CONTINUING RESISTANCE: A FEMINIST STUDY OF SELECT PLAYS BY POILE SENGUPTA

What emerges from a reading of these three plays is a feminist dramaturgy of remarkable consistency, coherence, and depth. Poile Sengupta has fashioned a theatre that is simultaneously local and global, contemporary and mythically resonant, realist and metatheatrical. Her central concern — the systematic subjugation of women through domestic violence, institutional indifference, political manipulation, and cultural narrative — is approached from multiple angles and across multiple temporalities, always with the dual awareness that oppression is structural (and therefore reproducible across time) and that resistance is also structural (and therefore sustainable across time). The title of this paper, Continuing Resistance, is meant to capture both the temporal persistence of Sengupta's feminist project across her career and the ongoing, never-completed quality of resistance as she dramatises it within her plays. Her women do not achieve liberation in any simple or final sense. Mangalam is dead before the play begins. Devi is gang-raped despite her courage. Shoorpanakha's mutilation cannot be undone. But in each case, Sengupta insists on the value and the reality of resistance — on the fact that these women did not simply acquiesce, that they protested and refused and persisted, that their stories of suffering are also stories of agency, however constrained. This insistence on agency-in-constraint is, perhaps, Sengupta's most significant contribution to the theory and practice of feminist theatre. She refuses the twin temptations of the feminist dramatic imagination: the temptation of triumph (the fantasy that women's struggles will produce clear, unambiguous victories) and the temptation of despair (the conviction that patriarchal structures are so complete and so deep that resistance is meaningless). Between these two positions she carves out a theatre of the difficult middle: a space in which women resist, partially succeed, are partially defeated, and continue. The grammar of this resistance is not the grammar of the heroic narrative but the grammar of the everyday — repetitive, cumulative, unglamorous, and absolutely necessary. It is in this insistence that Sengupta's work speaks most powerfully to the present. In a contemporary Indian context in which gender-based violence remains pervasive, in which the institutions of law, politics, and culture continue to be shaped by patriarchal assumptions, and in which the stories that a culture tells about itself — in epics, in media, in domestic ideology — continue to function as instruments of women's subordination, Sengupta's theatre of continuing resistance remains not merely artistically significant but politically urgent. She is not writing about the past. She is writing about now.

1.                Agarwal, Rekha. "Poile Sengupta's Alipha: A Feminist Study." Impressions: Journal of Literature and Culture, vol. XII, Jan. 2023, impressions.org.in. 2.                Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. 3.                de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. Jonathan Cape, 1953. 4.                Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Feminist Review, vol. 30, 1988, pp. 61–88. 5.                Mukherjee, Tutun, ed. Staging Resistance: Plays by Women in Translation. Oxford UP, 2005. 6.                Padmanabhan, Manjula. Harvest. Kali for Women, 1997. 7.                Sengupta, Poile. Women Centre Stage: The Dramatist and the Play. Routledge, 2010. 8.                "Mangalam." Women Centre Stage, Routledge, 2010, pp. 1–40. 9.                 "Alipha." Women Centre Stage, Routledge, 2010, pp. 180–240. 10.             "Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni." Women Centre Stage, Routledge, 2010, pp. 241–300.