Indian Drama Research Articles

The Evolution of Indigenous Identity in Native Indian Drama: A Comparative Study of Cultural Representation from Metamora to The Thanksgiving Play

This paper seeks to understand how Indigenous identity and representation have changed over time in Native American drama. For works historic and contemporary, the characters, themes, and cultural narratives present in plays written by and for Native peoples may provide insight into the social and political climates of the times when those plays were penned. The difference between the portrayal of Indigenous peoples in plays such as Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags and the portrayal of Indigenous characters in plays like The Thanksgiving Play and Body Indian is striking and significant. Playwrights who have been part of the historic tribal memory of their peoples may serve as an Indigenous lifeline to live historical memory rather than politicized “wokeness,” which seems to be the societal expectation of plays these days.

Impact of Indian Drama’s on Pakistani Culture: A Study on Women's Perspectives

This study investigates the impact of Indian dramas on Pakistani culture, explicitly emphasizing the perspectives of women aged 16 to 26. The research employed a survey questionnaire comprising one open-ended and 17 closed-ended questions, distributed to a sample of women from diverse educational institutions in Karak, Pakistan. With a response rate of 100%, the study findings highlight the topic's significance. The results reveal that a significant proportion of Pakistani women watch Indian dramas on television, indicating a strong influence on cultural preferences. However, the study also identifies negative impacts on social and cultural values. Respondents expressed concerns regarding language, dress, food, and cultural identity. These findings underscore the importance of promoting and preserving local culture through various avenues, including television programming, community activities, educational materials, and government initiatives. Recommendations include empowering women in cultural preservation efforts and strengthening regulatory measures to safeguard Pakistani culture. By implementing these recommendations, Pakistan can preserve its unique cultural heritage while fostering appreciation and understanding among its citizens. These insights contribute to the broader understanding of the influence of media on cultural dynamics, particularly from the perspective of Pakistani women.

Masculinities, femininities, and the patriarchal family: a reading of The Great Indian Kitchen

ABSTRACT This article seeks to examine the representation of masculinities and femininities in the renowned South Indian drama film The Great Indian Kitchen. The research construes the manner in which the two dominant genders promote and/or modify patriarchal norms within the institution of family. The functioning of women as ancillary members of patriarchy, the interplay between masculinities and femininities, their evolution in contemporary times, etc., are also critically engaged in the paper. The paper argues that the movie The Great Indian Kitchen not only illustrates different masculinities and femininities but also reconstructs the patriarchal family structure which institutionalises gender inequality. It further argues that the movie proposes an alternative image of the family based on gender equality, where men and women live with mutual respect and complementation.

Plight of Contemporary Indian Female Playwrights

There are innumerable Indian Woman English Dramatists working in experimenting with different themes, but their work is dispersed and cannot contain a body of work. The post-independence Indian drama has through the five eras grown more diverse, rich and varied in content and semiotics and lures upon myths, history, folklore, politics and society for material.

Switching Heads and Cultures: Transformation of an Indian Myth into the Quest of Identity Crisis in Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana

Myths and legends have an enduring significance for the fundamental human obsessions. Indian drama is flavoured with several elements in which mythology plays an important role. One of the most renowned playwrights of contemporary India, Girish Karnad who has made use of the theatre to explore the culture of Indian past, re-created Hayavadana, a commentary on the problems of human being’s search for completeness and perfection, with his own imaginative calibre deriving it from Kathasaritsagar, an 11th century compendium of Indian legends and drawing the picturesque of Thomas Mann’s story of The Transposed Heads in a modern approach. It revolves around the triangular relation between Padmini, Devdatta and Kapila ending in Padmini’s frustrated search to get the best of both men in one body highlighting the confusion of human identities and the ambiguous nature of human personality. This present paper focuses on how Girish Karnad re-interprets the mythology in his creation rummaging a conflict between modernity and indigenous tradition against the backdrop of mythical history to enunciate the acute crisis of identity, self-discovery and imperfection or and wholeness to reach to the zenith of perfection that is next to impossible reflecting the strength of psychology over the physical one where the human beings strive to obtain perfection in all the aspects throughout their life but they forget the fact that perfection is something that is unachievable. It is concluded that although the ending of the play is not within the orthodoxy of Indian epic texts and Hindu philosophy, it can be seen in the cultural context of an Indian woman of today who seeks to fulfil her needs and aspirations.

