Girish Karnad: Tughlaq
Tughlaq, Girish Karnad’s second play after Yayati, was written originally in Kannada in 1964. This was later translated into English by the author himself at the request of the noted theatre personality Alyque Padamsee in 1970. Karnad himself declares that he “was persuaded to *translate it into English by Alyque Padamsee,* who later produced it for the Theatre Group, Bombay” Subsequently the play has been translated into different Indian languages as well.
Though Tughlaq or for that matter all Karnad’s plays should be considered first as products of Kannada theatre, because most of these (Tughlaq included) was translated by the author himself into English, they are considered also as important contributions to Indian drama in English (translation). Not only has this helped to bridge gaps between regional theatres by providing a common meeting point, but has other implications as well. On the one hand, English by now has outgrown its stigma of being merely the colonizer’s language and has been so inducted into the Indian setup that Indian English itself warrants legitimation. On the other, when British English today has to contend with Englishes produced outside Britain, Indian English holds a place of its own in the changed scenario. In this context, the availability of major regional achievements in English translations only strengthens the position of writings in English produced in India. Karnad’s translations of his own plays Tughlaq among them constitute a major effort in this direction.
*Context of the modern Indian drama*
Karnad belongs to that ‘new’ generation of Indian dramatists who arrived around the sixties, with their urge to create a modern Indian drama. This was a pan-India phenomenon, with several dramatists bursting upon the scene in different corners of the country around the same time. Each of them felt that the aspirations of the contemporary generations of post-1947 India needed new dramaturgical forms for adequate articulations. Translations of Western masters, undertaken by many theatre practitioners, were not serving the purpose adequately. Indian drama needed to reinvent itself, both in form and content. It was this impetus that informed the plays of this ‘new’ crop of Indian dramatists Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi, Mohan Rakesh in Hindi, Badal Sircar in Bengali, K.N.Panikkar in Malayali, Girish Karnad in Kannada. The search for contemporary Indian drama had begun, and the first generation of the sixties was succeeded by others who followed their footsteps: G.P. Deshpande and Bhisham Sahni (in Hindi), Satish Alekar and Mahesh Elkunchwar (in Marathi), Mohit Chattopadhyay and Manoj Mitra (in Bengali), to name a few.
With the ancient Sanskrit drama having receded into the dim past and the folk theatre being confined to the margins, what had been traditionally postulated as theatre was largely Western importation. So, when a search for an authentic Indian theatre was undertaken in the colonial period, it usually tended to produce museum replicas of classical Sanskrit theatre. This was a way of reacting against the Western influx, which dominated the theatre scene. Though Michael Madhusudan Dutt had recycled a Mahabharataeipisode in his play Sharmistha (1856) to fit it into the Western tragic form, though Vishnudas Bhave had blended folk theatre forms like Yakshagana and akhyan with the modern proscenium theatre (1843), these examples of ‘hybridity’ did not always prove sufficient to rescue the Indian mindset from blindly equating the ‘ancient’ with the Indian and the ‘modern’ with the Western. Even the pathbreaking experiments of Rabindranath Tagore to use an Indian theatre semiology to encapsulate modern anxieties (as done by European masters) went largely unheeded.
After 1947, as a postIndependence generation tried to come to terms with the reality around them, a fresh search for an authentic Indian theatre was under way. This generation was aware of the doubleedgedness of the reality in which they lived: on the one hand, they realised, they could not remain insular to global events; on the other, they were alerted to the regional specificities that surrounded them. The generation of Tendulkar, Sircar and Karnad had received a Western education, often hailed from urban backgrounds, and yet were also aware of the rustic moorings. All this awareness went into the making of their plays even as they tried to express the yearnings of their generation. Even when they returned to myths or legends or folktales, they were recycling these for modern consumption, as in Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghasiram Kotwal, or Mohan Rakesh’s Ashar ke ek din, or Bhisham Sahni’s Madhavi. Karnad also, in several of his plays, explores ancient myths, legends, folklore, or even history, all the time contemporizing them to study his own times: while Yayati and Agnivarsha draw upon episodes from the Mahabharata, Hayavadana recasts a tale from Vetal Panchvinshi, and Tughlaq and Nagamandala draw upon chapters from ancient Indian history.
