With Bollywood now taking a backseat, the March 19 spectacle will be orchestrated by theatre veteran and director of Welcomtheatre, Aamir Raza Husain, who is famous for the extravagant Legends of Ram in 1994 and more recently, Sare Jahan Se Achcha. The event, which will be telecast live, will encompass song, dance and drama -- senior Doordarshan officials scurried to the spot today to inspect its suitability for a live telecast. The central theme (what else?) will be dharma as principle, as opposed to religion.

Conceptualised by Husain, the script has been written by Ritesh Shah (who has just finished a reworking of William Shakespeare's Othello: A Play in Black and White currently beingperformed in the Capital) and noted Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi.

But ASI officers maintained that the formal paperwork for the permission to use the monument came only after the stage had been erected, even though the Ancient Monuments Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958, prohibits construction activity within 100 metres and regulates it within 200 metres.

In 1993, the monument was used for a Pierre Cardin fashion show (that too was telecast live on DD), which elicited loud protests from conservationists. Though that was the last time ASI granted permission for such an event on the premises, Delhi Tourism Development Corporation has been granted intermittent leave to allow tourist groups to view the monument at night.

With Bollywood music director Raju Singh doing the score, the dance element will be provided by Bollywood regular Jaaved Jaffrey and his troupe, the enactments will be performed by Mumbai and Delhi stage actors, and the sets will be designed by top Bollywood art director BijonDasgupta.

The four segments to be enacted are the Shanti-parv from the Mahabharata; a discourse on ahimsa from Buddha; Chanakya will explain the concept of democracy as the will of the people to Chandragupta Maurya; and from the immediate pre-Independence era, there will be an act honouring the contribution of extremists to the freedom struggle.