TUGHLAQ by Girish Karnad

TUGHLAQ

                        -Girish Karnad

                        Girish Karnad, (born May 19, 1938, Matheran, Bombay Presidency [now in Maharashtra], India), Indian playwright, author, actor, and film director whose films and plays, written largely in Kannada, explore the present by way of the past.  Karnad’s next play, Tughlaq (1964), tells the story of the 14th-century sultan Mohammad and remains among the best known of his works.

                        “The whirlpool of violence and bloodshed” called Tughlaq, is based on “the life of Muhammad Tughlaq of 14th century sultan of Delhi, “the most infamous Mughal emperor who thinks himself as “I was too soft, I can see that now. According to Karnad, Sultan Muhammad Bin Tughlaq was “certainly the most brilliant individual ever to ascend the throne of Delhi and also one of the biggest failures. Tughlaq of Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq seems to be more humane than his original, Muhammad bin Tughlaq. It is so for the simple reason that he looks more sophisticated and gentle manlike and, therefore, subtler and saner than the most controversial monarch of Indian history, the so-called “Mad” Tughlaq (1325-51) of Delhi Sultanate.

                        The play Tughlaq explores the series of events that led to the downfall of one of the most fascinating kings to occupy the throne in Delhi, namely, Mohammed-bin-Tughlaq. The protagonist, Mohammad bin Tughlaq, known for his reformist, ‘ahead of his times’ ideas had a grand vision, but his reign was an abject failure. He started his rule with great ideals of a unified India. Yet in 20 years his reign had degenerated into anarchy and his kingdom had become a “kitchen of death”.
The vision of Tughlaq to unify India and keep religion out of politics cost him dearly. He put forth reformist ideas to bring about trust in his Hindu citizens like scrapping the ‘jijia’ tax on Hindus. One of his ideas was shifting the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in order to have the capital that is not only the center of his province but also a Hindu dominated area.

                      The play covers the consequences that followed this decision. The play starts with Tughlaq being portrayed as a strict yet respected ruler. The play dramatically highlights the how the business class of the country always tried to influence the decisions of the Ruler. The play also highlights how religion can be misused to bring in the common man
into a foul play.

                     The two characters, Aziz and Azam, represent a section of people who are clever enough to identify and mis-use the loop holes and in every law to enrich them.

The play outlines his clever plots to eliminate his opponents and ends with scenes of utter chaos and misery in the kingdom, and Tughlaq being left alone, having been abandoned by those who survived him. The play intends at capturing the helplessness of a great ruler, his downfall no matter how big the dreams and the visions in the hands of the religion and business class.

GHASHIRAM KOTWAL by Vijay tendulkar

GASHIRAM KOTWAL

                                    -Vijay Tendulkar

                        Ghashiram Kotwal is a Marathi play written by playwright Vijay Tendulkar in 1972 as a response to the rise of a local political party, Shiv Sena, in Maharashtra. The play is a political satire, written as historical drama. It is based on the life of Nana Phadnavis (1741–1800), one of the prominent ministers in the court of the Peshwa of Pune. Its theme is how men in power give rise to ideologies to serve their purposes, and later destroy them when they become useless. It was first performed on 16 December 1972, by the Progressive Drama Association in Pune. Jabber's production of the play in 1973 is considered a classic in Modern Indian Theatre.

                        It is deals with the “History of Maratha Samrajya”. Though Vijay Tendulkar denied but it is highly represent the history. Nana Phadnavis has been portrayed in dark shade who as per the chroniclers was an able administrator and shrewd politician who with his presight kept the Maratha Empire integrated for more than 20 years. Even in “Bajirao Mastani” film Nana sahib Peshwa portrayed very cunning and shrewd.

