ABSTRACT
Aer India’s Independence in 1947, practitioners searched for a theatre that could reƒect the complex historical, political, social, and cultural realities faced by the new nation. In 1971, Girish Karnad wrote Hayavadana (The One with the Horse’s Head, arguably the most inƒuential play of the Indian post-Independence era) to address the divided self of the post-colonial subject. In Hayavadana, hybridity was not just the subject of the play, but its structural strategy. Karnad employed a linear narrative structure, the proscenium stage, the fourth wall, and human characters, strategically placing them in a play with a structure of concentric circles, nonhuman characters, an acting style that breaks the fourth wall, and a way of seeing that challenged the
frame of the proscenium. By weaving together structures, aesthetics, and techniques inherited from the playwright-initiated, text-based, and plot-driven colonial theatre with structures, aesthetics, and techniques from Yakshagana, a well-known genre of dance-drama performed in his native state of Karnataka, Karnad created a play that is neither “Western” nor “Indian” but both: a new theatre that is both more than and dierent from the sum of its parts. Karnad consciously created a hybrid play that challenges the authority of colonial culture not by rejecting “Western” theatre or by giving center stage to theatrical practices and aesthetics denied by the dominant colonial theatrical discourse, but by challenging the binary terms on which colonial cultural authority was constructed. Hybridity is useful because it does not resolve “the tension between two cultures,” but “creates a crisis for any concept of [cultural] authority” by disrupting the production of cultural dierentiation (Bhabha 1994, 113-114).
