Night's Sunlight
A play by Ketaki Kushari Dyson
A fascinating example of modernity in Bengali writing is Ketaki Kushari Dyson's play 'Night's Sunlight', which was performed in her own English translation from September to October 2000 in nine different British venues.
* By WILLIAM RADICE
The Bengali original, Raater Rode, seen performed by Sunil Das's Sangbarta Group in Birmingham in 1994, I then enjoyed only moderately. This time I enjoyed it hugely - not just because the English was easier for me to follow - but because to see it in the British context gave it an added interest. The Bengali performance could only appeal to those who could understand it in Bengali; in Ketaki's superbly fluent and idiomatic English version, this interesting, diasporic play can now be fully absorbed into English experience, just as we can absorb Ibsen or Brecht.
The translation was commissioned by the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, and the production, by Tidal Wave Theatre, was a special Millennium Festival Project of the Centre. Performances were given in London, Swansea, Norwich, Reading, Cambridge, Bristol, Henley, and Oxford. The premiere of the English production took place at the conference on 'Writing Diasporas' held at the University of Wales, Swansea. I find Ketaki's approach to playwriting extremely musical. There is elegance and humour in Ketaki's linguistic and intellectual patterning. She is strongly aware of unfair hierarchies: whether in language (Bengali finds itself low down in the linguistic pecking-order), gender (the basic hierarchy that allows male motor-scooter riders in India to ride with a crash helmet, while permitting their female pillion-riders to ride with no helmet), or the 'wealth of nations'. She is a fighter, but a very positive and cheerful fighter. Her play is about many things, but performed in English, in the British context, it projects, above all, the determination of second generation Asian immigrants to assert their 'mission control', to find their own way of steering through a complex, perilous, and baffling world. *
A longer version of this review appeared in The Statesman, Calcutta.
- Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Night's Sunlight, Virgilio Libro:
Kidlington, Oxon, (no date), pp. 70,
ISBN 0-9537052-1-8
Dr William Radice is Head of the Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia, SOAS, University of London and specializes in Bengali.
E-mail: wr@soas.ac.uk