                        The female role in politics of power is limited only to surrender, acceptance and suffering. The position of Indian Women at the very beginning has been in a very pathetic condition. They are in marginal position. Gauri is representing the Indian women. Gauri is voiceless, powerless and victimized. She does not have a say even in a matter relating to her. She silently accepts what her father decides for her even though it meant passing through a living hell or a life of eternal damnation. She is the symbol of exploitation of female sexuality to represent the loss and destruction in their struggle for power.  Second is Gulabi. - Gulabi is no better though she wields some power and is financially well off she too has to dance to the tunes of her customers and Nana. She cannot think earn her livelihood without satisfying the sexual overtures of her customers. Third is Nana’s Wives – Nana’s wives are mute spectators to the sexual rendezvous of their husbands Violence against women and violation of human rights of women are rampant and this is pictured well in Ghashiram Kotwal. Ghashiram Kotwal though uncouth and rough is a man of action. He is not an idealist or a visionary. He belongs to our present lower rung of the police officials who may not necessarily be good administrators are the best for the field job that he does par excellent.

THE HAIRY APE by Eugene O'Neil

THE HAIRY APE

                        -Eugene O’Neil

                                    All of O’Neill’s plays are written from a personal point of view and reflect on the tragedy of the human condition. His plays deal especially with the American history and social movements.

                          Yank is the protagonist of the play who is portrayed as a British and laborer who searches for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the rich like Nazareth Steel. The play is divided into eight scenes and there are many laborers like Yank in the play with some high class characters like Mildred Douglas, her Aunt, the secretary at I.W.W, A Gentle man, Second engineer, etc. Yank’s fellow workers are Paddy, Long and other firemen. So, from the very beginning O’Neill has started presenting the class difference with the use of language and other description.

 Throughout the play Yank searches for his real identity but finds none. O’Neill indirectly asks very significant or suggestive question like; what is more important being dirty as a slave or being filthy like an animal? Are slaves really filthy or the masters themselves? Where does their filthiness come from? If it is mind then neither Yank nor other firemen but the upper class people are, filthy so far as their thinking regarding superiority is concerned.  

       As the lower class people do not have their own belonging, it also shows the question which are raised to their existence. All the workers like Paddy, Long, Yank etc. Consider that Transatlantic Ocean Liner as their own house but their livelihood is something serious problem caused in their life. Though they are force they are bound by their masters so it can be said that they are; free without freedom.

    As the industrial environment is presented as toxic and dehumanizing, O’Neill present how the laborers are seem by the masters also presents humanity is subsiding in this materialistic era. Yank has also been interpreted as representative of the human condition, alienated from nature by his isolated consciousness, unable to find belonging in any social group or environment. This play also reveals how deeply and rightly rigidity class is inscribed into American culture and the cultural and financial boundaries it erects.

THE NAMESAKE by Jhumpa Lahiri

THE NAMESAKE

                        By, Jhumpa Lahiri

            Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian-American writer. She has born on July 11, 1967 in UK. Author Jhumpa Lahiri was born Nilanjana Sudheshna but was called by her nickname “Jhumpa”. Lahiri’s life long mixed feeling about her identity as represented in her Indian name inspired Gogol’s struggle in The Namesake.

            ‘The Namesake’ focuses on first generation Indian immigrants and the issues they and their children face in the United States. ‘The Namesake’ takes the Ganguli family from their tradition bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. Jhumpa Lahiri's 'The Namesake' is the story of a young American Indian, Gogol. Gogol hates the name given to him by his parents, his 'good name' as they call it. He particularly hates the comparison to his namesake, Nikolai Gogol and is embarrassed by it. Gogol grows to be a handsome young architect, falls in love with an American girl and is happy for a while living with her and her family. Later, Gogol meets an Indian girl and marries her but feels lonely in the relationship.

          Gogol is not proud of his origins, in fact he has been shown to hate them .He is shown growing more sensitive to his family, particularly his mother as time passes. His reactions to his father's death are especially touching. Jhumpa Lahiri has managed to portray beautifully how Gogol's mother Ashima adjusts to her life in a foreign country, how she evolves from being a homesick housewife to a confident woman comfortable in her surroundings.  Jhumpa Lahiri does a wonderful job getting the reader into this character's head and feeling for him as he grows up in a culture entirely new to his parents and their attempts to keep the Indian culture true to their children.

