On the pleasant, misty evening of August 15, as azadi celebrations were in full swing, several hundred gathered outside the National School of Drama (NSD) to witness the NSD Repertory’s hegemonic rewriting of Bisham Sahni’s novel Tamas into a theatre production ‘Vibhajan Vibhishika Tamas’ (in previous years, this play was performed as ‘Tamas‘). After the performance, as the applause swelled through the crowd, Chitranjan Tripathi, the director of the NSD, was invited on the stage, where, with his hands folded in supplication, he pleaded ‘not guilty’.“Just let us perform (Bas hume natak karne dijiye),” were the words that followed.Two years ago, in 2023, as the play’s staging was postponed due to ‘unavoidable circumstances’ created by right-wing resistance (instigated by BJP’s former Rajya Sabha MP, Balbir Punj), many interpreted Tripathi’s plea as specific to the staging of this play. But given the crisis and the quagmire of politics in which the institution finds itself, it can also be read as a plea to let the institution perform.The earliest treatise on Indian dramaturgy, the Natyashastra, mentions enraged Asuras and Danavas (demons) who created the first disturbance when Natyaveda was performed. The ruling party has embodied a radicalised version of these demons, not only creating obstacles but obliterating the structural and artistic fabric of the institution itself.NSD, initially established under the Sangeet Natak Akademi, emerged as part of the Nehruvian project of building cultural institutions that could represent the idea of an ‘Indian’ culture. In doing so, it flattened the diversity of Indian cultures into an illusory version of a homogenised ‘national culture’. It offers a three-year diploma course with a stipend for every student enrolled, which encourage students from underprivileged backgrounds to think of a future in performing arts. Over the years, many theatre stalwarts and alumni of the institution, including Naseeruddin Shah, expressed dissatisfaction with this logic of one national institution that brought together students from different regions to learn and engage as it creates a certain linearity within them – the same speech pattern, the same physical vocabulary – which compromises the pluralism of expression in which theatre truly thrives.In 2017, NSD aimed at setting up ‘regional’ centres, but it was done without the ‘regional’. Its former director Suresh Sharma in 2019, talking about the different centres NSD is planning to open, stated that “these centres should not be ‘regional’ in essence, but in fact operate on the lines of IITs and IIMs”. The erasure of the regional essence is the homogenisation of Indian pluralism, propagating one way of doing things when there isn’t. There is no one accent to a language, there is no one intonation to a dialogue – to insist otherwise is to flatten the very diversity that sustains it. Regimes insist on one way, not art. What makes this worse is the exorbitant fee structure at the new centre which has opened in Mumbai, which directly threatens the diversity of backgrounds from which students have historically come.Mumbai is often called the city of dreams. But in this case, it might be more accurate to call it a city of dreams for a privileged few, as the price for the two semesters of the one year acting course is Rs 3 lakh each, or Rs 5 lakh if paid together. This is roughly 277 times higher than the tuition fee at the Delhi centre, where students pay just Rs 150 per month. Unsurprisingly, this has enraged many theatre practitioners and former NSD students across the country. Renowned theatre director and poet, and NSD alumnus, Raghunandana, called it a “betrayal”, rightly pointing out that “students no longer remain students. They become customers and clients.”This shift is not an isolated decision but a symptom of the larger erosion hollowing out the institution. The MOU of 2023-24 points towards a radical shift in Ministry of Culture’s expectations for NSD as it mandates that NSD “put efforts towards maximizing its internal resources and eventually attain self-sufficiency”. What has followed is priced ticketing for every production, an extension of the paid three-month acting programme, and now the exorbitant pricing of the Mumbai centre’s acting course. This reflects the larger construct of conformity the institution is staging; but this time its not the Mandi House audience on the receiving side, but the students themselves.NSD today stands on the shoulders of the students it once nurtured. Yet, Raghunandana argues, 99% of them would not be able to afford such fees. This shift transforms the institution into a space accessible only to a certain elite. A national theatre that will now be performed for, and by, the elites.At the same time, the institution has also been facing radical defunding since COVID, with its budget bottoming out at Rs 48.55 crore in 2023–24, which is a reduction of approximately 46% over the last five years. This loss of funding has cultivated a culture of fear, where the political structure dictates the true extent of artistic freedom. As one former student of the institution observes, “The students are reduced into instruments of the institution, fearing consequences of an expression of opposition, and administration is either scared or is state’s ideological puppet.” The theatre doesn’t accommodate dissent, doesn’t provoke thought, doesn’t stick its nose out into politics or the social world. In other words, there’s a preventive self-censorship going on for everything that is contentious.On the day of his appointment as the director of NSD, Tripathi said at a press conference, “This is a golden time for NSD and for live art. There is a lot of potential.” That ‘golden time’ has dimmed into a flickering bulb on a dying stage.In theatre, conformity or dissent crystallises on the stage in the form of the productions it mounts, and what we have witnessed so far is a crawling submission in the face of suppression. NSD has become an ally in the current regime’s war against the act of thinking. Anything that raises no claims, arguments or ambiguities can be staged. Amid funding cuts, paradoxically, huge expenditures are made on productions like Samudra Manthan, Vibhajan Vibhishika Tamas and Kargil, which neatly fit into the state’s narrative, employing an ‘us vs them’ moral framework. Through such political instrumentalisation of the past, using it as an aesthetic object, the state legitimises its political project of the present.On the reception side, especially post-COVID, there has been a rupture in the theatre-going public and its behaviours, leading to a degeneration of the theatre public sphere. Many theatre practitioners and part of school’s core audience have stopped participating in the school’s propaganda theatre. Further, ticketing and an increase in prices have made it into a more enclosed space, where only those who can afford to attend may witness performances. This is done at the cost of the ‘publicness’ of theatre, cultivating a new ‘private’ audience, which is aesthetically curious in a particular way and perhaps even morally polarised. These are primarily those who align with the state’s narrative, filling up seats as passive spectators. The only communicative response one could expect from such uncritical embrace is of a ripple of applause.This crisis, above all, reconfirms theatre’s importance and influence as a social medium in our present society. There is a dire need to generate more discussion around the function of state-subsidised theatre by questioning its ‘representativeness’ and rethinking why we go to the theatre in the first place. We consider the audience as the foundation of a theatrical event and thus its role becomes crucial in opening up a space for counter performance. If the theatre doesn’t reach out to us, we have to reach out to the theatre, expressing our disapproval, which should not be merely silent. We have to subject the institution’s conformity to critical scrutiny and radically engage with its functioning and productions, for those still striving for a free, safe space for learning, organising, staging and receiving.If institutions are meant to stand for a vision of the future, then what vision does NSD stand for today? Whatever it is, it certainly cannot be one of inclusion, plurality or dissent. May the curtain fall soon on this theatre of submission.Lakshya Choudhary is a theatre practitioner and writer, currently pursuing a master’s degree at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU.