Yesterday, a friend asked me what kind of plays Girish Karnad wrote and I found it difficult to summarize the wonderful complexity of his plays. He combines folk traditions from India with modernist ideas of theater and world from the West in a manner that is both exciting and individual. To give a sense of the eclectic influences on his writing, here is an excerpt from his interview with me regarding his “Indianness”: 

A. N.: At the end of your introduction to Three Plays, you say that the basic concern of Indian theatre today is to define its Indianness. How do you mean that?

G. K.: At least that is how we felt in the sixties. After all, we were the first generation to come of age after Independence.  I can’t really speak for the younger playwrights of today. Honestly, “Indian identity” should not be an issue fifty years after Independence. But in the 1950s we were dominated by British notions of what was art and culture and the British stage, in turn, was dominated by George Bernard Shaw. In the works of his Indian imitators, the Shaw model just became a context for flaunting political and liberal ideology in clever, witty dialogues. If you were modern, you wrote like Shaw, placed your action in a living room between three sofas and a table. Mama Varerkar, Adya Rangacharya, whom I mention because they were serious and good playwrights, they all wrote a kind of realistic theatre based on this model. Music, colour, movement—everything had been wiped out.  As you know, even in London, when the angry plays and the kitchen-sink plays broke away from the Shavian influence, they continued to set their scenes indoors and took enormous pains to reproduce dialect and details of daily life—ironing boards and kitchen utensils. They remained depressingly realistic. I found them claustrophobic. Instead, I was excited by Shakespeare. Since I had not had any Shakespeare in my upbringing except as boring texts taught in college to improve one’s English, I discovered him fresh, as “my contemporary,” on stage.  I read Brecht and, as I now realize, fortunately misunderstood him.  And then, there was also existentialism in the air. I was desperate for something different. Just before boarding the ship to Dover, I had written Yayati—the play had just poured out, guided by Antigone of Anouilh.  On the way back, three years later, I was bursting with Macbeth , Galileo, Caligula and Ivan the Terrible. Not quite Indian fare, you could say.

This highlights only the western theatrical influences on Karnad and not his debt to local traditions (he talks about this elsewhere in the interview, although when he laments the lack of music in realistic theater, he is also indirectly pointing to its presence in Indian folk theater). His response problematizes so well the idea of a singular “native” Indian identity and culture. I have been teaching Karnad’s plays in every class where I teach Indian literature because his plays raise this fascinating, and really unanswerable, question -- “What is ‘Indian’?”-- in so many thought-provoking ways.

I am new to this. To Fleff. To blogging. Relatively new to Ithaca College as well (or at least that is how I continue to feel). So I am very excited to get one more space to talk about everything related to what is home for me—this South Asian Space called India. Of course, I do have doubts about the title of this blog even though it was my own suggestion. Should it have been “Indian Spaces” instead of “South Asian Spaces”? The former is what I am expecting it will be most of the time, since not only here at IC, but in most situations, Indian voices are the loudest, often to the chagrin of others from and in the subcontinent. It is, therefore, more honest to call it “Indian Spaces.” But there is also the hope that maybe there will be voices here that might be related to South Asia but not necessarily to India? It would be wonderful if we could bring here news, events, contexts from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and other South Asian countries. Does that hope justify the second title?

In any case, there is a lot happening at IC this semester that is directly related to South Asian culture and arts so do visit this space regularly to find out all the details. Let me start with one announcement for now. FLEFF is helping bring to IC one of the foremost playwrights of the post-independence era in India: Girish Karnad. He is a bilingual playwright and translator but many in India will also know of his work in film—he is an acclaimed and award-winning director of parallel cinema and he has acted in countless mainstream (Bollywood) and parallel films. It is tempting to list all his awards here or line up here his formidable body of work but I continue to be astounded by the amazing approachability of this man whom the International Theatre Institute of UNESCO chose as one of its handful of World Ambassadors for theater (along with other luminaries like Wole Soyinka). Girish Karnad will be here from Oct 26-Oct 29 and will give a public talk on “Colonialism and Modern Indian Theater” on Oct 26 in Clark Lounge at 6.30pm. There will also be a staged reading of his play, “Hayavadana” (a play in English) directed by Prof Claire Gleitman on Oct 28, 6.30 pm, at Handwerker Gallery. Like most of Karnad’s plays, this is funny, profound, poetic and exciting—heads will be cut off, animals and humans will interchange selves, goddesses will come to life and serious issues will be explored without any moralizing.

Watch this space for more details about Girish Karnad and also about other exciting South-Asia related events at IC!