When Nayika Bhoomika opened at St Andrew’s Auditorium on January 9, it arrived with an argument: Tagore’s women are not props to be admired from afar but inner lives to be attended to. The evening, a continuous, four-part dance drama drawing from Chokher Bali, Chandalika, Kabuliwala and Maan Bhonjon, mostly makes good on that claim. It is a production of scale and taste, and it contains, quietly and insistently - two performances that will stay with you: Indrani Mukerjea’s and Subrat Panda’s.

Mukerjea has been visible on stage before; her Chitrangada last year, produced by her company Indrani Mukerjea Enterprise (IME), was a brave first public step into Tagore as performer-producer. What felt different on this night was a new discretion in her craft. Gone were the broad gestures of someone finding their theatrical footing; in their place was a controlled economy: a look held a beat longer, a micro-shift in weight that did more than a sentence of dialogue could. As Binodini in Chokher Bali and later as Giribala in Maan Bhonjon, Mukerjea takes up space without needing to fill it. She allows rage and tenderness to be partial and messy; she lets silence do its work. That willingness to accept ambiguity, and to refuse tidy moral framing, is the performance’s real achievement.