Critically acclaimed play taken from the Mahabharata to be performed at UH

Barb Forsyth

Andha Yug, Dharamvir Bharati’s critically acclaimed play taken from the Indian epic Mahabharata, was translated into English by Alok Bhalla and published by MANOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing for the first time in the United States.

Andha Yug: The Age of Darkness, a readers theatre production of excerpts from Andha Yug, complete with visual images from the Mahabharata and Gamelan music, will be presented on Saturday, June 26 at 7:30 p.m. in Orvis Auditorium.

Translator Alok Bhalla will both introduce the performance and play a role in the production. A question and answer session will follow the performance.  The event is free of charge and open to the public.

For more information, visit www.outreach.hawaii.edu/community and http://manoaonline.wordpress.com/ or call (808) 956-8246.

One of the most significant plays of post-Independence India, Andha Yug takes place on the last day of the Great Mahabharata War. The once-beautiful city of Hastinapur is burning, the battlefield beyond the walls is piled with corpses, and the few survivors huddle together in grief and rage, blaming the destruction on their adversaries, divine capriciousness-anyone or anything except their own moral choices.  Andha Yug explores our capacity for moral action, reconciliation, and goodness in times of atrocity and reveals what happens when individuals succumb to the cruelty and cynicism of a blind, dispirited age.

  I suddenly understood
  as if in a flash of revelation
  that when a man
  surrenders his selfhood
  and challenges history
  he can change the course
  of the stars.

  The lines of fate
  are not carved in stone.
  They can be drawn and redrawn
  at every moment of time
  by the will of man.

  —excerpt from Andha Yug

Andha Yug: The Age of Darkness is cosponsored by MANOA and UHM Outreach College with support from The Manoa Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, the Diversity & Equity Initative of the University of Hawai’i, and the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities.  Additional support from the “We the People” initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.