Aspects of Power in Sakharam Binder:
The study of Vijay Tendulkar’s plays gives us idea that the dramatist deals with actual incident in Indian community. In his plays, he was concerned with the means of power effects of oppression manifested in different forms, he lash out the institution of marriage and hypocrisy of the society. Whatever his predicament, it is obvious that he plays the power game through his elitist discourse to subvert the Indian Folk style and is reluctant to make his position clear.
Male Dominance and Female Frailty:
This play explains the complexities in the relationship between men and women of Indian society and how men misused the merit of power which is in their hands to oppress women. It exposes the bad treatment
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Arundhati Banerjee observe that this play ignores the cultural norms and boldly presents the crude preventions caused by physical deformity. We realize that, the main characters in the play are abnormal in their behavior and each one is unique in her or his abnormality, Sakharam smokes, speaks vulgar language, and drinks liquor; Champa is rebellious for her alienation and seeks for her joy; where Laxmi’s religious belief is unrealistic, obstinately conventional, and she was inhuman fundamentalist (Babu 90). Sakharam reveals the negative treatment by his parents and his father made to run away from the home, he said: “Born in a Brahmin family, but I’m a Mahar, a dirty scavenger. I call that a bloody joke! I ran away from home when I was eleven. Got fed up with my father’s beating. Nothing I did ever seemed right. You’d think I was his enemy or something. The way he’d thrash me!”(Tendulkar 127). The brutal treatment of Sakharam Binder by his parents leads him to behave rude in order to overcome his …show more content…
He chewed it up long ago. He bought me from my mother even before I’d become a woman. He married me when I don’t even know what marriage meant. He’d torture me at night. He branded me and stuck needles into me and made me do awful filthy things. I ran away. He bought me back and stuffed chilly powder into that god-awful place, where it hurts it most”(Tendulkar). Sakharam's citadel of power starts crumbling when Champa refuses to sleep with Sakharam; Champa doesn’t conform to the usual ‘man demanding’ and ‘women consenting’ in sexual matter. When Sakharam is overwhelmed by a passion and wants to gratify his sexual urge she retorts “Now you just behave yourself. Don’t you go around like a dog behind a bitch”(Tendulkar) as he cannot satiate her owing to the presence of Laxmi. Sakharam's power is totally negated at the end when Laxmi before parting reveals Champa's affair with Dawood. The physical lust leads Sakharam to throttle Champa due to his sexual jealousy and as a form of revenge when she leaves the house in his absence, this behavior for Sakharam is challenge to his power in his own house or code of ‘rules’. The secret relationship between Champa and Dawood reveals a new incident about practicing of physical lust in the modern
Throughout the plays, the reader can visualize how men dismiss women as trivial and treat them like property, even though the lifestyles they are living in are very much in contrast. The playwrights, each in their own way, are addressing the issues that have negatively impacted the identity of women in society.
Roy asserts that people’s fears of upsetting the power balance based in the caste system often leads to a blind acceptance of the status quo and a continuous sense of self-deprecation by individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy. When Velutha’s father fears that his son’s affair with a Touchable will have potentially disastrous consequences for him, he serves his own self-interest and is willing to endanger is son. He exposes the affair to the grandmother of the woman his son is having an affair with, revealing the extreme degree to which caste and conforming to societal norms drive the behaviors of individuals in Indian society; “So Vellya Paapen had come to tell Mamamachi himself. As a Paravan and a man with mortgaged body parts he considered it his duty…they had made the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible really happen…Offering to kill his son. To tear him limb from limb” (242). His fear of disrupting the status quo (i.e. the Indian social hierarchy) is so great that he is willing to sacrifice his own son’s life to protect his own. Rather than considering the genuine...
In Nehru’s India, women were victims of a “passive revolution” that subtly advanced bourgeoisie men of higher castes under a guise of parliamentary democracy. Though women have presided over the Indian National Congress, served as a prime minister, and represent a large part of India’s la...
Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, places Jane Austen’s emphasis of equality in marriage within an intercultural context, where the difference in culture is the source of social tension. As West meets East, American tycoon William Darcy sparks cultural conflict with his presumption of Indian girls’ “simple” and traditional characteristics and of their ready subordination to American men. Parallel to Elizabeth’s assertion of her father and Darcy’s equal class standing, Lalita’s fierce rebuttal of Darcy’s assumption highlights his ignorance of the Indian culture, especially his inability to understa...
In every society, the difference between genders leads to different roles and lifestyles depending on the culture of each society. While there may be similarities between gender roles among many societies, the explanations tend to be different from culture to culture. The society depicted in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is reminiscent of an Ancient Greek or Roman society, where the men are considered to be strong warriors and breadwinners, and the women are looked at as objects, whose main duty is to tend to the children and obey the husband without a question. While at first glance, the Shakespearean play Tempest seems different from Achebe’s book, in reality, similar themes lie at its center, including the abuse of women and male power dominating throughout the play. While the only female character is a young girl, who is a puppet of his father’s will, she has courage to be honest and to stand up against her father on more than one occasion, exhibiting an innate female power like Ekwefi in Things Fall Apart. Hence these two works, while written three hundred years apart and showing two societies at the opposite ends of colonization, illustrate that the gap between them is not as big as one would think when it comes to society’s gender roles.