The Impact of Hinduism and Buddhism on the Music of Indonesia

The incorporation of Hinduism and Buddhism in Indonesia has given a unique characteristic to the Indonesian cultural reality. Since the Kalinga–Bali Yatra (from 320 BC to the establishment of Kalinga kingdom in Central Java around 500 AD), that is, the yearly ancient naval expedition of sailors from Orissa (Kalinga in India) to the Swarnadwipa Islands (Malacca, Sumatera, Java, Borneo, and Bali), the culture of Hinduism and Buddhism has been slowly introduced and acknowledged by the people of Indonesia. The earliest interaction between Hinduism/Buddhism and the locals could be tracked since the period of Kalinga kingdom in the central part of Java island. The influence of Hinduism and Buddhism in Indonesian traditional culture has penetrated to the people’s musical tradition in Java and Bali. On top of that, the story of Ramayana and Mahabharata has been adopted into Wayang Kulit tradition in Java. Among other Hindu–Buddhist influences in Indonesia comprise Indian drama– dance, Rasa esthetic theory, Mahayana Buddhist influence in Bedoyo, Slendro pathet (Javanese gamelan musical organization system), and Hinayana Buddhist concept of removal of nine consciousness of human beings.

From Proscenium to Public: Explorations of Body and Space in Sircar’s Third Theatre

The name of Badal Sircar, the Bengali playwright, actor and theatre activist, holds a very prestigious position in the history of modern Indian theatre. Both in the field of the Indian mainstream proscenium theatre and in that of the Alternative/Street theatre, he has made significant contribution to the Indian drama. In the post-independence period, when Indian theatre world was caught in the debate of “modern” and “Indian”, he established a brand-new genre of theatre called “Third Theatre”. Third Theatre provided a potent resolution to the inherent dichotomy in modern Indian drama by skillfully reconciling indigenous theatrical tools and techniques with the Western proscenium tradition of a text-based, plot-driven idea of theatre. Sircar’s style is thus a hybrid of folk theatre and proscenium theatre. This was a creative attempt to create an alternate media to effectively spread the playwright's views among the populace. With all these innovative ideas, philosophies and techniques, Sircar’s primary purpose was to bridge the gap between the drama and the audience, between the rural and the urban, between the form and the content etc., and to attain to the ideals of liveness and direct communication in theatrical experience. This effort aids him in breaking sharply with the modern Bengali theatre, which is fixated on the manner of presentation used in the English Victorian drama, and elevating it to a hitherto unattainable level of artistry. The present paper seeks to explore how Badal Sircar experimented with the body of the actor and with the performance space in order to create a syncretic form of theatre accessible equally to the rural and urban.

The possibility of using psychotherapeutic elements of traditional Chinese drama in modern theatrical culture

The article is devoted to the study of the history of theatrical therapy in the no-si ritual drama. It is shown that, in general, the ritual elements of the no-si drama can be used in modern drama therapy. In addition, dramatic therapy, which is implied by the author in this article, is somewhat different from the modern concept of psychodrama, since it covers large areas of the human psyche. The author believes that it is not necessary to completely ignore this complex area of human culture, because regardless of function or form, dramatic therapy is closely related to the shamanic ritual of healing. The formation of the Chinese national drama took place in the context of the historical development of China. Having originated in the most ancient forms of shamanic rituals, the theatrical performance has evolved into a unique stage genre. Along with other earliest theatrical forms such as ancient Greek theater and ancient Indian drama, Chinese opera originated several centuries before our era, but unlike them it has survived to this day almost unchanged. Now Chinese traditional opera occupies an important place in the list of intangible heritage not only of China itself, but also of the whole world. One of the most important milestones in the development of theatrical art in China was the ritual drama "no-si", which today the ritual drama no-si in China is called a real "living fossil", because it is the oldest cultural form that has come down to us through the centuries. Archaic religious rituals, reflected in modern theatrical performances, testify to the mixing and syncretization of various religious traditions, including no-rituals and no-si drama, and modernity. The current generation is successfully modernizing the tradition of its ancestors in accordance with the times, preserving it in the centuries-old cultural memory of its people.

