Giving Away The Girl & Other Plays by Malini Bhattacharya

There is an interesting similarity about the two Books of plays before me. Both the books grow in stature through the accompanying literature that enhances the text, with an insight into the special circumstances that led to the writing of the plays in the case of one, and an understanding of an era and its legacy in the case of the other.

Non-bengali audiences may not be familiar with the first, a collection of translated plays by Mmalini Bhattacharya (Giving Away The Girl & Other Plays). The plays were written during a period of four years in the early eighties when an assortment of social issues concerning women had the public imagination worried. Sachetana, a women's group, needing a forum to create awareness, hit upon the idea of dramatising these issues and Bhattacharya, a core member; wrote what she calls "propaganda plays". She had never written a play before that, and never wrote one afterwards. It was the need of the time that created these plays.

Giving Away The Girl is about the evil of dowry often harking back to folktales and earlier literature. An interesting character is the heroine of bankim's Debi Choudhurani who appears across the barriers of time to succour to today's victims. There is an engaging use of music and memory The Monkey Dance, also about dowry is a monologue by a monkey-man with his two "monkeys" reacting to what he says. There is again an interesting use of music, and in this case the recall is through popular hindi film songs that convey the mood of the monkey-man's mqnologue. Coasting along in amusing, almost lazy fashion the audience is suddenly Shocked into introspection when the monkey-man berates his monkey for not being "human" enough to demand the privileges of male superiority

The last play Why All This Bloodshed?, tackles the communal divide but is really about the man-woman divide. The hindu woman who transcends the communal position to enter the province of humanity is thrown out by her husband even as the muslim wife is ejected by hers and they find themselves face to face with a common problem that can hardly be traced to the communities they belong to. Though these issues are still alive twenty years later, a reworking is perhaps necessary To refresh the impact the plays once had.

Shreekumar Varma Deccan Herald 09/03/03

GIVING AWAY ThE GIRL AND OTHER PLAYS by Malini Bhattacharya has a special resonance today. The point is worth mentioning, because the three plays in the volume, translated by Sarmistha Dutta Gupta and Paramita Banerjee, were written between 1980 and 1986, when the Indian women's movement entered, as the author says, a articularly "vigorous" phase. The plays endure because the naturalized oppression and violence that structure women's lives remain unchanged. Intended for "awareness-raising", they reflect with dramatic precision different patterns of social violence within which "women's is-sues" such as dowry, desertion, conjugal violence, maintenance and so on are placed. They are rare instances of works in which a passionate ideology unleashes creative resources, making full use of a non-realistic mode invoking song, dance, and a range of dialogue from the Bharatmata's bland officialese to the monkey-dance man's streetsmart sales spiel. Mu&ic is the staple of Giving away the Girl, the most wellknown and widely produced of the three plays.Perhaps the translation will inspire new productions of Why so much Bloodshed, for we need to see it again after Gujarat.

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