Towards an ethics of Responsibility: An Ethical Revaluation of the Political universe in Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit and Micchil

Abstract

Enrique Dussell writes about a certain fallacy characterizing political authority-namely the fallacy of identifying power with the possessor of the same, in complete oblivion of those who have actively established and continue to maintain through consent the authority of the powerful subject. In shifting roles and performative garbs, the actors in the plays of Badal Sircar explores new agencies of creativity. This paper seeks to explore how the aesthetics of performance in certain plays like ‘Evam Indrajit’ and others provide ample agency to the performer/ character to enable him or her to realize an agency of creativity, thereby unmasking the aforesaid fallacy that authority viewed in terms of the author and the political Master upholds or at least aspires to do so.  In certain cases, we find that the actor principally involved in playing a particular role that is representative of a certain degree of marginalisation assumes a part that does contradict such a node of representation. It is in the scope and purview of this paper to explore at length how such a shift in performance (that involves characteristic shifts in the representative portfolios of actors itself) actually enable the reflection of the idea that the individual subject is able to comprehend the apparatus of control and ‘interpellation’, and is, therefore, the legitimizing authority for power. Along with this, I also seek to explore how the incorporation of dramatic styles like the ellipsis, coupled with the aforesaid gesture of performance actually create a space characterized by a proliferation of instances of ‘play’, making any idea of surveillance itself point to the above-mentioned fallacy because it itself id indicative of a certain realization of the accessibility/knowledge of the modes of operation of control and the subjects of power.