New Delhi, Sept. 24 -- When director Anuradha Kapur first read Marathi playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar's Wada trilogy in the 1990s, she believed it to be "one of the most important plays of contemporary Indian literature". Mapping the Deshpande family of Dharangaon across three decades, the different parts-Wada Chirebandi, Magna Talyakathi, and Yugant- chronicle the slow collapse of a feudal Brahmin household against a backdrop of sweeping social change, ecological decay, and migrating lives. "It maps India from the 1970s all the way till the '90s. There is no such detailed examination of reality that I can think of in modern Indian literature. So, it's a classic text that way," she says.

Kapur is now bringing the epic to life in Virasat, a...