Assess
the contribution of the major Indian English playwrights. How have these
playwrights enriched the genre of Indian English Drama?
In
recent years Indian English drama is seeing its glory of performance drawing
comparatively more people than past years into the theatrical arena. The
present full flowering of Indian English drama has not occurred in a day;
rather it has to walk a long path to reach this present stage. Right from
Aurobindo, then Rabindranath Tagore to contemporary wide ranging artists like
Mohan Rakesh, Girish Karnad, Vijay Tendulkar , Mahesh Dattani, Badal Sirkar,
Mahasweta Devi, and Usha Ganguli, it has attained its present position.
Only
after the appearance of Michael Madhu Sudan Dutt’s Is This Called Civilization on The
Literary Horizon in 1871, Indian English drama made its true journey. In
1920, a new drama largely influenced by prevailing movements like Marxism, Symbolism,
Psychoanalysis and Surrealism appeared in almost all the Indian languages.
Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo who deserve the first Indian dramatists
in English in the true sense belonged to this time. Tagore’s plays mostly
written in Bengali are also available to us in English. His remarkable plays
are The Post Office, Chitra, Sacrifice,
Red Oleanders, Chandalika, Muktadhara, Natir Puja, Sanyasi, The King of the
Dark Chamber, The Cycle of Spring and The
Mother’s Prayer. Being well-rooted as regards the Indian ethos and ethics
in their theme, these plays received wide acclaim among people. Sri Aurobindo
who is one of the major voices in Indian English drama enriched theatre during
the time with his five complete blank verse plays along with six incomplete
plays. His complete plays are Perseus the
Deliverer, Vasavadutta, Radoguna, The
Viziers of Bassora and Eric and
each of these plays is written in five acts. His incomplete plays are The Witch of Ilni, Achab and Esarhaddon, The
Maid and the Mill, The House of Brut, The Birth of Sin and Prince of Edur. The length of these
incomplete plays varies from one scene of fifty two lines to three acts. The
feature that strikes most in Aurobindo’s plays is that they deal with the
different cultures and countries in different epochs, ringing with variety of
characters, moods and sentiments. Perseus
the Deliverer is based on the ancient Greek myth of Perseus, Vasavadutta is a romantic tale of
ancient India. Rodoguna is a Syrian
romance. The Viziers of Bassora is a
romantic comedy which takes us back to the days of the great Haroun al
Rashid. Eric is a romance of Scandinavia, a story of love and war between
the children of Odin and Thor. Romance, heroic play, tragedy, comedy, farce,
all find representation in Aurobindo’s plays and thus the scale of his plays is
large and the themes are diverse.......................................................................................................................................................
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