Inter-Caste Marriage and the Liberal Imagination Vijay Tendulkar's KANYADAAN

Critique of Liberal Hypocrisy

Given the paucity of dalit figures on our stages, Arun Athavale continues to carry an extraordinary burden of representation. It is telling that the English-language production directed by Lillete Dubey, the character, played by Joy Sengupta, had a limp.⁵⁹ This need to literally translate the taint of caste into a physical affliction makes Dubey's airy claim that the play's caste politics can be compared with those of race - 'just replace the daughter with a white girl from New York wanting to marry a black boy from Harlem' - particularly stunning.⁶⁰ A similar depiction of an inter-racial marriage is in fact virtually unimaginable, particularly if the black boy were to be played by a white actor. But this leads us to a final twist in the politics of representation. Some critics and viewers of the play have found it particularly offensive that Arun continues to be played by non-dalit actors. Here we may learn something from the debates that continue to inform the staging of Othello. For generations, black actors fought for the right to play this role, and for some of them, such as Paul Robeson, this right became synonymous with the struggle for Black rights. But recently, Hugh Quarshie, a Ghanaian-British actor writes that he resisted playing Othello because the play cannot help being, in the final analysis, a 'white view' of 'Moors'.⁶¹As Othello descends into gibbering and murderous anger, he is reduced to a type; black actors cannot rescue such a representation. It's a role that simply cannot be played with dignity, and therefore it is better to let it be visible as a 'white' representation of black masculinity. It seems to me that such an argument applies much more powerfully to KANYADAAN, which is far less nuanced about the social conflict at hand inasmuch as it lacks any depiction of casteism, whereas in Othello we have Iago, Brabantio and Roderigo who graphically portray race-hatred. KANYADAAN cannot depict dalit masculinity precisely because it is, as every staging of it claims, a critique of liberal hypocrisy. But it re- mains confined within the limits of such a critique. Every time it is staged, the narcissism of liberalism is enacted all over again.