Three plays
By: Girish Karnad.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Delhi; New York
Language: eng; kan
Number of pages: 221
Subjects: Karnad, Girish Raghunath, 1938-  -- Translations into English.; India -- Drama.
Other titles: 3 plays.
Description: These plays represent three phases in the career of the dramatist Girish Karnad, whose very first play rejected the naturalism then prevalent on the Indian stage. All three are classics of the Indian stage.

Tughlaq is a historical play in the manner of the nineteenth-century Parsee theatre. It deals with the tumultuous reign of the medieval Sultan, Muhammad bin Tughlaq, a visionary, a poet and one of the most gifted individuals to ascend the throne of Delhi (who also came to be considered one of the most spectacular failures in history).

Hayavadana was one of the first modern Indian plays to employ traditional theatre techniques. The various conventionsmusic, mime, masks, the framing narrative, the mixing of human and non-human worlds - are here used for a simultaneous presentation of alternative points of view, for alternative analyses of a human problem posed by a story from the Kathasaritsagar. By a supernatural accident, two men have their heads exchanged.

The wife of one of them has to decide who is her husband in the new situation and live with the consequences of her decision.

In Naga-Mandala, Karnad turns to oral tales, usually narrated by women while feeding children in the kitchen. Two such tales are fused here. The first comments on the paradoxical nature of oral tales in general: they have an existence of their own, independent of the teller, and yet live only when they are passed on from one to another. Ensconced within this is the story of a girl who makes up tales in order to come to grips with her life.
Table of contents: title: Nāga-mandala; title: Hayavadana; title: Tughlaq.