Girish Karnad's plays exemplified his generation's transformative practices, but also bore his distinctive mark

The following post, written by Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, appears as the introduction to Girish Karnad’s ‘ Collected Plays Volume One', published by Oxford University Press. During the 1961-77 period, therefore, each successive play by Karnad marks a departure in a major new direction and the invention of a new form appropriate to his content — ancient myth in Yayati, 14th-century north Indian history in Tughlaq, a 12th-century folktale interlineated with Thomas Mann’s retelling of it in Hayavadana, and early-postcolonial Britain in Anjumallige. Karnad belongs perhaps to the last generation of urban Indian writers who encountered the ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions of myth, poetry, history, legend, and folklore at first hand in their earliest childhood, and internalised them deeply enough to have their adult authorial selves shaped by them. Karnad comes uncannily close, therefore, to the kind of modern writer TS Eliot imagined in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, one of the founding critical texts of 20th-century modernism: [Tradition> involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence;...