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Tutun Mukherjee (editor); Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2005, pp. x+551,
ISBN 019 567008 6
, £21.99 (Hbk)
The near-invisibility of women playwrights in modern Indian drama presents a striking contrast not only to the prominence of female authors in print genres such as fiction, poetry, and non-fictional prose, but also to the increasing success of women as actresses and directors in the post-independence decades. During the colonial period, men dominated the activities of playwriting, acting, play-production, and theatre management to such an extent that women were more or less marginal in all these spheres. However, since the 1940s, actresses such as Tripti Mitra, Sova Sen, Sulabha Deshpande, Sudha Shivpuri, Surekha Sikri, Uttara Baokar, Rohini Hattangady, and Sunila Pradhan have set the standards for theatrical performance in the same measure that directors such as Shanta Gandhi, Vijaya Mehta, Joy Michael, Usha Ganguli, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, and Amal Allana have influenced and reshaped the artistic process of realizing playscripts on the stage. The energetic presence of women in the theatre, however, has not redressed the problem of their absence from the print medium. Mahasweta Devi's theatrical adaptations of her own Bengali short stories make up the only available collection of plays in English translation by an Indian woman playwright ( Five Plays , Seagull, 1997), augmenting a handful of individual titles by Shanta Gokhale, Dina Mehta, and Manjula Padmanabhan, among others. The imbalance of gender continues in recent anthologies: again, Mahasweta Devi's The Mother of 1084 is the only play by a woman author in G.P. Deshpande's Modern Indian Drama: An Anthology (Sahitya Akademi, 2000), while Chandrashekhar Kambar's Modern Indian Plays (National School of Drama, 2000) excludes women altogether. Only Erin Mee's DramaContemporary: India (PAJ Books, 2001) establishes a bolder...