Abstract
Drama is a reflection of life as we realize it. Hence it becomes a very effective tool to gauge the changes in social perspectives. In India, the later decades of the twentieth century have observed comparatively more women producing some very intense work. Most works written by women during these decades are genuine, reflexive, often violent and sometimes extremely disturbing. They try to seek a remedy to the question of electricity imbalance that is common in our society. In this newspaper I have attempted to analyse current fads in Modern Indian Drama in British especially in regards to to Women's Dilemma i. e. has compiled by women playwrights, about women and their experience. I've chosen Poile Sengupta on your behalf playwright and analysed her takes on for my review.
Keywords
Protest, Society, Theater, Women.
Poile Sengupta and the Theater of Protest.
A few years back, I used to be enjoying a movie My Big Excess fat Greek Wedding wherein a mother advises a grown up daughter stating,
". . . . You must always remember, a Man is the head of the family and the girl is the neck. It is the neck that converts the head in the path it desires to see, whatever it desires seen. . "
It was as of this precise moment that this quest of mine started out. A journey to discover the reality behind what as well as to see if indeed they held true in our world /culture as it is so similar to that of the Greeks.
Objective
I thought we would study Play as it's the closest art form alive as we realize it. And I chose modern women playwrights for research to be able to be able to measure the relevance of the words in a world i am an integral part of.
The objective of this newspaper is to analyse a new trend in theatre - the Theatre of Protest and showcase its relevance in the plays of Poile Sengupta, one of the most important contemporary Indian playwrights.
Traditionally women haven't possessed, nor were allowed a voice of their own.
"Because a woman has endurance, She is not allowed to speak; And she never discovers the words. " Narrator in Mangalam
Women, according to social construct and interpersonal device, were considered inferiors and possessed to play home roles in the family and familial role in the culture.
Cultural restrictions, traditional barriers, religious norms, poverty, illiteracy, subjugation and suppression have been the blocks on the way for women to pen down and articulate their things of views
History is evidence that male authors have often discussed women. In many of their works, the central character is a female. However, in these works, the ladies characters are almost always seen primarily with regards to men, and they are usually of interest largely in conditions of their passionate and sexual relationships. Women writers, similarly, often deal with the matters of Love, sexuality and relationship, but they deal with other areas of a woman's life as well. The ladies playwrights in India have focused on their appearance on level and breaking all the misconceptions and barriers they may have boldly used steps to symbolize themselves. They don't need to be dependent on the man playwrights to be displayed and act matching to their choice nowadays.
Women have found crisis as a way of expression of their innermost emotions, and exposition of personality. They have got been able to attain common people through staging and characterizing themselves in the plays from their own viewpoint. These women freelance writers consciously or unconsciously create themselves via a cultural identification and the outcome of these literary skill is to voyage towards self personality. They long and concentrate for an ultimate change in the culture.
Theatre of Protest
The new craze leading Indian English play is undoubtedly plays of women, by women for everybody. Women's theater has surfaced as a distinct dramatic drive which stages the many issues of modern-day Indian modern culture.
Women dramatists have courageously written serious and cultural plays portraying day to day life of women in the family, job, community, and the modern culture at large. It really is in these texts that one seems the pulse of the people of the country, their daily battles, their problems and difficulties as tangible realities. The problems brought up in these plays are perfect in their variety and range, especially in regards to to the women's experience. Such plays are a source of empowerment; they allow women to speak away. It really is at the intersection of art work, activism, and communal relevance. Such theatre acts as a musical instrument of real change in women's lives. It is an exploration of women's own unique idiom - their own form, their vocabulary, and means of communication. It really is challenging to the founded notions of theatre. It can thus be attributed as a 'Theater Of Protest' because women authors expressed their resentment up against the politics of exploitation based on gender discrimination.
These works do not confine themselves and then the domestic sphere or love and romance. They touch upon every site of life and offer a range of analyses of the position of women and various strategies that require to be adopted to negotiate cultural change. In fact, through their examination of the material circumstances of human being life, the work of these dramatists demands a reconsideration and reformulation of the easily set up paradigms of society.
As Tutun Mukherjee, eminent Critic and teacher at Hyderabad Central College or university says about these Women Playwrights,
"Their plays haven't any author-defined conclusions, no resolutions, no happy/unfortunate endings. They don't target at mental or emotional peacefulness but close in irresolution, just like life's activities often do. The plays disturb and roil the equilibrium; they provoke and demand response. They make an effort to forge a new kind of audience that will not expect to be entertained but will take part in the dialectics because the issues relating to women and children are of the kind that have invariably been and continue to be side-stepped and neglected by the contemporary society. "
Thus, in a few form, each of these plays deal with some type of resistance, sometimes attempting to investigate women's intimate exploitation in the local and general population sphere, sometimes recognizing women's own complicity in such exploitation. In in any event, they make an effort to define women's theater against male-dominated ideologies and make an effort to represent the under-represented facet of sexual misuse in women's lives.
