Marxist Analysis Of Americana By Girish Karnad

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Born on 19th May 1938, Girish Karnad is a playwright screen writer, actor and movie director He is by all critical voices considered to one of the doyens of modern theatre: Badal Sirca, Vijay Tendulkar, and Mohan Rakesh. He is the recipient of Jnanpith award. He uses history and mythology as a tool for his social radicalism. His plays have been with pride produced and directed by Ebrahim Alksazi,, B.V. Karanth, Alyque Padmsee, Prasanna, Arvind Gaur, Shyamanand Jalan and Amal Allana.
The present paper tries to explore the crypto Marxist philosophy in the play HayaVadana Although there is a thin filmline difference between Marxism, socialism, and Arya Samaaj, and especially the folk style of presentation in Indian theatre , Karnad’s thematic …show more content…

The classification of the different class structure of a society based upon human anatomy might have provoked Karnad to react against the castiest hegemony. Karnad took the idea of Hayavadana from ‘Kathasaritasagar’, but he followed the treatment of Thomas Mann’s version of it in his “The transposed head”. The final solution in the ancient tale is that, since the head is the determining limb, then the body should fit according to the head. At the end of Mann’s version, the body has adjusted to the heads and the person’s are again the same. Karnad has followed the Mann’s logic on the dichotomy between head and mind; he seems to have been seriously concerned with the western cultural questioning of the sharp schism between mind and body: He (Karnad) rejects the mechanical conception of life, which differentiated body and soul. In rewriting the story he seems to be pitting himself directly against the abstractness and emptiness of the Cartesian cogito- “I think therefore I am”. (Vanashree Tripathy

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