Reading Gender and Female Sexual Agency in a Bengali Adaptation of As You Like It.pdf (original) (raw)
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Multicultural Shakespeare
My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is negotiated in a Bengali adaptation, Ananga-Rangini (1897) by the little-known playwright Annadaprasad Basu. The Bengali adaptation does not assume the boy actor’s embodied performance as essential to its construction of the Rosalindequivalent, and thereby it misses several of the accents on gender and sexuality that characterize Shakespeare’s play. The Bengali adaptation, while accommodating much of Rosalind’s flamboyance, is more insistent upon the heteronormative closure and reconfigures the Rosalind-character as an acquiescent lover/wife. Further, Ananga-Rangini incorporates resonances of the classical Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, thus suggesting a thematic interaction between the two texts and giving a concrete shape to the comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa that formed a favourite topic of literary debate in colonial Bengal. The article takes into accou...
Borrowers and Lenders, 2024
This article examines five Bengali essays published in periodicals in the long 19th century, which compare Miranda intensively with the eponymous heroine of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1866 novel Kapalkundala. The five essays in question (Shrish Chandra Majumder, 1880; anonymous, 1889; Sudhindranath Tagore, 1891; anonymous, 1909; Kshirode Bihari Chattopadhyay, 1918) discuss how Shakespeare’s and Bankim’s texts address the condition of a woman brought up outside human society. They are especially concerned with what they mark as the inherent feminine kindness and the pristine form of sexual innocence featured in the heroines of these texts. These essays ignore invariably the possibility of reading The Tempest as an allegory of the colonial project. The elision of the political context enables these essays to create a universalist space where Shakespeare and Bankim may be treated as coequal artists, without undue deference to Shakespeare’s colonially propagated canonicity. These essays thus refuse to be defined by a colonial relationship of cultural subordination. However, the paradigm of universality evoked by them is posited on the fetishization of feminine innocence. These essays, my article argues, naturalize and replicate a patriarchal vision that they attribute to The Tempest and Kapalkundala.
The aim of this paper is to examine how gender issues were discussed by two different South Asian play writers through their plays: 'Maname' and 'Dhruvsvamini'. Secondary research objectives are to examine their different approaches to solve above discussed gender issues as well as to examine the use of Buddhist concepts in the discussion of above endeavor. Edirivira Sarachchandra is a significant Sri Lankan dramatist who wrote 'Maname' (1956) to critique gender-relations in Sri Lankan society. Jaishankar Prasad is an Indian writer who wrote the play 'Dhruvsvamini' to criticize gender issues of Indian society. Literature survey has been conducted to analyze the plays. The outcome of this paper would be an exploration of gender issues discussed in Sinhala and Hindi dramas.
'Speak of me as I am': Baishnavcharan Adhya and Othello in Kolkata
In William Shakespeare's Othello, the troubled tensions arising out of romantic love is projected on a nightmarish vision of interracial relationships which eventually ends in a terrible catastrophe. The contours of the play, shaped by the expanding colonial world of Renaissance England, outlined topographies of human difference which engendered new significations about personal and social identities. According to Ania Loomba, these identities are bred and sustained by the characters of the play who internalised the politics of race and gender. 1 Othello is thus not only a victim of racial discrimination, he half apprehends that his tragic fate is a result of his 'sooty bosom' which loves 'not wisely but too well'. Similarly, both Desdemona and Othello internalise the supposed consequences of their 'unnatural' union – Iago incites thoughts and apprehensions which were already existent. It is perhaps because of this that the play enjoyed popularity in nineteenth century colonial Bengal, where troubled dread about ethnic intermixing and yet its eventual inevitability etched out the dynamics of the relationship between the natives and the British. This resulted not only in framing the Orientalist paradigm 2 and engendered the discourse of racial superiority; it also inscribed the theatrical space of Bengal and helped in the evolution of its modern dramaturgical traditions and conventions. The 1848 performance of Othello by the actors of Sans Souci Theatre, Kolkata is a significant vortex of these myriad framings and ambivalances, especially because a native Bengali, Baishnavcharan Adhya (Bustomchurn Addy), acted as Othello in a production which otherwise comprised of British actors and was meant for primarily British audience.
Actresses on Bengali Stage-Nati Binodini and Moyna: the Present Re-imagines the Past
2011
The Bengal Renaissance ushered in the process of multifaceted modernization resulting in the major reshaping of the theatrical space both in terms of convention and praxis. Abandoning the convention of cross-dressing (where the earlier male actors were dressed as women to represent female characters), this new theatrical space began to accommodate the women actors for the representation of female characters. Parallel with the emergence of the "New Woman" in the upper middle class society of the nineteenth century, the women actors also constituted a segregated sphere of the emancipated women. Although "free" to encounter the public sphere, they were denied the degree of social acceptability/status that was otherwise available to the then upper middle class "New Women." This paper tries to locate the experience of a female actor of nineteenth century: Binodini Dasi: as is rendered in her two short autobiographical writings and the re-imagination of that experience in the twentieth century play Tiner Taloar by Utpal Dutt. Dutt uses the historical material to explore the consolidation and redefinition of the feminine space in his contemporary theatre. The Bengal Renaissance ushered in the process of multifaceted modernization resulting in the major reshaping of the theatrical space both in terms of convention and praxis. Abandoning the convention of cross-dressing (whereas the earlier male actors were dressed as women to represent female characters), this new theatrical space began to accommodate the women actors for the representation of female characters. Parallel with the emergence of the "New Woman" in the upper middle class society of the nineteenth century, the women actors also constituted a segregated sphere of the emancipated women. Although "free" to encounter the public sphere, they were denied the degree of social acceptability/status that was otherwise available to the then upper middle class "New Women." This paper tries to locate the experience of a female actor of nineteenth century: Binodini Dasi: as is rendered in her two short autobiographical writings and the re-imagination of that experience in the twentieth century play Tiner Taloar by Utpal Dutt. Dutt uses these two historical materials to explore the consolidation and redefinition of the feminine space in his contemporary theatre. In the first section of our paper Madhumita Roy would try to depict the history, the fact, as inscribed by the actress Binodini herself while in the second section