Playwright at the center Girish Karnad :-
               
Our project on Girish Karnad intends to examine the mutual contamination of the literary  World of drama and performative world of theatre is whether unavoidable or it demands a fundamental mutual development of  each domain as the debate raised by eminent scholar J.E. Quigley.
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               Girish Karnad is a playwright whose plays offer together a reengagement between the apparently separated worlds and makes the autonomy and accessibility to drama and theatre complementary rather than contrasting domains. His plays figure in university syllabi around the world to be taught in classrooms as texts; they are equally popular as performance texts re-produced many time and again by different directors. It is remarkable that whatever the physical or behavioral embodiment be given to the mythical, historical, social, or psychological horizons of the plays, the issues that build the plots are drawn from and remain firmly grounded in the experiential world of the readers/ spectators but bearing larger implications capable of transcending cultural specificities to reach out towards a universality of human knowledge. That Karnad’s plays are successfully performed by theatre groups of different countries and are extremely well received by the audiences of different cultures prove this point.
In Karnad’s plays, the world of reality and fantasy or illusion meet in such a way that poetry is created. To echo what was said about Genet’s work, Karnad’s plays represent the junction point at which “dream is simultaneously reality” where the invisible coincides with the visible, where the object is both itself and the revelation of something not-itself” as said by Richard N. Coe. Yet, it is everyday language that he uses, perhaps re-shaped and re-vitalized with connotative richness, but operating as part of, rather than in opposition to, the language of theatre.
  The wealth of such knowledge is obviously derived from Karnad’s own experience as an actor, director and translator because all the three functions demand knowledge and awareness of the strategies of both ‘adaptation, and ‘application’ of a given text.

The tension with in:

There are some tensions that always prevail in Karnad’s plays that is subsequently dominates the literary world throughout the ages. As George Largues Lukacs argues that ….in the great ages, the drama flowed ‘Naturally’ from the existing theatre, while, from Goethe on, ‘the poet dramatist’ rejects the theatre, writes plays which are ‘too good for it’ and then calls for the creation of the kind of theatre which will be good enough for the plays. The same happened in case of Tagore’s plays like ‘Red oleander’ ‘The king of dark chambers’ etc. On the other hand playwright like Artaud is well known for his position that theatre’s capacity to give visual embodiment to ideas with its distinctive Language/ Semiotics- awards theatre a unique system of intelligibility. Artaud’s theatre’s non verbal language might incorporate but would not finally need the language of written text. Hence, he argues, theatre provides an independent way of knowing that is not otherwise available.
 
The Problematic : - The point is to note here is that these views deepen the gap between literature and performance as separate domains and rare are the occasions when the twain is allowed to meet. Girish Karnad has examined these contrary propositions through his different plays.

Settling this matter :- To settle this contentious matter therefore, the ideal would be to reconcile the two ‘types of text, as being complementary to each other and insist upon an accompanying theatre environment to give life to a dramatic text. As has been pointed out by Jacques Derrida (in his revolutionary essay “Structure, Sign, and play in the discourse of Human Sciences’) since each and every thought is ‘Scripted’ even before it is ‘spoken’, any performance, however impromptu, is inevitably based on script.
 In his own words  Karnad says that his generation was the first to come of age after India became independent of British rule.
 
The Bengalees are arguably the first race to have proximity with ‘colonial modernity’. The tension between Eurocentrism and tradition has pervaded the minds of Bengali intelligentsia. In this respect Karnad has become the new God of Bengali theatre-goers. From the early seventies, Karnad’s plays have been translated into Bengali and performed by different theatre groups. The fact which is worthy of mention that all the plays of Karnad have been translated by the major poets, playwrights, and scholars of Bengali literature. Our survey shows that Karnad in Bengali translation is much more better sold than any other Bengali playwright. Our effort tries to record the reception and perception of Karnad’s plays among the Bengali readers and the viewers.
The fact that what is called ‘modern Indian theatre’ was started by a group of people who adopted ‘cultural amnesia’ as a deliberate strategy. It originated in the second half of the nineteenth century in three cities, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.
 
There was, however, a far more important reason for the superficiality of the fact. The urbane audience Where as in public life accepted the Western bourgeois notions of secularism, egalitarianism, and individual merit, at home it remained committed to the traditional loyalties of caste, family, and religion.
It is possible to argue, as Ashis Nandy has said, that this inner division was not psychologically harmful at all but was a deliberate strategy adopted by this class to ensure that its personality was not totally absorbed and thereby destroyed by the colonial culture.

The problem with the word ‘History’ :

Karnad says inevitably, for the Hindus have almost no tradition of history. The Hindu mind, with its belief in the cycle of births and deaths, has found little reason to record chronicles or glamorize any particular historical period. Still, independence had made history as written by the British automatically a subject of suspect. The Marxist approach offered a more attractive alternative but in fact seemed unable to come to terms with Indian realities. Even today Marxist ideologues are lost when confronted with native categories like caste. It was the Muslims who first introduced history as a positive concept in Indian thought, and the only genuinely Indian methodology available to us for analyzing history was that developed by the Muslim historians in India as observed by Karnad.
To sum up- this project keeping Girish Karnard at the centre, we want to examine the problems that any artist (novelist, playwright, poet etc.) has to face in a ‘post colonial present’

1. The tension that is prevailing between the pre-colonial past & the colonial past 
2. The same kind of tension between the colonial past & the post colonial present
3. The connotation of the word ‘reason’ in reference to colonial past & pre-colonial past
4. whether the word reason has become a word of ‘foreign’ origin in a country where philosophy of ‘Naya’ & ‘Vaisheshik’ dominated places like Mithila, Nabadwip, etc. ( references to professors Arindom Chakraborty’s review of a book on ‘Naya’ philosophy published in a Bengali daily ‘Ananda Bazaar Patrica’
5. The problem with the word ‘history’ in English meaning, then the Islamic interpretation (by the medieval Muslim historian like Al- Biruni & the word ‘Iti-haas’ as used in Mahabharata
6. The presence of languages  in different parts of our country in reference  to the notion of nationalism  &
7. The ‘earth shattering’ question of  violence that is negotiated in the play ‘Bali : The sacrifice  & others

            Girish Karnard still wants to deal with all this inner contradictions present in contemporary Indian literature & he had already dealt with in his plays like ‘Yayati,’ ‘Tughlaq,’ ‘Hayavadana,’ The dreams of ‘Tipu Sultan,’ ‘Nagamandala,’ etc. The faint presence of folk literature at the advent of rapid urbanization is also to be examined in this undergoing project.