Rage & Beyond Irawati’s Gandahari
Another event for the “Remembering Veenapani Festival 2017”, “Rage & Beyond: Irawati’s Gandahari” under the writing and direction of Sanjukta Wagh, with Hitesh Dhutia on acoustic guitar.
Sanjurta Wagh says: Rage and Beyond is not just my response to the character of Gandhari as she appears in Iravati Karves Yugant, a text that was hailed as one of the first contemporary reinterpretations of the Mahabharata by a woman writer in the 1960s. When I enter this text in 2014, I am negotiating with the tremendous ebb and flow that inevitably happens when one tries to embody an archetype, a mythological character that is so deeply entrenched in the Indian cultural consciousness. It is at the same time my interaction with Irawati Karve as an empowered woman, deeply rooted in Marathi tradition, someone who was known for her scholarship and yet sought to have a conversation with the world through her non-academic writing. In this rewriting and embodiment of Irawatis Gandhari, I am trying to keep this complexity alive without the need to either essentialise or glorify either author or her character, by not trying to fill in the blanks.”