Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq: An Exploration of Parsi Theatre on Stage

Girish Raghunath Karnad is a well-known contemporary playwright, screenwriter, translator, director and actor of Indian theatre and films. His position as an experimental playwright is as Badal Sirkar in Bengali, Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi; and Mohan Rakesh and Dharamveer Bharati in Hindi. In the early part of his life he was famous as a Kannada playwright, but with the passage of time he attained the status of a national figure in the realm of Indian theatre. He is one of those playwrights who experienced with the dramatic techniques of Parsi theatre and wrote one of his best plays Tughlaq. Karnad says that he had experienced the folk theatre (like Yakshagana) in his village by sitting with servants but with his parents he had experienced a new kind of theatre using full lights, sounds and all those modern dramatic techniques used in proscenium theatre. He says, “In my childhood, in a small town in Karnataka, I was exposed to two theatre forms that seemed to represent irreconcilably different worlds. Father took the entire family to see play staged by troupes of professional actors called natak companies which toured the countryside throughout the year. The plays were staged in semi-permanent structures on proscenium stages, with wings and drop curtains, and were illuminated by petromax lamps” (301)