Chapter III

Themes and Techniques in Manjula

Padmanabhan’s Plays

3.1

Themes:

Every play has one dominating idea and that is it’s major‘theme’.
This is the ultimate significance of any drama and that dimension of the
artist’s labour which outlives entertainment value. A ‘theme’, from old
French ‘tesme’, is a broad idea or story in a literary work or a message or
lesson conveyed by a written text .This message is usually about life,
society, or human nature. Themes often explore timeless and universal ideas.
Most themes are implied rather than explicitly stated. The theme is different
from the superficial outlay of the text; it is normally the meaning of the text
on more deeper or abstract level. Themes arise from the interplay of the plot,
setting, character, conflict and tone. Deep thematic content is not required in
literature; however, certain types of literary analysis hold that can be taken
as a theme.

Themes are often interpreted in diverse ways by different people or

critics, regardless of whether or not they discussed theme was the original
intent of the author. The same story can also be illustrated through different
themes in the hands of different authors. Themes differ from culture; but
there is general set of ‘classic themes’ that are prevalent in all cultures and
histories. These themes have their roots in the oral traditions of different

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cultures and recur in a range or literary works. Theme is not presented
directly at all. It can be extracted from the characters, action and setting that
make up the story. It is the reader’s duty to figure out the theme. The
writer’s task is to communicate on a common ground with the reader.
Although the particulars of readers experience may be different from the
details of the story, the general underlying truth behind the story may be just
the connection that both reader and the writer are seeking .The most
important point is that a subject is not a theme; it is some dimension of the
human condition examined by the work. A theme is a statement, direct or
implied about the subject.

3.1.1

Manjula Padmanabhan’s plays deal with various themes such as

Woman Violence, Alienation and Marginalization, Grim and Tragic
Predicament and Dehumanization of the City People, Colonization and
Communal Riots.

Woman Violence:

Since, long time woman has been treated inferior to man. Women
face violence in many ways in their daily lives, People on the roads who are
total strangers to them, view them as a sexual objects. Members of the
family, society assign to them a status lower than men. They are compelled
to face not merely physical violence but it is more often mental and
emotional, subtle and indirect, often insidious and hard to recognize.
Oppression of women is not only a material reality originating in economic
conditions, but also a psychological phenomenon - how men and women
perceive one another.

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 The effects of violence on women’s psyche are deeply complex,
hard to understand and even more difficult to overcome. The women
playwrights like Manjula Padmanabhan focus on all these various kinds of
violence and abuse that women face. These plays make up a powerful
volume focusing on one of the most important and problematic issues of our
society. Manjula Padmanabhan’s Lights Out, the daily mystery of heart
rending screams from a woman in obvious pain, destroys the fabric of
domesticity of a middle class couple, divided in their response to her
anguish.

The play is based on an eye-witness account. The incident took

place in Santa Cruz Bombay in 1982. The play unveils the presence of crime
in the society, where the acts of sexual violence occur frequently and no one
3

comes to the aid of the victim. The people living in neighboring three
buildings, all through this incident, due to fear, put their lights out as
everyone with their lights on had their windows smashed. They hesitate to
go there and help the victim. No one wants to take the initiative. Since long
time, woman has been given ill treatment by the male dominated society. In
the past woman was considered as goddess, but men had not given any right
to her. Women were considered as a show pieces. Cooking and serving to
all was the main job of woman. They were merely treated as puppets in the
hands of men. Now-a-days, the picture is changing; men are giving equal
treatment to the women. But not all women are enjoying this equality. There
are some women in our society getting treatment as sexual objects. They are
exploited sexually by the people. In the present play also, the victim is a
woman and she is shouting for help. But the people in today’s world are
becoming so much senseless, that the screaming of woman doesn’t affect on

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them. Their apathy due to their individualistic approach towards life is based
on personal interest. The title, Lights Out, itself is very suggestive. It depicts
the darkness of fear and ignorance that requires contemporary concern.
Padmanabhan intends to show that humans are basically social animals. If
people really wish to find solutions to such problems, they can do it
effectively; for that, they must pursue their personal interest and look for
those with whom they live. It is a tendency of people that they share their
emotions, feelings with other people; they help each other, but do not share
interests and obligation with others whom they do not meet every day. This
tendency results in a break-up in the society.

It depends on individual’s own behavior whether he wants to offer

help or not. Individual’s nature, temperament mould according to the
circumstances in which he/she lives. People, who live in villages, still co­
operate with one another, laugh and cry for one another but; in metropolitan
cities, no one could find time to look to one another. No one wants to
interfere in other’s life. People’s attitude towards woman is not good. If
someone misbehaves with woman, people do not blame the man but curse
the woman. The same thing happens in the play. Bhaskar and Mohan don’t
want to help that woman; so when they are unable to give any justification
for their passivity, they try to transfer the blame on victim by calling her a
whore. It shows the lowness of men in society. They do not stop at that only;
when Leela’s friend Naina enters the scene, they try to hide matter by calling
it ‘religious ceremony’.

