What Narrative? What Dissent?: Refractive Visions of India in M. Duras’s India Song and M. Padmanabhan’s Harvest

Abstract

India has been a great pole of attraction for both colonial and postcolonial literature. Postcolonial drama has also shown an equal fascination with this huge and versatile Asiatic land, as reflected in Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1974) and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest (1997). Despite the cultural difference between their authors and the 20-years’ gap in their writing, the two plays are comparable on various thematic and aesthetic issues. They are both narratives of chaos, violence, frustration and despair, dealing with slippery and disembodied subjectivities, which point to mortality and ultimately death. The atmosphere of distancing from reality and the process from gradual disappearance to total absence are achieved through voices off, fictionalization or virtuality, while scopophilia is also enhanced both as a dramatic device and as a trope of audience reception. However, the stance and the mood of the writing are radically different in the two plays: nonchalance, nostalgia and postcolonial melancholia in the French play; biting satire and political urgency in the Indian play. Despite the hybrid identity and the cosmopolitanism of the two women dramatists, it becomes obvious that in the contemporary situation of global politics and transnational capitalism the position of the western writer is still more advantageous for the scope of the writing itself and its reception, whereas the 3rd world writer is still writing under a state of emergency and his/her work is perceived under the same restrictive circumstances.