While these dramatists related to developments across the world, and expressed anxieties shared by modern existence, they were also firmly entrenched in their regional contexts. It is important to remember that they were writing in their particular regional languages first; the translations into other languages, including English, came later. Their plays, language-specific/culture-specific codes were the rich harvests of modern regional theatres of different parts of India; it was under their guidance that these regional theatres were making progress. Modern Indian theatre, therefore, could no longer be considered a homogeneous entity, as in the years before Independence. Necessarily spanning across the multilingual/ multicultural diversity of the Indian society, it comprised the entire spectrum of the several regional/bhasa theatres: the Marathi theatre, Bengali theatre, Hindi theatre, Oriya theatre, Kannadi theatre, Malayali theatre, Punjabi theatre, Gujrati theatre. These modern Indian dramatists, then, had to carefully poise themselves between the global and the local, forging out of this delicate balance the theatre idioms of the modern Indian theatres.
*Historical play or political allegory?*
Karnad recaptures in Tughlaq an eventful phase of early Sultanate India as he makes MuhammadbinTughlaq one of the most controversial rulers of the period the protagonist of the play. The action of the play begins around 1327 and spans the next five years of Muhammad Tughlaq’s reign.
This phase of Tughlaq’s reign is etched with his idealistic/eccentric measures, for which he is much misunderstood and ultimately branded as “mad Muhammad”. Some of these measures include his overt secular policies in treating all his subjects equally, irrespective of their religious following (“without any consideration of might or weakness, religion or creed”); his decision to transfer his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad politically, because Daulatabad is more centrally located (“Delhi is too near the border and ...its peace is never free from the fear of invaders”) but, more important because ideologically it furthers his patronage of the Hindu community (“ Daulatabad is a city of the Hindus and as the capital, it will symbolize the bond between Muslims and Hindus which I wish to develop and strengthen in my kingdom”); his economic vision in his attempt to inscribe money with a new value concept by minting copper coins (“A copper coin will have the same value as a silver dinar...It’s a question of confidence. A question of trust!”). With each of these steps, Tuglaq makes a bid to carry his generation into a new enlightened era (“They are only cattle yet, but I shall make men out of a few of them”). He is prepared to redefine the boundaries of religion and its interrelations with politics (“Yes, there is dirt and sickness in my kingdom. But why should I call on God to clean the dirt deposited by men?”; “Generations of devout Sultans have twisted their minds and I have to mend their minds before I can think of their souls.”). Yet, all his efforts were misunderstood, even grossly abused, jeopardizing all his attempts to move beyond the delimiting boundaries of the contemporary socioeconomic political determinants. By the end of the play, we see Tughlaq not only having to retract all his steps but, in the process, losing control over his sanity and on the verge of madness. What started out as an idealistic vision is mired in the crude reality of everyday existence and dismissed as the eccentric policies of a mad king.
