Adaptation, Opposition

Abstract

“Adaptation, Opposition” looks at why Mahabharata adaptations in modern Indian theatre staged interrogative counter-retellings and the aesthetic decision this entailed. The paper delves into modernist re-telllings of the Mahabharata. Aparna Dharwadker has shown that Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug (1954), as well as Girish Karnad’s Yayati (1961) and The Fire and the Rain (1998) were written to articulate an authentically Indian alternative to the commercial, Western theatre-inspired, Parsi theatre (2005, 39). Now considered canonical plays of modern Indian theatre, these plays were written against a commercial motive, which allowed the playwrights to explore avenues to create alternative, counter-re-tellings, often expanding on minor characters and stories from the Mahabharata to critique systems of power. The paper explores in what ways were the plays interrogative of the status quo, and what were the cultural contexts that shaped the production of the play, as well as how the plays further influenced the field of cultural production in their own turn. The paper thus argues that one has to think of afterlives of the Mahabharata as a map of networks spanning different and often opposing forms, media, genres and languages.