Theatre of Discomfort: Confronting Communal Violence through Monologue in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Hidden Fires.

Abstract

     The current research offers a textual analysis of Manjula Padmanabhan’s Hidden Fires (2002), a monologue responding to the Gujarat riots, to investigate how Indian English theatre addresses the politics of communal violence. Although significant scholarship on Indian theatre frequently emphasizes group pieces and established dramatists, the monologue as a subversive form remains inadequately examined. This research examines how Padmanabhan utilizes minimalism, irony, and direct audience engagement via a detailed analysis of the play's linguistic, structural, and rhetorical techniques to create a ‘theatre of discomfort’ that challenges traditional catharsis. Rooted in postcolonial performance studies and trauma theory, the research illustrates how the text incorporates fragmentation, silence, and disconcerting tonal shifts as aesthetic methods that engage viewers in the ethical and political dimensions of violence. Instead of only acting as passive record, Hidden Fires acts as an interventionist text that recontextualizes theatre as a locus of resistance, memory-work, and ethical confrontation. This study enhances the literature on South Asian theatre, spectatorship, and the ethics of depicting violence by emphasizing the monologue's capacity to disrupt dominant narratives of communalism.