Sabira Merchant, in her own right.

The stage first

Sabira Merchant was born in Bombay and educated at a finishing school in Switzerland. She began in the city’s English-language theatre in the 1960s with Theatre Group Bombay, the company associated with Alyque and Pearl Padamsee, and became one of its leading actors. Her Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Alyque Padamsee, won her an All India Critics Association award.

Alyque Padamsee’s assessment is printed on her memoir: “Sabira really has all the makings of a theatre great: discipline, vulnerability and excellent speech.” She has never left the stage. She played Queen Elizabeth in The Buckingham Secret at the NCPA, and in 2025 was among the theatre stalwarts who reunited for a tribute to Alyque Padamsee.

Fifteen years of asking the good word

For fifteen years she hosted What’s the Good Word? on Doordarshan, the English word game that a generation of viewers grew up with. It made her voice and her precision with language familiar across the country, long before she taught either for a living. She still conducts live versions of it for audiences in Mumbai.

On film she appeared in Shyam Benegal’s Trikal (1985) as Dona Amelia, in the British film Sixth Happiness (1997), and in Miss India: The Mystery (2003). Nisha Pahuja’s award-winning documentary The World Before Her (2012) filmed her at work as the Miss India contestants’ diction and etiquette coach.

Preparing India’s winners for the world

Femina Miss India engaged her to prepare its winners for the international pageants, on speech, articulation, presence and conduct. Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta, Yukta Mookhey and Diana Hayden were coached by her before their world titles. She has worked with Mr India winners in the same way.

This is not history. In May 2025 Femina Miss India publicly thanked her for coaching Nandini Gupta, Femina Miss India World 2023, for her “exceptional expertise in speech and articulation” ahead of the Miss World final.

The teacher

Alongside the pageants she has taught professional presence, business etiquette and grooming to corporate teams, entrepreneurs and management trainees for decades, including sessions for the IMC Ladies’ Wing and the Rotary Club of Bombay, and the two long-running etiquette programmes at Princeton Academy on which this institute is built.

Her account of why it works is short. “I am essentially an actor. As an actor, it is always easy to put myself in somebody else’s shoes, and that is where my work as a teacher becomes easier. My only approach is simplicity.”

Off duty

In the early 1980s she founded Studio 29, one of Mumbai’s first nightclubs, which brought disco to the city. She has collected modern Indian art since the 1960s and was profiled by Sotheby’s in 2019 on the Gaitonde canvas that started her collection. Her memoir, A Full Life, written with Mitali Parekh, was published by Jaico in 2022.