Asif Currimbhoy (born 1928)[1] is an Indian playwright writing in English.

Currimbhoy
is India's first authentic voice in the theatre . He is one modern Indian playwright
who has shown great interest in producing drama. Among the very few dramatists
writing plays in English, he has made his dbut as a dramatist for the stage. His 29
plays are first and foremost meant for the stage.Born to an industrialist father and a
social worker mother, Carrimbhoy's acquaintance with English language at a young
age was responsible for him attaining mastery over the language. He pursued his
higher education from the Wisconsin University and his love for Shakespearean
drama has influenced his body of work.His first play Goa witten in the 1964 deals
with racial discrimination as a paradigm of postcolonialism.
Asif Currimbhoy (1928- ) is a prolific Indian dramatist of international renown. He
emerged on the theatrical scene in India during the early 1960s, establishing
himself as a dramatic documentarian of contemporary political events in his
country, including the Indian invasion of Goa and the Bangladeshi war of liberation.
The English-language playwright has also taken as his subjects the lives of such
eminent Asian spiritual leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. For his
particular political and theatrical vision of India, Currimbhoy has been described as
one of the most provocative Indo-English dramatists alive today, and yet he has
earned greater acclaim outside his own country.

Asif Currimbhoy was born in Bombay, in 1928. His family was prominent among the
Khojas, a small, close-knit community of Shiite Muslims. Raised in an atmosphere of
privilege, Currimbhoy attended a Jesuit mission school before moving to the United
States to study at the University of California. After graduating, he returned to India
and became an executive for India's Burmah-Shell Corporation. The job involved
extensive travel throughout the country, from which he gained first-hand
experience of the settings that later figured in his plays. Currimbhoy's first play was
The Tourist Mecca (1961), a romance dealing with the theme of East-West encounter
that takes place in the shadow of the Taj Mahal.

The emerging playwright came to national attention in 1961, when his play The
Doldrummers was banned from performance by government censors because of its
illicit content. The play portrays the fundamental humanity of a community of
dropouts who are living a promiscuous, hedonistic existence in shacks along Juhu
Beach, on the coast outside Bombay. Artists and celebrities in India responded with
outrage to the ban, eventually forcing the government to reconsider. Currimbhoy
went on to produce several other plays during the first phase of his career, including
The Dumb Dancer (1962), an experimental Kathakali dance drama; OM (1962), a
bold attempt to portray Hindu spirituality on stage; and Thorns on a Canvas (1963),
a satirical look at the production of art and the patronage behind it. The mid-1960s

also saw the beginning of the playwright's interest in dramatising various aspects of
Indian political history: The Captives (1963) depicts the political climate in India at
the time of the 1962 Sino-Indian war, focusing on the war's effect on the country's
Muslim minority; and Goa (1966) allegorically critiques India's 1961 invasion of the
Portuguese colony of Goa through the story of an Indian boy's ardent but possessive
love for a Goan girl.

Currimbhoy began another phase of intensive productivity in the early 1970s,

beginning with Inquilab (1971; 'Revolution'), a play depicting the appeal to Indian
youth of the Mao-influenced Naxalite movement that emerged in West Bengal in the
late 1960s, and Darjeeling Tea? (1971), a seriocomic portrait of the last 'pukka
sahibs' (or Englishmen) who remained in India as tea planters after independence.
Among the playwright's most ambitious works is Sonar Bangla (1972; 'Golden
Bengal'), a sweeping epic that attempts to dramatise the liberation of Bangladesh
from Pakistan in 1971. While critics have recognised the importance of the play's
themes and the potential for significant dramatic impact, some, including M.K. Naik,
conclude that the immense scope of the story renders the play ultimately
unstageable. Om Mane Padme Hum! (1972; 'Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus!')
incorporates newsreel clips, slide projection, and filmed scenes in a multimedia
production that chronicles the Dalai Lama's escape from Tibet in 1959. In An
Experiment with Truth (1972), Currimbhoy establishes the dramatic structure
according to key events in Ghandi's political life, while focusing on the great leader's
personal struggle to remain sexually abstinent.

Currimbhoy has written numerous other full-length and one-act plays, as well as
scripts for film and television. Notable among his one-act plays are The Hungry
Ones (1966), which draws a provocative comparison between famine victims and
American beatniks; The Refugee (1971), which portrays the flight of 10 million
refugees from East Pakistan into India in 1971; and The Miracle Seed (1973), a
depiction of Indian village life.

The popular and critical response to Currimbhoy's work has been mixed. Writing for
the Indian magazine Frontline (Vol. 20, Issue 01, 2003), Bhaskar Ghose notes that
the English-language plays of Currimbhoy and others had little impact on Indian
audiences during the 1970s. Ghose speculates that this may have been because
audiences were resistant to the idea of Indian plays written in English, or perhaps
because the works of Currimbhoy and his English-language contemporaries were
simply overshadowed by the great popularity of Vijay Tendulkar's Marathi plays and
Girish Karnad's Kannada plays. 'Whatever it was', he concludes, 'all of these

[English-language] plays amounted to very little in terms of the creation of a

vigorous tradition of play writing.'

