This book is the first volume of a collection of plays by Girish Karnard, most of which have been published before by OUP. This volume contains four plays, namely Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Bali: The Sacrifice and Naga-Mandala.

The troubled reign of a fourteenth-century sultan of Delhi helps dramatize the crisis of secular nationhood in post-Independence India. A twelfth century folktale about ‘transposed heads’ offers a path-breaking model for a quintessentially ‘Indian’ theatre in postcolonial times. The folktale about a woman with a snake lover explores gender relations within marriage. Individual human sexuality meets the historical debate on violence in Indian culture. The plays in this volume span roughly the first half of the career of Girish Karnad, one of India’s pre-eminent playwrights. The three-volume set of Karnad’s Collected Plays brings together English versions of his important works. Each volume contains an extensive introduction by theatre scholar Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison. The introductions trace the literary and theatrical evolution of Karnad’s work over six decades and position it in the larger context of modern Indian drama. In addition, they comment on Karnad’s place as author and translator in a multilingual performance culture and the relation of his playwriting to his work in the popular media. Each of these volumes serves as a collector’s item, making Karnad’s works accessible to theatre lovers worldwide.

The tale of a mythic king’s aggression against his offspring, and his desperation to escape the curse of old age laid upon him in the prime of life. The anxieties that torment a middle-class family as their daughter awaits the arrival of the ‘suitable boy’ from abroad whom she has never met. The morphing of the city of Bangalore, whose founding myth celebrates its human ambience, into India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ where strangers are thrown together, get entangled, and are violently pulled apart. In the plays of Girish Karnad, one of our fi nest playwrights, time, family, love, and sexual aggression resound from the mythic past into the contemporary megalopolis. The three plays collected in this volume not only span Karnad’s creative graph from his first play, Yayati, to his most recent, Boiled Beans on Toast, but also chart out the themes that have disturbed and shaped Indian drama since Independence. The volume includes an extensive introduction by theatre scholar Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, which analyses Karnad’s work in the context of modern Indian drama.