indian writing in englishcs5080212/itd.pdfindian english drama silence! the court is in session •...
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Indian English Drama
Silence! The Court is in Session
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• One of the outstanding Indian playwrights
• Has excelled in many departments of literature: essays, short stories,
criticism, screenplay writing and drama.
• Ranked with great Indian playwrights like Badal Sarcar, Girish Karnad
and Mohan Rakesh.
• Works : Shantata! Court Chaule Ahe (1967), Ghāshirām Kotwāl
(1972), and Sakhārām Binder (1972).
Vijay Tendulkar
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Silence! The Court is in Session
• The degradation of the judiciary system
• Forceful male supremacy in Indian society
• Condemnation on the Indian society and the
prejudices it carries against women.
• The play is derisive on the middle class
probity, where people have all the rights to
pass the judgments and Silence is the only
alternative left for the victim.
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Characterization
• Benare represents all the women in India
who are suppressed, oppressed and are
marginalized.
• The character Mr. and Mrs. Kashikar,
Ponkshe, Rokde, Sukhatme represents
hypocrisy and inferior complex.
• Tendulkar has left the play open without
suggesting any solution to the problem of
Ms. Benare.
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Ms. Benare • Tendulkar has depicted the difficulty of a young woman, who is a victim
of the male dominated society.
• The game of mock trial, which started for entertainment, turns into
Benare’s tragedy.
• Benare is an educated woman about thirty-four years old who worked
as a schoolteacher.
• She was also associated with an amateur dramatic alliance, whose
prime purpose was to educate the public with social and current issues.
• Benare was reluctant to perform the role of an accused but this
reluctance was ignored.
• The playwright endeavors to create a game-like non-serious
atmosphere. But soon the imaginary charges led to personal dilemmas.
• Benare is initially seen in a cheerful mood of flamboyance, but she gets
her first blow, when Ponkshe, a scientist, says, “She runs after men too
much.”
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Satire and Irony
• A satire on the unjust male dominating society and
on the working of Court.
• Mr. Kashikar, the judge should be free from the
prejudice but he was just the opposite.
• The court allows Prof. Damle to enjoy his married
life and does not accuse him to exploit and abuse
the life of a woman.
• The irony of the mock trial is that Benare is accused
in the court without the presence of Prof. Damle.
• The witnesses take oath touching the Oxford
English Dictionary
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Satire and Reality
• The accusation :
“Prisoner Miss Benare under section No.
302 of the Indian Penal Code, you are accused
of the crime of Infanticide.”
• The verdict :
“This court hereby sentences that you
shall live. But the child in your womb shall be
destroyed.”
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Issues Surrounding
Indian English Drama
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Third World Literature
• Fredric Jameson
• US Scholar, Post Modernist
• “Third World Literature in the Era of
Multinational Capitalism”
“ The third world texts, even those which are seemingly
private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic,
necessarily project a political dimension in the form of
national allegory; the story of the private individual
destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation
of the public third world culture and society”
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Third World Drama
Western beliefs
• Predominant belief was that "theatre" did not exist in
Third World countries, that theatre owed its literary
heritage to Shakespeare and a few others.
• Refusal to see third world literature as writings like
canonical ones.
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Criticism of the Western Outlook
• Each nation of the Third World has a theatre that
is peculiar to it.
• These nations have rich, century-old traditions;
these nations are at a certain moment in history
and expression in the domain of theatre is a
direct consequence of this identity
• A fruitful interaction between drama in native
languages and English drama, e.g. Silence
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Conclusions • The play Silence! The Court is in Session serves to
quash all Western prejudices regarding Third World
Drama as a whole
• It skillfully demonstrates the integration between
drama in native languages and English
• It has several interesting experimentations to silence
critiques who accuse third world drama of borrowing
heavily from Western concepts and ideas
• The same arguments apply to other Indian plays,
Nagamandala, Lights Out as well.
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Conclusions Today, the Third World is divided between a desire for
"modernism," which would consist of adopting Western
values and assimilating the theatre as an object of
consumption and
The will to rediscover in the traditional forms of a specific
culture the burning embers of the theatre of tomorrow.
Between pure and simple imitation of Western dramatic forms
and the reconstruction of past forms, a third path is open to the
nations of the Third World: that of renewing their heritage,
beginning with the past and assimilating into it the given facts of
contemporary evolution.
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Bibliography
Tendulkar, Vijay. Silence! The court is in Session,
trans. Priya Adakar
www.wikipedia.org
Fredric Jameson – Third World Literature in the era of
Multinational Capitalism
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