Perspectives and Challenges in Indian–English Drama (Hardbound - 2012)

The present critical anthology on Indian-English drama is a welcome addition to the ever-increasing repertoire of the academic world. It contains some twenty-two papers on diverse authors, themes and trends. The authors treated in it are Girish Karnad, Mahesh Dattani, Badal Sircar, Rabindranath Tagore (chronologically, Tagore should have been placed first), and Vijay Tendulkar. The themes dealt with herein are myths and folk tales, religious propensity, social alienation, audience participation, feminine psyche, role of freedom, and man-woman relationship. And the trends touched upon in this anthology are mythic and symbolic interpretations, focusing on folklore, experimentations in Third Theatre and street plays, and feminist approaches to certain plays. The broad spectrum of Indian-English Drama has also been presented in a few papers.

In its present shape and size, this anthology will, hopefully, find a place on the library shelves and enlighten the academics on the perspectives and challenges inherent in Indian-English Drama.

Neeru Tandon did her M.A., LL.B., from Kanpur University. She has topped in her LL.B. Exams and won Gold Medal for it. She obtained her Ph.D. in Indian- English Literature in 1991. Her research papers form part of several anthologies as independent chapters and have also appeared in several reputed journals. Her area of interest includes contemporary fiction— mainly Indo-Anglian, Afro-American, and Canadian Women Writers’ writings in English. Presently, she is a Senior Reader at the Postgraduate Department of English, V.S.S.D. College, Kanpur. Woman Literature is an area in which she is carrying out her postdoctoral research work (D.Litt). She has experience of more than eighteen years of teaching postgraduate students. She is guiding research scholars in various fields like Parsi fiction, Canadian fiction, Afro-American fiction and Indian-writing in English. Founder Secretary of Kanpur University Association for English-studies, Dr. Tandon has several publications to her credit, which include critical commentary on R.N. Tagore’s Muktadhara, Anita Desai’s In Custody, and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable.