Negotiating the Ethical urgency - A View of modern Indian Drama

The request of ethics has come to be highly crucial with the arrival of postmodern and post-colonial consciousness. Cross-cultural influences straight through mass migrations and globalization have come to be increasingly foremost resulting in a hybrid world culture. The uneasy co-existence of the global and the local has made the issue of ethics highly involved and problematic, especially on account of the complicated and often incompatible subject positions which a person has to adopt in daily situations.

It is very difficult for a postcolonial and postmodern Indian subject to pinpoint the definition of ethics. The subject moves back and forth between discrete rationalities. He/she is never able to totally cast off the sway of his/her own culture and traditions while he/she is aware of and attracted towards modern discourses. The subject is always caught up between the favorite discourses on Indian/Western, traditional/modern, old/new. He/she thus himself/herself has to choose his/her definition of ethics and the extent to which they can or cannot be followed.

Nuclear Weapons

The postcolonial literature has been very successful in the depiction of this conflict, showing the difficulty of an private forced to make these difficult choices. modern Indian drama has very beautifully dealt with this involved issue and depicted the aspects of this disagreement with utmost precision uncovering many layers of complexity and gift new tentative definitions of ethics and ethical crisis. Vijay Tendulkar, for example, has dealt with group ethics in his dramas such as Silence! the Court is in Session, Kamala and Sakharam Binder. Girish Karnad has taken up political and religious ethics in plays like Tughlaq, Dreams of Tipu Sultan and Bali while Mahesh Dattani's major concern has been forging newer sexual ethics straight through plays like A Muggy Night in Mumbai, Bravely Fought the Queen and Do the Needful.

In this paper I have undertaken a comparative study of the ethical crises of discrete postcolonial subjects in the dramatic world of Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad and Mahesh Dattani.

Leela Benare, the protagonist of Vijay Tendulkar's Silence! The Court is in Session can be best appreciated if we treat her as a subject signifying both leisure and subjugation, a subject who would act freely but whose leisure is shaped and puny by group and cultural structures. As a corollary she is both free and unfree in her utterances and actions. She can be compared to Sarita in Kamala and Jyoti in Kanyadaan. All three of them are at the mercy of involved socio-cultural soldiery and obscure psychological motivations. They are educated women, strongly aware of their rights, individualistic in outlook, but they are also constrained by the soldiery of tradition which chain and hold them back. The issue of concern here is however, that this oppression and constraint is carefully legitimate by these women being steeped in patriarchal discourses themselves. It can be said that these women are caught between the discourses of personal leisure on the one hand and those of group norms and traditions on the other. The request is whether to site ethics in an private or a society at the time of crisis.

To reconsider Leela Benare's case in particular, she can be described as a representative of modern Indian women in similar situations. She displays independence, self-assertiveness and skepticism but she is also highly sensitive to the primary norms of morality. She is tied down by the arduous constraints of the label of Indian ness that is imposed on her by the self-styled guardians of group norms and cultural ideals even as she tries to live life on her own terms. The fact that she makes a desperate attempt to profess what may be called her personal doctrine of life hints at a deeper fear that her dream of leisure may never be realized. Indeed, there is a duality in her character: she is both subject to the repressive group apparatus as well as a subject possessed of the liberating modern consciousness. This duality makes her what she is as a postcolonial subject.

The play is about a play which somehow easily turns into a cruel mock-trial. An amateur theatre group arrives in a hamlet to achieve a consciousness-raising play about the dangers of atomic warfare. The group consists of discrete characters who record distinct sections of society. Among them is Leela Benare, the protagonist. She seems to have tried to live her life on her own terms and has remained more or less unfazed by criticism so far. She is cheerful and carefree like a child. And she is free of the hypocrisy that characterizes everyone else in the group. It is not that her life has been easy; she has suffered a lot but she tries her best to enjoy her life and work. The others consequently envy her.

