Manoj Mitra’s Play Honey from a Broken Hive: A Discourse of History and Culture

Abstract

Schools of cultural studies are chiefly devoted to ‘specify the functioning of the social, the economic, and political forces and power structures that are said to produce the diverse forms of cultural phenomena’(Abrams 53).  Literature is one of the cultural phenomena that are ‘viewed as endowed with meanings that are the product of social forces and conventions, and
that may either express or oppose the dominant structures of power in a culture’(Abrams 54). Manoj Mitra’s play Honey from a Broken Hive exemplifies a representative cultural discourse that expresses and opposes the dominant structures of power in Bengali or rather Indian culture in the post-Independence era. Though Honey from a Broken Hive is not a historical play, this play needs to be taken back to the socio-political conditions or ‘historical conditions’ from which the play emerged as a voice to address the subject of the marginalized. The aim of my paper is to scrutinize, identify and articulate all the ‘state apparatus’ that have been automatized and naturalized by the state power-politics through the
Bengali play Honey from a Broken Hive by Manoj Mitra.