Article 14 Page 2

The Thannane Theatre Group headed by K.A.Gunasekaran often premieres the play. Thannane appeared on the theatre scene in 1995. Since then, the group has been creating an awareness of suppression of the oppressed and underprivileged people. It meets the people in every nook and corner of the interior villages of Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry through theatre and folk musical concerts. It is also actively involved in Dalit movements for creating awareness among these people. The group also conducts workshops at the national, state and village levels to help educate the theatre aspirants including by training eunuchs as performers. He also tries to construct a theatre for eunuchs to highlight the problems faced by them.

Bali Adugal takes a cue from an inscription, found in a temple of a village in Tamil Nadu, particularly in Kongu Nadu. The inscription is about a human sacrifice that took place in the past. The author with contemporaneity has successfully interpreted this text and highlighted the social oppression that the dalits suffered in the past. The play has textually blended yet another historic dialogue between Ambedkar and Mulk Raj Anand on social oppression which has been extracted from the book Annihilation of Caste written by Ambedkar.

The play depicts the practice of scapegoating and the conflicts between the dominant Brahmins and the downtrodden, the Dalits of the village. In this play, the rich and the powerful Brahmins dominate the poor and the downtrodden of the same village, always ridiculing and suppressing them on all occasions. The play features a scene where a 'rath' (chariot) is carried by Dalits and it accidentally breaks. This damage of the rath is attributed to the Dalits because a Dalit designed it. In order to pacify the village goddess, the Brahmin priests demand a human sacrifice. Hearing the news everyone flees in fear. In the end, a person is identified as the one to be sacrificed but the latter to save his own skin bargains with the priests. He places his wife as the sacrificial lamb and saves himself from being killed. Thus, the play deals with the problem of Dalits and how they are victimized by the 'system'. Though the play at the beginning tries to put forward the concept of Dalit theatre and to popularise it as a major tool against their atrocities, in the end, the play turns out to be a strong Dalit feminist manifesto.

The songs and music have to be heard and felt during the performance. Or else it would be very difficult to translate the emotive language of this play. Dalit's songs and music differ for death, marriage and war. The introductory and also recurring musical song in Bali Adugal is 'Thanthana'. 'Thanthana' is a song of lamentation played often by the Dalits to free themselves of the pain they undergo from oppression. It can be positively compared to the Blues of Afro-American music.

The second song in Bali Adugal begins with (naaluvarna sadhiyela) the description of four Varnas. The music tuned for this song is tragic. The holy thread of the Brahmins and the ropes of the tied Dalits are symbolic. The "threads" and the "ropes" are intertwined with the rhythm of the music and songs. One can find the fusion of the language of music and the language of body in the performance where the Brahmins beat with their holy threads on the tied Dalits. This scene is symbolically enacted to bring out the centuries-old oppression of the Dalits. The symbolic usage of thread, the author said, was designed for the audience

The third song in Bali Adugal is on "lahirtham". In Pondicherry children sing this 'song' inschools and on streets. Children jumping across a child who is made to bow down utter this word. Literally speaking the word has no meaning and in the play it is used as a pun to mock at the meaninglessness of the Sanskrit mantras uttered in rituals of the dominant castes.

In their very breath, in the tunes hummed, in their simple mocking songs, in their very use of language, Dalits have imbued a rebuffing attitude towards the hegemonic dominance that inheres in the caste hierarchy and it's a Herculean task that befalls the translator to transfer these cultural and linguistic nuances into the target language.

Human Scapegoats and Bali Adugal

The practice of human sacrifice was widely prevalent among the ancient Greeks, and in Slavonic ceremonies. In ancient Rome Human scapegoats such as Mamurius Returius (Frazer 1993-94) were too common. The King of the Bean on Twelfth Night, the Medieval Bishops of Fools, Abbot of Unreason, or the Lord of Misrule are figures of the same sort in Italy, Spain, and France. A close reading of Frazer's chapters (Frazer 1993-94 LVII and LVIII) on scapegoats in The Golden Bough show how the servile classes such as slaves, serfs, bondsmen, and generally the poor were used as human scapegoats. Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and 'useless' beings for human sacrifice during the period of calamities such as plague, drought or famine in the city. They used to sacrifice two of the outcasts as scapegoats. One of the victims was sacrificed for the men and the other for the women.

The play Bali Adugal takes its cue from this practice of human sacrifice that was widely prevalent in India. In the Indian social context the people chosen as the scapegoats were often people from the backwaters of society and quite often Dalits who refused to abide by the norms of the cast hierarchy. They were chosen as scapegoats with the explicit motive of removing the 'evil' from the body politic though ritualising the whole event and making it look divinely ordained in the eyes of the public. The playwright objectively questions this practice of scapegoating Dalits, at the same time subtly criticising the point of the transference of this oppression on Dalit women.

The play opens up multi-layered levels of texts within texts. The text incorporates the conversation between Dr.B.R.Ambedkar [BRA] and Mulk Raj Anand [MRA], which took place on an evening in May 1950, on a beach in Cuffe Parade Colaba, Mumbai. The conversation has been extracted from Appendix III of Dr.B.R.Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste. The play apart from taking a cue from an inscription also blends/intertwines the historic conversation throughout the text and turns the text into a dialogue, between the dialogues of the play. The play blends different pasts that become histories and reinterprets them with the contemporary problems in mind.

The very opening of the play puts forward the question of meaning and brings forth the politics of the translation of culture and language. The conversation follows:

This text of the 50's [a historical text] is about the Buddhist text [and practice] of addressing which itself is 2000 years old. These are the opening lines of the play, a conversation about the form of addressing which itself becomes a form of addressing the audience. Further, the conversation also strengthens the meaning-making process of words by explaining the meaning of the particular word 'idiocy', which means, "going round and round in a circle" [which has not been included in the Tamil translation but is found in the English version of the conversation].

Later in a conversation that interludes the play Dr. Ambedkar confesses about his participation in the Constitution Drafting Committee viz. that he was merely a scapegoat, which is the title of the play.

Such inter-textual references reverberate throughout the play. It opens up layers of texts within texts. Basically, the play revolves around a fragment of an inscription which has the dominant people's history or social text inscribed on the stones. The play is a careful intertwining of the historical text - the inscription, expanded and extended into a performance text - the play. In other words, there seems to be a translation of one text into another text or one genre into another. At another level, the play is a blend of dialogues in between the dialogues between Dr.B.R.Ambedkar and Dr. M.R.Anand. The play opens and ends with the dialogue between two - whereas the dialogues of the characters of the play become a subtext.

Again, the dialogue between B.R.Ambedkar and M.R.Anand is a sub- text taken from Appendix III of the main text, Annihilation of Caste. The dialogue as a sub text of a historical text becomes a main text in the play, which spins around the dialogue of the characters. The play is built upon such translation and transformation into an innovative framework of texts and genres. ]

As noted earlier, the play begins with a conversation between Dr. Ambedkar and Anand. Dr. Ambedkar alerts Anand on the first word he utters 'namashkar', and thereby the politics of language is brought to the forefront.

As for the translator, he is in a unique position with regard to this text i.e., the text of conversation between the two which itself is a translation in Tamil from English (which probably might be a translation from Marathi). One has to note here the point that the play itself is a site of a translated text.

In this context, it may be in order here to recall the views of Octavia Paz who in his short work on translation claims that all texts, being part of a literary system descended from and related to other systems, are "translations of translations of translations'. He continues: