Author: Eminent Contributors
Publisher: Seagull Books
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8170462290
Description
Each of the playwrights in this collection takes a folktale and turns it into a contemporary experimental play, intervening in the traditional material and reshaping conventions from an urban perspective. Although the folk and rural elements remain embedded in the body of the narratives, it is interesting to note the shifts and intersections which occur in the process of rendering folklore as a present-day performative text.
Jokumaraswami by leading Kannada playwright and poet Chandrasekhar Kambar is a vibrant, earthy play which creatively reworks the folk myth of a phallic god of fertility into a powerfully contemporary anti-feudal message.
Pebet is a folktale about a mother bird fighting to protect her children from a predatory cat politicized by H Kanhailal, who transforms this familiar story into a struggle against the political and cultural colonization of Manipur.
What could possibly ally a southern fertility drama from Karnataka, an eastern tale from Manipur about a bird family fighting a cat, and a northern story rendered into Chhattisgarhi about a truthful thief?
-Ananda Lal
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Ananda Lal
Jokumaraswami
Chandrasekhar Kambar
Pebet
H Kanhailal
Charandas Chor
Habib Tanvir
APPENDICES
Introduction to the First Edition of Jokumaraswami
Folk Theatre As I See It
Chandraskhar Kambar
Pebet
Rustom Bharucha
Introduction to the First Edition of Charandas Chor
Javed Malick