Modern Indian English Drama: A Historicist Reading of the Selected Plays

New Historicists are interested in recovering lost histories and in exploring mechanisms of repression and subjugation. The major point to focus is that the New Historicists tend to concentrate on those at the top of the social hierarchy (i.e. the church, the monarchy, the upper-classes) which is a kind of history. New Historicists tend to draw on the disciplines of political science and anthropology given their interest in governments, institutions, and culture. However, New Historicists take this position further by then claiming that all cultural activities may be considered as equally important texts for historical analysis: contemporary trials of hermaphrodites or the intricacies of map-making may inform a Shakespeare play as much as, say, Shakespeare's literary precursors. New Historicism is also more specifically concerned with questions of power and culture. In this paper we focus our new historicist approach on the five selected plays, viz, Larins Saheb by Gurucharan Das, The Refugee Asif Currimbhoy, Lights Out, Manjula Padmanabhan, Worm Play Zubin Driver, Dance like a Man by Mahesh Dattani