                 The narrative is simple and lucid; a lot of attention has been paid to the details. The novel manages to highlight the confusion, the homesickness and the loneliness of the first generation Indians in a foreign country. The triumph of the novel is when Ashima, who misses India all her life comes to think of Boston as home.       

THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison

THE BLUEST EYE

                        -Toni Morrison

                                    Toni Morrison is an African-American writer and professor. Growing up in Ohio, she developed a love for literature and storytelling. She studied English at Howard University and Cornell University, before teaching English at various universities and working as an editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She continued to write and gradually garnered national attention before publishing Beloved in 1987. Beloved was hugely successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is regularly included in the discussion of the best novel written after World War II. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her writings often focus on the experiences of black women in the United States. She is currently a professor at Princeton University. Morrison's work joins the African-American literary tradition, which strives to depict the African-American experience of living in the United States. With The Bluest Eye, Morrison set out to create a distinctively black literature, what she calls a "race-specific yet race-free prose." Her novel joins an abundance of texts that center on African-American experience in the decades after the Civil War, most notably, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston, Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, Native Son, by Richard Wright. Morrison's prose is infused with black vernacular, and black musical traditions such as the spirituals, gospel, jazz, and the blues. Her novel also joins the modernist tradition established by Faulkner and Woolf, utilizing techniques of stream-of-consciousness, multiple perspectives, and deliberate fragmentation.

                                    Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black; the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been designed specifically to murder possibilities; the "bluest eye" refers to the blue eyes of the blond American myth, by which standard the black-skinned and brown-eyed always measure up as inadequate.

                                    The Bluest Eye is a harsh warning about the old consciousness of black folks' attempts to emulate the slave master. Pecola's request is not for more money or a better house or even for more sensible parents; her request is for blue eyes — something that, even if she had been able to acquire them, would not have abated the harshness of her abject reality.

HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

HEART OF DARKNESS

                                    -Joseph Conrad

                        Joseph Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was an orphan by the age of 12; his mother and father both died as a result of time the family spent in exile in Siberia for plotting against the Russian Tsar. He wrote his best-known works in the years just before and after the turn of the century: Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), and Nostromo (1904). Conrad died in 1924.

                                    Joseph Conrad's novels reside in the transition period between Victorianism, with its strict conventions and focus on polite society, and Modernism, which sought to explode old conventions and invent new literary forms to convey human experience more fully. Conrad's work was instrumental in this effort, particularly his experimentation with the use of time and non-chronological narratives. Heart of Darkness also fits squarely into the genre of colonial literature, in which European writers portrayed the colonialism and imperialism of European nations from Africa to the Far East in the late 19th and early 20th century.

                                    During the last two decades of the 19th century, European nations battled each other for wealth and power. This battle caused the "scramble for Africa," in which European countries competed to colonize as much of Africa as possible. While the colonizing Europeans claimed to want to "civilize" the African continent, their actions spoke otherwise: they were interested solely in gaining wealth and did not care how they did it, or who was killed. One of the most brutal of the European colonies in its treatment of the native Africans was the Belgian Congo, the property of the Belgian King Leopold I. In 1890, Joseph Conrad worked as a pilot on a steamship in the Belgian Congo, and Heart of Darkness is at least in part based on his experiences there.

                                    This is a book that takes place in Europe and then in Africa. Lot of students read this in class as a short story. It is not that short. This was also a movie called "Apocalypse Now". Martin Sheen is in it, with fatty Marlon Brando and Harrison Ford. It's a pretty good movie. In this story there are "agents". These are guys that travel and go get ivory.

