Two Plays by Girish Karnad - The Dreams of Tipu Sultan / Bali The Difference

Two Plays by Girish Karnad - The Dreams of Tipu Sultan / Bali The Difference

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Author: Girish Karnad
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 125
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195664760

Description

This book contains two new plays by Girish Karnad, one of India's foremost dramatists and actors. The first play deals with the world of drams secretly recorded by one of India's most famous warriors, while the second explores the existential dilemmas of passion and violence posed by an ancient Jain myth.

The figure of Tipu Sultan has continued to dominate Indian and British imagination for over two centuries, as the endless flow of scholarly works, ballads, plays and novels about his tempestuous life and tragic end testifies. What, however, is less well known is that this man, who spent a large part of his life on horseback, maintained a record of his dreams, which he kept concealed from his nearest associates. The Dreams of Tipu Sultan examines the inner life of this warrior, political visionary, and dreamer. It was commissioned by the BBC and broadcast in Britain on the fiftieth anniversary of Indian Independence.

Bali: The Sacrifice was commissioned and first presented by the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, UK. The king is devastated to discover that his queen is involved with an elephant-keeper. In order to avert the evil consequences of her infidelity, he is forced to sacrifice a cockerel to the gods. But he is a Jain, and non-violence is the fundamental principle of Jain faith. In desperation, he substitutes a bird made of dough, which in turn has unexpected results. The myth is less concerned wit actual violence than with the morality of substitution, which permits violence a wider and more subtle play by masking its true nature.

REVIEWS

The play rescues Tipu from colonial perceptions and presents him refracted through history in a different perspective, that of independent India. More importantly the play is, in a collective sense, a reclamation of history, a truth too close to our heart for it to ever fail as a play.
-The Hindu

The play rescues Tipu from colonial perceptions and presents him refracted through history in a different perspective, that of independent India. More importantly the play is, in a collective sense, a reclamation of history, a truth too close to our heart for it to ever fail as a play.
-Elizabeth Roy, The Hindu

BALI: THE SACRIFICE

You have probably never seen anything quite like it. Drawing on myth to ask questions about religious tolerance and violence, it is both alien and completely accessible.

Nona Shepphard's canny, beautifully acted production offers both the simplicity of myth and a touch of Bollywood as tragedy and comedy, the universal and the deeply personal, spark off each other. Every time you are about to snort with laughter, you are stunned into silence by the realization of what is at stake.

The experience is greater than the sum of its parts, and it is as enjoyable as it is thought-provoking.
-Lynn Gardner, The Guardian

Contents

The Dreams of Tipu Sultan

Bali: The Sacrifice