The myth is alive in India, says Chandrasekhar Kambar in his foreword to The Shadow of the Tiger and Other Plays, a collection of three of his plays translated into English. Kambar can say this with authority, for he is a respected poet, folklorist and playwright of Karnataka who was the brightest star of the 11 'modern folk theatre' movement in the seventies. Now 'folk' is a dangerous word-as dangerous as 'Indian'. It is often used as a derogatory reference to works of art-be they dance, drama, poetry or painting-made up to look attractive with a few dabs of ethnic colour. Kambar's works, however, are full of a joyful vigour that reflects the environment that nurtured him. His plots echo the myths and folktales he grew up listening to in his village, Udugeri.

'To be a poet truly of my soil I have to be mythical,' he says in the Foreword. Elsewhere (in the essay 'Fear and Creativity'), he states: I don't know how to write anything but poetry. That is the temperament of our village. One need not, of course, take a writer at his word when he professes to be a son of the soil, It is easy to spot the false and contrived character of artthat feigns 'folkness', and those who have listened to and watched Kambar's works in the original can attest to his genuineness. Even his critics-those who accuse him to representing 'a perfect, beautiful tradition', of lacking a contemporary sensibility-can't deny the vibrancy, the seamless blend of song, dance and rhythm, in his plays. Unfortunately, his writing suffers in translation; many of the songs, especially, take a severe drubbing.

'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves', the first and most adeptly translated play in this collection, is a unique and fun-filled adaptation of the Arabian Nights classic. It has singing donkeys, a sutradhara who occasionally steps in to interact with the characters, and god Ganesha who is captured by the king of thieves. 'The Shadow of the Tiger' sparkles with myth and magic-it deals with illusion and reality, and with the search for truth. 'Tukra's Dream,' is a tragic story set in the British Raj. Tukra is a man without an identity; he represents millions of nameless suffering people. The only way he can transcend his oppressive reality is through his dreams, and ultimately, through death.

The folk idiom is essentially non upper-caste, Kambar is not part of the Sanskritised caste, and so he presents a subaltern viewpoint. For instance, a poor boy wonders how he can act like a god with a rounded stomach when his belly is so empty that his knickers are slipping down. A thief muses, on noticing that the loot has been stolen: Could it be someone from the police? Because only the police steal from robbers. God's way of blessing people whom he favours (such as Ali Baba and the Hakim) is by keeping them in poverty.

Kaliyuga is a time when the magic charms of the respected village elder don't work, and when the tree that shelters the mother goddess is cut down. Tukra, who is repeatedly beaten for no reason, vanquishes his tormentor, Patila, in his dream,-he fights a rapacious bird that represents the British coloniser as well as the feudal Patila. In the end, before he is hanged, he tells the sutradhara, 'And if you, by chance, find God,tell him that he didn't do justice to Tukra.'

Non-Brahmanical gods have a fluid identity, and are as fallible as human beings. 'We still bargain with our gods and walk among them,' Kambar says in the Foreword to this collection. Man and the superhuman are both part of the same structure. In 'Ali Baba', the boy who acts as Ganesha is a hungry lad who steals the laddoos offered to the deity he represents, and he is also god incarnate, removing obstacles to the production of the play.

The playwright asserts in the Foreword that his primary mode of experience is celebration. 'Myth celebrates, philosophy contemplates.' He draws a distinction between the 'heavily abstracting Brahmain mind' and the 'non-reducing sensibility of the primitive or the oppressed.' But if philosophical ideas such as time, eternity, appearance and essence are products of Brahmanical thought, what are such concepts such as illusion and reality (Maya?), or the search for 'truth that is whole...truth without shadow' (essence?), doing in The Shadow of the Tiger? You cannot hold this against Kambar, of course, for myths can be retold in a million ways. If the three old women in the forest, for instance, remind one of the witches in Macbeth, so what? The writer's imagination cannot be restricted: he is free to draw upon advaita or psychology or Shakespeare as he pleases.

A word about the book jacket. The title on the front, scrawled vertically in imitation of Chinese characters, is incomprehensible, and the lettering on the spine deserves a place in an opthalmologist's office. A terribly uninspiring display for so colourful a bouquet.

C.K. MEENA
freelance journalist and journalism teacher.