Mumbai: The iconic National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), celebrating the golden jubilee, is a living example of how unadulterated vision and imagination, dedication and perseverance of a man–the late Jamshed J Bbabha (with more than ample support from the late Tata group patriarch JDR Tata) can create, nurture, and serve the arts, artists and art-lovers of all genres and feed the soul of an otherwise purely commercial megapolis.
On Dec 29, 2018 the great artist den entered its golden jubilee year. From a humble beginning on a rented property on the Bhulabhai Desai Road in south Bombay and inaugurated by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi on December 29, 1969, the NCPA today houses five world-class theatres–the Tata, the Jamshed Bhabha, the Experimental, the Little Theatre and the Godrej.
The NCPA was registered as a public trust in June 1966 as the National Institute of the Performing Arts. The current name was adopted in November 1967 and the first performance was staged on Dec 29, 1969 on the rented premise, courtesy the generosity of the late Madhuri Desai, the trustee of the Bhulabhai and Dhirajl Desai Memorial Trust.