Karnad's Violence: Writing in the aftermath of Colonialism

Abstract

This paper focuses on the postcolonial significance of the thematic and formal violence that is discernable in the historical and mythological plays of Girish Karnad, using the framework of trauma literature. In so doing, the paper explores aspects of the plays that have been considered irrelevant to postcolonial studies, and demonstrates that both the historical and the mythological plays are national allegories concerned with investigating the continuing communal violence in India. The historical plays use history as an allegory to present Indian secular leadership as a condition of melancholia and a hybrid that contains within itself the seeds of communalism. The mythological plays present the inherent violence and burden of secularism through the unravelling of identity due to an encounter with an Other who claims kinship. As such, the violence that epitomizes Karnad?s plays is shown to be strongly connected to Indian secularism.