This treatment of a historical character in the context of his period was undertaken by Karnad for a specific purpose. He recognized certain contemporary signs in the history of Tughlaq and saw the dramatic possibilities of using this as a framing device to talk about his own times. As he once declared himself (in Enact, June 1971):
What struck me absolutely about Tughlaq’s history was that it was contemporary. .. .within a span of twenty years this tremendously capable man had gone to pieces. This seemed to be both due to his idealism as well as the shortcomings within him, such as his impatience, his cruelty, and his feeling that he had the only correct answer. And I felt in the early sixties India had also come very far in the same direction the twenty-year period seemed to me very much a striking parallel, (as cited by U.R. Anantha Murthy, “Introduction” to the English translation of the play by Karnad, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, viii)
This “twenty-year period” that Karnad refers to corresponds to the two decades of Nehruvian idealism when, as Prime Minister, Nehru was trying to steer India into a new socioeconomic cultural era after Independence. But much of Nehru’s idealistic visions went awry frustrated by the socioeconomic and political realities of an emergent nation. As experts in the field have pointed out, Nehru’s “industrial planning was geared to a purely foreign technology which was incongruous with the country’s economic and social conditions” (Amiya Rao and B.G. Rao, Six thousand days, Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1974, 32). His socialist model in a democratic context was incomprehensible to the Rightists and inadequate to the Leftists. His brand of secularism, which advocated that the State should have nothing to do with religion was soon misinterpreted to mean that the State should encourage all religions. Even as these idealistic designs crumbled in the face of the sociopolitical realities, there was a growing sense of disillusionment that gripped the nation towards the end of that “twenty-year period” of Nehru’s rule. Karnad’s Tughlaq, written in 1964, foregrounds that mood of discontent and disenchantment and accurately encapsulates the spirit of the age. To quote Anantha Murthy, “it is a play of the sixties and reflects as no other play perhaps does the political the mood of disillusionment which followed the Nehru era of idealism in the country” (“Introduction”, Tughlaq, vii-viii). In doing this, the play problematizes the reading of history and ultimately emerges as an astute political allegory of its times.
*Existentialist play*
Scholars have noted existentialist traits in Karnad’s Tughlaq. Affinities with Camus’ play Caligula have been particularly identified. The protagonists of both these plays are caught in a godless universe, in which they are left to carve out their own paths through odds and impediments. In the course of this, they increasingly lose sight of the idealistic visions they had started out with, and retaliate with a startling ferocity on the world around them, which they hold responsible for stifling their visions. Faced with this bleak situation, in which they are grossly misunderstood and despised, even by ones who had once been close, both protagonists desperately try to cling to their own convictions and retain their faith in their own abilities. If Caligula is faced with the threat of assassination at the end of his career, Tughlaq increasingly loses grasp over his sanity. In fact, even as their faith seems to desert them, both are plunged into meaninglessness where the thin borderline between idealism and eccentricity, cruelty and compassion, and sanity and insanity seem to dissolve away. Yet, in the face of such an abysmal void, they try to comprehend the meaning of their existence even if it is in death or in madness.
Right from the start, Tughlaq dispenses with traditional notions of religion and divinity. He has no use for a religion that cannot serve the cause of the people. Aware that religion has been repeatedly used to break the spirits of men, he sets about to right the wrong perpetrated: “Generations of devout Sultans have twisted their minds and I have to mend their minds before I can think of their souls”. He admits there are shortcomings in his realm but insists, “why should I call on God to clean the dirt deposited by men?” At the same time, he does not hesitate to take liberties if that would further his cause, though religious leaders like Imamuddin warn him that he is guilty of “scores of transgressions” from the tenets of Islam. Tughlaq is prepared to induct teachings and ideas from nonIslamic sources (like Greek culture) if that would help him to expand his horizons: “I can still feel the thrill with which I found a new world, a world I had not found in the Arabs or even the Koran.” He can even intermingle religion and politics to get rid of impediments like Imamuddin, tame insurgents like AinulMulk, trap the conspiring nobles in their own scheme of striking during prayer or invite an obscure Abbasid to make a public display of his piety. In brief, out of each adverse situation, he tries to carve out a path for himself, not always caring for religious propriety, political niceties, or even personal relationships. Not only does he astutely remove Imamuddin or the nobles, but must also sacrifice Shihabuddin, whom he trusted, and his stepmother, whom he loved, for a greater political vision. His impatience transforms itself into his ruthlessness, so much so that by the end of the play he stands alone, hated and deserted by all. He even begins to have doubts about his earlier convictions: “I have been chasing these words now for five years and now I don’t know if I am pursuing a mirage or a fleeing shadow”. Finally, he can only fall back upon what fate seems to have in store for him his madness, and there he finds a companion, his God: “all I need now is myself and my madness to prance in a field eaten bare by the scarecrow violence. But I am not alone, Barani. Thank Heaven! For once I am not alone. I have a Companion to share my madness now the Omnipotent God!”