                                    The story starts out with these 5 dudes sitting on a boat. There is a lawyer, an accountant, a military guy, the narrator, and some dude named Marlow. Then Marlow tells them his story. He starts out telling them how he was sailing around, all over the place. He jumped from boat to boat experiencing new things. Many of these boats were ivory boats, sailing around looking for ivory. His rich powerful Aunt got him a job as the captain of a steamer in Africa looking for Ivory. . Then he arrives at the "station". He sees a lot of overworked black slaves. He meets this handsome accountant guy. The accountant tells him about a dude named Kurtz. Kurtz is one of the best "agents" (he gets a lot of ivory). They take a trip to the central "station". They get there and see that their steamboat has sunk. The manager of the central station doesn't know where Kurtz is.

That night Marlow talks with one of the agents. The agent says good things about Kurtz and how he'll probably be promoted in the big company. However, the agent kinda hates Kurtz because they are competing for similar promotions. Marlow pumps the agent for info on Kurtz. Marlow is very curious about this dude named Kurtz. Then the Steamer is fixed so they continue with the trip. They head toward Kurtz’s station to find out what the hell happened to him.

They sail on the river and then they are attacked by spears and arrows. It’s the African savages attacking them. They shoot back and try to pop some caps in their asses. They finally blow the steam whistle and the noise scares the savages. Then they get to the "Inner Station". A Russian dude is there and he’s taking care of Kurtz because Kurtz is sick. The Russian sailor dude tells the crew that Kurtz went psycho and started killing the African savages and stealing their ivory. He became their leader and was treated like a God. Marlow sees sticks with heads on them (like Lord of the flies). Marlow is kinda scared because he knows Kurtz has a big African army that will do anything he wants them to. Kurtz was the one who told the savages to attack Marlowe's steamboat. So now the crew has Marlow in their "custody".

The night before they leave, Kurtz tries to escape back to his followers (the African savages). Marlow catches him and doesn’t let him go. They take Kurtz back and that’s where he says those famous lines "Oh the horror. The horror! Then Kurtz dies.

Marlow gets sick, but then gets better. He goes back to Brussels. He visits Marlowe's fiancee who he left at home. In the book she is called the "Intended" (like he intended to marry her). She asks Marlow what Kurtz’s last words were. He lies and says it was her name. She cries.

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

 FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

                                      -Thomas Hardy

                    Far From the Madding Crowd centers on the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene, and the three who love her and try to win her over. Gabriel Oak, Mr. Boldwood, and Sergeant Francis Troy find themselves intertwined in their quest to win Bathsheba. Bathsheba is headstrong, feminine, and beautiful. She inherits her uncle’s farm, and tries to run it herself. As all of them were farmers, they didn’t think that she could do it. Although she had a few things go wrong like fires she overall handles her farm very well and became a good farmer. But, her love life was something else. She had three men after her at the same time. The first suitor she met was Gabriel Oak.

                    Farmer Oak was dependable and caring and wise. Without him, Bathsheba couldn’t have taken care of the farm. Oak did have his own sheep, but they were killed in a freak accident when they ran off a cliff. Oak is “one with nature." He knew just by looking at his she’s tails that it was going to rain. He would do anything for Bathsheba (and he did), even though she denied his first attempt at marriage. In the end thought, Bathsheba did marry Oak. Troy first met Bathsheba as they were walking through the woods. Bathsheba became tangled in the brambles with Troy. He made a few comments to her about how lovely se was and how he would love to stay tangled up with her. Instantly, Bathsheba was in love. Little did she know that Troy was deeply in love with a girl named Fanny Robbins, who was a maid of Bathsheba’s? Troy ended up marrying Bathsheba, but it was a bad marriage and didn’t last for long. Bathsheba was in love with Troy’s image and he loved her for her money and appearance. The final straw for their marriage was when Fanny died. Troy lost his true love, an unborn child, and in the end, his own life. Ironically, his death was by the hands of Bathsheba’s suitor Boldwood.