INDIAN ENGLISH DRAMA-A DISCOURSE

Drama is a composite ne art. It is mimetic like any remaining performing expressions in writing literature. It imitates life, specially reecting the three unities of drama- time, place and action. As Somnath Sarkar says: "It is intended for portrayal on the stage by entertainers who act the parts of the characters of its story, and among whom the account and the discourse are conveyed." India has a long and fertile history in Drama, beginning from Sanskrit plays of Vedic Age. Dramatists of Indian Writing in English have scaled the length and expansiveness of the experimentation in dramaturgy of India during and after independence. To understand the profundities of Indian Drama in English certain characteristics features are to be remembered. Fundamentally, the Indian Writings in English during Modern Age articulate the growing and the all around present authors as well as the impact of Existentialism, Globalization, Surrealism, Dadaism, Magic Realism and the Post Colonial issues. India had been under the provincial shackles for a time span of 300 years and indeed the colonial language and culture had cast its direct shadow on the Indian literary venues

ISSUES OF GENDER BAISED, CASTE, HEREDITY, RELIGION AND SEX IN THE PLAYS OF GIRISH KARNAD: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Girish Karnad was one of the most prominent and celebrated figures in Indian drama. He was an actor, playwright, and director, whose contribution to Indian theatre was immense. Karnad's plays were deeply rooted in Indian history and mythology, and dealt with issues such as identity, language, and cultural conflict. His works were widely performed and admired not only in India, but also internationally. Karnad's contribution to Indian drama can be seen in his numerous awards and accolades throughout his career, including the Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan, and Jnanpith Award, considered the highest literary honour in India. His plays, such as Yayati, Tughlaq, and Hayavadana, are regarded as modern classics of Indian theatre. Girish Karnad, the renowned Indian playwright, has addressed various social, cultural, and political issues in his works. While caste, heredity, religion, and sex are themes that occasionally appear in his plays, it is important to note that Karnad’s works are not limited to these topics. He explores a wide range of subjects and uses them as a means to reflect upon the complexities of Indian society and human nature. Here are some instances where these themes are present in Karnad’s plays. Karnad excelled in multiple fields, including theater, cinema, and literature. He was an accomplished playwright, having written numerous plays in Kannada, his native language, as well as in English. Some of his notable plays include Tughlaq, Hayavadana, and Nagamandala. He also acted in films and directed critically acclaimed movies like Vamsha Vriksha and Utsav.

POWER POLITICS IN GIRISH KARNAD’S HAYAVADANA AND TUGHLAQ

Through the centuries, Indian drama has been one of the means of discovering how a human being can achieve an optimal human existence–cultural, social, political, material, and spiritual. The staging of patriotic plays in modern Indian theatre boosted operative energy in the freedom movement. The spirit of liberty provided significant impetus to the revival of various forms of performing arts. After independence, Karnad, along with other playwrights such as Vijay Tendulkar, Mohan Rakesh, and Badal Sircar, conducted 101 theatrical and thematic experiments in order to free individuals from the shackles of superstitiously internalized socio-cultural constructs.