*Characterization*
The characterization in the play calls for special attention. This is all the more necessary when we realize that Karnad has used this particular phase of Indian history to comment upon contemporary times. Yet, at the same time, he has to show a certain amount of allegiance to the historical data, retaining some of the more well-known historical facts about Muhammad Tughlaq’s reign. He has to sift through the historical material at his disposal selecting, adopting, and adapting this material to suit his own purposes. Karnad’s play, therefore, has to do a kind of tightrope-walking, carefully balancing a certain degree of fidelity to the historical source with an artistic autonomy that requires him to digress from and/or rework his sources to create a piece of dramatic composition. This dexterous balancing so informs the characterization in the play that multiple facets of the same character are often simultaneously available.
The central figure of Tughlaq, with ambivalences writ large upon him, is a supreme example of this. Questions are raised about him that are never conclusively answered. The very first scene shows how a large section of the people suspect him of patricide, though there are also several others who rubbish this view and are prepared to support and endorse his idealistic schemes. He guesses that his stepmother harbors the same suspicions, and rebukes her in the second scene. Yet, in Scene X, in a moment of dramatic crisis, he blurts out that he has been responsible for the killings of his father and his brother: “I killed them, yes but I killed them for an ideal”. Even this frenzied confession, from one who by then is tottering on the verge of insanity, does not conclusively prove anything. Neither are we sure of how to respond to his dealings with Sheikh Imamuddin those of an idealist or a wily politician?
Similarly, the way he traps Shihabuddin and the conspiring amirs at their own game is another instance of his astute political agility. His brutal killing of Shihabuddin brings out the ruthlessness he is capable of, yet he almost lovingly stabs him with “But I like you too much”; and immediately after, to preempt any trouble from Shihabuddin’s father, he can think of having Shihabuddin declared a martyr who died defending the sultan during an attempt on his life. At the end of the day, we are left wondering whether Karnad has depicted Tughlaq as a hero, or an antihero?
That of course has been Karnad’s design. Tughlaq, as the representative of the modern man, in a world that bears close resemblances to the world of the existentialist, can hardly be made into a tragic hero. With its contemporary reading of historical processes, the play problematizes the characterization of its protagonist by having the character riddled with ambivalence. His idealism and his eccentricity are the two sides of the same coin, and we are never quite sure when one passes into the other. His several schemes the shifting of the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad, the introduction of the copper currency, and the patronage of the persecuted Hindus are abandoned halfway, corrupted, and frustrated by the harsh realities of everyday experience. Is his idealism lacking that sense of pragmatism without which it soon dwindles into mere idiocy?
If we are hesitant to pass this harsh judgment on Tughlaq, Karnad himself has created a figure through whom the inadequacies of Tughlaq are foregrounded. Aziz, through the entire length of the play, acts as a foil to Tughlaq, frustrating each of his designs with his devious distortion of them.
The sultan’s grand proclamations to mete out equal justice to his Hindu and Muslim subjects are grotesquely parodied by Aziz in disguising himself as a Hindu Brahmin who seeks justice for being wrongly oppressed by the State. Tughlaq’s introduction of the copper currency is ruthlessly battered by those who flood the market with counterfeit coins, foremost among them being Aziz. Aziz buys lands in a famine-stricken region to collect State subsidies and even exploits the ordinary people on their way to Daulatabad. He murders Ghiyasuddin Abbasid, the descendent of the Arabian Khalif, to impersonate him, thereby making a travesty of Tughlaq’s attempts to seek the blessings of the Khalifat and publicly reinstate prayers in his kingdom. Through each action, Aziz makes a mockery of all of Tughlaq’s lofty idealistic plans, exposing their inherent lapses. In serving as Tughlaq’s foil, even his nemesis, Aziz becomes more of an abstraction of the reality that impinges upon the sultan’s grand idealism and turns it into a grotesque parody.
