Girish Karnad – författare

Th e troubled reign of a fourteenth-century sultan of Delhi helps dramatizethe crisis of secular nationhood in post-Independence India. A twelft hcenturyfolktale about 'transposed heads' off ers a path-breaking model fora quintessentially 'Indian' theatre in postcolonial times. The folktale abouta woman with a snake lover explores gender relations within marriage.Individual human sexuality meets the historical debate on violence in Indianculture. The plays in this volume span roughly the fi rst half of the career ofGirish Karnad, one of India's pre-eminent playwrights.Th e three-volume set of Karnad's Collected Plays brings together Englishversions of his important works. Each volume contains an extensiveintroduction by theatre scholar Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Professorof English and Interdisciplinary Th eatre Studies, University of Wisconsin,Madison. Th e introductions trace the literary and theatrical evolution ofKarnad's work over six decades and position it in the larger context ofmodern Indian drama. In addition, they comment on Karnad's place as authorand translator in a multilingual performance culture and the relation of hisplaywriting to his work in the popular media.Each of these volumes serves as a collector's item, making Karnad's worksaccessible to theatre lovers worldwide.

The tale of a mythic king’s aggression against his offspring, and his desperation to escape the curse of old age laid upon him in the prime of life. The anxieties that torment a middle-class family as their daughter awaits the arrival of the ‘suitable boy’ from abroad whom she has never met. The morphing of the city of Bangalore, whose founding myth celebrates its human ambience, into India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ where strangers are thrown together, get entangled, and are violently pulled apart. In the plays of Girish Karnad, one of our fi nest playwrights, time, family, love, and sexual aggression resound from the mythic past into the contemporary megalopolis. The three plays collected in this volume not only span Karnad’s creative graph from his first play, Yayati, to his most recent, Boiled Beans on Toast, but also chart out the themes that have disturbed and shaped Indian drama since Independence. The volume includes an extensive introduction by theatre scholar Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, which analyses Karnad's work in the context of modern Indian drama.

Muhammad Bin Tughlaq, who ruled from Delhi in the fourteenth century, was a man of many dimensions. A well-read scholar of the arts, theology, and philosophy, a brilliant calligraphist, a mystic, as well as a poet, it is the 'madness' that earned him the epithet 'Mad Muhammad', that Karnad explores in the play. Using history and myth in equal measure, Karnad delves into the psyche of Muhammad to understand and interpret the rationale behind his whimsical actions. Operating at both symbolic and metaphoric levels, the action of the play is closely paralleled with 'contemporary' political and social events. The new Prologue by Karnad recounts the personal history behind the genesis of the play as well as its afterlife-the many productions and general reception. With an Introduction by U.R. Ananthamurthy and an essay by Aparna Dharwadker, this Oxford India Perennials edition is the testimony of Tughlaq's enduring influence even after four decades of its first publication.

The battle of Talikota in 1565 radically altered the contours of the political map of India within a space of a few hours. The Vijayanagara empire, which straddled the whole of South India, collapsed in the face of four minor Sultanates with little resistance, while its capital, one of the most prosperous cities in the world, was plundered, decimated and lay uninhabited for the next few centuries, known to the world outside only as 'the ruins of Hampi'. At the centre of this cataclysm was 'Aliya' Ramaraya, ambitious, ruthless, brilliant strategist, a son-in-law of the emperor but unacceptable within the royal lineage, generalissimo who ruled the empire without being allowed to step on its throne. The play explores in detail the complex of gender, caste, clan and religious loyalties that brought the various forces together to explode in an unforeseen catastrophe.