Representative Plays:
Andha Yug (1953)
Bio:
Indian playwright, novelist, and poet Bharati was known in the last decades of his life as the editor of the prestigious Hindi weekly Dharmayug, but his enduring reputation rests on two seminal works from the early 1950s. Like Kurosawa's filmRoshomon, the novella Suraj ka satvam ghora (The Seventh Horse of the Sun) portrays a web of triangular relationships, in tales related by a narrator who is involved in the plot but does not intervene. A similar narrator, implicated in the action and yet outside it, weaves together the many strands of Bharati's most famous work, the drama Andha Yug (The Age of the Blind, 1954), which blends folk theatre conventions with those from classic Sanskrit and Greek drama. It shows the lawless events of the last days of the epic battle of Mahabharata, which signal the coming of a new age of darkness. Questioning the ethical authority radiated by the god Krishna, the play is explicitly concerned with the ethics of war, particularly with the issues raised by the bombing of Hiroshima. Its performance in 1963 under the direction of Ebrahim Alkazi, in the open-air setting of Talkatora Gardens in Delhi, was a landmark of modern Indian theatre.
Source: Oxford Reference
Links:
Andha Yug from Oxford University Press
KEYWORDS:
Indian, Hindi, Bengali