Not only Aziz, but the other characters, too, who move in and out of the world of Tughlaq, ultimately help to give further meaning to the character of the protagonist. Tughlaq’s political maneuvers, sharpened by the astuteness of the wily Najib, play the cat-and-mouse game with adversaries like Ainulmulk or Imamuddin or even Shihabuddin and the conspiring nobles. His awareness that he has a special role to play in history is whetted, on the one hand, through his encounters with religious leaders like Imamuddin and, on the other, through his companionship with the historian Barani whom he considers one of his closest friends. If Tughlaq’s political measures are guided by Najib, and his intellectual thirst satiated by Barani, his emotional cravings find a mooring in his stepmother, with whom he shares a complex impassioned relationship: he loves her intensely, but ultimately sacrifices her to his political idealism when she confesses that she has killed Najib. By the end of the play, with Najib murdered, Barani alienated, his stepmother executed by his own orders, and the entire kingdom dubbing him “mad”, Tughlaq finds himself alone in a world where his idealism is the other name for insanity. Cut off from the rest of humanity, he stands by himself trying to comprehend the meaning of his existence; his affinities with the existentialist modern man are firmly established by then.
*Recurrent motifs in the play*
Though the play makes use of historical material, though it allegorizes the contemporary political situation through its use of history, Karnad takes recourse to motifs and symbols that recur throughout the play to expand its horizons and enhance its structural pattern. One such motif that we meet early in the play and which keeps coming back over and over again is that of disguise, physical and moral. In the very first scene, immediately upon Tughlaq’s grand proclamations of Hindu-Muslim amity in his kingdom, we meet the Brahmin who has won the case against the sultan in the court of the Kazi; yet we are soon let into the secret that the Brahmin is no Hindu at all but the Muslim washerman, Aziz, in disguise. Significantly, this truth is held back from Tughlaq till the very last scene of the play. But it is made evident from the very first use of disguise how this motif, through its repeated use, will encapsulate the discrepancies between what is and what ought to be, between the dream and the reality, the idealism and its parody, the world of Tughlaq and that of Aziz. Aziz’s incessant adoption of disguises and assumption of identities all the time parodying Tughlaq’s idealistic measures climax in his killing of Ghiyasuddin and passing himself off as one of the Abbasid dynasties.
The adoption of disguises runs rampant among the other characters as well, wittingly or unwittingly. On the one hand, Sheikh Imamuddin is clueless about Tughlaq’s sinister plans when the latter requests him to don identical garments to go and meet Ainulmulk: the similarity in physical appearance was intentionally foregrounded, which resulted in Ainulmulk mistakenly killing Imamuddin in place of the sultan. On the other, Ratan Singh consciously promotes before Shihabuddin his disguise of a trusty ally yet all the time secretly betrays him to Tughlaq. The amirs pretend to be eager courtiers while all the time they wield the sword to kill Tughlaq during prayers. For that matter, Tughlaq keeps changing his own stances like a chameleon, in keeping with his political maneuverings: his handling of the amirs at court and effortless foiling of their attempted coup, his encounter with Imamuddin to advance his political gameplan, and even his final trapping of Aziz provide supreme examples of Tughlaq’s dexterity at adopting disguises and identities. In the face of such incessant use of disguises by major and minor characters alike, the borderline between the worlds of dream and reality, of idealism and ruthlessness, of Tughlaq and Aziz increasingly become blurred till, in the final impression, a mask can no longer be distinguished from the face, sanity from madness.
