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Vijay Tendulkar, one of the leading modern Indian dramatists, delves deep into human nature and culture to diagnose clinically how various forces interact with each other to engender violence in one's individual and social life. He suggests that violence does not often result from any single factor but arises from a complex interplay of variety of factors such as biological, psychological, social and economic. His plays reveal how strong human biological needs and drives lead to violent consequences particularly when they are thwarted by restrictive or blocking situations. When the psychic energy which is based on biological sexual instincts, motivated for pleasure is displaced or frustrated, it may erupt in violent forms of expressions. For example, Mitra's devouring possessiveness for Nama in A Friend's Story is the clear manifestation of her irresistible lesbian urge. When deprived of fulfillment, her libidinous energy becomes self-directed and inverted, pushing her to the desperate act of committing suicide.
Keywords: Libido, Repression, Disequilibrium, Lesbian, Biological urges, Betrayal, Rage.
The traditional structure of society which prescribes a strict moral code quite often works as a restraining force and suppresses the basic human impulses of the individual aimed at seeking pleasure. These desires very often manifest themselves in heterosexual relationships but it may also have the propensity to seek normal fulfillment in homosexual relations as well. Obviously, the restrictive and coercive morality of society does not accept such relations and condemns them as unhealthy. When such biological urges conflict with traditional social norms of sexual behaviour, they become a repressed force and tend to find expression in various forms, such as, frustration, anger and rebellion or escape.
In modern Indian drama the exploration of this hitherto tabooed subject has become more frequent and candid. Besides Mahesh Dattani's Muggy Night in Bombay, Tendulkar's A Friend's Story stands out as a play focused exclusively and boldly on this theme.
The playwright shows how biological urges manifesting in the form of libidinous drives tend to grow from a normal state of desire for pleasure and fulfillment to a condition of rage and rebellion in the face of thwarting situations. Unable to find fulfillment these desires often tend to spend themselves up through discord, despair and sink into the abyss of nothingness and self-annihilation. Freud...