EXPLORING THE NATURE OF TRAGEDY IN TUGHLAQ AND KHUANGCHERA

• Lalrinngheta

  Mizoram University

  Author

This paper undertakes a comparative study of the tragic art of two modern Indian historical dramas: Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq (1964) and Laltluangliana Khiangte’s Pasalṭha Khuangchera. Though they arise from very different literary cultures — Karnad writing in Kannada within the cosmopolitan tradition of modern Indian theatre, Khiangte writing in Mizo within the developing literature of a small North-East Indian community — the two plays are illuminatingly compared, for both dramatise the collision of a noble protagonist with the irreversible movements of history, and both raise, in distinctive ways, the question of what tragedy becomes when it is realised through the materials of Indian history and culture. The paper argues that both plays achieve genuine tragic stature, satisfying the structural and emotional requirements that the tradition of tragic theory has identified, while transforming the inherited form through their distinctive materials. It argues, further, that the two plays represent contrasting modes of the historical tragic: Tughlaq a tragedy of the idealist whose own contradictions destroy him, in the manner of the introspective modern tragedy of disillusionment; Khuangchera a tragedy of the heroic resister whose virtue is rendered fatal by an overwhelming external force, in the manner of the affirmative communal tragedy. Through the comparison, the paper seeks to illuminate the range of the tragic in modern Indian drama and to demonstrate the value of reading the tragic literature of India’s smaller cultures alongside that of its major traditions.

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