 66th National Film Awards, the only Gujarati film ever to take the top prize, on a reported budget of around Rs 2.5 crore. A poet who had spent two decades writing for people who are not allowed to speak got handed a film about women in the Rann of Kutch who are not allowed to dance. The casting of the writer was the smartest decision the production made.