This preoccupation with disguise in major and minor characters may be related to the prevailing atmosphere of political intrigues in the play. Each plays his/her little game, often from behind assumed/pretended identities. In this context, the other important motif that gains prominence is that of the game of chess. The very second scene shows Tughlaq playing the game all by himself, engaged in solving “the most famous problem in chess”, which even famous players had not been able to solve. His encounters with Ainulmulk, on the one hand, and Imamuddin, on the other, almost remind one of the same game. In fact, Tughlaq’s wily handling of the situation is akin to killing two birds with one stone; the moves, prompted by the cunning Najib, and carried forward by the astute ruler himself, have all the unmistakable touches of one expert at the game. It is also significant that as the play progresses and Muhammad increasingly loses control over those around him as well as himself, he is no longer shown to be engaged in this game, which requires a high level of mental alertness. His mental agility, so evident in his political manoeuvrings in the earlier half of the play, gives way to frenzied tyranny (“Nothing but an empty graveyard of Delhi will satisfy me now”) and ultimately to moods of despair, vacuity, and even madness. The change is perceptible not only to Tughlaq himself (“How can I become wise again, Barani?”: Sc 8) but also to others: “It was a man wandering alone in the garden. He went to a heap [of counterfeit coins], and stood there for half an hour, still as a rock. Then he dug into the heaps with his fists, raised his fists, and let the coins trickle out... He does that every night every single night it’s like witchcraft” (Sc 12). By then, all his moves have been checkmated by the likes of Aziz.
Even as Tughlaq makes this journey from intellectual vigor to vacuous insipidity, from idealistic vision to frenzied madness, prayer another recurrent motif assumes new significations. Early in the play, Tughlaq is shown to emphasise the importance of prayer (“the Sultan never misses a prayer”: Sc 1; “The Sultan, as you know, is a fanatic about prayer. He has made it compulsory for every Muslim to pray five times a day:” Sc 5); yet, at the same time, a substantial part of his subjects suspect that he had arranged for the assassination of his father and brother during a procession at prayer-time. Subsequently, when the nobles, led by Shihabuddin, attempt to kill him during prayer, he preempts their move by having them apprehended by Hindu soldiers (Sc 6). At the end of that assassination attempt, he feels that “prayers too are ridden with disease and must be exiled”; so he prohibits prayer in his kingdom: “There will be no more praying in the kingdom, Najib. Anyone caught praying will be severely punished” (Sc 6). Again, with his idealistic plans collapsing around him and himself tottering on the verge of insanity, Tughlaq tries to reinstate prayer in his kingdom by publicly welcoming Ghiyasuddin Abbasid to conduct prayers in his realm. Ironically, by then, the real Ghiyasuddin has been murdered and supplanted by the impostor Aziz; Tughlaq’s desperate bid to reinstate prayer is frustrated by Aziz’s machinations. The play concludes with Tughlaq dozing through the Muezzin’s call to prayer, at the end of which he wakes up with a start and hardly knows himself: “He looks around dazed and frightened, as though he can’t comprehend where he is” (Sc 13).
In the subtle handling of these motifs, many of which operate as stage images Karnad adds to the dramaturgical texture of the play. As the historical play of a medieval Sultan is recycled into a political allegory of the dramatist’s own time, these motifs/images help to expand the scope of the play and give it a wider panoramic perspective.
*Tughlaq and ‘Transculturation’*
Written originally in the Kannada language, the play collapses together the sociopolitical environments of the medieval Sultanate of Delhi and post-1947 India, particularly under Nehruvian rule. The social/political/cultural parameters of Tughlaq’s India are therefore redefined in the post-independence context. Not interested in merely regurgitating the story of the medieval sultan, Karnad inscribes this with significations more immediately available in his own India. A sociocultural transition has therefore been made, even as the story of Tughlaq has been retold in our own terms.
