Rustom Bharucha (born 1953 in Bombay) is a writer, director and dramaturg based in Kolkata, India.

He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and a retired Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies which he taught in the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, between 2012 and 2018.

Over the years, he has published a number of books including Theatre and the World (1993), The Question of Faith (1993), Chandralekha: Woman/Dance/Resistance (1995), In the Name of the Secular (1999), The Politics of Cultural Practice (2000), Rajasthan: An Oral History (2003), Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (2006) and Terror and Performance (2014).

[1] A leading interlocutor in the area of intercultural performance, both at theoretical and practical levels, he has also attempted to redefine the relationship between culture and development through a number of workshops with marginalized communities in India, the Philippines, Brazil and South Africa on issues relating to land and memory, the politics of touch, re-enactments of history, and social transformation.

A former advisor of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development in the Netherlands, he has served as a consultant for the Arts Council in Ireland on cultural diversity in the arts, in 2008, as well as for Ford Foundation on its interdisciplinary and multicultural Artography project, in the United States, in 2007.