Parallel Interplay between Tradition and Folk Theatre: A Study of select works of Vijay Tendulkar

Folk theatre is the root of modern Indian drama, and with the advancement of modernity, folk theatre keeps balancing the dynamic aspect of modernity. Most of India's well-known playwrights overcame the limitations of regional language throughout the 1970s and produced a number of excellent plays on a national scale. The majority of their experimental productions were focused on incorporating Indian folk theatre components or performance traditions into mainstream theatre. As a result, we see Utpal Dutt using Jatra in Surya Sikar and Girish Karnad adopting Yakshagna, a traditional type of theatre, in his play Hayavadana (1972). In order to create a new type of theatre that he called the "Third Theatre" or "Street Theatre", Badal Sircar experimented with incorporating folk elements into proscenium theatres. Similar to his contemporaries, Vijay Tendulkar also experimented with many types of folk drama in Ghasiram Kotwal (1972) and other plays. The current study is an integrated effort to concentrate on how tradition and modernity are portrayed in Vijay Tendulkar's plays. Another way to put it is that modernity has economic, social, cultural, and political ramifications. A cultural driving force with social, economic, and political ramifications is tradition. Vijay Tendulkar explores both conventional and contemporary tendencies in his plays through folk theatre. In his plays, he combines elements of heritage and modernism. They are entangled with both modernity and tradition. One may easily notice Tendulkar's keen observation of life in his plays . He strikes a delicate balance between tradition and contemporary in expressing the social realities . The purpose of this article is try to understand how Tendulkar employed various folk theatre styles to express power dynamics and the outcome of oppression, a very modern and postcolonial subject, on stage.

Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings ed. by Ananda Lal

Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings ed. by Ananda Lal

ANALYSIS OF HUMAN STRUGGLE OF MAIN CHARACTERS IN INDIAN DRAMA FILM “BLACK” (2005)

This study describes the struggle of the main characters in the Black movie. This study is descriptive qualitative. The analysis shows that 1) Sahai convinces Michelle's parents, especially her father to help Michelle. 2) Sahai controls Michelle's emotional disturbance by ignoring her anger and refusing to speak through finger-spelling. 3) Sahai teaches fingerspelling by touching and forming letters on Michelle's hand. 4) Sahai teaches Michelle good manners in eating with a spoon. The impact of Sahai's struggle on Michelle's life is 1) Michelle can spell letters and words. 2) Michelle gets a college education and can graduate. 3) She can become fully human is physically limited. The film shows human struggle trapped in the darkness that surrounds Michelle's life makes her behave like an animal because she can't catch and understand the teachings and attention of her parents. Michelle as a disabled child since birth, can't see and hear, which makes her mother look for a teacher to educate her. Sahai teaches her how to communicate through hand and mouth gestures. So, we can understand the struggles of the parents, teacher, and Michelle's struggle to find light in her life.

Urban Materiality and Social Change: Mapping the Urban Reality in Mahesh Dattani’s the Big Fat City

Mahesh Dattani’s The Big Fat City (2014) is a representative work of contemporary Indian English Drama that explores the changing mindscape due to urban conditions. This paper is an attempt to evaluate the performance and performativity of the urban inhabitants and their consequential transformation. The paper explores the play at the cross-section of performance studies and urban theory to highlight the influence of ever evolving and fast paced life of city on its inmates with high aspirations, who gradually get stuck in the labyrinthine life with its compulsions. City as a social force works as an organic entity and presents an ambivalent vision of human relationship. Whenever characters fail in realising the pulse beat of time and the changing social system, they meet their predicament that ends in miseries and sufferings. Keywords: Urban Materiality, City Space, Performance Studies, Contemporary Indian English Drama, Mindscape

Decoding Caste and Power-Structure in Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan

