Gendered Trauma in The Starved by Mangalu Charan Biswal
Keywords:
Caste, Gender, Trauma, Theatre, FeminismAbstract
In Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism, Gayle Austin (Austin, 1990) describes the use of presence and absence of female characters as tools to critique the social discourse communicated through theatre. The act of reading with the context of the presence and absence of female characters in plays reveals the power discrepancy and resultant correlation between characters. This reading of presence and absence in the masculine world constructed by the male author is interlinked with the hegemony practiced in the society where the plays are set in. This paper is a study of the Odissi writer Mangalu Charan Biswal’s play The Starved to critique the role played by gender in defining trauma caused by poverty for Dalit characters from Bajnia community of Orrisa. The paper studies the absence and presence; silence and invisibility of female characters in this play to reveal the discursive bias which allows marginalization of female trauma in Dalit theatre.
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