Badal Sircar Analysis

I will be talking generally about Safdar Hashmi’s theatre group Jana Natya Manch, generally called as JANAM and its one of the most important play Machine. It was in 1973 that JANAM was founded by Safdar Hashmi along with some of colleagues. While he was a student, he was an active member of the Student Federation of India and also a member of Indian People’s Theatre Association. Safdar himself was a left wing political activist and a lover of art. He never shied away from the fact that he was a partisan of both politics and art. Safdar Hashmi, who was steeped in political awareness and deeply in love with theatre identified that street theatre is the most suitable form for his political expression (Tanvir, Memorial Lectures 3). As the effort of the street theatre is to locate theatre back to the people, day to today survival issues of the common people is projected as the themes of JANAM’s plays. According to Safdar Hashmi, plays of the street theatre must express the sentiments of downtrodden and the oppressed people as he considers street theatre as people’s theatre and so the themes of the plays must have a close connection with popular mass movements. They also have to question as well as interrogate all those anti- people policies of the established regime and also have to defend the protesting right of people and at the same time the plays should register the dissenting

The dominant idiom of Indian writing today is firmly entrenched in pain, anxiety of displacement, nostalgia, yearning to belong to roots, and so on. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss are two such novels that explore the tragedy of man on several levels using different perspectives. Both the novels are about averted culture-clash tragedies, homogeneity vs. heterogeneity, and about Indian sensibilities.

My viewing of the One Man, Two Guvnors production in 2013, and the feelings of chaos, shock, anarchic laughter and anticipation sparked my interest of exploring this play, and why its lazzi and improvisation added to the heightened experience I had, whist viewing this performance. I became interested in how much the One Man, Two Guvnors play written by Richard Bean, was based of the traditional Commedia dell’Arte play The Servant of Two Masters written by Carlo Goldoni. I planned to explore the extent of how much the play was improvised and the extent of how much it was scripted and planned. I looked at why Commedia dell’Arte used improvisation and the approach of incorporating improvisation and lazzi into a performance. I went about doing so by comparing the characters and the scripts of Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors to Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters. I researched the role of Improvisation and Lazzi in traditional commedia dell’Arte and compared it to its role in One Man, Two Guvnors. I decided to carry out my research by surveying audience members who had viewed the production of One Man, Two Guvnors , and finding out how the incorporation of improvisation and lazzi heightened the experience for the audience and impacted them.

Bharathi Mukherjee’s later novels Jasmine(1989), The Holder of the World(1993) and Leave It to Me(1997) comprised her last creative phase conveniently termed here as the phase of immigration. By now she has travelled a long distance in terms of thematic perception and character portrayal. Beginning with an expatriate’s uprooted identity in the early 70’s, her creative faculty explored the transitional dilemma of characters in early 80’s, whose acculturation bids were occasionally thwarted by the complexity of cultural plurality in the adopted land. However, after the publication of The Middleman(1998), the process of cultural acclimatization appears to be complete and the characters betray the confidence of an immigrant, almost a naturalized citizen, in facing the challenges of human life.

As Mehta describes the Bombay of his youth, the reader is given a nostalgic view of what the city used to be. As a child, growing up there he is not the outsider that he becomes when his family moves to New York. He describes this experience as a, “central event, that fulcrum of time,” which shaped the rest of his life (6). Subsequently, throughout the rest of his childhood he desires to go back to Bombay and to leave New York, a place

The ideas of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1965) changed the theatre in many ways. Brecht along with Erwin Piscator developed the style of Epic theatre style contrasting to previous accepted styles. Presentational in form, Epic theatre is a vehicle for social comment through techniques such as: alienation, historification, eclectic influences (highly Asian), constructivism in scenery, disjointed and illogical scene placement, ordinary clothing and lighting, the use of music to detach the audience from emotion, placards and signs and projected images. Didactic in nature Brecht’s works aim to challenge the

In the words of Gay McAuley, “for an activity to be regarded as a performance, it must involve the live presence of the performers and those witnessing it…” (McAuley, 2009, cited in Schechner, 2013, pp.38). This statement recognises the importance of both the actor and the audience for something to truly function as a performance. In addition, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones highlights the significance of the theatrical space and how it can influence an audience stating that “on entering a theatre of any kind, a spectator walks into a specific space, one that is designed to produce a certain reaction or series of responses” (Llewellyn-Jones, 2002, pp.3). The relationship between actor, audience and theatrical space is no less important today than it was at the time of theatre during the Spanish Golden Age and the creation of Commedia dell’arte in Italy. Despite being very close geographically with theatre thriving for both in the same era, sources that explore the social, cultural and historical context of these countries and the theatre styles will bring to light the similarities and differences. This essay will analyse the staging, the behaviour of the audience as well as the challenges the actors faced, and how this directly influenced the relationship between actor, audience and theatrical space.

