Playing with Words

In her introduction to the book,Chandra gives an overview of original Indian plays written in English. “It is only after the 1950s that performance-oriented drama began to appear,” she says. Decades later,in the world of Indian writing in English,the genre of drama “still has the status of stepchild”. “Works of many talented playwrights have been forgotten,” she says. After her introduction to Ramanathan’s Mahadevbhai,a play about Mahatma Gandhi and his secretary,she thought of compiling his work “to find a wider audience”. The Mumbai-based playwright credits Chandra for the book. “This is her project. She convinced the team at Orient Blackswan that the plays are worth publishing,” says Ramanathan. The plays in the book include Mahadevbhai,The Boy Who Stopped Smiling,Curfew,Collaborators,3,Sakina Manzil,Shakespeare and She,Jazz and Shanti,Shanti,It’s a War.

The plays are written between 1993 and 2008 and show the writer’s love for music. That apart,given Ramathan’s inclination towards contemporary issues and research,most of them can be termed as “docu-dramas”. For instance,Curfew was written immediately after the 1992-93 riots in Mumbai,3,Sakina Manzil is set in 1944 and deals with the Bombay Harbour blast,and Jazz is about the influence of jazz on Bollywood as well as the lives of the musicians who kept this genre alive.

Missing from the collection are some of Ramanathan’s best-known plays,including Cotton 56 Polyester 84,which is about Mumbai’s mill culture. “That may be included in Volume II,if such a thing happens,”says the playwright.

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