Girish Karnad : A Tribute

Girish Karnad is a writer, dramatist, director and actor par excellence. He belongs to a generation that has produced Dharamveer Bharati, Mohan Rakesh and Vijay Tendulkar who have created a national theatre for modern India, which is the legacy of his generation. Jnanpitha Awardee, Karnad is the author of many well known plays in Kannada and English. He has represented Indian art and culture in foreign lands. Girish Karnad was a conscious writer, who had keenly observed cultural and political upheavals in India and brings in a new equation in his plays. In this paper, I propose to analyze the selected plays of Indian playwright Grirish Karnad who has experimented with the fusion of the traditional and the modern dramatic forms and content. Karnad is most famous as a playwright and his plays have become a byword for imagination, innovation and craftsmanship. In the subsequent years, Karnad continued to post script narratives, interpreting for us histories and myths, forging an idiom of writing that was tethered to both the past and present. Karnad's practice of drawing source from myths and tales lends the play an immediacy of appeal. This paper thus studies Karnad's selected plays from the point of view of themes and techniques. While doing so, the focus will mainly be on the history and myth in his dramatic works-Karnad's journey from his first drama 'Yayati holds a mirror to the very evolution of a truly 'Indian theatre.'