Hari Madhab Mukhopadhyay
A Balurghat theatre director who founded Triteertha and directed over 60 plays, honoured posthumously with the Padma Shri in 2026.
Hari Madhab Mukhopadhyay built a serious theatre company in Balurghat, a district town in north Bengal, and kept it going for fifty years. He was named posthumously for the Padma Shri in 2026 in the field of art, from West Bengal [1].
Learning in Kolkata
Mukhopadhyay was born on 3 April 1941 in Balurghat, the headquarters of South Dinajpur district [2]. As a student and young professional in Kolkata from 1958 to 1967, he watched the work of Bengali theatre greats such as Sombhu Mitra, Bijon Bhattacharya and Utpal Dutt, which shaped his own ideas [2].
Triteertha
Back home, he became a commerce lecturer at Balurghat College and in 1969 helped found the theatre group Triteertha, which chose him as its director [2]. Over five decades he directed and acted in more than sixty productions, among them Galileo, Raktakarabi, Debangshi and the Hindi play Bichhan [2]. The group took its work to Delhi, Lucknow, Varanasi and Patna [2].
Playwright
He wrote more than fifty plays, collected in three volumes, and many essays on theatre [2]. He also wrote a weekly column about his life in theatre for Anandabazar Patrika [2].
He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for direction in 2007 and the West Bengal government’s Banga Bhushan in 2012 [2]. He died on 17 March 2025 [2].
Sources
- [1] Padma Awards 2026: list of awardees — Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. Accessed 11 October 2026.
- [2] Padma Awards 2026 investiture ceremony brochure: citation for Hari Madhab Mukhopadhyay — Press Information Bureau, Government of India. Accessed 12 October 2026.
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