The play is scheduled to be performed in the evening. The group has nothing to do before that. Bored, they hit upon a plan. They would enact an impromptu trial. The proposal is, ironically, made easily by Leela. It, however, turns out that the others find in it an opening to dig up Leela's past 'sins' - her socially unacceptable guide - so that they can humiliate and punish her publicly and pat themselves for being the conscience-keepers of society.

Leela Benare's sin in the group eye is that she is going to be an unwed mother. She has been in love with Professor Damle - a much older, married man, with five children - for his intellect. Damle, however, exploits her physically and discards her when she asks him to help her. About him, she says: He wasn't a god. He was a man. For whom everything was of the body, for the body! That's all. . . . (Tendulkar 118)

Leela's infatuation with Damle is representative of her ambivalent association with authority as such. She both spurns and reveres authority, whether it is of Damle, of the Kashikars, or of group institutions. Damle appears to her as a father shape because of his age as well as his intellectual and pro status. He is thus in a position to exploit her emotionally and physically. unquestionably he is the second elderly man in her life who uses her body and then casts her off. The first was her maternal uncle who exploited her when she was an innocent child of thirteen years only. He too is now the object of her hatred and scorn. This ambivalent association of love/hatred and respect/scorn can also be seen in her attitude towards the authority of the mock-trial court, particularly as represented by the Kashikars and Sukhatme. She despises them, yet she cannot bring herself to refuse to stand trial before them. She simultaneously protests against and submits to their authority.

The play throws light on the double-edged weapon of the favorite discourses of motherhood, honour, nationalism and group responsibility. Robert J.C. Young remarks:

The ideal of the nation is often imaged as a woman, and the ideology of nationalism often invests the nation's core identity upon an idealized, patriarchal image of ideal womanhood. (63-64)

These discourses are supposed to empower women but are often used to harm women's interests. Woman is held responsible for the dignity and honour of motherhood and straight through that for preserving the aged cultural traditions of the country. In custom however, instead of empowering her, these discourses compromise her leisure in the name of responsibility. The vague and questionable notions of morality and motherhood are used to curtail Leela Benare's leisure while the trial. According to Sukhatme:

The woman who is an accused has made a heinous blot on the sacred brow of motherhood . . . Her guide has blackened all group and moral values. . . . If such socially destructive tendencies are encouraged to flourish, this country and its culture will be totally destroyed. . . . Woman is not fit for independence. . . . (114-115)

They are thus using a rationale for which, however, they offer no ground. So this discourse is presumed to be self-legitimating. Their anti-rational attitude is confirmed also when Kashikar supports the custom of child-marriage, wishing that it should be revived (98). The most thoughprovoking thing is that the opposition to ideas and institutions of group enlarge is expressed in the guise of preservation of national culture.

We find here two opposing discourses warring against each other to take rights of Leela's self-identity. On the one hand she is unable to shake off the sway of these patriarchal, subjugating discourses, while on the other she vehemently asserts her individuality, defends her personal leisure and the rights of the body:

I despise this body - and I love it! I hate it - but it's all you have in the end, isn't it? It will be there. It will be yours. Where will it go without you? And where will you go if you reject it? Don't be ungrateful. It was your body that once burnt and gave you a moment so beautiful, so blissful, so near to heaven! . . . (118) The ambivalence and complexity of Leela's attitude are duly articulated by the playwright and seem to indicate the absence of any easy solutions. The disagreement between the claims for leisure as an autonomous person and the demands made by society quote the self as an embattled territory. Leela Benare wants to be independent, assertive and alive to the senses, to be the self that she was before the trial, but the society wants her to be submissive and a slave to the rules of morality created by it. The demands of society make her what she is post-trial. Her self undergoes a terrible turn while the process of the trial. And she only reluctantly accepts the new self that others have given her.

The play can be also seen as deconstructing the idealized image of the Indian woman as Devi or Shakti. There is no ideal Indian woman as such, apart from the real flesh-and-blood women. The identity of a woman in India (or elsewhere for that matter) is socially and culturally constructed and the constructions serve certain socio-political and personal ends.

