Rakshasudi Thota: Comfortable and encouraging story
Overcoming the barrier of pandemic, after two years, Shudrka Hyderabad staged a Telugu play Rakshasudi Thota at Lamakaan. It is based on Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant. Shudrka Hyderabad, an amateur theatre group based in the twin city of Hyderabad-Secunderabad, has been performing plays in Hindi, Bangla and Telugu since 2004.
Rakshasudi Thota is a tale of a cruel and miserable giant who walls off his blossom-filled garden to stop children from playing there. In the absence of children, the once beautiful and communal garden falls into a bleak and perpetual winter: the Giant has literally brought on anthropogenic climate change and crop failure through his selfishness.
The years pass until one day the children discover a way to sneak back through a hole in the wall. As the children return, so do a generous, blossom-filled spring and a mysterious child, whose endearing struggle to climb a tree melts the Giant’s frozen heart. Following his Scrooge-like conversion, the Giant reaches a contented old age, until finally, the little boy appears again after having disappeared without a trace.
Now revealed to be the Christ child with stigmata on his hands and feet — or what he calls “the wounds of love” — the boy has come to escort the reformed Giant to Paradise. Despite its Christian symbolic overlay and its racial coding of white innocence, the tale captures how an unthinking and ruthless adult world can intrude on a childhood one, with devastating effects.
The Giant can be read as a symbol of the adult’s immense and overwhelming powers over children and the non-human natural world and therefore also as a tale of disrupted refuge and, eventually, restored ecological balance.
From a contemporary vantage point, the story can also be read through an ecological lens as a parable about human-centric greed and climate change.
By putting walls around life, the Giant ineluctably transforms the environment and alters the seasons. While interpretations vary, Shudrka Hyderabad believes the story endures because it follows an easy redemptive arc. When the Giant walls his Edenic garden off from playful children, when it withers in permanent winter, we are offered direct hope and deliverance in the form of a child saviour.
It is a comfortable and encouraging story because it tells us with ecclesiastical certainty that no matter how miserly and desolate the world becomes, there is always a way out. The Giant, whose avarice puts the entire world in jeopardy, can be converted. This is a particularly hopeful message if we understand ourselves to be human giants wreaking havoc, tampering with earth systems, in our own non-fairy-tale ways.
It is hopeful to think the power to kill gardens and children’s playgrounds, to destroy the planet itself, could be matched by the redemptive power of the next generation to reverse such destructive impulses, that we could be compelled to repair the world through gestures of kindness and generosity.
This play is going to be performed in the forthcoming Rangapeeth Natyamela, Berhampore National Theatre Festival and Andhra Association, Kolkata in the last week of December 2021.
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