India, Sept. 6 -- On a recent Saturday afternoon, I drove to Jagriti Theatre, 15 km away in Whitefield, to what used to be the outskirts of Bengaluru. Frankly, when Arundhati Raja, one of the leading lights of English theatre in India, invited me to see her latest production, Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, I wondered how many people other than loyal fans of the Rajas would be drawn to see it.

I was wrong to doubt. The denizens of my city are sensitive to the repression that women continue to experience. A feminist play written by a rebellious gay Spanish playwright saw a packed auditorium. Lorca wrote it in 1936, a couple of months before he was assassinated by Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. The pla...