In critical terms, many praise the sophisticated craftsmanship of Currimbhoy's

drama, and his ability to present compelling ethical concerns through the
interweaving of political events and private relationships. On the other hand, in his
article 'A Theatre of Journalism', which appeared in Indian P.E.N. (vol. 40, no. 12,
1974) A.K. Bhatt charges that the journalistic quality of much of his work (written as
it was in immediate response to current events) has resulted in a lack of attention to
language. M.K. Naik offers extensive analysis of the playwright's characterisation,
dialogue, themes, and stagecraft in his essay 'Half-God's Plenty: The Drama of Asif
Currimbhoy', which appears in his Studies in Indian English Literature (1987). Naik
concludes that while Currimbhoy demonstrates fine dramatic instincts in many
scenes within his plays, he ultimately fails to translates these instincts into
coherent, effective drama. Most critics recognise Goa as one of Currimbhoy's most
successful dramatic efforts. Daphne Pan offers an in-depth analysis of the play in
her essay, 'Asif Currimbhoy's Goa: A Consideration', which appears in Through
Different Eyes: Foreign Responses to Indian Writing in English (1984), edited by
Kirpal Singh. P. Bayapa Reddy, one of the foremost scholars of Currimbhoy's work,
commends the psychological complexity, fine balance, and lyrical language of the
play in his 'Asif Currimbhoy's Goa: A Study', which appeared in Ariel: A Review of
International English Literature (Vol. 14, No. 4, 1983), edited by Inder Nath Kher and
Christopher Wiseman. Reddy is also the author of The Plays of Asif Currimbhoy
(1985), one of the few full-length studies of Currimbhoy's work. Another substantive
study is 'The Dramatic Art of Asif Currimbhoy' by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, which is
included in Indo-English Literature: A Collection of Critical Essays (1977), edited by
K.K. Sharma.
Faubian Bowers comments that Asif Curriumbhoy was Indiasfirst authentic voice in
the theatre. He has written on a variety of themes and produced farce, comedy,
tragedy, melodrama, history,fantasy, etc. Bayapa Reddy, in his thematic research
on
Currimbhoys plays, classifies his plays into social, political andreligious ones.
Currimbhoy carefully selected the political, religiousand social issues related to India
and neighbouring countries in the post-Independence period. He was moved by the
violence thaterupted in the country during the sixties.He asserts that he chose to
write for the theatre because hethought that this was the art form which allowed
him to expose thecomplexity of the society. Theatre was a medium to
commentextensively on the changes that came over India after Independenceand
his concept of a sophisticated society has been graduallyamalgamated into the
plays. He argues that the Indian struggleagainst colonial power has proved less

fruitful because
economically.

post-colonialIndia

has

become

colonised

culturally

and

Edward Said states that the idea of post-colonialism needs thedynamic between
itself and its colonizers in order to define itsexistence:The Orient is an integral part
of European material civilization andculture. Orientalism expresses and represents
that part culturallyand even ideologically as a mode of discourse with
supportinginstitutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, evencolonial
bureaucracies and colonial styles. (87)

The dynamic between the colonizer and the colonized may imposean intellectual
rather than a political domination over the post-colonialnation. While political
freedom may exist, the intellectualindependence is far from reality. Said goes on to
state "it is acertain will or intention to understand, in some cases to
control,manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or
alternative and novel) world." (90)Resistance theory in post-colonial literature
refutes the very notionthat idea of representation also connotes further
subjugation.Resistance literature uses the language of empire to rebut its
dominantideologies. In other words, the colonized nation is "writing back,"speaking
either of the oppression and racism of the colonizers or theinherent cultural "betterness" of the indigenous people. Helen Tiffinexpresses this point best in her essay
"Post-colonial Literatures andCounter-discourse": "Post-colonial literatures/cultures
are thusconstituted in counter-discursive rather than homologous practices,
andthey offer fields' or counter-discursive strategies to the dominantdiscourse."
(96)
It is the intention of this paper to analyse the paradigm of coloniser and colonised
distinction as revealed in Asif Currimbhoy's
Thorns on A Canvas
. It depicts the relationship between an upper class patron of art and some artists
who belong to the lower strata of society where
the distinction between the racial us and other
has been perceptible in the pattern of elitist and underprivileged
relationship. Maltis father is the representative of the elitist class
and Yakub and Nafesa are the representatives of the downtroddenclass. The father
is a patron of arts and Yakub and Nafesa are beggar-like artists who are treated as
ugly and browbeaten.