Full Description
This anthology of six selected plays, written between 2000 and 2020 by Bratya Basu, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2021, is the first collection of Bengali plays that blends avant-garde, pop and traditional cultures with contemporary dramatic themes. The six plays, freshly translated into English, each bring a uniquely Bengali and Indian perspective to the intermingling of past and present, global and local, and magical and real in a postmodern pastiche about India today. The collection is divided into three thematic sections:
1) 'Poignant Challenges, Soulful Remorse' examines power in Indian politics, religion, and family.
2) '(In)visible Boundaries, (Un)democratic Choices' explores the relationship among democracy, nation building, and the role of women in intergenerational political struggle.
3) 'Intimately Political, Politically Intimate' navigates queer identity, mental health and the fabulation of modern Bengali life in a 21st-century India straddling the progressive politics that removed section 377 and Hindu nationalisms that stoke new conservatisms.
Contents
Preface
INTRODUCTION
Section 1: Poignant Challenges, Soulful Remorse -Love in the Times of Corona imagines a Kolkata overtaken by pandemic and wild animals as families, governments, and media fall apart. Penitence takes the audience back to Gautam Buddha's Mahaparinirvana to examine the relationship between religion, violence, and ethics in its historical contexts with contemporary relevance.
1. Love in Times of Corona
2. The Penitence
Section 2: (In)visible Boundaries, (Un)democratic Choices - The Final Night re-imagines the Indian nationalist Muhammed Ali Jinnah's final night in British India set within the tumultuous events of partition. The play revolves around emotional wounds between him and his daughter in the larger ethico-political imagination of leaving the injured nation to the newly created Pakistan. Creusa-The Queen is a Bengali play based on Greek mythology and follows Queen Creusa through a murderous plot and an unrelenting challenge to the gods and patriarchy within democracy in her pursuit of social justice.
3. The Final Night
4. Creusa, the Queen
Section 3: Intimately Political, Politically Intimate - Blackhole follows Angshuman Banerjee's crisis of sexual identity down a blackhole of absurdism, digital information overload, and knowledge-power knots that make up the struggle of self-fashioning in the digital age. Who? is a psychocomic thriller that puts contemporary Bengali life under a microscope and deftly moves through topics of misogyny, mental health, and cricket in an absurdist whodunit that spotlights the hypocrisy of the middle-class Indian family.
5. Blackhole
6. Who?
AFTERWORD
