Over the past five decades, Girish Karnad has been recognized nationally and internationally as one of the pre-eminent playwrights in contemporary India. Born in 1938, he belongs to the generation of writers who came to maturity shortly after independence and collectively reshaped Indian theatre as a national institution in the later twentieth century. This edition of Karnad’s Collected Plays, published in two volumes, brings together English versions of all his important plays by the playwright himself for audiences around the world. The four plays featured here have been performed in every major Indian language, as well as in English, Sinhala, German, Spanish, Polish, and Hungarian, in cities ranging from Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Kolkata to London, Colombo, Weimar, and Chicago. Published together for the first time, these texts display Karnad’s unique ability to use ancient myth, pre-modern history, and folklore as resonant parallels for modern experience, both private and public. Both volumes contain substantial new introductions by Aparna Dharwadker, Associate Professor of Theatre and English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to tracing the plays’ literary and theatrical evolution, the introductions comment on Karnad’s place in a multilingual performance culture, the relation of his playwriting to his work in the popular media, and his larger than lie presence as an engaged intellectual in the Indian public sphere. This volume is a collector’s item, which makes the works of Girish Karnad accessible to a wider readership among theatre lovers across the world.
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