Post Colonial India English Drama
English Literature Eng 102 Term Paper II Topic: Post-Colonial Indian English Drama India has the longest and the richest tradition in drama. During the age of the Vedic Aryans, drama was performed in a simple way. Different episodes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavad-Gita were enacted out in front of people. When Britishers came in India, the crippled Indian drama regained its strength. In 1920, a new drama in almost all the Indian languages came to the fore, it was a drama largely influenced by prevailing movements like Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and surrealism.
Indian drama got a new footing when kendriya Natak Sangeet Akadmi was started in January 1953. National school of drama set up Sangeet Natak Akadami in 1959 was another development. The year 1972 was a landmark year for Indian theatre. Badal Sircar, vijay tendulkar and girish karnad have contributed to the modernization of the face of the Indian theatre, these play wrights have made bold innovations and fruitful experiments. Postcolonial Writings as we have observed, emphasize the process of strong resistance in the societies and also put emphasis on the reality of life.
It deals with the literature written by the people of colonized countries that take the suffering and survival and resistance of their people as their subject matter. Postcolonial Writings can be considered as the historical marker of the period because it deals the literature which comes after decolonization as well as it is considered as an embodiment of intellectual approaches. At the intellectual level Postcolonial writers engaged themselves in opening up the possibilities of a new language and a new way of looking towards the world.
Their writings can be taken as a medium of resistance to the former colonizer. Their themes are focused on the subject matters like identity, national and cultural heritage, border crossing, contemporary reality and situation, human relationship and emotions etc. In the Indian context, Postcolonial writing makes its presence felt in the English-speaking world by giving new themes and techniques. The rise of Postcolonial Indian English writing was a significant aspect of Indian English literature.
If we talk about the different genre of Postcolonial Indian English literature, drama became one of the best mediums for expression. Postcolonial Indian English poets make use of current situation in the society to give their poetry a Indian flavor. The new phase of Indian theatrical development happily coincides with the personal development of Girish Karnad as a dramatist. His contribution goes beyond theatre: he has directed feature films, documentaries, and television serials. He represented India in foreign lands as an emissary of art & culture.
He has experimented with the fusion of the traditional and modern dramatic forms and content. Pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial experiences in literature cannot be compartmentalized in true sense. They are not divorced from each other. His play ‘Tughlaq’ was a reflection of the changing times- the narrowing of the great divide between the rulers and ruled. Karnad reminds us of T. P. Kailasam and Rangacharya who go back to myths and legends to show the modern life with all its elemental passions and man’s struggle to achieve perfection.
If creating new themes and techniques is a part of Postcolonial writing, Shiv K. Kumar can be truly called a Postcolonial poet. Winner of Sahitya Academi Award with various books of poetry, drama, short story and translation, Shiv K. Kumar gave an identity and a sense of direction to Indian English poetry in the Postcolonial period. His knowledge of Indian myths and Indian history is amazing and he uses them as themes in his poetry. But the most appealing aspect of his poetry is that it gives a distinct touch to Indian sensibility.
Other than this, themes like East-West encounter, Indian landscape, national identity, contemporary reality he takes all these as his themes in his poetry which give the whole essence of Postcoloniality. In his Award winning book of verse, Trapfalls in the Sky (1987), we can see Kumar’s seeking for the national and cultural identity. As a Postcolonial poet, Kumar makes an attempt to come to terms with contemporary reality which is integrated with Indian landscape.
Kumar’s dealing with national and transnational themes indicates his open mind and his approach towards life. Like many of the poets of Postcolonial era, Kumar tries to write authentically about the performances of rituals, superstitions prevailing in Indian society. Kumar is considered one the most outstanding poets of Modern Indian English Literature, who has the credit to give the recognition, Modern Indian poets got in the world of English Literature. Kumar is a poet who is known for his portrayal of India and its different aspects in very a beautiful way.
But another picture of India is seen in a very different way in his poetry when we see the hidden reality of religion prevailing in India As the most important element of Postcolonial literature is the sense of national identity, consciousness of the richness of the cultural heritage of motherland and its wealth of natural resources. Twenty years after Independence, R. K. Narayan was still tackling issues of colonialism. The Vendor of Sweets (1967) takes us through the tensions integral to a family in which two generations belong to two different cultures.
Ascetic Jagan belongs to an old India of family and history his son to an India increasingly subject to the foregrounding of the commodity and a dramatic industrialization. Narayan explores the inevitable clash of what is, in many ways, both a colonial and a post-colonial encounter: Jagan, a follower of Gandhi and a veteran of the wars against British Imperialism, must attempt a negotiation of an ethos invasive to his own definitions of nationality; Mali, without this structure, must reconcile an American capitalism with India’s own sense of what constitutes a modern nation.
This theme is continued in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975). Again two generations, this time British, must come to terms with an alien culture. Whilst Olivia’s adventures are romanticized, Jhabvala attempts to explore in a more sophisticated manner the social outlay of Anglo-Indian relations with the higher Muslim classes and Olivia’s step-grand-daughter is confronted with an India that remains hidden in the works of Kipling, Forster or Narayan. Leelavati the beggar-woman’s life, if not her behavior, demonstrates an unusual social awareness of the lowest castes.
It is to be noted that the East-West dichotomy within the later generation has become less strained: modern Britain is expected now to accept India on its own terms. Salman Rushdie, whose work has been produced in the eighties and nineties, has removed himself from the sites of both nationality and naturalism but remains in an engagement with economic colonialism and its consequences. Midnight’s Children (1982) critiques the post-Independence political strategies of Nehru and Indira Gandhi.
Critique and critiqued demonstrate an India which has not yet fully resolved the dramatic industrialization necessary to the creation of a modern nation: Rushdie’s response is necessarily part of the same Western political agenda as Nehru’s or Mrs. Gandhi. Modern Indian English drama has set a significant tradition for new literature in postcolonial period. Writers skate over their experiences those are either socially rooted or floating. They perceive the incongruous situation of life and experience. Hence they ventilate a kind of ironical expression in their verbal expressions.
Indian English Drama after Independence has no relationship with drama written earlier. He categorized the pre-Independence Indian English Drama as “greasy, weak spinned and purple adjectived”. They express themselves in an alien language (global code), which in spite of all sociolinguistic forces for broad-based Indianization fails to transmute or authenticate a local space as effectively as any Indian language. It creates room for a certain cultural, historical and linguistic distancing from the colonizer’s code. In the sociolinguistic domain, in the hands of Indian English Writers, the Queen (the global code) is wearing a bindi. local colour). Indian English Writers are after all the members of the communities comprising the Indian population spread over a continuum. It’s a tough ask for the writers to restrict their individual regional impulses suffering to their own community to become intelligible by the other communities written the geo-national space of India. Indian English dramatist did not use Indian Dramatic traditions and myths creatively. Another major reason was that English as a second language was not suitable medium of expression for two Indians doing conversations.
So Indian playwrights could not make their Indian characters speak in English. The language barrier prevents the lower classes from coming to the Indian English Theatre. Actually to form our culture identity we need tradition, continuity and change. It is only when we accept these three things that we can really have a theatre movement which is completely linked to the development of cultural social and individual identity. Only then we can achieve harmony through the language of theatre which must necessarily be filled with a sense of rootedness revealing a true Indian sensibility.
