It was a plea against war…
OK nothing new. Lots of people make that and then sit back and let the world go on as before, with wars being fought again and again.
But this plea had something new to it.
It was the women characters in Mahabharata who seemed to be making a plea, an emphatic one at that, against war. ‘Aandubali’, a play wrote and directed by veteran dramatist Vayala Vasudevan Pillai, had prominent women characters from the epic, Mahabharata, including Kunti, Draupadi, Subhadra and Gandhari pondering on how their actions had led to the battle fought on the plains of Kurukshetra, the battle for upholding ‘dharma’, the battle of righteousness against evil. These characters go in for some kind of an introspection and try to find out if they could have averted the war that took away many of their near and dear ones.
‘Aandubali’ was presented recently on the stage by M.Phil students of the Centre for Performing and Visual Arts, University of Kerala, at The University Senate Hall in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of Kerala. Working effectively on symbolic levels, the play had scenes that made viewers sit up and think, on things like the futility of war, the concept of ‘dharma’ and ‘adharma’, death etc.
‘Aandubali’ finds relevance as a play that, though based on the Mahabharata, has universal significance and speaks of things that we can easily relate to.
