Indian playwright, actor, and director Habib who broke with European form to embrace Indian folk cultures.  Tanvir grew up in Raipur and moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1945 to join the egalitarian groups - the Indian People’s Theatre Association and the

Progressive Writers Association. Tanvir’s first success was Agra Bazar (1954), in which he brought urban middle-class actors together with uneducated  folk artists for the first time on the Indian stage. He studied theatre in England at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but it was the work of German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and the traditional actors of Tanvir’s homeland who most influenced him. In 1959 Tanvir and his future wife, Moneeka Mishra, founded Naya Theatre, a company devoted to folk performance. To allow his uneducated actors to work naturally, Tanvir used the Chhattisgarhi dialect rather than formal Hindi in his plays and worked from improvisations rather than formal scripts. Tanvir drew from both Brecht and indigenous theatre and was also known for his incorporation of folk songs, poems, and music into his plays, exemplified in his much-admired Charandas Chor(1974). He also acted in several movies, notably Gandhi (1982), and was a member (1972–78) of India’s Parliament.