Indian English Drama

Silence! The Court is in Session

• One of the outstanding Indian playwrights

• Has excelled in many departments of literature: essays, short stories,

criticism, screenplay writing and drama.

• Ranked with great Indian playwrights like Badal Sarcar, Girish Karnad

and Mohan Rakesh.

• Works : Shantata! Court Chaule Ahe (1967), Ghāshirām Kotwāl

(1972), and Sakhārām Binder (1972).

Vijay Tendulkar

Silence! The Court is in Session

• The degradation of the judiciary system

• Forceful male supremacy in Indian society

• Condemnation on the Indian society and the

prejudices it carries against women.

• The play is derisive on the middle class

probity, where people have all the rights to

pass the judgments and Silence is the only

alternative left for the victim.

Characterization

• Benare represents all the women in India

who are suppressed, oppressed and are

marginalized.

• The character Mr. and Mrs. Kashikar,

Ponkshe, Rokde, Sukhatme represents

hypocrisy and inferior complex.

• Tendulkar has left the play open without

suggesting any solution to the problem of

Ms. Benare.

Ms. Benare • Tendulkar has depicted the difficulty of a young woman, who is a victim

of the male dominated society.

• The game of mock trial, which started for entertainment, turns into

Benare’s tragedy.

• Benare is an educated woman about thirty-four years old who worked

as a schoolteacher.

• She was also associated with an amateur dramatic alliance, whose

prime purpose was to educate the public with social and current issues.

• Benare was reluctant to perform the role of an accused but this

reluctance was ignored.

• The playwright endeavors to create a game-like non-serious

atmosphere. But soon the imaginary charges led to personal dilemmas.

• Benare is initially seen in a cheerful mood of flamboyance, but she gets

her first blow, when Ponkshe, a scientist, says, “She runs after men too

much.”

Satire and Irony

• A satire on the unjust male dominating society and

on the working of Court.

• Mr. Kashikar, the judge should be free from the

prejudice but he was just the opposite.

• The court allows Prof. Damle to enjoy his married

life and does not accuse him to exploit and abuse

the life of a woman.

• The irony of the mock trial is that Benare is accused

in the court without the presence of Prof. Damle.

• The witnesses take oath touching the Oxford

English Dictionary

Satire and Reality

• The accusation :

“Prisoner Miss Benare under section No.

302 of the Indian Penal Code, you are accused

of the crime of Infanticide.”

• The verdict :

“This court hereby sentences that you

shall live. But the child in your womb shall be

destroyed.”

Issues Surrounding

Indian English Drama

Third World Literature

• Fredric Jameson

• US Scholar, Post Modernist

• “Third World Literature in the Era of

Multinational Capitalism”

“ The third world texts, even those which are seemingly

private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic,

necessarily project a political dimension in the form of

national allegory; the story of the private individual

destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation

of the public third world culture and society”

Third World Drama

Western beliefs

• Predominant belief was that "theatre" did not exist in

Third World countries, that theatre owed its literary

heritage to Shakespeare and a few others.

• Refusal to see third world literature as writings like

canonical ones.

Criticism of the Western Outlook

• Each nation of the Third World has a theatre that

is peculiar to it.

• These nations have rich, century-old traditions;

these nations are at a certain moment in history

and expression in the domain of theatre is a

direct consequence of this identity

• A fruitful interaction between drama in native

languages and English drama, e.g. Silence

Conclusions • The play Silence! The Court is in Session serves to

quash all Western prejudices regarding Third World

Drama as a whole

• It skillfully demonstrates the integration between

drama in native languages and English

• It has several interesting experimentations to silence

critiques who accuse third world drama of borrowing

heavily from Western concepts and ideas

• The same arguments apply to other Indian plays,

Nagamandala, Lights Out as well.

Conclusions Today, the Third World is divided between a desire for

"modernism," which would consist of adopting Western

values and assimilating the theatre as an object of

consumption and

The will to rediscover in the traditional forms of a specific

culture the burning embers of the theatre of tomorrow.

Between pure and simple imitation of Western dramatic forms

and the reconstruction of past forms, a third path is open to the

nations of the Third World: that of renewing their heritage,

beginning with the past and assimilating into it the given facts of

contemporary evolution.

Bibliography

Tendulkar, Vijay. Silence! The court is in Session,

trans. Priya Adakar

www.wikipedia.org

Fredric Jameson – Third World Literature in the era of

Multinational Capitalism