Inside Jaane Pehchaane Anjane – The Artists Behind Anupam Kher’s New Musical Comedy-Drama | Part 2
From Delhi’s street theatre and Mumbai’s casting rooms to filmmaking, documentary work, Mithila art and now an international stage, Maya Sharma has spent more than two decades discovering storytelling from almost every side. This fall, that journey brings her to North America with Anupam Kher’s Jaane Pehchaane Anjane, including its Boston-area performance on October 11.
When the curtain rises on Jaane Pehchaane Anjane, the immediate attention naturally falls on Anupam Kher and Swaroop Sampat. Look a little deeper into the ensemble, however, and another fascinating artistic journey begins to emerge.
Maya Sharma has auditioned for roles and has also sat on the other side of the room, helping cast actors for major films and series. She has performed under theatre lights, worked behind the camera, travelled through Uttarakhand making documentaries, taken on creative production responsibilities and found an entirely different form of expression in the intricate lines of Mithila painting.
After moving through all these different worlds, she now finds herself back where her artistic journey first took shape: the stage. Only this time, that stage is travelling across continents.
As Jaane Pehchaane Anjane prepares for its North American tour, Maya joins Anupam Kher, Swaroop Sampat, Meghna Malik and an accomplished ensemble, bringing with her an artistic journey that began more than two decades ago and has rarely followed a predictable path.
Before the Camera Came the Stage
Maya Sharma’s journey in the performing arts began in 2004, with early experiences that included street plays with JNU IPTA in Delhi and performances during her college years.
Street theatre is an interesting place for an actor to begin because there are no retakes and very few barriers between performer and spectator. An actor has to communicate immediately, hold attention and respond instinctively to the energy of people standing just a few feet away. It is theatre stripped to one of its purest forms, where the strength of the performance and the story must do much of the work.
From those beginnings, Maya moved deeper into theatre, working with respected directors including Robin Das, Bapi Bose, M.K. Raina, Surendra Sharma, Vivek Mishra, Himanshu B. Joshi, Ramesh Manchanda, Satish Anand and Raj Narayan Dixit. Over the years, she performed in more than 20 theatrical productions across India, taking on characters spanning different ages, personalities and emotional landscapes.
After moving to Mumbai, her theatrical journey continued through collaborations with directors including Pramod Pathak, Rohit Tiwari, Kulvinder Singh Bakhshish, Gajendra Ahire and Mithil Rey. She also performed in English-language productions, further widening the range of her stage work.
One name from that chapter carries particular relevance today: Gajendra Ahire.
Years after becoming part of Maya’s theatre journey in Mumbai, Ahire and Maya find themselves working together again, this time on Jaane Pehchaane Anjane, written and directed by Ahire and now travelling internationally with Anupam Kher.
For Maya, theatre has remained much more than another medium of performance. She describes it as a living exchange between actor and audience, where immediacy, unpredictability and shared energy make every performance different from the one before it.
That makes Jaane Pehchaane Anjane feel less like another addition to her résumé and more like a return to her artistic foundation.
Learning Storytelling From Behind the Camera
Acting could easily have remained Maya’s singular pursuit, but curiosity took her in another direction.
She spent a period working as a creative director for a production house, becoming involved in different aspects of filmmaking, including writing, editing, cinematography, acting and direction. Rather than viewing these as completely separate disciplines, Maya began understanding how each contributes to the larger process of telling a story.
Documentary filmmaking opened another world altogether.
Her work took her through Uttarakhand, particularly the Garhwal region, where she worked closely with local communities while creating documentary projects for the Government of Uttarakhand as well as independent productions. Those assignments took storytelling away from scripts, studios and constructed characters and placed her among real people, real experiences and communities whose stories had to be understood before they could be filmed.
She later carried that experience into corporate filmmaking and projects with NGOs.
Maya’s own reflections on filmmaking repeatedly return to empathy, human connection and the ability of stories to resonate beyond the screen. For an actor who would eventually bring her primary focus back to performance, those years behind the camera added another layer to her understanding of what makes a story believable.
She was not simply learning how to perform a story; she was learning how stories are built.
The Actor Who Began Casting Other Actors
Perhaps the most fascinating turn in Maya Sharma’s career came when she began working in casting.