We see in the play a disagreement between the real self and the performed self: what the population in the amateur theatre group unquestionably are, what they would like to be, what they gift themselves to be, and how the implicit and explicit group codes decree their identities. There is a kind of duplicity of self in the identities of approximately all the members of the group, along with Leela Benare, of which they themselves may not be aware. And this duplicity can be clearly grasped if we reconsider it in the light of the plan of subjectivity. Though Leela is distinct from others in not deceiving herself about her motives and intentions, yet she is helpless before the so called law of morality. It is for this conjecture that she so desperately looks for person who would lend to her unborn child his name as father:

He must have a mum . . . A father to call his own - a house - to be looked after - he must have a good name! (118)

The society, with its moral codes and restrictions, is therefore already housed in Leela's consciousness. She has so internalized the patriarchal codes that she cannot bring herself to violate them despite her individualistic, modern and right-conscious protestations. She is a subject pulled apart by primary patriarchal law of ethics on the one hand and modern western individualistic ethics on the other, which teach her to respect leisure and rights of an individual. The play thus depicts the predicament of a postcolonial subject, who has to find her own answers and make her own decisions. The aim of art remains, however, to dramatize the difficulty of a subject caught in this conflict, which Tendulkar's art surely succeeds in achieving, though the playwright does not offer any easy solutions and suggests that no easy clarification is infact, available.

The protagonist of Girish Karnad's play Dreams of Tipu Sultan is also on the horns of an ethical dilemma. Tipu Sultan, one of the most politically perceptive emperors in India while the British rule, kept on wavering between nationalistic associations with Indian and everything Indian and his respect for the British way of life, their undying love for their nation and their passion for trade. Tipu knew that the English were successful in India due to their clever political machinations and their stronghold in trade.

. . . Think of the John firm - how they came to this country, poor, cringing, and what they have come to be in a mere fifty years. They threaten us today. It's all because of their passion for trade. (26)

He wished the Indians to wake up to this fact and instead of letting Indian resources open to exploitation by the British, be their own scholar and earn profits by trading Indian goods. This land is ours and it's rich, overflowing with goods the world hungers for, and we let foreigners come in and rob us of our wealth! Today the Indian princes are all comatose, wrapped in their opium dreams. But some day they'll wake up and throw out the Europeans. . . . It's them or us. . . .(36)

That is why Tipu sent delegations to China, France, Istanbul and so on to extend trade relations with these countries. He imported technology from these countries and exported rare Indians products to them, thus, strengthening the economy and building a trading empire. But though Tipu was full of nationalistic and patriotic feelings, he could not help wondering at European enthusiasm and power and wishing it for themselves: We in our country. . . That's what makes Europe so extraordinary - it's full of new ideas - inventions - all kinds of machines - bursting with energy. Why don't we think like them? (36) Tipu was relentless in his criticism of his fellow native rulers, who supported the British and facilitated their ruling them. He lashed at the Nizam and the Marathas when they joined hands with the British against him:

We are blocked by our own people. (40)

Tipu feared that his own trusted officers might stab him in the back, when the moment came. He envied the British nationalism, their love for England and their steadfastness. In a dream, while talking to his father, he discloses his deepest fears and his admiration for the British in a long speech:

But, Father, often, suddenly, I see myself in them - I see these white skins swarming all over the land and I wonder what makes them so relentless? Desperate? . . . They don't give up. Nor would I. Sometimes I feel more certain of them than my own people. . . . They believe in the destiny of their race. Why can't we? . . . But the English fight for something called England. What is it? It's just a dream for which they are willing to kill and die. Children of England! (51-52)

He feels a kinship with the British in their undying love for their nation and their never - say - die attitude. But at the same time Tipu feels revolted by their apathy when the British request his sons as hostages. He doesn't want his sons to be influenced by the violence ingrained in their language:

The danger is: they'll teach my children their language, English. The language in which it is potential to think of children as hostages. . . .(43)

Tipu's predicament is the predicament of a modern Indian subject, who is indecisive about whether to admire the developed countries of the world for their progressive ideas, wealth, work culture and propriety or to look down upon them for their lack of what we call Indian values of trust, pity and love. What do ethics consist of, in other words? Do they mean that we must achieve our ends relentlessly without caring for means or do they stand for the eternal human emotions of love, bonding and fraternity? Tipu seems to be very clear about what to inculcate from the west and what to reject.

