Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the dramas of Urdu-Hindi playwright Upendranath Ashk. His oeuvre reveals a creative encounter of Urdu-Hindi literature with Western naturalism. It challenges current ideological hegemony and represents a contradiction in the cultural narrative of dominant literary discourse.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with the dramas of Urdu-Hindi playwright Upendranath Ashk. His work challenges current ideological hegemony and represents a contradiction in the cultural narrative of dominant literary discourse. It was received positively in the 1950s. After partition, in the period of the nationalization of Indian theatre, dramatists were required to emancipate themselves from Western influence and begin writing in the mode of either classical Sanskrit drama or Indian folk theatre. It was also the period when Urdu began to be associated with the cultural narrative of Islam and Muslims in South Asia, whereas Hindi was seen as the national language of India and as the language of Hinduism and Hindus. This shift in ideology led to a negative reception of Urdu-Hindi playwright Ashkk and his naturalistic dramatic production after the 1960s.

In the following I deal with Hindi drama from its beginnings until the 1960s. I emphasize the importance of Urdu drama and Western theatre for the origination and development of Hindi theatre. Next, I proceed to discuss the work of Ashk whose immense contribution to the field of Hindi drama was first honoured, but then neglected. I argue that his work shows a subtle blending of Urdu-Hindi Progressivism, the Western dramatic tradition, and the Hindu reform movements and is thus both modernist Western and modernist Indian in character. However, as Ashk did not write in the wake of the poetics of classical Sanskrit or Indian folk theatre, his work was considered antithetical to the dominant cultural narrative.