It is said that women are more sensitive than men. In this play,
Leela and Naina -these two women show sympathy and pity towards the
victim. Their intension is that they want peace and harmony in their life.

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Instead of helping the victim, Mohan and Bhaskar want to watch the rape-
scene through the window. It shows that human mind is becoming
emotionless, senseless. In the end they choose the safest way of coping with
the problem, it is the peak point of their lowness. They decide to take
photographs of the gang-rape and to beat the rapist if possible. People like
Surinder are a few in society. Even though he is willing to help and excited
to fight with the victimizers, his lack of decision making fails him.

The notion of controlling the female body shaping, reforming and

rerouting its work, movement and space, is a constant and persistent one. It
is so deeply ingrained that certain forms of violence, such as beating are
considered a natural part of woman’s life. Imposition of control over the
female body through various, forms including violence, is such an accepted
notion that it becomes a part of everyday life. Padmanabhan makes reader
think about the pathetic situation of women.

Alienation and Marginalization:

The modernist movement of the early 20 century drastically changed

the way art and literature were perceived in the western culture. The themes
expressed in modernism are perhaps some of the most diverse, disturbing
and difficult to understand. One of the principal themes expressed in the
modernist literature is alienation. Alienation is the state of feeling of being
estranged or separated from one’s milieu, work products of work, or self.
Despite its popularity in the analysis of contemporary life , the idea of
alienation remains an ambiguous concept with elusive meanings , the
following variants being most common: 1) Powerlessness , the feeling that
one’s identity is not under one’s own control but is determined by external

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agents , fate , luck or institutional arrangements , 2) Meaninglessness ,
referring either to the lack of comprehensibility or consistent meaning in any
domain of action or to a generalized sense of purposelessness in life. 3)
Normlessness, the lack of commitment to the shared social conventions of
behavior. 4) Cultural estrangement, the sense of removal from established
values in society. 5) Social isolation, the sense of loneliness or exclusion in
social relations. 6) Self estrangement, perhaps the most difficult to define
and in a sense the master theme, the understanding that in one way or
another the individual is out of touch with himself.

Marginalisation is the outcome of a complex inter relation of social,

economic and cultural factors , the result of which rendered a large number
of aboriginal youth more susceptible to legal processes than their non­
aboriginal counterparts. A considerable number of aboriginal youth have
been alienated from the mainstream of society by the interaction of family,
poverty and dysfunction, educational failure and labour market exclusion.
As a direct result, many young aboriginals, particularly those in urban and
metropolitan setting, have sought refuge in a sub- cultural lifestyle
characterized by crime, drug, abuse and hostility.

Poverty is an economical description of marginalization which

includes a number of factors which will be discussed separately at a later
stage. The extreme marginalization of the aboriginal people is in terms of
access to the fundamental socio-economic resources such as housing,
income, employment and education. More specifically, significant predictors
of crime were identified as poverty, single parent families and crowded
dwellings. Unemployment has been identified as one of the major sources of
marginalization among the aboriginal youth. Young aboriginal people have

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seen long-term unemployment in successive generations of their family and
community.

Many parents leave their children to their own devices and hope that
outside help and programme or even institutionalization will solve the
problem. Women have been found experiencing extremely high levels of
domestic violence. The type of violence that is being witnessed today is
qualitatively and quantitatively different from that in the earlier eras. The
dominant theory explanation for the prevalence of family violence in
communities relates to cultural domination and dispossession. The
relationship between the lack of identity, low self esteem and crime is
somewhat convoluted. ‘Juvenile delinquets’ generally exhibit characteristics
of identity crisis and low self-esteem. Drawing together the separate points
already made about the sub cultural life style of the young aborigines, a
predisposition and indeed, interconnectedness between marginalization and
involvement in the criminal justice system is evident.

Manjula Padmanabhan has treated the theme of alienation and

marginalization in her two plays Lights Out and Harvest. Bhaskar, Leela,
Mohan, Naina, Surinder and Frieda are characters in the play, which are
shown on the stage. But the character around which the whole play revolves
and which is not shown on the stage is the ‘victim’. No one knows her name,
her caste and class. Lights Out presents a tragic spectacle of the daily rape of
women, watched from distance by the middle class people. According to the
spectacle victims are prostitutes and not decent women belonging to
dignified society. They treat prostitute totally inferior in comparison with the
decent or pious, sacred women.