The minuscule retail and hotel zone in Calcutta were strikingly unlike cities in North America but parallel to Bridgetown. The hotel zones in the ports of colonial cities were essential than the ones in North American cities. The big difference between the two regions were the social power; in Calcutta which had a huge indigenous population had local authority of courts, police headquarters, town guard built on the edge of the town rather than in the institutional zone. This seemed to be a tend in Colonial places in Asia. The presentation of Bowden model to port cities, mercantile city and more specifically Calcutta where European had a vast role imply that comparable development was a shared pattern of land use in British colonial cities around the world. The reasonably amount of free urban land to operate formed many colonial cities to be noticeably similar. The reason being that in Asian colonial cities, the town was draped around the British mercantile core. When a generic British mercantile city is recognized then it would be a lot easier to understand the European colonial cities around the world. The land use had more of an impact than Bowden acknowledges and the retail and hotel zones were substantially smaller than North American

As discussed in previous readings, reproductive labor refers to labor that must be done in order for the perpetuation of the cycle of labor in a capitalistic society. In this way, reproductive labor is labor that produces labor. Hondagneu-Sotelo describes reproductive labor as it pertains to the cult of domesticity mentioned in the Almaguer reading. Reproductive labor is gendered as being the primary work of a woman who maintained the house and the children while her husband earned money to support the family. This exemplifies reproductive labor because the woman is doing the work at home so that her husband is able to earn an income, thus producing a cycle of labor. Furthermore, the woman of the house who raises the children is performing

Dreaming of Tombstones (133-188): A Summary and Critical Analysis of Gender Issues in “City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty, Volume 10” by Ananya Roy

Karnad , the writer as a creative genius and a cinematographic artist. He does not simply make us see, but makes us through camera. The difference between a cinema and a literary form, is seen obviously through medium viz. verbal and visual. The approach in Karnad’s play is essentially a visual where his inclination towards visualization of the scenes and settings create a cinematic interest. The regular adaptations from Indian literature in several languages for Indian cinema , no doubt , brings curiosity of interlinking of some of the past and traditional Indian implications of the Indian past and her glory. The preconceptions and belongingness to the theory of the principles of Indian origin or heritage certainly creates among audience the proud feeling of cherishing, respecting and reviving the ancient past of the primitive identity. As Flaubert says, “derive(s) almost voluptuous sensations from the mere act of seeing”. Karnad seems creating memorable situations through the convincing setting. He also applies full visual imagination and powers of description. He tried to direct the events with a keen determination to record fully and accurately a specific moment of perception. Arun Sajnani, the Director and the Screenplay writer Anil Mehta, have equally tried to judge Karnad’s determined principles of creating persons, scenes, setting and the motif as well. Sajnani, even been sensitive to the

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster is a Modernist novel which highlights the complex inner life of its characters using complicated plots and recurring symbols and images. Foster questions the conformist approaches of representing reality: he reiterates that whatever people call reality is an indefinable commodity. E. K. Brown, a renowned American critic, points out that the main idea of A passage to India is “the chasm between the world of actions and the world of being” (Mitra 5). Hence, the novel is not simply a piece of anti-colonial fiction: it is modern classic too, one that is as relevant in the present times as it was in the pre-colonial times. In this paper, we analyze the nature of the different realities presented in ‘A Passage to India’. Further, we discuss the ways the treatment of this subject both contributes to the development of the central themes of the novel and

In the first few excerpts from Al Biruni’s India – an informative text on his observation of Indian life – Al Biruni sets up the stage for his readers to develop a mindset necessary to understand his description of Indian culture, philosophy, language, etc. In this paper, I will establish that Al Biruni’s experience, and hence his explanation of India should have been considerably impacted by his sociopolitical standing. At the same time, I will make the case that despite of his keen efforts to limit his text to informative purposes, he fails to prevent his out-group bias from appearing in his writing.

E.M. Forster’s classic novel “A Passage to India” tells the story of a young doctor, Dr. Aziz, and his interactions with the British citizens who are residing in India during the time of the British Raj. Throughout the novel, the reader gets many different viewpoints on the people and the culture of India during this point in history. The reader sees through the eyes of the Indian people primarily through the character of Dr. Aziz, and the perceptions of the British through the characters of Mr. Fielding, Adela Quested, and Mrs. Moore. Through the different characters, and their differing viewpoints, the reader can see that Forster was creating a work that expressed a criticism that he held of the behavior of the British towards their Indian subjects.

The play is based on Mitra’s experience as a postmaster in rural areas of Orissa and