For more than a decade, Maya has been involved on the other side of the audition process. Her collaborations with casting director Gautam Kishanchandani included projects such as Choked, Ghost Stories, Guilty Minds and Thar.
What made her perspective particularly interesting was that Maya entered the casting room as an actor herself. Her approach, as she explains it, comes from understanding what performers experience during an audition and creating an environment where they can become comfortable enough to deliver an authentic performance.
There is an intriguing reversal in that chapter of her career. Actors spend years entering rooms hoping that someone sitting across the table will recognize something special in them; Maya eventually became one of the people sitting across that table, searching for that quality in somebody else.
Few performers get to understand the audition room so intimately from both directions.
Maya also took on responsibilities as a creative producer, broadening her understanding of yet another part of the process that eventually brings a story from an idea to an audience.
All of those experiences inevitably travel back with an actor when she returns to the stage. Understanding what a director sees, what a camera captures, what a casting professional searches for and what another actor experiences can subtly change the way a performer approaches a character.
From Police Inspector to Maharani
While exploring filmmaking, casting and production, Maya continued building her own career in front of the camera.
Her television work includes Mauka-E-Vardaat, where she played a police inspector in a lead role, and Bheema, in which she appeared as a District Magistrate. In K.C. Bokadia’s Sardar: The Game Changer, Maya portrayed the Maharani of Jamnagar alongside Rajit Kapoor.
Her screen journey has extended across television, films, advertising, short films and voiceovers, while her recent work includes Sanskar, directed by K.C. Bokadia and featuring Mugdha Godse and Aman Verma.
The range of those roles tells one part of her story, but there is another side of Maya Sharma’s creative life that has nothing to do with an audition, a camera or a theatre stage. To understand that part of her journey, the story leads back to Bihar.
A Patna Connection Finds Its Way Onto Canvas
Born in Patna, Maya grew up with an awareness of one of Bihar’s most distinctive artistic traditions: Mithila painting, widely known as Madhubani art.
The intricate patterns and earthy character of the art form fascinated her from childhood, although life eventually carried her toward theatre, Delhi, Mumbai, acting, filmmaking and casting. The fascination with Mithila art, however, remained somewhere in the background.
Then came the COVID period, when the pace of everyday life suddenly changed and Maya finally found the time to explore that childhood interest more seriously.
What began as curiosity gradually developed into a personal artistic practice. Her work draws upon the detailed patterns, symbolism and visual language associated with traditional Mithila art while leaving room for her own interpretation. She has since created original and commissioned works, including paintings inspired by Radha and Krishna.
There is something revealing about this chapter of Maya’s life. For years, much of her creativity had involved interpreting characters, scripts and stories created by others. With a canvas in front of her, she discovered another language for storytelling, one in which the lines, patterns and interpretation were entirely her own.
Theatre Calls Her Back
Despite everything Maya explored along the way, theatre never disappeared from her creative life.
In recent years, she has brought acting firmly back to the centre of her work. One of her significant theatrical projects is Maai Ki Aakhiri Chhath, where she takes on the protagonist role of Maai.
Then came Jaane Pehchaane Anjane.
The production reconnects her with Gajendra Ahire and places Maya within an ensemble built around two highly accomplished performers, Anupam Kher and Swaroop Sampat.
For an artist whose journey began with theatre in 2004, joining a major international theatrical tour more than two decades later brings an interesting sense of continuity. The surroundings have changed, the scale has changed and the distance from those early Delhi performances is enormous, but the essential relationship remains the same: an actor, a stage and an audience experiencing a story together.
Inside Jaane Pehchaane Anjane
Written and directed by acclaimed filmmaker and theatre personality Gajendra Ahire, Jaane Pehchaane Anjane explores relationships in today’s world and the curious contradiction of people being deeply familiar to one another while, in many ways, remaining strangers.
The musical comedy-drama moves through relationships, memories and emotional connections with humour, music and drama, looking at the people we believe we know and the parts of them that may still remain undiscovered.
Anupam Kher captured the essence of the production particularly well when introducing the play:
“This play is not just a story. It is a reflection of you.”
That reflection extends to relationships, memories and emotions as they unfold in the immediacy of live theatre.