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 Padmanabhan’s intention is to show the attitude of the people towards
the women who are prostitutes. Bhaskar and Mohan don’t know surely
whether the victim is a whore or not; but to hide their passivity, their
inability, they term the victim as ‘whore’. According to them, she may be a
whore and the act is going on according to her will; such types of act don’t
have any effect on whores as they are regularly happening to them. They
think that a whore is in habit of having such experiences. No one thinks that
she is also a human being that she also has mind and self-respect. But
circumstances, poverty, unemployment impel her to do such acts. People
like Bhaskar and Mohan think that their wives or women from upper and
middle class have status, they have morality, they are pious, sacred and they
9

possess Sita’s virginity. And the lower class women are whores and they
don’t have virginity. It is partiality true that they can’t remain pious as they
have sexual relations with many; but there are certain reasons behind it.
When these women receive ill treatment from the people, they get alienated
from the society. People like Mohan and Bhaskar pray to their women on the
contrary they curse the whore. Though their business isn’t morally accepted,
it is against the code; they do not do that willingly. Bad circumstances - lack
of proper guidance, poor family background, unemployment, illiteracy make
them to do it.

Indirectly, Padmanabhan gives the message that if people try to

understand the situation and if they help such women by giving them equal
treatment and getting fair job. then no one will become a victim. Moreover,
there is need to change the attitude of people in the metropolitan cities. With
the changing of time, their attitude is also changed. They become so much
emotionless that screaming and shouting of the woman doesn’t disturb them.

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Treatment given to women since the distant past is not good; the male
dominated society always treats woman as an object of desire. No one tries
to peep into the mind of a woman. If the sophisticated people make efforts to
understand women properly, then such a class will never emerge.

The same theme is handled by Padmanabhan in her next play Harvest.

The playwright, through creating paradigms of subversive strategies,
presents a multiplicity of perspectives such as the males and the females of
the 21st century who lack will of their own. They are facing dangerous issues
in their prison-like existence like inhospitality, unemployment, the closure of
factories, the moral decline and a weakened morale, the lack of privacy, the
partiality of parents towards bread-winners among their children, the
pathetic condition of women , organ donation, human body donation,
cloning, artificial insemination and the comprehensive spread of cyberspace.
Though the playwright has painted the picture from the realm of fantasy, the
spectator gets from the very outset of the play, a realistic picture of modem
times.

Om, the unemployed frustrated young man, is the representative of the

modem man. Inability to find job makes him disappointed. Responsibility of
family forces him to sign the contract of organ donating and he gets isolated
from society. A First World organ receiver provides him all the facilities; but
he gets distracted from the society. This sense of alienation makes him
coward and a slave. Jeetu, Om’s brother a male prostitute, is one more
alienated character in the play. He also suffered from the grief of
unemployment, improper family background, moral support from parents
and proper guidance. He doesn’t become a male prostitute by choice; but
circumstances make him so.

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 Ma is responsible for Jeetu being a male prostitute. She is not
presented as a very docile, passive, typical Indian mother. In any society,
whether ancient or modem, motherhood is held in high esteem. Typical
Indian woman sacrifices anything for her children. But this mother hates her
son. She doesn’t bother at all when her younger son, Jeetu, is taken away for
transplantation. Lack of guidance love and care makes Jeetu isolated.
Throughout the play, he is shown detached from the family members.

Grim and Tragic Predicament and Dehumanization of City People:

Dehumanization is a psychological process, whereby opponents view

each other as less than human and thus not deserving moral consideration.
Jews in the eyes Nazis and Tutsis in the eyes of Hutus are but two examples.
All the people have some basic human rights that should not be violated.
Innocent people should not be murdered, raped or tortured. They should be
treated justly and fairly, with dignity and respect. Dehumanization is a
process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and
hence, not worthy of humane treatment. This can lead to increased violence,
human rights violations, war crimes and genocide. It is the process of
stripping away human qualities, such as denying others their individuality
and self-esteem. It is like a form of self-death that now often precedes
psychological death owing to the institutionalization of the dying.

The human predicament in the third millennium is very disquieting

and unsetting, precisely because in this era civilization ruthlessly invades
man’s inner privacy. In order to eke out a living, he is even prepared to
ignore his wife. When Om mindlessly signs off his name for organ
transplantation, he does the same thing. In the classics like the Mahabharata

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and the Ramayana, the wives of the heroes stood with them through thick
and thin without the slightest murmur of complaint. Every Indian knows that
when Yudhishtara lost everything in a game of dice and when the Pandavas
were sent out of their city, their devout wife, Droupadi did not lose heart, but
went with them not in rich garments but as a bare footed beggar-maid.
Similarly, in the Ramayana, when Lord Rama was banished for the period of
fourteen years into a jungle, his dutiful wife Sita happily threw her lot with
her husband, saying, “A wife’s place is beside her husband”. The forest with
him was like a palace and heaven itself for her.

Padmanabhan has depicted such characters that have no relevance to

the above mentioned characters. In 2010, in the metropolises of India, she
cannot visualize any ideal womanhood of this kind. She has only a sad
spectacle to offer. Even, there is no affinity between brothers. Blood
brothers are presented as utterly selfish. The ideal brotherly affection that
Lord Rama, Laxmana and Bharata mutually shared fails to inspire the
brothers Om and Jeetu in Harvest. Manjula Padmanabhan has broken the
ideal concept of brotherhood and made brothers go for each other’s throat.
Jaya doesn’t feel guilty to make love with her brother-in-law Jeetu, in front
of her mother-in-law. She cares for Jeetu, offers herself to Jeetu. Jeetu cracks
a vulgar joke with her when he does not find any privacy in her beehive- like
apartment, “If we can sit in public, we can just as well screw in public too-
especially since you’re now officially my wife”!(2A8)

The teenage boy Jeetu has clearly lost all his moral moorings when he
says that he will service all- “cows, pigs, horses...for a price”. (1C3) Jaya,
by offering herself to Jeetu, proves that here is a false marriage - “Uhh!
false- false... false... life”. (1C45) Quarrel between mother-in-law and

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daughter-in-law is nothing new to Indian people. The world portrayed by the
playwright is the female dominated world, where Ma rules and Ma’s words
are law. She is physically more powerful than her daughter-in-law, Jaya.
When Jaya snatches the remote control from Ma’s hand, Ma threatens her
with the harsh expression: “Pig- faced buffalo! Give it back or I will- I will
shit in the water supply .. .1 will microwave your entrails”! (Ibid:3Al 1)

Though the quarrels between mother-in-law and daughters-in-law are

famous in India, there is some attachment between them; but Ma and Jaya
are totally detached from each other. The sense of futility that pervades in
Harvest is based on the chilling response of the character’s sudden
consciousness of their empty, meaningless life. Their life moves nowhere
and in the beautiful phrase borrowed from Anita Desai’s Voices in the City,
“enclosed in locked container”.(240) Each of them is imprisoned in his or
her own consciousness. In the modem jargon, Jaya with increasing despair
tells her brother-in-law, Jeetu, “It’s not really a life any more. We were just
spare parts in someone else’s garage.”(2A6).

Padmanabhan has depicted the same theme in Lights Out too. The
difference is that, in Harvest, man is detached from the family members and
in Lights Out he is detached from society. People are behaving like animals
in the zoo. In the zoo, animals are detached from one another put in different
compartments. So each animal lives its own individual life. Tiger does not
interfere in the life of lion; lion does not see what elephants are doing.
People living in the metropolitan cities are behaving in the same way. As
they are so much busy in their lives, no one knows what is happening in
their next apartment. Sometimes, they don’t know who is living in their next
apartment.

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 They are following the western culture. No one wants to make rapport
with their neighbour. If someone is in danger, facing tragic situation, no one
goes to help him/her. The same thing happens in Lights Out. Some vulgar
people are raping a woman and Bhaskar and Mohan are enjoying that scene.
It is pathetic that the rules of morality are so openly violated The
Mahabharata refers to how Lord Krishna saving Droupadi from shame and
thus protecting her dignity. Today’s Krishna does not want to take risk.
Under the pretext of laws and regulations, they are trying to hide their
passivity.

Nevertheless, there also exist in society good people like [Link]

he lacks the proper skill of planning and decision making. Women are
sensitive to such issues; but they are also too much selfish and think about
the safety of their own family. Though they are women themselves they do
not have affinity for the women who is being raped by some devils. All these
things suggest that man is retreating from civilization back to barbarism.

Colonization:

Colonialism is the extension of a nation’s sovereignty over territory

beyond its borders by the establishment of either settler or exploitation
colonies in which indigenous populations are directly ruled, displaced or
exterminated. The colonizing nations generally dominate the resources,
labor and markets of the colonial territory and also impose their socio­
cultural, religious and linguistic structures on the indigenous population. It is
essentially a system of direct political, economic and cultural intervention
and hegemony by a powerful country in a weaker one. The term
‘colonialism’ may also used to refer to an ideology or set of beliefs used to

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legitimize or promote this system. As the Oxford English Dictionary makes
clear the word colonialism has fairly recently acquired meaning of “alleged
policy of exploitation of backward or weak peoples by a large power.” The
boundaries of colonialism, like those of many literary eras, are difficult to
draw. The history of colonialism as a policy or practice goes back for
centuries, and arguably the story of colonialism is not over yet. Thus
literature of several ages reflects concerns about colonialism in the depiction
of encounters with the native peoples and foreign landscapes and in vague
allusions to the distant plantations. Colonialism is primarily a feature of
British literature, given that the British dominated the imperial age. Even
colonial writers of other nationalities often wrote in English or from an
English setting. The literature of colonialism is characterized by a strong
sense of ambiguity, uncertainty about the morality of imperialism, about the
nature of humanity, and about the continuing viability of European
civilization. Perhaps the essential colonial critique is Joseph Conrad’s Heart
Of Darkness, though, E.M. Forster’s A passage To India similarly explore
the paradoxes of colonialism.

Manjula Padmanabhan has depicted the theme of colonialism in her

award winning play Harvest. One thing that surprises the spectator the most
is the way the youth in the play are ready to accept authority and are anxious
to have it laid on the line. All the characters in the play behave as if they
knew the direction. No one has objection or revolt against anything. They
are too nice to rebel against. Nothing provokes them into hostility. Om
knows that his wife has illicit relationship with his brother; but he is not at
all provoked. He behaves like a dog at the door fawning on its master. He
lies down, “like a corpse”. Jeetu, the 17 year old youth, looks like, “death’s

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first cousin.” With the enormous amount of freedom he gets in the new
millennium, he thinks that he enjoys life; but in reality, it costs a handful of
years off his life. Even his mother does not pay attention to him, because her
eyes are stuck to the TV screen, Not just a couple of Doordarshan channels,
but 750 video channels from all over the world.

At first, Jeetu is not ready to accept the dominance of the First World
people, later he is ready to offer any organ of his body to a beautiful
phantom seen in a contact module. He doesn’t know whether that person is
young or old, whether it is male or female. Jaya makes him see reason; she
says, Jaya: But she wasn’t real! But Jeetu retorts,” She exists, that’s enough
for me, she is a goddess and she exists; I would do anything for her-
anything!” (3A8)

Passively, he follows the gray Guards for transplantation. Like him,

even Om comfortably compromises, whatever matters, whatever happens to
be its fate. The play focuses on people’s craze for sophisticated lifestyle and
electronic gadgets. They have in front of them, a bewildering multiplicity of
gadgets to choose from. Soon after the negotiated barter and the nefarious
agreement with the recipient, through which they sacrifice their self respect
and dignity, the family of Om starts receiving what they have longed for.
Through the contact module fitted in their house, they can now have direct
contact with the recipient thousands of miles away. It is quite natural that
Om and his family members want to change their pathetic existence from
“living day in day out, like monkeys in hot case, “lulled to sleep by their
neighbor’s rhythmic fasting !Dancing to the tune of the melodious traffic!
And starving.”(lA6)

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p
i:

‘i f)
 When Om signed the contract, there was no toilet in his flat. There
was only one toilet in whole building, and forty families were sharing that.
To Ginni, the first world Receiver, “It’s wrong! It’s disgusting! It’s
unsanitary! (1B8). Ginni provided everything for the family like jewellery,
perfume, flowers and even chocolates to humour Om’s people. It is like
magic, Om’s single room apartment is transformed into a sleek residence,
with steel and glass, mini gym, TV set, computer terminal, an air
conditioner, also a low Japanese style dining table. Cosmetics change the
look of women. They decorate themselves with jewellery on their ears,
wrists, ankles and throats.

Ginni, the foreign Receiver from America is never shown on the

stage. Spectators can see her only through contact module. In the beginning,
the spectator as well as Donor and his family see the face of a young lovely
girl. Even the stoical Ma falls in her love and describes her as ‘an angel’. Ma
is at a fix to understand why the foreigner loves her son so much. Only a
little later she understands that her beloved son has sold the rights to his
organs: “ His eyes! His arse!” Om falls in love with her voice and the
phantom of her profile and tells her: “Madam! It’s our pleasure! Our duty, I
mean! Anything we can do to help...” (1B5). Padmanabhan shows the irony
of situation that the Indian are not able to decolonize themselves even after
some fifty years of the colonizers’ exit from India.

Independence for the Indians is like pompousness and ignorance. All

the characters in the play suggest that it is not colonizers that ruled over
India, but it is Indians that made them rule. Om’s unconditional surrender to
the white rich American shows the unmistakable slavish attitude or the
‘dependence complex’ of the Indians. Ginni knows the weakness of the

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donors. She is clever enough to entrap the Indians by inducing them with
luxurious things. By offering electronic comforts, she tries to keep everyone
happy in Om’s house. Though Ginni takes care of Om as well as his family
members, the audience knows that she is not at all sincere. The sympathy
she expresses for Om’s family members is just skin-deep. Ginni increases
their disillusionment and they themselves are responsible for their pathetic
condition.

Communal Riots:

Communal violence is carefully planned and executed with political

or state support or at least with subtle state connivance. Such violence results
in great losses of lives as well as properties. It goes on for a long period of
time and is deliberately not controlled unless the stated goal is achieved. The
anti- Sikh riots of 1984, Bhagalpur riots of 1989, Mumbai riots of 1992 and
Gujarat riots of 2002 are the obvious examples. Those riots spontaneously
break out on minor causes like dispute over land or money matters between
two individuals or groups, knocking out somebody accidently by car or
scooter or construction of masque or temple etc. Since these are unplanned
and spontaneous clashes, they can be easily controlled, given little
determination on the part of the police and in such riots, few lives are lost or
not much damage is done to property.

The 2002 Gujarat violence refers to a series of communal riots between

the communities of the Hindus and the Muslims that took place in the Indian
state of Gujarat between Feb and May 2002. The riots occurred after the
Godhra train burning. In September 2008 the Godhra commission confirmed
that a thousand people were killed in violence after the train incident.

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Independent estimates by groups and NGOs place the figure higher nearer to
2000. The large scale, collective violence has been generally described as
riots or inter communal clash. The perpetrators of the violence as well as
Sangh Pariwar leaders and the Gujarat government maintain that the
violence was a spontaneous, uncontrollable reaction to the Godhra train
burning; others have termed it as a massacre and an attempted programme or
genocide of the Muslim population, emphasizing that the violence was^
largely directed against the defenseless people, indiscriminate with regard to
age or sex and alleging that it was pre- planned, organized and aided by the
local authorities and political leaders.

The Bombay riots started as a result of communal tension prevailing

in the city after the Babri masque demolition on 6 December 1992. It is
commonly believed that the riots occurred in two phases. The first was
mainly the Muslim backlash as a result of the Babri Masjid demolition in the
week immediately succeeding 6 December 1992 by Hindu hard-line
elements in the city of Ayodhya. The second phase was a Hindu backlash
occurring as a result of the killings of Hindu Mathadi Kamgars (workers) by
the Muslims in Dongri (an area of south Mumbai). This phase occurred in
January 1993. Overall around 900 people were killed in these riots. As a
result of the riots, a large number of Muslims migrated from the Hindu
majority areas to the Muslim areas in the city changed drastically on
religious basis. However separation and mistrust between the people on
religious grounds was widely believed and reported until more than a year
after the riots.

Manjula Padmanabhan’s hard hitting Monologues under the title of

Hidden Fires are the result of the Bombay riots and the Gujrat riots. These

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five Monologues reflect the theme of communal riots directly or indirectly.
Every Monologue has its own message to pass to the Indian people. Hidden
Fires presents a sorrowful story of man, who became a victim of riots
without any of his fault. The Man was living happily with his family; he was
a lion in his kingdom. But some people, whom he calls ‘red hot coals from
ancient fire’, came in his life and totally destroyed it. The Man is convincing
that, if there is danger in life everyone will do anything to defend it, in the
same way when the country is in danger, everyone will protect it. When such
type of violence occurs, no one waits for help or calls the police. When they
see a fire, they stamped it out. The word ‘fire’ is used symbolically for a
person who disturbs the peace and harmony of the country. The comment,
“If I don’t see immediately, from your expression, or the clothes you wear,
or the style of jewellery around your neck or the color of your bangles, or
the cut of your blouse that you are one of us, the chances are I will assume
that you are one of them. That’s how I used to think” (5) shows that people
do not change their tendency, till they make discrimination between Hindus,
Muslims. Every group wants to dominate the other.

By taking into consideration such issues, Padmanabhan wants to focus on

the trivial things like caste, class, religion for which people kill one another
India, is a country where people from all castes, classes, and religions live
together. In India there is unity in diversity. Indians celebrate one another’s
festivals, enjoys one another’s food. But some people do not want to
maintain this peace and harmony in the society.

Which type of people suffer due to in such violence is an important

question to be discussed. Most of the time it is the lower class people, who
are poor and helpless. The most shameful thing is that politicians do pay

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much attention to such issues. The playwright’s intention is to take people
away from such violent issues. She wants to awaken people. She is trying to
convince people that quarreling with one another, killing one another are
useless things.

In her next monologue, Know The Truth, she has pointed out how
T.V. channels add fuel to fire by showing live incidents. Actually, to spread
the news throughout the country is their duty. But what they do is totally
different. They show how politicians make efforts to maintain happiness,
contentment and peace throughout the nation; but in reality, they do nothing.
Instead of solving the problems of the people, they make big issues from
trivial things. Such type of T.V. channels skillfully neglect the serious
problems and chew minor and trivial topics.

In Famous Last Words, the young host plays the games with the real
lives. In the very beginning, host announces that for each minute of inaction,
one person from the weaker section will be bumped off the register of life -
it could be any young woman at any time, of any age, a divorcee or a widow,
or a mistress. It could be a dalit, or someone in a mixed caste, mixed race,
mixed community marriage. It could be an old person or an orphan or a
leper. It could be an AIDS patient, a hisra or a prostitute. It could be a
disabled person, war-veteran or a diabetic. It could be anyone who has a
secret, anyone who is insecure, anyone who doesn’t have friends, relatives in
Government service- anyone at all. (19-20)

What this announcement indicates is that those who belong to the

lower strata of society, those who are insecure, will suffer in this game.
Padmanabhan’s intention is to show the injustice done with poor people. The

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woman in points uses the fragile flame of a candle to make important points
about nationalism and patriotism. Flame is the symbol of light of
knowledge; so playwright gives the message to the citizens that they should
not be narrow minded. Thinking in limited way becomes a hurdle in the
process of development. Citizens should think in a broad way. Each and
everyone should have respect and pride for his country. Everyone should
think that Maharashtra is not different from Karnataka that Punjab is not
different from Gujrat. When everyone will broaden, views in such a way
then there will be no riots and no violence.

Finally, in Invocation, the names of ordinary people are used to create

a memorial for those killed by violence through no fault of their own,
innocent victims whose names sometimes have been the sole cause of their
death. This Monologue makes us aware of the importance of name in man’s
life. People who become victims of riots are not admired like soldiers who
die in war; these victims of violence pass out of our memory as if their
deaths were of no account. The playwright suggests that instead of invoking
Gods by reciting their names, we should invoke those people who are
innocent victims.

3.1.2

Techniques in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Plays:

Drama in ancient time was totally different from the present. With the
changing time, the playwright has changed their style of writing. Modem
Indian Theatre has moved away from the traditional performance
predominant forms and the play text has assumed primacy. Most of the time,
the playwrights intend to follow the general trends in the West, where the

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text becomes the guide to the production. Today’s theatre is still playing
oriented and it’s not performance oriented. The attitude behind writing play
is changing. This reorientation shows the marked shift from the performance
to the text, even as modem theatre moves from rural to urban India.

Too many hands contributed to give distinctive shape to this enormous

mass of creative material. Vijay Tendulkar wrote in Marathi about
contemporary issues and his plays have been translated and performed in
many other Indian languages. He has become something of a household
name in the urban India. Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghasi Ram Kotwal is one such
play on the life of morally decadent Peshwa mler Nana Phadnavis and the
corrupt Brahmins of Pune are two important characters in it. Music and
dance woven in the very fabric of the play were inspired by the Dashavatar
traditional form. These elements of traditional form sharpen the irony of the
situations. This play intends to break the conventions and introduces modem
technique.

Girish Kamad wrote Hayavadan taking inspiration from Thomas

Mann’s short novel, the story of the transposed heads which in turn based on
an ancient Indian tale given in Kathasaritasagar by Gunadhya. The play is
marked for its use of musical movements and its innovative structure and
elements. Badal Sircar; the Indian Absurd dramatist is one of the major
theorists and practitioners of Contemporary Experimental Theatre in Bengal.
One of the playwrights who have shaped and reshaped the contemporary
Indian Theatre is Mahesh Dattani. His outstanding feature made him receive
the prestigious ‘Sahitya Akademi Award’ for Final Solutions. The range of
his themes, his mandatory spilt-level stage and his own internalization of his
craft by way of the fact that stage worthiness is never compromised upon,

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have all contributed to the continued growth and renewal of his art both in
terms of form and content.

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest presents a dystopian vision, wherein

the inherent imperialist tendencies of science have created a polarized world,
divided unequally between the First World Receivers and Third World
Donors. This economic gulf is not gendered in any obvious way; the third-
world men and women are equally subject to the First World control and
exploitation. The ways in which gender determines the relationship between
women and science is made evident through the operation of the politics of
desire. The play opens with an Author’s Note that clearly establishes its
science-fiction credentials.

“The year is [Link] is significant technical advances, but the cloths

and habits of ordinary people in the ‘donor’ world are no different to those
of third world citizens today. Except for the obviously exotic gadgets
described in action, household objects look reasonably familiar”. (1)

By linking together the temporal future (the year 2010) with significant
technical advances, Padmanabhan appears not only to achieve the requisite
cognitive estrangement of science fiction, but also to accept the ideological
implications of a progressive science that underlie this literary stratagem.
Both of these, however, are immediately problematized by the statement:
“The cloths and habits of ordinary people in the ‘donor’ world are no
different to those of the Third World citizens today”.

The progressive notion of science applies only to the ‘receiver’ or the

first world. Third world citizens are totally distanced from that. The entire
play does undoubtedly represent a “What if’ scenario; the emotional charge

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of this possibility is very clearly differentiated for the First and Third worlds.
What is the role of science in the Third World? A quick overview of the
play’s plot premise of the play will make this clear. Om, a Third World
inhabitant, is ‘employed’ by a multinational firm called InterPlanta services
as an organ donor for a first world inhabitant. Om’s entire family, his Ma,
Jaya, his wife and Jeetu, his brother, is kept under strict electronic
surveillance by the receiver. In a way third world becomes the supplier of
laboratory specimens, the raw material, required for scientific experiments to
be conducted in the first world. As the first world people will have this
Donor material it needs to be well preserved; so certain amount of
technology has to be transferred to the third world.

This is represented in the play by the household products supplied by

the InterPlanta Services to Om’s family. The installation of these new
products requires a complete removal of all third world equipments from
Om’s flat. Modem technology had destroyed all existing modes of
knowledge used in the Third World. For Third World audience, the
technological innovations remain “exotic gadgets” that are not different from
the magical devices. By thus separating science from technology,
Padmanabhan undermines the simple science-fictional connection between
the technological innovation and progress. The First World experiences a
seamless connection between science, technology and development, the
third world has a disjointed experience, where technology is linked neither
to the increased scientific knowledge nor to the development as measured by
the security of life and liberty. The First World Receiver in Padmanabhan’s
play is an old man, Virgil, who requires both a young male body and a fertile
young woman who can carry his child. But he appears to Om and his family

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first as Ginni, a beautiful white-skinned woman “exuding a youthful
innocence and radiant purity” and later in the body of Jeetu, a young
attractive man ready to fulfill Jaya’s sexual and material desires. Together,
Virgil and Ginni/Jeetu embody the Janus-faced science that creates
“laboratory state”, where science acts as the modem man’s ‘gaze’.

As a representation of this “laboratory state”, Harvest goes a step

further and reveals the ways in which science engenders the Third World
through its gaze. In the play, this gaze is embodied in the contact module
that not only allows the First World Receiver to monitor every aspect of the
Donors lives but also allows the Donor’s to see and interact with the
receiver. The gaze thus controls the native not only through the power
generated from knowledge but also through the power of desire. On the one
hand the contact module transforms Om’s flat, and by extension, his entire
life as well as that of his family into “human gold fish bowls”, where
Virgil/Ginni can observe every activity, every sneeze, and every belch of the
donors and convert this to plethora of data into a controlling manipulative
system of knowledge. The contact module allows Virgil to appear first as the
desirable Ginni to Om and Jeetu and later as the desired Jeetu to Jaya. Ginni,
“the computer generated wet dream”, fascinated both Om and Jeetu.

The outstanding feature of Padmanabhan’s play is her use of the

‘contact module’. It is mediator between First World and Third World. The
First World people always try to win over Third World by using such
devices. Though there are some characters that are conquered by them, Jaya
resists to surrender. She refuses to be a slave of the Receivers. She has self­
pride and she tries to maintain that if it is a battle between the First World

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 and Third World, directly or indirectly Third World won, as Jaya resists
bowing down before Virgil.

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Monologues in Hidden Fires illustrates her

fondness for the new technique. A monologue is an extended, uninterrupted
speech or a poem by a single person. The person may speaks his or her
thoughts aloud or directly, addressing other persons e.g. an audience, a
’ character, reader or inanimate object. As a literary device, it is most common
in dramatic genres, but can also be found in prose fiction.

Padmanabhan considers Monologue as the most appropriate medium

for confronting and negotiating responses to the post-Babri Masjid
demolition and the post- Godhra Hindu-Muslim communal violence in
Gujrat, through varied discursive frames of history and theatre. Like Dattani
in Final Solutions in Hidden Fires along with contemporary issues she
explores also the issues of identity, suffering and loss, violence and the
resulting ‘other’.

The themes tackled by them are similar; but the techniques used are
different. In one way or other, they break the traditional conventions of the
Indian English Drama. In Final Solutions the mob/chorus comprising five
men and ten masks on sticks (five Hindu and Five Muslim masks) is the
omnipresent factor throughout the play, crouching on the horseshoe-shaped
ramp that dominates the space of the stage which is otherwise split up into
multilevel sets. The masks lie significantly strewn all over the ramp, to be
worn when required. Dattani carefully uses the same five men in for any
given religious group when they assume the role of the mob. Instead of
using dialogues in the conventional form, Padmanabhan used five

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Monologues in Hidden Fires which makes her distinct from other
playwrights. There may be different reasons or intentions behind using such
a technique. In the European drama, playwrights such as Shakespeare and
Goethe used the Soliloquy to great effect in order to reveal their character’s
personal thoughts, emotions and motives without resorting to the third
person narration. Padmanabhan has the same intention. Her purpose in
performing these Monologues is to pass the message of non-violence. As she
wants to depict the disadvantages of violence in a very effective manner she
has selected the form of‘personal Monologue’.

These Monologues are the result of the Bombay riots and the Gujarat
Riots. When one person come on the stage and share his pathetic
experiences with the audiences and tries to tell them about incident which he
has gone through, automatically the audience get involved in it and starts
feeling sympathy for that person. Throughout these Monologues, she has
handled the theme of communal riots; but by using different format like solo
performance, games etc, she has made these Monologues interesting. People
do not get bored while watching these Monologues. Moreover, within less
time they give message effectively.

Padmanabhan, the playwright with multiple ideas and innovative

techniques has always managed to make her audiences sit up and listen with
such involvement that they even begin to forget that they are, in fact,
watching a play. Along with her experimentation with language and
structure of the play, she handles the techniques of the use of contact module
a scientific device, to connect the First World people with Third World
people, the futuristic setting and the Monologues very skillfully.

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