Modern Indian Plays (Volume 2)

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The volumes which contain these Indian plays are entitled Modern Indian Plays. The word 'modern' has a tentative significance since it includes the drama of Rabindranath Tagore who was our Renaissance figure, and also that of Satish Alekar who was born in 1949, nine years after the death of Tagore. Perpetual dramatic and theatrical experiments have meant that the modernist movement was not allowed to develop into a tradition. Modernity, for us, does not represent a set of aesthetic values but is confined to the capturing of the present moment to give it a shape. Contemporary reality has a fascination for our writers and playwrights and this shapes the substance and style of their writing. To be modern is to reject the past in favour of the present or to reinterpret the past in the light of the present.

But this adherence to contemporary reality has its own problems. The presentation of reality in language becomes its own interpretation because language provides us tools for definition and analysis which are very difficult to resist. This situation reminds one a statement by Antonin Artaud who said:

Written poetry has value for one single Moment and should then be destroyed Let the dead poet make room for the Living....the time for masterpieces is past.

This attitude seems to be in search of a moment of "absolute present', almost a point of origin - a genuinely romantic search. In the Indian context this attitude might have been a way of escape from the problems of history. During colonial times we suddenly became aware of our history-thanks to the modern system of education-and were forced to take sides. The situation is truly ambivalent since it forces us to reject the past as well as accept it for reinterpretation, for we have attained, either for good or for bad, a historical identity. It is truly difficult to accept the past as the past, either we are proud of it or ashamed of it, and both are dangerous mental states. Hence the inevitable grip for the contemporary reality on our imagination. The past serves as a metaphor of contemporary reality. The poetic advantages of such metaphors cannot be denied. But when a culture is changed into a metaphor it acquires a meaning, of course, but loses its life and growth. The difficulty is felt by our avantgarde literature but it is ignored. But it cannot be gainsaid that there is an unconscious struggle going on in modern writing to conquer history through history. Our best dramatic masterpieces which are also realistic have this power to transcend history.