The English language is now looked upon as the single most unifying element of the new generation of playwrights and the literary. But certainly, without the put-on, British accents as this is not suitable to the Indian stage.
The new generation of playwrights that includes Swar Thounaojam -26, Ram Ganesh Kamatham- 25, Anupama Chandrasekhar -28, Harsha Dandapani -30, Gowri Ramnarayan, Guru Charan Das, Manjula Padmanabhan, Poile Sengupta, Ramu Ramanathan are few names who have gained popularity recently in the playwrights world creating their masterpieces in the English language.
Royal Court Theatre of Mumbai admits that they receive only a few plays in Hindi and Marathi or Bangla and Tamil for the Writer’s Bloc festival held there whereas English entries were numerous.
RCT’s festival offers young playwrights the mentorship of Carl Miller and Phyllida Lloyd( both of them are RCT playwrights) along with the assurance of production and performance of their play, they create, at the end of the workshop.
English playwrights have not been too much in India except for Mahesh Dattani lately. But the new breed of writers is not playwrights only for money as these passionate writers want to share the idea and their thoughts.
Girish Karnad, the veteran actor, playwright, and director also started writing in English before he died. The veteran actor didn’t consider English to with an alien language anymore.
English speaking audience of today does not consider the language to be an elitist concept. Rather it is the medium to keep the current generation of theatre practitioners connected with the audiences.
Shri Ratna Tata Trust has started a project grant to Ranga Shankara which is a 2-year-old theatre in Bangalore to organize a translator’s residency program at Adishakti in Puducherry. This organization’s aim is to adapt to Indian languages plays in English. This is an effort to move performance text from Indian languages into English so that the contemporary theatre community can start enacting them.