Themes
There are many issues that club women from writing takes on as gender differences, religious barriers, ethnical restrictions, lack of economical support, prevailing prejudices against women (women cannot produce good has), family tasks and most importantly insufficient standard education. In spite of these restraints, a few women playwrights have been successful in their endeavours to write and produce works in India and also have been acclaimed internationally as well. Dina Mehta, Manjula Padmanabhan, Poile Sengupta and Tripurari Sharma are a few of the names to say who have been working tirelessly in the field of drama and also have published many has. These has are linked with a commonality of themes and their objective bound with a common eyesight. A recurrent theme is that of psychosexual abuse and exactly how women manage sexism in everyday activity. The limelight is on women marking out their anguish, the pain, and frequently the inferiority that they suffer from.
Raju Parghi in his article 'Indian Dilemma and the Introduction of Indian Women Playwrights: A SHORT Survey' claims that plays compiled by women can be broadly classified into four wide-ranging categories. He says,
"The topics of the has compiled by women mostly offer with the issues related to women, at the same time they also depict children's world and the problems related to men. The women playwrights are aware of contemporary issues combined with troubling past thoughts, expectation of better and blissful future try to present balanced views on both society and family. Their multifarious topics can be compressed under four extensive categories of takes on. The Works of Human relationships include styles like motherhood, intricate baffling romance of men and women, incest and adultery. The Works of Violence focus on numerous kinds of assault as physical, emotional, psychological, and the exploitation of women at home and in vocation. The Takes on of Amount of resistance present the themes or templates of, voicing against rape, injustice and inequality, poverty illiteracy and gender discrimination. The Has of Revolution suggests the themes of tone of voice of the voiceless, politics issues, religious and superstitious routines conservative values and traditional limitations. "
Poile Sengupta
Poile (Ambika) Sengupta is one of India's foremost playwrights in British. She's written many takes on and everything her takes on have been performed once in a while in Banglore. Mangalam, was written in 1993 and produced another calendar year. Her other works include Inner Laws and regulations, (1994), A Pretty Business (1995), Keats was a Tuber (1996), Collages (1998), Alipha and therefore Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni (2001) and Samara's Song(2007). Mangalam was shared by Seagull in Body Blows (2000).
In the Preface to the anthology of her takes on, Poile Sengupta says,
". . . after i write, I really do so with the awareness, the sensibility that is mine. However I've always been stressed about the status of women, and children, who appear to be the most detrimental sufferers in virtually any conflict, whether familial, cultural or political. " She also promises to enjoy the challenge of fashioning the sentence structure of an English sentence into what's essentially an 'Indian' syntax.
Her first play Mangalam received The Hindu - Madras Players Play-scripts Competition in 1993. It really is a exceptional play that revolves around a inactive person. The connections among the personas probes days gone by that hides many skeletons. Each persona is nuanced and individualised and each storage gives flesh and blood vessels to the absent Mangalam. The invisible is made noticeable through memories.
Mangalam is the feminine personality in the play within the play, whose death becomes, in ways, the foundation for a lot of the action. Throughout the first Function, we can feel her 'absent occurrence', through referrals to enough time of her life when she was alive. At first, we are advised that she probably devoted suicide by swallowing pills, but we aren't given any reason behind her having done so. It is only the narrator's choric commentary that provides insights like "Women die many varieties of deaths; men do not know this. "(102). Slowly but surely we learn that she was taking someone else's child when she got wedded to Dorai. Her sister Thangam's response to the accusation is, "Did you ever think that it could have been forced after her?"(122). Not inclined to relent upon this, Dorai is keen on presenting himself as the victim, until Thangam retorts, "What about that married female who used to come to the temple everyday and take prasaadam from your daddy? She got prasaadam from you also, didn't she?"(121). While any clues of the woman's unchaste do can malign her reputation forever, a similar act on a man's part, is forgivable and can be easily overlooked. Dorai, however, still gets the audacity to justify himself, "It's different for a man"(121). The shamelessness with which such private aspects of a woman's life are openly reviewed, slandering her reputation even after her loss of life, is nothing more than a warfare of ideologies between your characters, none of them of whom are actually sensitive to the increased loss of Mangalam. The female voice offstage feedback: "Just because a female is strong, she is never to be guarded; others violate her, and she must pay for their trespass. "(123). It is at the end of the first Act, that we become familiar with that Mangalam was molested by her own sister Thangam's hubby, alongside which reports, Dorai's little girl Usha too happens, having remaining her husband's house, because the oppression there, had received the better of her. Home space, which is the marker that traditions units for the preservation of women's chastity (Sita was abducted when she crossed the boundary designated by Lakshman), has now become a space of sexual assault and has led to an impasse for ladies.
Act Two is, in a way, a comment after Act One, because one realizes that the first Action was a play within the play is reading. However, the same designs recur here, too. Actually, Sengupta uses the same stars in this Act as in the previous one, to depict the ruthless repetition of exploitation, even though in the second Take action, 'modernity' has set in. Suresh is a modern-day 'rake' who values only conquest over women. This is why his sister Sumati is resulted in remark, ". . . the moment a female doesn't match the group of being a mother or a sister, she's baggage. . . intimate baggage. "(129). Soon, Thangam learns that her man Sreeni has been possessing a clandestine extra-marital affair with another woman, which leaves a feeling of hopeless reconciliation in the reader's brain. It gets further aggravated when Radha instructs Vikram: "[Sumati] had gone out with [a] man and I believe he was violent with her. She didn't realize. . . he suddenly. . . "(146). Towards the end, just when Thangam has gained courage enough to leave her husband, a sudden terrified scream is listened to, which one soon discovers, is Sumati's, striving to flee from the advances of her uncle.
