Reconstruction of Legend in Contemporary Panjabi Drama in India

Reconstruction of Legend in Contemporary Panjabi Drama in India PANKAJ K. SINGH A significant section of Hindi and Panjabi drama (which emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries respectively) has engaged itself with subjects derived from myth, legend, and history of India. The choice might have been partly a pragmatic one because the narratives from the past provided a structure of shared beliefs; yet it was also a conscious attempt to infuse the country with cultural vitality and to awaken the national spirit. The past was invoked to portray models of endurance, self-sacrifice, courage, and undaunted resistance in the characters of Sita, Savitri, Abhimanyu, Maharana Pratap, Rani Padmini, and others to inspire the writers' countrymen to fight against oppression and colonial rule. The return to the past was inevitably characterised by "revivalistic romanticism" which countered the colonizer's image of the inferior, the barbaric, the uncivilized of the colonized.' However, in the post-colonial phase, the use of myth, legend, or history is problematic and multidimensional; in addition to using the past to clarify and comment on the present, playwrights (particularly from the sixties onwards) present a critique of their own cultural traditions which they confront, question, subvert, and at times even reject. Legend, despite its specific differences from myth, performs similar psycho -social functions. Like myth, legend is a cultural construct which records, presents, and further regulates and validates the moral system of a society. With its precepts and examples, legend, like many myths, is a rationale for the values and practices of a society. The legendary narrative, like the mythical, is privileged as the collective wisdom of the elders and as the wisdom of the ages, and becomes a pervasive component in the consciousness of a society. While the use of legend in drama has definite aesthetic advantages, both as a thematic statement and as a structural principle - as a shared belief-system and as a shorthand for handling a multiplicity of time and space - it also serves as the ideological and cultural code of the society which the creative Modern Drama, 38 (1995) 109 110 PANKAJ K. SINGH writer has to negotiate in trying to come to tenns with his or her own cultural heritage. In the process, he is able to foreground the contradictions blurred in the traditional discourse, as he also fills in the motivated gaps, retrieves the erased text, and thus subverts it from within. The legends of the Punjab, going back to medieval times and before, are essentially patriarchal in their values and structure, whether as the legends of love or those of morality which posit models of ideal human conduct. The woman stands either marginalized or misrepresented; at the most she is a person of no consequence who is unfit to be noticed, and at her worst she is an evil, wicked temptation ever ready to entice man, someone against whom the virtuous man should carefully guard himself. While playwrights of an earlier age were content to focus on the images of woman glorified in the myths, of woman steeped in endurance, self-sacrifice, and steadfast virtue (for example, Brij Lal Shastri's plays Saviu'i and Sukanya (1925) derived from the Mahabharata ), playwrights in the post-colonial phase focus instead on the image of the wronged woman and recreate legends from her point of view. Even though drama in the Punjab, as in the rest of India, remains men's forte, the contemporary renderings of the traditional patriarchal narrative take a feminist form in a bid to make them more realistic, just, and open to question and analysis. While retaining the broad structure of the legend, the plays which recount the love-legends foreground the suffering and tragedy of the woman which remain suppressed or largely submerged in the wealth of generalizations and digressions in the legendary narrative that, at times, even blame the woman for the tragedy as in the legend "Mirza Sahiban." However, some other plays build on a more radical deconstruction of the patriarchal legend inasmuch as the victim is retrieved from the margins and is situated at the centre. She is given voice and visibility, enabling her to question patriarchy and to demystify and deflate...