The Plays of Asif Currimbhoy: A Reading in Postcolonialism

Colonialism is the conquest and control of other people’s land and lives. Not limited to the incursion of various European powers into Asia, Africa or the Americas alone, it is a continuous, widespread feature of human history. Leela Gandhi remarks: “Colonialism marks the historical process whereby the West attempts systematically to cancel or negate the cultural difference and value of the ‘non-west’". India was one of the “productive colonies” for the West,and its natives mere “human material”. The Orient was treated as “alien and unusual”, civilizationally inferior, weak and suitable for colonisation, says Said. It was “a playground for Western desires, repressions, investments, projections” and that it was Europe’s “richest colonies” and one of its “recurring images of the Other”. Asif Currimbhoy, the authentic voice in Indian English theatre deals with various notions of postcolonialism in all his plays, written during India's post-independence period, with their focus on the cultural, social and political dimensions. Contemporary postcolonial discourses put capitalism culpable when it depends on racial hierarchies, self-other distinction,and all sorts of oppression.