Author: Dr. Aparna Das
DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.70798/Bijmrd/04010033
Abstract: Post-independence Indian theatre reveals profound tensions between colonial inheritance and indigenous cultural memory, a conflict powerfully dramatised in Girish Karmad’s Hayavadana. The study offers a postcolonial reading of the play to explore the paradox of “incompleteness within completeness” as a central metaphor for fractured identity. Through myth, folktale, and the motif of transposed heads, the play interrogates hybridity, cultural ambivalence, and the instability of selfhood. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the article argues that Hayavadana articulates the psychological and cultural condition of the postcolonial subject through a syncretic theatrical form.
Keywords: Postcolonial theatre, Hybridity, Identity, Incompleteness, Myth, folk tradition, Girish Karnad
Page No: 246-251