Another play entitled Keats was a tuber was short-listed for the Uk Council International New Playwriting Prize in 1997. Very sensible and humorous, it presents several English instructors in a provincial college or university and brings into play our ambivalent attitude to British and the way it is normally trained. The mindless memorizing of facts, often not the fundamental ones, is what provides play its name. The students memorize the range 'Keats was a tuberculosis patient' by breaking it into two meaningless servings: "Keats was a tuber, Keats was a tuber" and "culosis patient, culosis patient. . . . " The memorized brand does little to make clear Keats' poetic genius and illustrates the mechanised and spiritless coaching that drains a vocabulary and a literature of the beauty and appeal, and in no way products learning. As the real human relationships unfold in the play, Sengupta makes fantastic use of the British language - with each character demonstrating an individualizing inflection -- as a bridge between those who instruct and those who are educated.
Some of her other very well known works are Inner Laws and regulations (1994), a satirical sit-com about five mothers-in-law and their five daughters-in-law whose brands are attracted from the epics; and a woman-centred play called A Pretty Business (1995). Her play Perfect - manufacturers of Calcutta using its backdrop of football was published in Telegraph in 1998. Sengupta talks about that she wrote Collages in 1998 after she achieved a dear old lady at the Uk Council Catalogue who talked to her for hours as if she was desperate for someone to speak to. She looked a miserable and lonely female. The play too is grim and reflective in its build and style. A 1999 play, Samara's Melody, deriving its name from an Iraqi city, is a mournful socio-political reflection on the violence that wipes out all traces of culture and civilization. In its wake comes the sense of irreparable human being loss. The play Alifa (2001) recalling the first term in the alphabet in Hindusthani, dramatizes the road blocks in the way of women's empowerment. You can find just two people, a woman and a guy, totally unrelated and unknown to each other and extremely different in character and persona yet at certain points their narratives intersect. The stage lamps up one and the other alternately as they tell their experiences. The play is both attractive and relevant.
Sengupta's Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni (2001) can be an ambitious play which takes its people from two different epics. They meet as two travelers at an air port. Slowly but surely they start chatting and uncover their innermost thoughts about the way they are ill-treated by history. Sengupta talks about that she was fascinated with a folktale about Shakuni's brothers being imprisoned and killed by the Kauravas when Hastinapur kingdom was extended to Qandahar in the northwest. Only Shakuni had survived and he swore revenge after the Kauravas. His dice were made of his brothers' bone fragments. Shoorpanakha, on the other palm, represents all those women who are striking enough to stay solo and declare their desire to have male companionship without taking recourse to phony modesty. Such women threaten the male world so they may be described as "dangerous rakshasis" (un-Aryan demonesses) who must be handled/contained/ punished before they can annoyed the patriarchal set-up. When these two characters meet in a modern situation, another turmoil commences to threaten the world. Finally it is Shoorpanakha who dissuades Shakuni from provoking another bloodbath.
Conclusion
The Indian women playwrights consider theatre a far more serious tool of appearance and representation. They may have dealt with certain issues that your men playwrights have failed to do. They may have followed the genre as a more practical methods to present serious familial, communal cultural and political issues, the heinous offences and methods of the culture in satirical way. Their target is to bring knowing of certain harsh realities, to safeguard every individual's basic privileges, to live easily, and to respect every individual regardless of different gender caste or creed. The above mentioned four types of has can be again compressed into one umbrella term as 'The Has of Change' a fresh development that perhaps will go hand in hand with the theater of women.
As Poile herself says through the narrator in Mangalam
"For the women, the gods said Let them be strong, rooted like trees and shrubs For this is they who shall hold The ends of the world mutually, And there will be storms Along with the winds will blow quite strong But the women will remain like trees, They'll contain the world collectively. "
References
- Kaushik, Minakshi (2012), Struggle and Appearance: Selected Works by Manjula Padmanabhan, Poile Sengupta and Dina Mehta, Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 1(1).
- Mukherjee, Tutun (2005), Ed. Staging Amount of resistance: Takes on by Women in Translation, OUP, New Delhi.
- Mukherjee, Tutun (2007), Getting a Words: Forging an Audience: Women Playwrights in British, Muse India (Web-Zine, ), Concern 14.
- Parghi, Raju(2010), Indian Play and the Introduction of Indian Women Playwrights: A Brief Study, Impressions : An e-journal of British Studies, 1(1)
- Sengupta, Poile(2010), Women Centerstage : The Dramatist and the Play, Routledge, New Delhi.
- Singh, Anita(2009), Feminist Interventions: A Reading of Light's Out, Getting Away with Murder and Mangalam, Muse India, Concern 26.