Social structure is a power-structure where every social category reflects the power relations with other in hierarchy. Caste is one of the decisive derivatives in India to measure human relations. It is something which has defined the social hierarchy based on the birth of an individual. Caste has become the most striking method of discrimination of people in India with its maligned and fabricated interpretations. Indeed, it has been originated for distribution of people on the basis of their work for proper functioning of society. Vijay Tendulkar, a Marathi playwright and one of the founding pillars of Modern Indian Drama along with Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar and Girish Karnad, has discussed the problems of caste discrimination and general perspectives about inter-caste marriages in India in his play Kanyadaan. Through this play Vijay Tendulkar also tries to reflect his thoughts on contradictory relationship between imaginary idealism and harsh realism; and also on texture of modernity and social change in India through the marriage of two people of different castes and backgrounds. The present paper is an effort to analyse Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan, originally written in Marathi and later on translated into English, as social documentary on relationship between caste and social structure based on power-relations, caste-based discrimination, inter-caste marriage and pseudo-idealism prevalent in the course of social and cultural progress. The present paper also deals with decoding of the phenomenon of ‘violence’ employed in caste-based power relations in the society.

Performative Aspects of Mahesh Dattani’s Plays

Modern theatre in India comprises mainly of English, Hindi, Marathi and Hinglish (comprising of a mix of Hindi and English dialogues) plays. English theatre was brought to India during the British rule and was watched mostly by art connoisseurs of the rich, upper class. This, however, changed after independence, as, many Indians entered the fray and theatre slowly became open for common people too. The post-independence Indian English drama is notable for a wide range of subjects treated, issues presented and also it takes into its compass some globally appealing issues. It displays a remarkable growth and maturity. Mahesh Dattani is a dynamic dramatist, a professional Baratnatyam dancer, a drama teacher, a stage director, and an actor. A person, who has touched almost every aspect of the theatre and has received the first ‘SahityaAkadami Award’ (1998) for writing in English, he is rightly called the successor of Girish Karnad for his innovations in dialogue writing, pragmatic stage decorations, light arrangements, etc. One of his major contributions is that he has infused actability into Indian drama in English. It seems that, all the limitations, which in a way marred the beauty of Indian English theatre down the decades, are finally overcome. As Reena Mitra observes, ‘Dattani confidently challenges the traditional denotations and connotations of the words’ India’ and ‘Indians’.1 What makes his plays ‘performance oriented’ are his dramatic techniques. The paper intends to focus upon the aspects which make his drama stand out.

Missing Shadows, Moving Shadows. The Process of Translating Prakrit in an Indian Drama Manuscript

Missing Shadows, Moving Shadows. The Process of Translating Prakrit in an Indian Drama Manuscript

Philosophy of Spiritual Evolution in Karnad's Play Hayavadana

Girish Karnad, the “Renaissance Man” and an important proponent of the “Theatre of Roots” movement, rebelled against British influenced Indian drama. He had employed native traditional myth and legends into the themes of his plays and used folk theatre techniques for representational intent. His play Hayavadana delves into the Indian folk theatre elements to address the contemporary issues of the nature of identity and human being's quest for completeness through the perspective of philosophical riddle of mind and body dualism. The play explores the issue of mind-body dualism or conflict of incompleteness at three levels viz. divine, human and animal levels. With the example of transposed heads of the two main characters and the question of their real identity; the transformation of Hayavadana into a complete horse with ability to neigh; and the child's ride and control on the horse offer the multi-layered consciousness levels of the human understanding and psyche along with the possibility of intended spiritual evolution.

Social Hypocrisies in Vijay Tendulkar’s The Vultures

Abstract: Early plays in India were written in Bengali by Bengali writers which were mostly translated into English from Bengali in the 19th century. But drama in English failed to serve a local theatrical habitation, in sharp contrast to plays in the mother tongue (both original and in the form of adaptations from foreign languages); and the appetite for plays in English could more conveniently be fed on performances of established dramatic successes in English by foreign authors. Owing to the lack of a firm dramatic tradition nourished on actual performance in a live theatre, early Indian English drama in Bengal as elsewhere in India grew sporadically as mostly closet drama; and even later, only Sri Aurobindo, Ravindranath Tagore and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya produced a substantial corpus of dramatic writing. Between 1891 and 1916 Sri Aurobindo wrote five complete and six incomplete verse plays. Keywords: exploitation, sexual violence, homosexual, individuall degradation, consciousness, hypocrisies