The production brings together Anupam Kher and Swaroop Sampat, supported by an ensemble featuring Meghna Malik, Maya Sharma, Vikas Rawat, Shraddha Mandale and Herman D’Souza.
Its creative team adds another dimension to the production. Anu Malik has composed the music, marking the celebrated composer’s first venture into creating music for a stage play, while the lyrics are written by acclaimed lyricist Kausar Munir. The songs feature the voices of Shaan, Sukhwinder Singh and Anandi Joshi, with choreography by Chirag Aggarwal.
For readers who have been following this series, Chirag Aggarwal was the focus of Part 1, where we explored why dance plays such an important role in the musical world of Jaane Pehchaane Anjane. With Maya Sharma, the lens moves from movement and choreography to the journey of a performer whose understanding of storytelling has been shaped by theatre, film, casting and visual art.
From Mumbai to North America
Jaane Pehchaane Anjane had its world premiere at Mumbai’s iconic NCPA Tata Theatre on April 12, 2026, where the production opened to a packed audience and received a standing ovation.
Reflecting on the premiere afterward, Anupam Kher described the experience as “nothing short of magical,” recalling how the performance developed into an emotional conversation between the actors and the audience.
It is an observation that connects remarkably well with Maya Sharma’s own relationship with theatre. She began with a form of performance where the audience was physically close and its response immediate; more than twenty years later, that exchange between performer and audience remains at the heart of what she does.
Only the geography is changing.
This fall, Jaane Pehchaane Anjane travels across the United States and Canada, taking the production thousands of miles from the Mumbai stage where it premiered.
For Maya Sharma, it adds another chapter to an already unconventional artistic journey that has travelled from Patna to Delhi, from Delhi to Mumbai, and now from India to North America.
Boston Welcomes Maya Sharma on October 11
For New England audiences, that journey arrives on Sunday, October 11, 2026, when Jaane Pehchaane Anjane comes to the Collins Center for the Performing Arts in Andover, Massachusetts.
Presented in the Boston area by Jay-Ho! and Dhoom Entertainment, the production brings Anupam Kher, Swaroop Sampat and the ensemble together for an evening of contemporary Indian theatre that moves through humour, music, emotion and the complexities of human relationships.
For many people in the audience, Anupam Kher may naturally be the name that first draws them to the production, while Swaroop Sampat is another familiar and admired presence. Yet theatre is ultimately an ensemble art, shaped not only by the names on the marquee but by the individual journeys, experiences and instincts that every performer carries onto the stage.
That is also the purpose behind our Inside Jaane Pehchaane Anjane series: to look beyond the marquee and introduce the artists whose individual journeys come together to create what audiences eventually experience on stage.
Maya Sharma makes a compelling second chapter because she arrives with more than two decades of theatre behind her and an understanding of storytelling developed from several very different vantage points. She knows what it means to walk into an audition hoping to be discovered, and she knows what it means to sit across the room searching for the right actor. She has travelled into communities with a documentary camera, worked behind the scenes in filmmaking and creative production, and explored another side of herself through the patient, intricate discipline of Mithila painting.
Perhaps that is why simply calling Maya Sharma an actor does not quite tell the whole story.
Her journey is one of an artist who kept exploring different ways of telling stories, gathering something from each experience along the way, only to discover that the road would eventually lead her back to where much of it began.
When Maya Sharma steps onto the stage in Andover on October 11, Boston will meet the actor. Behind that performance, however, will be more than two decades of theatre, cinema, filmmaking, casting and art, all finding their way into the same spotlight. Tickets
About the Series
Inside Jaane Pehchaane Anjane – The Artists Behind Anupam Kher’s New Musical Comedy-Drama is a special Jay-Ho! editorial series exploring the actors and creative minds behind the production as it makes its way across North America.
Going beyond the names on the marquee, the series looks at the journeys, experiences and creative lives of the artists who collectively bring Jaane Pehchaane Anjane to the stage.
Part 1: Why Dance Is the Heart of Anupam Kher’s New Musical Jaane Pehchaane Anjane: Meet Choreographer Chirag Aggarwal
Part 2: From Casting Rooms to Center Stage: Meet Maya Sharma, the Versatile Artist Joining Anupam Kher’s Jaane Pehchaane Anjane