Through the perforated sheet, Aadam Aziz never saw his bride until he asked for her hand in marriage. Instead, he fell in love with “the softness of her ticklish skin, or the perfect tiny wrists, or the beauty of her ankles.” Aadam Aziz, who had concentrating on loving the pieces of Naseem, was ill prepared for her presence in its entirety. Naseem and Aadam’s marriage “rapidly dissolved into a place of frequent and devastating warfare under whose depredations the young girl behind the sheet and the gauche young Doctor turned rapidly into different stranger beings…”
To begin, Nair shows us that both couples have a willingness to work and fight for their relationships, from Dubey's thoughtful marigold proposal and fierce protection of Alice to Aditi's honest confession of her affair, and Hemant's forgiving response. Hemant explains to Aditi, "What marriage doesn't have risks? Whether our parents introduce us, or we meet at a club, what difference does it make?" Hemant emphasizes that it is not so much about how two people meet but more so about how they approach a relationship: with honesty, integrity, and empathy. Relationships and individuals are complex, and thus should be regarded with sincerity. In the same way, culture is just as complex. Returning to the censorship scene, Aditi watches from the sidelines as her ex-boyfriend and television personality, Vikram, poses the question of censorship in India on his show Delhi.com: is censorship necessary and how much western influence can an another culture accept? The question can be related back to how one approaches a relationship. Censorship is not a valid means of upholding culture; it is dishonest and rather ineffective. Instead, Monsoon Wedding encourages us to commemorate India's
Sharma, Pankaj. "Depiction Of Woman As Human: A Reading Of Excesses Of Feminist Readings Of Shakespeare's King Lear." Language In India 13.12 (2013): 433-446. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.
The corruption in hospitals, where “doctors can keep their government salary and work in private hospitals”, sees people like Balram’s father die of horrible deaths every day. Dismayed by the lack of respect of the government for its dying citizens, Balram is corrupted by the fact that in the “darkness”, there is no service, not even in death. Balram also claims that “the schoolteacher had stolen our lunch money”, which was for a government funded lunch program. However, Balram doesn’t blame him, which justifies that Balram, from such a young age gives into the idea of corruption saying that “...you can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet”. In addition to his father and the school teacher, Balram is corrupted by his childhood hero Vijay. Growing up, Balram idolises Vijay for having escaped “the darkness”. However what he is ignorant of is that even though Vijay is in “the light” he is still corrupted by “the darkness”. Balram explains that “Vijay and a policemen beat another men to death”, yet he doesn’t see it as a problem, because he understand that one cannot become successful in such a corrupt system without becoming as corrupt as the system itself. It is here that Adiga asks the question of how are impoverished Indians are expected to refuse to engage in corruption when they live in such poor conditions. Thus, the reader is able to sympathize with Balram’s corruption,
Garg in ‘Hari Bindi’ discusses the story of a common woman and made it extraordinary by the active force she was experiencing in herself to live her life. The husband of the protagonist symbolises the power and control of patriarchy that had restricted her life in such a way
Balram from time to time would take the Honda City without Mr. Ashok’s knowledge and drive others around. As his time in Delhi progressed, the reader is able to see this once innocent country boy turn into a greedy city driver. Balram would begin to stop sending his family money and cut contact with them all together. Despite all the unconventional actions Balram had done in Delhi, there was no act more heinous than the killing of his employer Mr. Ashok. Balram knew it was the perfect time to do it because of the amount of money Mr. Ashok had with him.
In the novel A Passage to India, written by Forster, he is bias towards the women in the novel. The society when Forster wrote the novel in the 1920’s had different views on women than it has today a...
Indian Writing in English has a special status in English Literature owing to its treatment of women characters. Short stories help the writers to project select characters in an impressive way to the readers. In Indian context the status of woman in a society and her treatment is very different from those of her European or American counterparts. Women are depicted both as a good and evil in literature by various writers. However, in no literature is a women stereotyped as was done in Indian literature. Away from the mythical stereotyping of women, Ruskin Bond portrayed his women in a different way. The female characters of his short stories range from a small child to a grandmother. These characters are as powerful as men and have left a strong impression on the readers. I have chosen following eight short stories for the critical analysis of Ruskin Bond’s Women in this paper.
...herefore found pleasure and contentment within each other because of the pain that they both shared. Therefore this proves that in a country such as India, where social status and prosperity are crucial, it is evident that love takes preference over all, despite the norms of India, love will always be a priority. Therefore we see that not only did Ammu and Velutha break the ‘Love Laws’ , but so did Estha and Rahel break the ‘Love Laws’ when sleeping with each other.
In the present play Vijay Tendulkar chooses a term of judicial register as the title of his play to make a powerful comment on a society with a heavy patriarchal bias that makes justice impossible and that converts the august judicial system into an instrument of oppression of women and the vulnerable. Ideally justice can be provided only if the judge and the judicial system are objectively detached. But the same objective detachment can become the face of a very repressive and dehumanized system if the persons involved in the process of justice are themselves devoid of human value and compassion.