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Theorizing Realism: The City, Everyday Life, and the Proscenium The principal antithesis to the intertexture of myth and history in postindependence Indian theatre (discussed in the preceding two chapters) appears in several interlinked groups of plays that portray the historical present rather than a received or imagined past and that possess a range of common features without displaying the closer “family resemblances” that would characterize a distinct dramatic genre. Focusing on contemporary life, these plays are more or less realistic in presentational style; their action is invented, not derived from preexisting narratives; their settings are urban (often metropolitan) or semiurban; and their primary level of signiccation is literal rather than analogical or allegorical. To a remarkable extent, these works have also settled on the private space of home as the testing ground of not only familial but social and political relations, so that domestic settings, love, marriage, parent-child conbicts, generational shifts, and the quotidian pressures of urban life appear as the common cctional substrata of plays that are thematically disparate. Following in part the conventions of social realism and proscenium performance that had decned modernity in late colonial theatre, important new plays in the urban-realist mode appeared concurrently with the crst major works of mythic-historic retrospection in the 1950s and have coalesced over cve decades into an equally, if not more, substantial tradition. Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, and Mahesh Dattani are among the 268 chapter 8 # Realism and the Edicce of Home major contemporary practitioners who work predominantly in the realist mode and possess a social imagination that expresses itself primarily through the psychodrama of family relationships. Other leading playwrights , such as Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, G. P. Deshpande, Mahasweta Devi, and Satish Alekar, have o,ered stylized variations on realism in specicc plays or groups of plays, or have assimilated its conventions to their respective forms of historical, environmental, political, and absurdist theatre. In its totality, the contemporary tradition of urban, realist, predominantly domestic drama is large and varied and includes some of the most inbuential plays of the last cve decades: Vijay Tendulkar’s Shantata! court chalu ahe (Silence! The Court Is in Session, 1967), Gidhade (Vultures, 1970), Sakharam binder (Sakharam the Bookbinder, 1972), Kamala (1981), and Kanyadaan (The Gift of a Daughter, 1983), all in Marathi; Mohan Rakesh’s Adhe adhure (The Uncnished, 1969), in Hindi; G. P. Deshpande’s Uddhwasta dharmashala (The Ruined Sanctuary, 1974), Ek vajoon gela ahe (It’s Past One O’ Clock, 1983), and Andhar yatra ( Journey in Darkness, 1987), also in Marathi; Madhu Rye’s Koipan ek phoolnu naam bolo to (Say the Name of Any Flower, 1974) and Kumarni agashi (Kumar’s Terrace, 1974), both in Gujarati; Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Raktapushpa (Petals of Blood, 1972), W ada chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion, 1985), Atmakatha (Autobiography , 1988), and the Yuganta trilogy (1994), in Marathi; and Mahesh Dattani’s Tara (1990) and Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), in English. Despite formal and thematic di,erences, Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit (And Indrajit, 1962), Baki itihas (1965), Pagla ghoda (Mad Horse, 1967), and Shesh nei (There’s No End, 1969), in Bengali, Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar churashir ma (The Mother of Corpse Number 1084, 1973), in Bengali, and Satish Alekar’s Mahanirvan (The Great Departure, 1974) and Pidhijat (The Dynasts, 2002), in Marathi, also participate in this tradition by virtue of their urban settings and their preoccupation with contemporary middle-class life. Predictably, there is no single “theory” of realism or naturalism that undergirds this varied drama set mainly in the contemporary middleclass urban home. Rather, in the polyphonic theatrical discourse of the last cve decades, the subject of realism has occasioned a range of theoretical , ideological, and polemical positions that place a high value on theatre’s commitment to the historical present and its ability to contend with its own times. In terms of subject matter, the focus on contemporary urban experience sets the realist works apart from plays concerned with a mythic or historical past, as well as from plays immersed in the Realism and the Edicce of Home 269 ostensibly timeless realms of folk narrative and traditional performance. In thematic terms, the persistence of home-as-setting has created a “typology of home” in post-independence Indian theatre, within which the practice of each major playwright forges distinctive connections between the private world of the family as an emotional and psychological entity and the public world of social and political action. In performance , these plays have established the proscenium...

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