Ramesh P. Panigrahi (b.1944) is a junior contemporary of famous Indian playwrights like Badal Sircar, Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad and K.M.Panikkar. Born in a remote village called Dharakote, situated on the foothills of the Eastern Ghat Mountain ranges of Ganjam District in Odisha, India, Ramesh is present on the stage as a playwright, actor, designer, director, translator and theatre critic for the last 62 years (1963-2025), Author of around 100 plays in Odia and 23 plays in English translation, he is a pioneering theatre person of India who has worked in all the branches of theatrical subgenre. Ramesh Panigrahi is a pioneering playwright of India who experimented with postmodern Indian theatre form as early as 1971 in his play, Mahanatak (The Emperor with his pot) and he wrote the first thesis in India on a postmodern American playwright – Sam Shepard(1943-2020).Ramesh P. Panigrahi has written six screen-plays for Oriya films and won four cine-critic awards. He has also written the screenplay and dialogues for a Hindi serial (Ristey kaise kaise) telecast from the Metro T.V. channel, Delhi. He taught courses on creative writing, screenplay writing & E-journalism at the Institute of Mass Communication, Bhubaneswar, the film studies at Orissa Engineering College, Cuttack and at the School of Film Studies, KIIT university, Bhubaneswar.

Dr. Panigrahi worked as a playwright in the tribal districts of Odisha for five years (1969-1974) and he deployed the theatrical performance mode for educating tribal children in schools. He dramatised the school texts, trained the children and their teachers and performed them without a proscenium format during day time. The meaning of the school texts could be understood and communicated to the students as well as tribal highlanders, who occasionally volunteered to participate in the performances out of fun. The experiment, now called “Theatre-in-Education”(TIE) may be treated as the first in the country since TIE was introduced in the National School of drama much later, in 1989, after around 30 years. It was named Sanskar Rang Toli. Panigrahi initiated the deployment of theatrical performance for education in the Koraput, Nabrangpur and Malkangiri districts. He also worked with naked “bonda” hill dwellers and staged a play for them in 1973(captioned Bindu-o-Balaya). It became a kind of social movement since the naked highlanders learned to cover their groin and torso with clothes instead of putting on coloured beads. He recruited a bonda girl for the leading female role (she studied up to standard-VII) since she knew how to read odia alphabets.

In 1971, Dr. Panigrahi studied European drama and the ‘theatre of the absurd’ and started writing anti-plays, atom-plays and flash plays in the western mode. He, then, collaborated with famous Odia painter Bipin bihary Sahu in his Studio Chitralekha, Berhampur and with late dr. Dinanath Pathy, painter, historian, poet, art-critic and founder principal of B.K.College of Fine Arts, Bhubaneswar to experiment with colours and structures of stage performance.

In the process of his theatrical individuation, Panigrahi conducted folk theatrical conventions and collaborative performances joining Danda Nata, Chadheya Nata, primitive dances and Prahallada nataka and showing its culminating form in Odissi dance. He then worked for 8 years (1984-1992) in the empty-space jatra theatre instead of the proscenium format. He wrote 18 jatra plays and directed them, moved in the truck boards through the length and breadth of Orissa. Mahasweta Devi, Jnan-peeth award winner playwright from Bengal inspired and supported his projects. As a playwright and Director he addressed around 5million countryside spectators of Odisha. Panigrahi’s message proclaimed: “We live in a culture of the spectacular and the specular: a culture that theatricalises everything, turns life into mirror effects and performance situations where attention and significance are timed and framed so that what seems to matter most one moment has become trivial the next, expendable; a culture which would seem to value surfaces and depths making no distinctions between them, and yet pursues hysterically a quest for the real”. This theatrical as well as messianic endeavor has helped immensely to generate awareness in Odishan rural sector and more than 40 jatra theatre teams switch on their footlights every late evening to entertain and educate villagers of the rural sector.

Dr. Panigrahi, then, came back to the rural sector of Ganjam district in the south to work with folk theatre teams who survived through quasi-commercial performances. He made extensive and intensive research on the performing mode of Prahallada Nataka of Luduludi village near Belaguntha, (Ganjam) and led the team to Katpadi, Tamilnadu to participate in the Kattaikuttu Festival-2005 organised by Dr. Hanne M. De Bruin and P. Rajgopal. His experiment as the technical director in the performing space of Prahallada Nataka was appreciated by the critics.

Dr. Panigrahi taught English literature (poetry, fiction, drama and literary criticism) for thirty four years in the government colleges of Odisha and was superannuated from Ravenshaw Autonomous college as a class-1 gazetted officer, of the Orissa Education Service. After retirement he taught in the Distance Education Department of Utkal University. He also taught E-journalism and creative writing in the Institute of Mass Communication and screenplay writing in the School of Film Studies, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar.