Brecht’s Dramaturgy and The Indian Scenario

Abstract

This paper draws its refrain from the ideas of Brecht vis-à-vis the Indian context Brecht always suffered the fact that he gets worked up to work for the people not to shake them off from their arm chair. Both Tendulkar and Karnad followed this dictum to the core as the so-called aficionados who come to watch their dramas could keep their hats on which watching their dramas. They never treated their audience as a bunch of simpletons. They appealed to reason. They help build bridges. At times bridging worlds, at times a bridge built across seeming differences, at times throwing’ hybridity, at other times jutting the irreconcilables, in short ‘unconcealing’ through the ‘thingness’ of things. The lived-in life of imprisoned ancestors has a story to tell, re-narrate, for the woes that confront apparently liberated grandchildren may very well be said to be a product of a faulty repossession or in the event of no such fault found, onus then be deemed due to a superstructure that was not constructed in accordance to spatio-temporal realities.