Also, even as Karnad undertakes to translate the play into English himself, he is overlaying it with a further deposit of ‘transculturation’. The narrative now does not remain restricted to merely medieval Sultanate Delhi, nor only to Karnad’s contemporary India, but reaches out to a larger English-speaking world in other parts of India or even overseas. The relationship between English (the erstwhile colonizer’s language, and even today associated with elite cosmopolitan culture) and the original play in Kannada (a regional language) is anything but simple. The conscious choice of the English language in which he chooses to translate the regional play is a deliberate one, perhaps prompted by several considerations. To make this possible, Karnad has had to make the Indian/Kannada cultural specificities available in the English language. To start with, Karnad had to appropriate the cultural nuances of the Sultanate era of medieval Delhi in Kannada; and, now, he has to recycle them in the English idiom for a wider English readership.
Consequently, on the one hand, Karnad deploys culturespecific terminology that points in the direction of Tughlaq’s Sultanate period: not only are common Islamic names used (“Muhammad”, “Shihabuddin”, “Imamuddin”, “Ghyasuddin”, “Aziz”, “Azam”, “Ratan Singh”) but also the more familiar Anglicised versions of some nonIalamic names are rendered into the less familiar Arabic equivalents (so, “Sukrat” for Socrates, or “Aflatoon” for Plato); official designations are retained (“KaziiMumalik”, “Khalif’, “AinulMulk”, “Vizier”, “Sheikh”, “Ulema”, and, of course, “Sultan”); references to “Mecca” or “Kaaba” or even the poetry of Rumi (Sc 8) reinforce the Islamic ambience; the Muezzin’s call to prayer reverberates through the play (Scenes 6, 13); the Islamic customs of taking an oath on the Koran (Sc 6), or imposing (or not imposing, in the case of Tughlaq) the jizyah tax on the Hindus (Sc 1), or stoning to death an adulteress (Sc 10) are recalled; the elaborate ritual of prayer (namaz) is carried out on stage, though punctuated by the amirs’ attempt to assassinate Tughlaq (Sc 6). On the other hand, Karnad has, on occasion, reverted to more acceptable English renditions, perhaps keeping in mind his target readership: “Allah” is therefore used alongside the English more correctly, JudaicChristian “God” (Sc 2, 3, 6, 10, 13) or even “the Lord” (Sc 5); Tughlaq is often called/ referred to as “Your Majesty”/ “His Majesty” (Sc 2, 3,6,8,13).
These repeated oscillations between the several cultural registers medieval and modern, Arabic and Indian, Indian and English provide for the cultural density of the play, which, in turn, makes it a remarkable sample of ‘transculturation’ in modern Indian theatre.
*A brief stage history*
Since Karnad wrote Tughlaq in 1964, the play has been successfully performed not only in Kannada, the language in which it was originally written but also in other Indian languages as well as in English. It was Alyque Padamsee who first produced the play in English for the Theatre Group in Bombay in 1970. The first staging of this production was at the Bhulabhai Auditorium, Bombay, in August 1970. It was at Padamsee’s request that Karnad translated the play into English.
Tughlaq was produced for the National School of Drama Repertory around 19791980, directed by the then Director of the National School of Drama, Ebrahim Alkazi. In this version, done in Hindi heavily interlaced with Urdu, Manohar Singh played Tughlaq, while Uttara Baokar was cast as the Stepmother. The original site for the performance was the Purana Quila (Old Fort) in New Delhi; the production subsequently toured different parts of the country.
In Calcutta, the play was directed by Sekhar Chatterjee for his group Theatre Unit, and by Salil Bandyopadhyay, for heatron; in the latter produced the stage/film star Santu Mukherjee performed the role of Tughlaq for some time. Earlier, sometime in the 1970s, a production of the play was initiated by the collective effort of several groups of Calcutta, in which no less than Sombhu Mitra, the doyen of the modern Bengali stage, played Tughlaq, Keya Chakravorty took on the role of the Stepmother, while Rudraprasad Sengupta was the historian Barani; this production was directed by Shyamalan Jalan.
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