A distinct plane of ethical considerations is in case,granted by Mahesh Dattani's plays based on the theme of alternate sexuality. In A Muggy Night in Mumbai, Dattani chooses to dwell on same-sex relationships crumbling under the exerting sway of group demands. The play throws light on a collection of responses of population with alternate sexual preferences to group pressures. Prakash represents the usual problematic homosexual, who begins to doubt his own reality and tries to reorient himself towards being 'straight'. Then there is Sharad, who is the most upfront about his identity. He says:

If any one of us can be straight, I am Madhubala. (85)

Bunny Singh, the Tv actor, who would hide his sexuality behind the sham of a successful marriage, suggests:

Camouflage! Even animals do it. Blend with the surroundings. They can't find you. You political gays deny yourself the basic instinct of camouflage. (70)

Bunny represents probably the typical Indian attitude towards the issue. This attitude is shared by Nitin in Bravely Fought the Queen. Nitin tries to continue a loveless association with his wife, Alka behind which he might hide his clandestine gay relationships. Nitin too appears to be a victim of the righteousness and highhandedness of the world of 'normal' men. Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri points out:

Dattani seems to be pointing at the tasteless spaces between feminism and gay liberation where both situate a customary oppressiveness in the 'straight' male and his assertion of phallocentric 'normal' pre-eminence - the self-delusion of their creed. (52)

The same hypocrisy and sham that Dattani rejects in A Muggy Night in Mumbai are presented as probably the only alternatives to profess peace with the group custom without taking a risk of upsetting them in Do the Needful. Alpesh, a gay man whom his parents want to marry off a second time after his first unsuccessful marriage, finds his clarification in consenting to marry Lata, who loves another, whom she cannot marry, he being a terrorist. This marriage is preferable to the anarchic damage impending on the group status of the two families, should the young have their way.

The play raises serious ethical questions as to whether suppressing one's real sexual identity could originate long-lasting group well-being and happiness and whether it would not be great to come out openly once for all than manufacture lives miserable. The disagreement in terms of normative heterosexual behavior and alternative sexuality forms the major concern here.

The postcolonial subject in India and elsewhere is oscillating between two kinds of rationality - one represented by the primary cultural plan and the other by modern western discourses. This disagreement between the two cultures/ traditions/ civilizations becomes apparent in the works of Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad and Mahesh Dattani, where ethics find a new definition and corollary in taking the centre-stage.

A study of these three dramatists shows how the issue is dealt in discrete ways and in discrete classes of society. Tipu Sultan belongs to royalty and aristocracy, Leela Benare to lower middle class while Dattani's subjects to an upper metropolitan class of society. Also the three dramatists deal with the issue differently. In Tipu's case for example, he knows how to selectively accepted western ideas and culture. In divergence to Tipu, Leela Benare remains unresolved till the end of the play between individualistic concerns and group concerns. In Mahesh Dattani's plays, however, western modernity provides a discourse to those sexualities which are otherwise suppressed under the weight of custom in India, giving them a respectable space. By learning these three dramatists in a comparative analysis, we are able to address a diversity of subject positions and recognize the possibility of a composite plan of ethical stand as we see it in modern Indian drama.

Works Cited:

Chaudhuri, Asha Kuthari. Mahesh Dattani. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2005.

Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. Noida: Penguin Books, 2000.

Karnad, Girish. Two Plays by Girish Karnad. New Delhi: Oxford University, 2004.

Tendulkar, Vijay. Collected Plays in Translation. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Young, Robert J.C. Post-colonialism; A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Negotiating the Ethical urgency - A View of modern Indian Drama