Majumdar.

Andha Yug: A Colonial depiction of Mahabharata

Theatricality, though, it seems clear that the concept is closely related to performance or

performativity; it inspires far more ambivalence and is employed in less consistent ways. “Andha

Yug” (1953) by Dharamvir Bharati is one of the most significant plays of modern India; Set in

the last day of the Great Mahabharata war, the five-act tragedy was written in the years following

the 1947 partition of India atrocities, as allegory to its destruction not just of human lives, but

also ethical values – the play is a profound meditation on the politics of violence and aggressive

selfhood. It is the ambivalence of theatrical jurisprudence that makes “Andha Yug” an

appropriate example to study the theories of theatricality.

It tells the story of modern human tragedy symbolically and metaphorically using the characters

from Mahabharata. Through these characters, Bharati has commented upon tragedy of our times.

A composition, Andha Yug is a perfect balance between drama and poetry, where the theatricality

is further expounded by Bharati adapting the classical structure of Indian drama with Greek

Chorus.

The Mahabharata is about power politics, about national disintegration and schisms; the Indian

here confronts the forces of history. It is these darker aspects of political conflict that Bharati

brings the foreground in his theatrically poetic interpretation of the epic in Andha Yug. The vast

expanse of Indian epics and the kaleidoscope of folklore provide enough material for a theatrical

production exploring almost all aspects of the stage. The action of the play takes place on the last

day of the Mahabharata war and is centered on a few bewildered survivors of the Kaurava clan.

The ramparts are in ruins, the city is burning, and Kurukshetra is covered with corpses and

vultures. The surviving Kauravas are overwhelmed by grief and rage. They long for one last act
 Majumdar. 2

of revenge against the Pandavas. That is why when Ashwatthama releases the ultimate weapon,

the brahmastra, which threatens to annihilate the world, they refuse to condemn it as ethically

reprehensible. The moral centre of the play lies in Krishna. Despite his failure to ensure peace, it

is his presence throughout the play which reveals to us that the ethical and the sacred are always

available to human beings even in the worst of times.

The plot of the play doesn’t need any surgical innovation; it is ready for a high pitched drama.

Drawing on narrative conventions of the Western epic form, Bharati uses several pairs of

narrators and listeners to describe the action. The entire dimension of the stage is used to portray

the tension of the situation. The characters’ speeches are frequently in the form direct statements,

as monologues, soliloquies, and semi-soliloquies (Awasthi 60).

The theatricality then becomes imminent. The play creates a form of Brechtian alienation among

the audience, repeatedly forcing them to reflect on the effect of the actions, rather than being

lulled by an emotional identification or empathy toward the characters. However, unlike Brecht’s

sustained cerebral forms of epic drama, Andha Yug also resonates with powerful theatricality

evoked by death, physical pain, and moral confusion (Datta 170). In fact Ibrahim Alkazi, who

first directed the play, remarked that the “total impact of sound and visual images” created an

“ultimate theatrical form” (Alkazi 4-5). Alkazi's production made history in modern Indian

theatre, when he staged first Andha Yug in 1963, first amidst the backdrop of the ruins of Feroz

Shah Kotla, Delhi and then Purana Quila's tiered steps in the 70s; it brought in a new paradigm in

Indian theatre of the times.

The device of ‘conflict’ and masking of emotions is ardently used in its true Greek structure.

The action of Andha Yug resonates around the images of blindness. Between the two extremes of
 Majumdar. 3

the physical blindness of the king, Dhritarashtara, and the beastly blind hatred of his grandson,

Ashwatthama, the play depicts many forms and shapes of the human inability to the see the face

of reality (Jain 75). The chorus at the opening scene of the play is aptly used to set forth the

theme of blindness:

“The stream of blood / Nears its end almost / It would be strange if no one won / or both sides

lost / on the throne of ages / A blind man is seated / and blindness wins on both sides…”

The theatricality is heightened by the king’s guards echoing the same sentiments in images of

blindness and disease:

“There was nothing to guard / in the civilization of the blind and the old…/…That blind culture /

that sick honour / is what we have guarded / for seventeen days...”

In Bharati’s play, the heroic battle of the revered epic, The Mahabharata, has been reduced to a

nihilistic ‘end game’. In it one can find echoes of Shakespeare’s travesty of the “Iliad” in

“Troilus and Cressida”. Thus Krishna bestows responsibility on the humans for their own

salvation: “others shall take all other responsibility”. The drama reaches its pinnacle when

Krishna looks into a renewed future when “new life will be built on old destruction”. Directors

have used theatrical space to segregate Krishna as a divine and yet allocated a nearness to depict

his human form. Bharati leaves immense possibilities to shift the characters around breaking

away from the confines of position and lights used to depict blindness on stage.

Indian critics generally emphasize the broad universal theatrical dimensions of Andha Yug.

Andha Yug is the first acknowledged classic of post independence Indian theatre, and perhaps,

the work that best exemplifies the merging of “literariness” and “theatricality”. The ability to

experiment made the young director of the National School of Drama Pravin Kumar Gunjan to
 Majumdar. 4

invent his own style to enact this masterpiece by devising allegories like live images of the

wrestlers and ferocious screen images of buffaloes, apart from using a variety of orchestral

instruments, outlandish costumes and stylized design. The interplay of these elements projects

the intense hatred, the frenzy to avenge and the madness to resort to nuclear holocaust to embody

in the most vital character of Ashwatthama.

Andha-Yug proved for the first time in the history of Hindi literature that poetry can be

successfully and meaningfully presented in a theatrical form, enhancing the theatricality of the

play. Bharati’s creative use of various theatrical techniques and most significantly, breaking the

confines of the proscenium paved the way for open air theatre in India. Its theatrical success also

lies in its structural flexibility that adapts to diverse theatrical experiments.

Work Cited

Alkazi, Ibrahim. “Directing Andha Yug”. In Enact. 4-5. 1978

Awasthi, Suresh. “Andha Yug and The Mahabharata”. In Enact. 6-7. 1965

Bharati Dharamvir. Andha Yug (English), Tr. Alok Bhalla. Oxford University Press, USA, 2010.

Datta Amaresh "Andha Yug (Hindi)". The Encyclopedia Of Indian Literature (Volume Two)

(Devraj To Jyoti), Volume 2. Sahitya Akademi. p. 170. (2006).

Rubin Don The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: Asia. Taylor & Francis. 1998

Encyclopedia Britannica. WEB. 2010