Makhan Lal Saraf Wins Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Kashmiri Theatre

At Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi on 13 August, an actor in his ninth decade of life walked up to receive a citation from President Droupadi Murmu for a craft he taught himself as a young man in Srinagar's Chinkral Mohalla. Makhan Lal Saraf was one of more than a hundred artists conferred the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship and Awards for 2024 and 2025 that afternoon — India's highest recognition for music, dance and theatre — and the only Kashmiri actor honoured for acting this cycle, alongside Chetana Das of Assam and Suresh Kumar Hazzu.

The citation, as reported by Daily Excelsior, credits Saraf for his "outstanding contribution to drama, Kashmiri literature, theatre direction and the promotion of Kashmiri cultural heritage" — a career that by any count runs past sixty years and touches nearly every medium Kashmiri performing arts have used to survive: stage, All India Radio, Doordarshan Kendra Srinagar, and film.

A self-taught actor who became an institution

Saraf never trained formally. He picked up the craft watching and working alongside senior Kashmiri theatre figures, and by the mid-1960s was already building the infrastructure of a theatre scene rather than just performing in it — associated first with Ramgmanch, founded in 1966, then as one of the founders of the Kashmir Theatre Federation in the early 1970s, and later Bhoorang. Across those groups he worked as actor, director, producer and scriptwriter, staging Kashmiri-language productions such as Dr. Faustus, Kuss Log Daavass and Taqdeer Saaz, and appearing in Hero Machama, Aknandun and the opera Vitasta, where he played Neel Naag.

Radio and television carried his work to a far wider Kashmiri audience than any stage could. As an A-grade All India Radio artist and a familiar face on Doordarshan Kendra Srinagar's Kashmiri-language dramas, Saraf became, for a generation, one of the voices and faces most associated with Kashmiri performing arts on air. He acted in the Kashmiri films Maanziraat and Mehjoor, and appeared in a television serial directed by Shyam Benegal.

He also wrote about the form he'd spent his life practising. His Kashmiri-language book Drama Movement in Kashmir went on to become the first theatrical text taught as coursework in the Kashmiri department at the University of Kashmir — an unusual afterlife for a working actor's own account of his field, and one measure of how seriously the form has come to treat him.

What the award follows

Like most of Kashmir's Pandit theatre community, Saraf left the Valley during the militancy of 1990. What that migration meant for Kashmiri theatre — an art form built on live audiences and a spoken language — never fully separated from his own subsequent work. In 2018 he performed in Poshgondh, a play built around the disintegration of Kashmiri Pandit families after the exodus. In 2013, a documentary on his life and career, Profile for Progeny, premiered not in Srinagar but at the IIIM auditorium in Jammu, produced by the socio-cultural group Vyeth with former chief secretary Vijay Bakaya as chief guest — a screening for an audience that was, by then, largely rebuilding its cultural life from Jammu rather than the Valley. A year later, one of his plays was staged in both cities to full houses.

That is the throughline that makes this award land differently in Jammu than it might elsewhere. A large share of the audience Saraf has spent decades performing for and writing for now lives here, in a city that absorbed tens of thousands of displaced Kashmiri Pandit families after 1990 and has since become the place where much of that community's cultural memory is passed down — often to young people who have only ever known the Valley through what their parents and grandparents describe. A record like Saraf's, and a text like Drama Movement in Kashmir, is part of what that memory gets built on.

Artists and cultural bodies across Jammu and Kashmir have welcomed the recognition, with several telling JK Media they hoped it would encourage younger performers to take up Kashmiri theatre and continue preserving the region's performing-arts traditions — an appeal aimed less at Saraf's own generation than at the one that comes after it.

Sources: Daily Excelsior, Press Information Bureau, JK Media.