Emergent Trends and Issues in Indian English Drama by Abha Shukla Kaushik

Author:Abha Shukla Kaushik [Kaushik, Abha Shukla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aadi Publications

11

A Discourse on Postmodern

Feminist Plays in India with

Reference to Aur Kitne Tukde

and Mangalam

M.S. Raj Sree

Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it (Bertolt Brecht).

Situating Aur Kitne Tukde and Mangalam within theatrical tradition of feminist plays in India, this article attempts to foreground the postmodern techniques employed by feminists playwrights and moves on to juxtapose national violence and domestic violence.

The virtual absence of women from the documented history of modern Indian theatre is disquieting. Mahasweta Devi’s theatrical adaptations of her own Bengali short stories is the only available collection of plays in English translation by an Indian woman playwright, augmenting a handful of individual titles by Shanta Gokhale, Dina Mehta, and Manjula Padmanabhan. The inequity of gender continues in recent anthologies also. Mahasweta Devi’s The Mother of1084 is the only play by a woman author in G.P. Deshpande’s Modern Indian Drama: An Anthology while Chandrashekhar Kambar’s Modern Indian Plays excluded women playwrights altogether. Only Erin Mee’s Drama Contemporary: India establishes a bolder equation by including two women authors, Usha Ganguli and Tripurari Sharma among the six playwrights featured in her selection.

In this grim scenario, Staging Resistance: Plays by Women in Translation, which brings together 18 plays by modern Indian women playwrights in English translation for the first time, is unmistakably a ground breaking collection. The editor Tutun Mukherjee argues that:

drama and theatre are two cultural products, in which the bias of gender generics and sexual difference are in evidence as social and psychic reality. Placing the forms within the discourse of ‘gender as genre’ reveals the way [the] sex-gender system operates in the art and practice of drama and theatre and controls their cultural reproduction (4).

The purpose of her collection, therefore, is “to explore the imbrications of gender in the history of Indian theatre ... [and] to explore the relationship between theatre, society, and gender” (16).

The wide-ranging nature of the anthology in terms of chronology, language, and genre supports these claims. The authors in the collection include Rabindranath Tagore’s sister Swarnakumari Devi, Vinodini, Jameela Nishat, etc. The 18 plays represent 10 important Indian languages from across the country: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. The plays by Varsha Adalja, Catherine Thankamma, C. S. Lakshmi, and V. Padma draw on figures from Indian myth, such as Sita, Mandodari, Ravana, and Mahabali from the Ramayana, and Amba from the Mahabharat. Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s Medea reworks the well-known Greek myth into a surreal portrait of a failed marriage in contemporary Bengal, while Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry’s Fida reworks Racine’s Phaedra as Punjabi verse tragedy, and Manjit Pal’s Sundran rewrites the Punjabi legend of Pur an Bhagat to focus on his abandoned eponymous lover. Tripurari Sharma’s A Tale from the year 1857 is set against the Mutiny, a turning point in colonial history.

Following the realistic tradition, Swarnakumari Devi’s The Wedding Tangle, Kusum Kumar’s Listen Shefali, Malatibai Bedekar’s Prey, Muktabai Dikshit’s Gamble, and Jameela Nishat’s Purdah deal with the social problems like dowry

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