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The following message, written by Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, is the introduction to Girish Karnad's "Collection of Captured Pieces, Volume One," published by Oxford University Press. It has been republished here with the authorization of OUP.
On June 10, 2019, Girish Karnad, a veteran actor, director, and playwright, died at the age of 81 in his Lavelle Road residence in Bengaluru after a long illness.
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Girish Karnad (1938-2019) was part of the formative generation of Indian playwrights who matured in the two decades following independence and who, collectively, transformed Indian theater into a major national institution at the end of the 20th century. The work of these dramatic authors has a historical connection with the modern theatrical forms that emerged under the influence of Western models in metropolises such as Calcutta and Bombay during the colonial period. Their modernity, however, is shaped by the unprecedented experience of political autonomy and the new nation, and involves rejection rather than continuation of colonial theater practices.
In modern Indian theater, the years before and after independence in 1947 disjunction period during which the commercialism of the Parsi stadium (dominating until the 1930s) and the radical populism of the Indian People & # 39; s Theater Association (dominant in the 1940s) have become unsatisfactory models for the future development of urban drama. This feeling of disconnection from the immediate past has led the more ambitious authors who succeeded one another after independence to rethink the problems of dramatic form and presentation style, to forge radical links with an older past and the present. postcolonial in India, and to put the resources of world theater (especially the modern Euro-American theater) to an innovative use. In addition to his contemporaries such as Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Vijay Tendulkar, Badal Sircar, Utpal Dutt, Habib Tanvir, GP Deshpande and Mahesh Elkunchwar, Karnad is a playwright whose work reveals a determined and conscious effort for a new Indian drama.
Girish Karnad. Image via Facebook / @ KarnadHandle
The members of the Karnad theatrical generation share a number of important qualities that separate them as a group from their precursors. To varying degrees, these authors consider dramatic writing as a serious literary activity and dramatic drama as a complex verbal art, potentially related to theatrical practice, but also independent of it: the text as meaning is thus detached from the commercialized genres. entertainment and political performance of the day. At the same time, they constitute the first group of modern dramatic authors in India who simultaneously belong to the economies of printing and performance. All had notable success on the scene, while their work was also distributed in print form and became available for badysis, commentary and interpretation outside the bounds of performance. Each author devotes himself to an indigenous language (rather than English) as a medium of original composition, and thus to the literary and performative traditions of the region where this language is dominant. But everyone has also been actively involved in the interlingual translation process, which gives their pieces national (and often international) visibility and establishes them as contemporary clbadics. In another perspective, Karnad and his contemporaries have made the role of "dramatic author" essentially synonymous with that of "theoretician" and "critical". By proposing theoretical and polemical arguments about form, language, style, purpose, and influence in a range of rhetorical genres, they presented the first well-developed, often antithetic theories of dramatic representation and reception. in modern times in India, and have conceptions of the role of theater in cultural and national life.
See also – Girish Karnad remembers the fraternity of Indian art and culture: "His strong and unshakable voice will be missed"
With the theater as chosen literary form and the kannada as the main language of original composition, Karnad is an example of the transformative practices of his generation, but he also carved a prominent place in the field, dramatic style and identity from the author. . Most of his plays use the stories of myth, history and folklore to evoke an ancient or premodern world that resonates in contemporary contexts because of his astonishing ability to remake the past in the image of the world. present. Karnad's betrothal with the myth (especially some episodes of the Mahabharata) begins with Yayati in 1961, continue in Hittina Hunja (19459004) The Dough Rooster 1980; rewritten in English as Bali: The Sacrifice 2002) and culminates in Agni Mattu Malé ( Fire and Rain) in 1994. The line of l 39; history moves from Tughlaq (1964) to Talé-Danda (Death by decapitation 1990) and The dreams of Tipu Sultan (1997). Hayavadana ( Horse head 1971), N "aga-Mandala ( Play with a cobra 1988), and Flowers : A Monologue (2004). Anjumallige (literally, "Frightened Jasmine", 1977) is the only original piece of Karnad with a contemporary decor. early 1960s – and his most recent work, Broken Images (2004) is the only one to be found in contemporary India.In the period 1961-1977, each successive piece of Karnad marks a departure in a new major direction and the invention of a new form adapted to its content – ancient myth in Yayati history of northern India in the fourteenth century in Tughlaq a 12th A folkloric tale of the century interspersed with the story of Thomas Mann in Hayavadana and post-colonial Britain in Anjumallige . In the last pieces, this quadrangulated motif repeats itself in a different order, creating a cycle of mythological-folk history in Hittina Hunja, N "aga-Mandala and Talé-Danda (1980-90), and a second cycle of myth-story-myth-contemporary folklore in Agni Mattu Male, Tipu Sultan, Bali, Broken Images and Flowers (1994-2004 ).
Our Archives: Girish Karnad on Agnivarsha and the Writing of a Mythological Drama
The Dominant Presence of the Ancient and Medieval Past in Drama Karnad is a result both personal He explained from the beginning that deeply rooted stories of myth, oral history and legend were a vital link between the author and his audience, and that the theater was a particularly powerful means for the communication of such cultures. rnad may belong to the last age Most urban Indian writers who have been confronted with "big" and "small" traditions of myth, poetry, history, legends and folklore have been initiated to their infancy and were sufficiently internalized to be shaped by themselves. The Western playwright no longer has access to such a vibrant oral culture, and Karnad is fully aware that it is rapidly eroding in India as a result of processes of urbanization, westernized education and economic development. Orality and print, however, are also carefully balanced in his work. All his main pieces, from Yayati to Agni Mattu Malé and Bali originate from memorable stories, but depend heavily on printed sources for their textual complexity and their weight. Karnad is therefore strangely similar to the genre of modern writer imagined by TS Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," one of the founding texts of twentieth century modernism:
] [Tradition] implies, in the first place, the historical meaning, which we may call almost indispensable to whoever would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense implies a perception, not only of the past, but of its presence; . . . It is this historical sense, both timeless and temporal and together and temporal, that makes a writer a traditional one. And it is at the same time what makes the writer very aware of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.
Karnad's ability to fight "the timeless and the timeless" is more evident in his juxtaposition of myth and history,
Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker is a professor of English and interdisciplinary theater studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
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