Re-Inventing Tradition and Decolonizing the Stage: A Study of Girish Karnads Plays

Abstract

This postmodern blurring of cultural lines has resulted in a universal humanity that can be accessed via a single body of knowledge. The epiphanic moment of confronting the other shifted the focus from Europe to the East, where scholars realized that the epistemic discourse of their own countries reflected the same a priori delimitation of knowledge. The Radhakrishnan Commission, for example, proposed in 1948 that the fields of natural science, social science, and the humanities should study different aspects of reality: facts, events, and values, respectively. In order to dismantle the epistemic dominance of western knowledge and eradicate the homogeneity of discourses, the time has come to highlight, as Bakhtin would have it, the importance of comparative dialogic in establishing cross-cultural dialogic. In a same vein, the Orientalist paradigm has to shift toward a focus on humanistic conversation between South and South and a reconfiguration of the Asian dilemma of singularities. To get a holistic comprehension of human beings, a paradigm shift and rethinking—what Derrida terms Transformed Humanities, New Humanities—is essential.