The story of Indian participation in New Zealand’s arts is often told through a festival performance or a visiting star. Prayas Theatre offers a different timescale: years of rehearsals, successive productions and the work of keeping a community company alive.
Founded in Auckland in 2005 by Amit Ohdedar and Sudeepta Vyas, Prayas has helped make South Asian theatre part of the city’s cultural life. Its history connects migrant initiative with a wider public audience, while retaining the practical challenges of a volunteer-driven organisation.
Building something audiences could share
In The Big Idea’s twentieth-anniversary feature, the founders described wanting to broaden the forms through which South Asian culture was encountered. The company brought together people from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and developed work for audiences beyond those communities.
That breadth is important. Prayas has strong Indian roots, but describing every participant or production as Indian would flatten the South Asian relationships on which it was built. Its contribution lies partly in making room for those differences within a shared theatrical project.
The company’s biography of Ohdedar traces his origins to Kolkata and records his direction of works including Tagore’s Kingdom of Cards, Shahid Nadeem’s Dara and The Clay Cart, the last co-directed with Sananda Chatterjee in 2023. The range extends well beyond a single style of performance.
A partnership on a bigger stage
One clear landmark came in 2019, when Prayas and Auckland Theatre Company co-produced A Fine Balance. ATC’s season brochure identifies Ahi Karunaharan as director and credits the adaptation of Rohinton Mistry’s novel to Sudha Bhuchar and Kristine Landon-Smith.
The production ran at Q Theatre. Its story followed people trying to maintain their lives during India’s 1975 Emergency, placing a major South Asian literary work before Auckland theatre audiences.
Contemporary criticism helps explain the partnership’s significance without turning the history into publicity. Theatre Scenes reviewer Rand T. Hazou welcomed its expansion of the stories and performers visible on Auckland’s main stages, while also discussing emotional distance in the production. The work was being assessed as theatre, with artistic choices open to scrutiny.
The work behind continuity
Prayas marked twenty years with Pitārā: A Box of Memories in 2025. In its November 2025 update, the company described a refreshed committee, a retrospective production and a history stretching back to rehearsals in community halls.
An Awaaz account of the anniversary also records less celebratory realities. Ohdedar discussed funding, finding volunteers and maintaining their commitment, alongside the disruption of the pandemic and the effort of reconnecting with audiences.
In the same report, writer and director Ankita Singh described Prayas as an accessible place to develop theatrical experience outside formal study. That helps explain the value of continuity: a community company can provide repeated opportunities to participate, rather than a single invitation to appear.
For Indian New Zealanders, Prayas is therefore worth noticing between celebrations as well as during them. Its record shows cultural contribution accumulating through organisations, relationships and productions. The lasting achievement is a place where people can keep making work, testing it before audiences and passing experience to those who arrive next.
Source-based feature prepared on 25 October 2026 from the linked published material. No new interview was conducted.
