Collected Plays: Volume Three: Yayati, Wedding Album, and Boiled Beans on Toast

by Girish Karnad

The tale of a mythic king’s aggression against his offspring, and his desperation to escape the curse of old age laid upon him in the prime of life. The anxieties that torment a middle-class family as their daughter awaits the arrival of the ‘suitable boy’ from abroad whom she has never met. The morphing of the city of Bangalore, whose founding myth celebrates its human ambience, into India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ where strangers are thrown together, get entangled, and are violently pulled apart. In the plays of Girish Karnad, one of our fi nest playwrights, time, family, love, and sexual aggression resound from the mythic past into the contemporary megalopolis. The three plays collected in this volume not only span Karnad’s creative graph from his first play, Yayati, to his most recent, Boiled Beans on Toast, but also chart out the themes that have disturbed and shaped Indian drama since Independence. The volume includes an extensive introduction by theatre scholar Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, which analyses Karnad’s work in the context of modern Indian drama.

294 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 22, 2018

About the author

Girish Raghunath Karnad (Konkani : गिरीश रघुनाथ कार्नाड, Kannada : ಗಿರೀಶ್ ರಘುನಾಥ್ ಕಾರ್ನಾಡ್) (born 19 May 1938) is a contemporary writer, playwright, screenwriter, actor and movie director in Kannada language. His rise as a prominent playwright in 1960s, marked the coming of age of Modern Indian playwriting in Kannada, just as Badal Sarkar did it in Bengali, Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi, and Mohan Rakesh in Hindi. He is a recipient of the 1998 Jnanpith Award for Kannada, the highest literary honour conferred in India.
For four decades Karnad has been composing plays, often using history and mythology to tackle contemporary issues. He has translated his major plays into English, and has received critical acclaim across India. His plays have been translated into several Indian languages and directed by eminent directors like Ebrahim Alkazi, B. V. Karanth, Alyque Padamsee, Prasanna, Arvind Gaur, Satyadev Dubey, Vijaya Mehta, Shyamanand Jalan and Amal Allana. He is also active in the world of Indian cinema working as an actor, director, and screenwriter, both in Hindi and Kannada cinema, earning numerous awards along the way. He was conferred Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan by the Government of India.

Reviews

[Neeraja Vaidya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essence:
This book has 3 plays by Girish Karnad - Yayati, Wedding Album and Boiled Beans on Toast, Yayati being the first play written by him and Boiled Beans on Toast his penultimate.

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Inspiration:
Plays is a form of literature that I haven't explored much. Watching plays is relatively easier as good actors and drama sets pour emotion and context into the script. However, reading a play is very difficult. The reader has to put in a lot of imagination to understand the emotions behind the dialogue scripted by the playwright. So, I decided to read Girish Karnad's play and exercise those grey cells.

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Summary:
Yayati is a play based on King Yayati from Mahabharat. The King cheats on this wife Devayani with her maid servant Sharmishtha and is cursed to untimely invincible old age. However, he convinces his son Puru to take on his old age in exchange of the later's youth. Though the main storyline is quite different from the one in Mahabharat, the play manages to capture some key emotions of the characters - Devayani's pride, Sharmishtha's self-respect, Yayati's temptation, Puru's resignation, Chitralekha's remorse and Swarnlata's denial, as well as the relationships that these characters share with each other.

The play Wedding Album is the best of the three plays. It captures the scenes in a family, where the daughter is about to get married to a guy settled in USA, whom she has met only digitally. The story resolves around the bride, her siblings, parents and their maid. The story highlights the hypocrisy in each of these characters, and shows how even the most intimate family is unaware of the true nature of each of these characters. This play digs deep into human nature and psychology.

The play Boiled Beans on Toast is the story of the budding metropolis of Bangalore. The story explores the ills of city life and how each strata of society be it the rich upper class, the aspiring middle class or the struggling lower class struggles with the fast changing life in this metro. It shows how certain evils like falsehood, deceit and greed exist everywhere in cities irrespective of class, gender and age.
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What did I like?
1) Simple situations and dialogues with complex underlying themes
2) Intricate story lines with few characters
3) Intelligent unveiling of characters through situations and dialogues
4) Addressing of contemporary social evils and human mindsets in the second and third play.
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What could have been better?
1) Yayati seemed a bit out of context and could have been more elaborate and more adhering to facts.
2) Boiled beans on toast is a little too negative and pessimistic. The play brings out much more of a bad shade in the characters.
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Rating:
3.5/5

[Deepa Gokhale-bhujle]

Loved the plays, especially "Yayati" the connection between our culture that often puts the burden or responsibilities on a young person whether to carry the tradition or otherwise. It can truly destroy the energy in a person and take away the youth! It is not a story of just a king and a prince but it is a story that can take place in any household

I had listened to this story about the king asking his son for his youth. But I did not remember what exactly happens at the end and I think that was more because when I heard the story at a very young age, I did not understand the meaning of the youth or the old age as I was merely 9-10 reading the Mahabharata.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in Bangalore and Sirsi while staying with a friend's upper middle class Indian family and so I'm probably over-identifying with the way Wedding Album and Boiled Beans on Toast seem to let you into family dynamics that I felt-- with no evidence -- might be similar to the ones taking place around me in Konkani.