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THEATRE [Playscripts]
Price Rs 90 £
7.95 $ 11.95 Tooppil Bhaasi, one of Kerala's best-known playwrights, received several
awards in the course of his long career in theatre, including the Kerala Sahitya Nataka award,
and the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi award. Memories in Hiding, his last work, won
the Kerala State Government award for the best play in 1992.
Price Rs 75 £
11.95 $ 17.95 Begum Barve, the central character after whom the play is named, is a
transvestite who has spent his life playing women's roles in the professional theatre. Layers of
space and time interweave and overlap in this powerfully haunting play, in which dreams take
shape and form only to turn into nightmares.
Price Rs 75
£ 7.95 $ 11.95 In an unusually irreverent text that plays with the traditional Marathi
musical mode of the mourning keertan and the theme of death, Satish Alekar's
The Dread Departure tells the story of a dead man who will be cremated the way he wants
to be and no other way.
Price Rs 75
£ 7.95 $ 11.95 This is an intense family drama in which the tensions between various
members of a middle-class family escalate to a tragic climax.
Price Rs 75
£ 7.95 $ 11.95 A successful septuagenarian writer sets out to dictate his autobiography to a quizzical
young scholar; but it remains unwritten. Different versions of the truth clash as he
comes to confront an ego that he had never really known.
Rs 75
£ 7.95 $ 11.95 In Party, Mahesh Elkunchwar takes a Chekhovian look at members of the 'creative'
set in an Indian metropolis, with their pretensions, rivalries, aspirations, and frustrations, even as they
are stalked like a guilty conscience by Amrit, the one among them who chose to drop out of the set.
Price Rs 75
£ 7.95 $ 11.95 In Flower of Blood and Reflection, Mahesh Elkunchwar presents two young
men-or maybe they are one and the same-both loners from a small town lost in the metropolis. Verging on
the Absurd, they bear traces of their origin in the life of the middle class in India today.
Price Rs 75
£ 7.95 $ 11.95 This clever, witty comedy by Hindi playwright Mrinal Pande is a 'folktale standing on
its head', rich in ironical content as it holds up to satirical comment the relationship between the
privileged and the poor.
Rs 150 £ 9.95 $ 11.95 This farcical comedy by Bengali playwright Manoj Mitra tells us the hilarious tale of
old Banchharam who, by his refusal to die, out-manoeuvres all those who are waiting greedily to lay claim
to his valuable orchard. An Encounter With Royalty (Rajdarshan), turns the pomp
and power of kingship on its head, as an impoverished old brahman enters the body of the dead king. Manoj
Mitra is amongst the best known and most widely produced playwrights of Bengali theatre. He is also a
well-known actor and director, and heads the theatre group Sundaram.
Rs 75
£ 7.95 $ 11.95
Vijay Tendulkar , best Known for his emotionally charged protest plays and filmscripts, chooses a different genre for Ghashiram Kotwal-that of the musical historical. Set in Maharashtra in the late eighteenth century, it recounts a power game played out in terms of caste ascendancy in politics. The work draws on several Maharashtra folk styles, and has an obvious relevance in the context of individuals playing the game of politics, taking advantage of situations, rising to power, and crashing to impotence at the whims of more powerful players in the same game-a typical phenomenon in almost any political complex. The play is widely known in its Theatre Academy production directed by Jabbar Patel, with more than three hundred performances to its credit, in India and abroad. In the translation by Eleanor Zelliot and Jayant Karve it retains its racy vigour and musical charm-all that went to make the production a hit. This edition
also contains a production casebook, a biographical note on the playwright,
and critical studies of the play.
Rs 75
£ 7.95 $ 11.95
In Old Stone Mansion, a play widely staged in the original
Marathi and in several other Indian languages, Mahesh Elkunchwar takes
a close look at one of those old families still struggling against time
in some small town or village, trying desperately to hold on to the tenuous
bonds that once kept such a family together, even as the big city in the
distance lured it and the inevitable individual yearnings pulled the members
of the family apart-a phenomenon so common in India today. Elkunchwar
sees history in action, and steers clear of the sentimental, to produce
a document of social change, striking in its authenticity.
Rs
75 £ 7.95 $ 11.95
Jokumaraswami, a phallic god of fertility worshipped in Karnataka, is identified with Basanna, the fearless peasant protagonist who stands up to the tyrannical feudal lord with tragic consequences, reliving the myth of the god in the person of the hero. In this secularized reworking of a religious myth, Chandrasekhar kambar's vibrant, earthy play creatively uses the local folk theatre form of Bayalaata, blending worship, music, dance, song, narration, sex, death and religion to convey a powerfully contemporary anti-feudal message. 'Through kambar,
the dramatist has once again become the poet too… [His] work springs from
the soil and yet assimilates modernism…kambar is unique. The staging of
this play was an overwhelming experience
Rs 75
£ 7.95 $ 11.95
A Marxist intellectual, facing an inquiry, stands by his commitment, even as the forces ranged against him rake up a past that is a long and painful story of humiliation, betrayal and failure. In this widely performed play,the public and the private, the ideological and the emotional interpenetrate to make this exposure/self-discovery of a highly sensitive individual a piece of intellectual history-so characteristic of its author, the Marathi playwright G.P. Deshpande, a leading Marxist intellectual himself and Professor of Chinese Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
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Begum Barve 
The Dread Departure
Autobiography
Party
Two Plays
Banchharam's Orchard and 
Ghasiram
Kotwal 
Old Stone Mansion (Wada Chirebandi)
Jokumaraswami 
A Man in Dark Times