Indian English Drama
Silence! The Court is in Session
• One of the outstanding Indian playwrights
• Has excelled in many departments of literature: essays, short stories,
criticism, screenplay writing and drama.
• Ranked with great Indian playwrights like Badal Sarcar, Girish Karnad
and Mohan Rakesh.
• Works : Shantata! Court Chaule Ahe (1967), Ghāshirām Kotwāl
(1972), and Sakhārām Binder (1972).
Vijay Tendulkar
Silence! The Court is in Session
• The degradation of the judiciary system
• Forceful male supremacy in Indian society
• Condemnation on the Indian society and the
prejudices it carries against women.
• The play is derisive on the middle class
probity, where people have all the rights to
pass the judgments and Silence is the only
alternative left for the victim.
Characterization
• Benare represents all the women in India
who are suppressed, oppressed and are
marginalized.
• The character Mr. and Mrs. Kashikar,
Ponkshe, Rokde, Sukhatme represents
hypocrisy and inferior complex.
• Tendulkar has left the play open without
suggesting any solution to the problem of
Ms. Benare.
Ms. Benare • Tendulkar has depicted the difficulty of a young woman, who is a victim
of the male dominated society.
• The game of mock trial, which started for entertainment, turns into
Benare’s tragedy.
• Benare is an educated woman about thirty-four years old who worked
as a schoolteacher.
• She was also associated with an amateur dramatic alliance, whose
prime purpose was to educate the public with social and current issues.
• Benare was reluctant to perform the role of an accused but this
reluctance was ignored.
• The playwright endeavors to create a game-like non-serious
atmosphere. But soon the imaginary charges led to personal dilemmas.
• Benare is initially seen in a cheerful mood of flamboyance, but she gets
her first blow, when Ponkshe, a scientist, says, “She runs after men too
much.”
Satire and Irony
• A satire on the unjust male dominating society and
on the working of Court.
• Mr. Kashikar, the judge should be free from the
prejudice but he was just the opposite.
• The court allows Prof. Damle to enjoy his married
life and does not accuse him to exploit and abuse
the life of a woman.
• The irony of the mock trial is that Benare is accused
in the court without the presence of Prof. Damle.
• The witnesses take oath touching the Oxford
English Dictionary
Satire and Reality
• The accusation :
“Prisoner Miss Benare under section No.
302 of the Indian Penal Code, you are accused
of the crime of Infanticide.”
• The verdict :
“This court hereby sentences that you
shall live. But the child in your womb shall be
destroyed.”
Issues Surrounding
Indian English Drama
Third World Literature
• Fredric Jameson
• US Scholar, Post Modernist
• “Third World Literature in the Era of
Multinational Capitalism”
“ The third world texts, even those which are seemingly
private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic,
necessarily project a political dimension in the form of
national allegory; the story of the private individual
destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation
of the public third world culture and society”
Third World Drama
Western beliefs
• Predominant belief was that "theatre" did not exist in
Third World countries, that theatre owed its literary
heritage to Shakespeare and a few others.
• Refusal to see third world literature as writings like
canonical ones.
Criticism of the Western Outlook
• Each nation of the Third World has a theatre that
is peculiar to it.
• These nations have rich, century-old traditions;
these nations are at a certain moment in history
and expression in the domain of theatre is a
direct consequence of this identity
• A fruitful interaction between drama in native
languages and English drama, e.g. Silence
Conclusions • The play Silence! The Court is in Session serves to
quash all Western prejudices regarding Third World
Drama as a whole
• It skillfully demonstrates the integration between
drama in native languages and English
• It has several interesting experimentations to silence
critiques who accuse third world drama of borrowing
heavily from Western concepts and ideas
• The same arguments apply to other Indian plays,
Nagamandala, Lights Out as well.
Conclusions Today, the Third World is divided between a desire for
"modernism," which would consist of adopting Western
values and assimilating the theatre as an object of
consumption and
The will to rediscover in the traditional forms of a specific
culture the burning embers of the theatre of tomorrow.
Between pure and simple imitation of Western dramatic forms
and the reconstruction of past forms, a third path is open to the
nations of the Third World: that of renewing their heritage,
beginning with the past and assimilating into it the given facts of
contemporary evolution.
Bibliography
Tendulkar, Vijay. Silence! The court is in Session,
trans. Priya Adakar
www.wikipedia.org
Fredric Jameson – Third World Literature in the era of
Multinational Capitalism