Negotiating Tradition and Modernity: A Critical Study of Select Plays of Girish Karnad
Author(s): G. Yadagiri
Publication #: 2608001
Date of Publication: 02.12.2023
Country: India
Pages: 1-8
Published In: Volume 9 Issue 6 December-2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.62970/IJIRCT.v9.i6.2608001
Abstract
Girish Karnad occupies a singular position in modern Indian drama as a playwright who transformed inherited myth, folklore, and history into a vocabulary for interrogating the contemporary condition. This paper undertakes a critical study of three of his major plays—Hayavadana, Naga-Mandala, and Tughlaq—to examine how Karnad negotiates the tension between tradition and modernity in postcolonial India. Rather than treating tradition and modernity as opposed categories, the paper argues that Karnad's dramaturgy stages their mutual entanglement, using pre-modern narrative forms to articulate distinctly modern anxieties concerning identity, gender, and secular nationhood. Drawing on Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker's scholarship on Karnad's historical and mythic method, and situating the plays within the broader revival of Indian folk theatre after independence, the study demonstrates that Karnad's use of masks, curtains, the Bhagavata figure, and Brechtian alienation devices allows him to hold tradition and modernity in productive, unresolved dialogue. The paper concludes that Karnad's theatre neither romanticises the past nor uncritically endorses modernity, but instead uses the friction between them to expose the fractures within Indian postcolonial selfhood.
Keywords: Girish Karnad, tradition and modernity, Indian folk theatre, postcolonial drama, myth and history, Hayavadana, Naga-Mandala, Tughlaq
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