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.

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' offers 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 first half of the career ofGirish Karnad, one of India's pre-eminent playwrights.The 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 Theatre Studies, University of Wisconsin,Madison. The 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.

The three modern Indian plays brought together here are established classics, all written around the mid-1960s. Girish Karnad's Tughlaq was originally written in Kannada and explores the psyche of a medieval monarch. Evam Indrajit, by Badal Sircar, originally written in Bengali, uses myth to examine some of the dilemmas of the Indian middle classes. Girish Karnad has here translated this and his own work into English. Violence and the sexual compulsion that lies behind the facade of respectability is the theme of Vijay Tendulkar's Silenced, originally written in Marathi and here translated by Priya Adarkar.

In Naga-Mandala Karnard weaves two Kannada folk-tales together. The first one comments on the paradoxical nature of oral tales in general; they have an existence of their own, independent of the teller, and yet live only when they are passed on from one story-teller to another. Ensconced within this is the story of Rani who makes up tales to fill the void in her life. Rani's predicament poignantly reflects the human need to live by fiction and half-truths, the need not to push the search for Truth beyond the point where the whole edifice of day-to-day living may come tumbling down.

This play by one of India's foremost playwrights and actors is based on a story from the Mahabharata which tellingly illuminates universal themes - alienation, loneliness, love, family, hatred - through the daily lives and concerns of a whole community of individuals.

This book is the first volume of a collection of plays by Girish Karnard, most of which have been published before by OUP. This volume contains four plays, namely Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Bali: The Sacrifice and Naga-Mandala.

This book is the second volume of a collection of plays by Girish Karnard, most of which have been published before by OUP. This second colume contains four plays, namely Tale-Danda, The Fire and the Rain, The Dreams of Tipu Sultan, Two Monologues: Flowers and Broken Images

Wedding Album, the latest play written by renowned playwright Girish Karnad, is a hilarious and moving spectacle that is deeply revelatory about the India that we live in today. The central characters of this play portray the modern, middle-class, Indian family: a daughter who lives in Australia with her husband and children, a son who is a media professional, a younger daughter who is willing to marry a 'suitable' boy from the US whom she has never met, a doting mother, an ageing father rapidly losing his authority, and a loyal cook.Wedding Album operates at two levels: it explores the traditional Indian wedding in a globalized, technologically-advanced India even as it juxtaposes the very different life experiences and expectations of the family and the loyal cook. By doing this, Karnad reveals how particular notions of wealth, well-being, sexual propriety, tradition, and modernity form the basis of middle-class society in contemporary India. This play has already been staged at numerous venues and was translated by Karnad himself from Kannada into English. An outstanding addition to OUP's corpus of plays by Girish Karnad, this volume will be of value not only to students and teachers of modern Indian drama, but also to general readers.

One of the finest playwrights of our time, Girish Karnad's plays present a critical sense of history, myth, and time. This new play by Karnad has a reference to the founding lore of Bangalore, in which an 11th century king was saved by an old woman who offered him boiled beans. The grateful king desired to name the spot 'Bendakalooru', the place of boiled beans, which would symbolize hospitality and welcome for a weary traveller. However, over the period of time the place has emerged as Bangalore, India's 'Silicon Valley'. The play makes this impersonal city and its humongous growth in the last two decades its subject. Portraying the story of a cross section of those who live in the city-well-off housewives and their maid servants with hidden and complicated lives; lower middle class strugglers desperate to climb the corporate ladder; privileged rich kids rebelling against their fathers' money-this play is a direct and realistic gaze at contemporary India.