Tagore second-rate playwright: Karnad
10 Nov 2012 7:22 AM IST
Veteran actor and playwright Girish Karnad has created another controversy by calling Rabindranath Tagore a ‘second rate playwright’. ‘Tagore was a great poet but a second rate playwright,’ Karnad said on Friday. Actor Soumitra Chattopadhyay slammed Karnad saying that Tagore was a very important playwright of the 20th century and that Karnad has a ‘mental block’ against Tagore. ‘It’s a personal bias against Tagore which is at work here. His plays may not be realistic but they are allegorical and that does not take away from the importance of a play like Dakghar’, Chattopadhyay told Millennium Post.
After publicly targeting Nobel laureate V S Naipaul by calling him anti-Muslim at the Mumbai Literary Festival recently, Karnad claimed Rabindranath Tagore’s peers also did not accept him as a playwright. ‘Rabindranath Tagore wrote mediocre plays...We should learn to be practical in this matter,’ he said.
Reacting to Karnad’s critique of Tagore, another contemporary playwright from Bengal, Kaushik Sen, said even Karnad hasn’t produced anything ‘spectacular’ in the last 10 years. ‘Every playwright needs to be reinterpreted in the modern context. It took Shambhu Mitra to give us a modern version of Tagore’s Raktakarabi. When I directed Tagore’s Dakghar last year, I harped on the plight of the state in the context of the struggling farmers of Nandigram and Singur. How can you dismiss a Raktakarabi or Muktadhara as mediocre?’ Sen told Millennium Post.
Veteran theatre director Bibhas Chakraborty also hit out at Karnad, saying he has no authority to be ‘judgemental’ about Tagore’s works. ‘If Karnad had seen Raktakarabi, he would have understood its relevance in today’s world. If he can’t direct Tagore or if it is his personal dislike of a literary genius which is at work, why should we give him any importance?’ he said.
After publicly targeting Nobel laureate V S Naipaul by calling him anti-Muslim at the Mumbai Literary Festival recently, Karnad claimed Rabindranath Tagore’s peers also did not accept him as a playwright. ‘Rabindranath Tagore wrote mediocre plays...We should learn to be practical in this matter,’ he said.
Reacting to Karnad’s critique of Tagore, another contemporary playwright from Bengal, Kaushik Sen, said even Karnad hasn’t produced anything ‘spectacular’ in the last 10 years. ‘Every playwright needs to be reinterpreted in the modern context. It took Shambhu Mitra to give us a modern version of Tagore’s Raktakarabi. When I directed Tagore’s Dakghar last year, I harped on the plight of the state in the context of the struggling farmers of Nandigram and Singur. How can you dismiss a Raktakarabi or Muktadhara as mediocre?’ Sen told Millennium Post.
Veteran theatre director Bibhas Chakraborty also hit out at Karnad, saying he has no authority to be ‘judgemental’ about Tagore’s works. ‘If Karnad had seen Raktakarabi, he would have understood its relevance in today’s world. If he can’t direct Tagore or if it is his personal dislike of a literary genius which is at work, why should we give him any importance?’ he said.
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