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Cultural ‘Scape’ and Social Space: Reflection of Fragmentation

in Elkunchwar’s Sonata
Ankur Konar
Kochipukur, Chandmari Road,
Badamtala, Burdwan,
West Bengal 713101

The sense of cultural fragmentation has heavily been indicated in the following

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titles of recent times: Featherstone’s Undoing Culture, Miyoshi’s Off Centre, Chatterjee’s
The Nation and its Fragments and Gupta’s Disrupted Borders.2 In this age of postmodern
plurality, due to immense fluidity of the categorical elements the stark and dark process
of rigid categorization does not survive. To safeguard this argument let me quote Simon
Malpas: “Contemporary culture moves at an almost incomprehensible speed …
Civilizations, traditions and forms of social interaction are transformed or even
annihilated as borders become more fluid and the conventions, customs and ways of life

axthat once distinguished one place from another turn into matters of choice” (01, my
emphasis). To theorize this topsy-turvy sense of fluidity, Arjun Appadurai in his oft-cited
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization conceptualizes the idea of
‘scape’ to monopolize the radical overflows of continuous exchange, simultaneous
attraction and repulsion and kinetic modality towards both the known and unknown
territory of identical zones connotating “a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that
cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models”
(Appadurai, 32). Elkunchwar’s 2002/2007 drama Sonata can easily be categorized to
have such “fluid, irregular shapes” (Appadurai, 33) and scapes where three women
characters are put in an intermediary zone of cultural implementation. Succession of
identities through the intellectual trajectories of Dolon, working in ‘multinational’
company (279), Aruna, busy with her self-induced conformity to Sanskrit literature and
Subhadra, a ranting and brandishing journalist, projects Elkunchwar’s textual desirability
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of cultural fault-lines through radical verbal eloquence. Elements of transactional
transitoriness have its presence in the dramatist’s description of Aruna who is “fortyish,
once beautiful but now fading” (245). Projecting a multi-axial understanding of cultural
exchange this Marathi lady, Aruna wears a “Bengal handloom sari” (245). On the other
side, Dolon, having “Same age as Aruna”, is modern “in an old, much worn but
obviously expensive dressing gown, plump, stylish boy-cut” (245). Surprisingly, “She is
perhaps trying to put the room in order but in her effort to do so, she brings more disorder
in it” (246). What we find in the first few pages is that a sense of oxymoronic cultural
hinge because, Aruna, as projected in the drama, is to a large extent careful and Dolon is
‘carelessly’ (245) conscious of her own carelessness. “Blowing money” (247) for
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unnecessary matter is not an act of surprise from such Dolon who verbally ‘ignores’
(246) Aruna, as the latter accuses. But immediately, Dolan, from the level of cultural
consciousness conveys Aruna, with a tone of teaching, that food is “The top-priority of
any blue-blooded Bengali” (246) and immediately adds: “Know something Aruna? I may
be hopelessly Maharashtrianized, but scratch me and you’ll find a gluttonous Bengali
beneath” (246). In the uncertain field of cultural ‘possibles’, one cannot rigidly say that
Dolon is Bengali and Aruna is Marathi, but have to say that Dolon is ‘Maharashtrianized’

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Bengali and Aruna is Begalised Marathi. Rigid compartmentalization has no basis in this
unified world of cultural transience. Samik Bandyopadhyay who wrote an ‘erudite’
Introduction to the Oxford edition of this play, wants to read the characters in terms of
“temperamental and cultural differences” because he believes that the characters have the
stance to “break out of their stance of self-sufficiency” (xxvii). In that sense, this text
does have a thematic resemblance with Bauman’s famous argument of ‘liquidity’:
“Bauman sees liquid modernity not so much as a world of egocentric individuals who
shape their lives as personal projects made through their own imaginings about the
possibilities that the world out there has to offer, but one in which men and women are
reflective moral agents who live in an uncertain world which means that they are forced

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in the quotidian of their day-to-day lives to contemplate their existential insecurities”
(Blackshaw, 10).3

Formation of cultural gap through cultural map has been interfaced through the
tropes of disability, dissident imagination and indefatigable absorbency. The drama is set
in a muggy night in Mumbai in “one of the finer suburbs” of this metropolitan city where

ax“delicate fragile objects can be found” (245). Readers can also see Dolon’s “array of
perfumed bottles of all shapes and colours” (245) in plural and Aruna’s natural antipathy
[‘allergic’ (263)] to these. As the cultural destinations are different Dolon cannot tolerate
Aruna’s vehement rejection of the bottles and gives Aruna a judgmental lesson: “Why do
these empty bottles irritate you so much? They are so beautiful. Throw them out! And
what do I keep in their place? Vicks vaporub? Iodex?” (248). But immediately after that,
between the acts of attraction and repulsion, stasis and kinesis, union and fragmentation,
proposed and supposed, opposed and reposed, frame and game, Dolon begins to enjoy
Aruna’s proposed matter for meal i.e. rice which Dolon describes as “That famous
Marathi delicacy, Cheap and tasty!” (248). They have no specific agenda based
‘ideology’; they are “not even feminists” (271). They only want to “Drink life to the lees”
(258). Elements of engulfing fluidity can also be marked in Dolon’s non-stop “channel-
surfing” (248) [“surfing the channels” (250) and “surfs channels” (259)]. She cannot
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select one channel but can go against Aruna’s proposed ‘BBC’ or ‘Star News’ (250) and
can project a cool request: “MTV please” (259). As she believes “Why should the
Marathis be always correct?” (251), an insurgency of sporadic conversation becomes the
result:

ARUNA: Aren’t only the Bengalis always artistic and cultured?

DOLON (giggling). Together we could give the entire country a complex. (251)

In fact, fluid process of ‘complex’ identical communication will lead to the cultural flow
of interdisciplinary spheres. Apparent disproportion of passion and cultural homologation
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of different relationships are the sense and essence of this drama. The third character of
the drama Subhadra is a clear case of such non-conformist cultural rainbow. Dolon asks
with an articulated anxiety: “Can Subhi speak even one language straight? It is always a
horrid cocktail of English, Hindi, Marathi” (251). As far as linguistic identity is
concerned, question is that where does Subhadra belong. Such radical displacement and
differentiation at least on cultural level is an automatic product from the cultural sleek
surfaces of inchoate subjectivities of a brand new 21st century drama.

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In the sensorium of slipperiness in self-location, Subhadra, over mobile phone (a

sign of fast fluidity) to one of her colleague, throws a predatory pre-cultural state where
there is none to praise and very few to love. In the trope of enclosure the grid of
difference makes a display of tattering disconnection and shattering dissatisfaction. The
cultural message of this text is predominantly congregational when Aruna laments that
“Twenty five years in Mumbai but I still think of home” (252) and Dolon prides: “Once a
Calcuttan, always a Calcuttan” (252). Such disruptive lines of overlapping and over-
living may either be called emergence of divergence or divergence of emergence but it
ultimately brings the question of who has outsmarted whom in the “collective emotional

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excitement” (Smith, 10):

ARUNA: Why don’t you put on some music? ‘Moonlight’ Sonata? (Dolon is
looking out, humming to herself.) I started listening to that kind of music because
of you. Otherwise Naatyasangeet is the height of our good taste.
DOLON: And that other thing. Ki jeno? Ramayan – Geet Ramayan.

ax ARUNA: Marathi answer to Robindrasangeet. (254)

If Dolon wants her own identity, then Aruna must have her own; without Aruna, Dolon is
incomplete and without Dolon, Aruna is fragmented. As “culture has become decentered”
and “there is an absence of coherence and unity”, culture “can no longer provide an
adequate account of the world with which to construct or order our lives.” (Featherstone,
01). Naturally, one culture is not dominant; but there are some sporadic and spasmodic
liquid overlapping elements in their cultural exchange. Direct exploitation of code-
switching gives the play a great liquid dimension of linguistic flexibility. It is ‘liquid’
because it simply means the ambivalence: “in a fluid setting, flexibility is the name of
rationality. Skills do not retain usefulness for long, for what was yesterday a master
stroke may prove today inane or downright suicidal” (Bauman, 22).
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The play has an interesting sense of literalization and celebration of cultural
transmission. Sudden fusion of the uncertain characters in an inter-connective cultural
situation are posing a problem that brings the sense of dispassionate mode of address.
Aruna wants a cultural referral: “Take me once tomar bari. Introduce me to your
Mashima, your Meshomoshay … Yours river. We will sail on them and listen to the
Majhis singing” (255). To make a meaningful journey from ‘I’ to ‘we’ what people
definitely need is the spontaneous overflow of stark ‘we’ not a dark ‘I’. Aruna, the
“straight-laced middle class Maharashtrian” (258) has understood the essential fluidity of
our existential elements. On the other hand, if the journey remains incomplete, the use of
the word ‘dislikes’ (257) will be immense. The text also focuses to the readers that cool
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negligence of other culture has been made with an element of cultural cajoles – culture
seen as the ensemble of different faiths. Aruna may cast ‘disapproval’ (263) at Dolon’s
drinking glass but Dolon can call for a ‘celebration’ at Aruna’s winning ‘award’ (268) for
cultural excellence; recalcitrant subjects are bound to shake the roots of stark monopoly
of one cultural rigidity. Rejection of rigidity is that point to which my article is entirely
destined to. Certain and sudden circularity of cultural differentiation projects the requisite
epistemic gap of determination.4 Even Subhadra’s strong intention to ‘freelance’ (273) is

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a marker of professional fluidity by being not stuck to one particular print-house. The
play, through a radical celebration of diversity, paramounts the linguistic flexibility and
cultural spontaneity and liquid identity simply because “liquid modern living is
rhizomatic; it is in a constant state of becoming: a middle without a beginning and an
end.” (Blackshaw, 93). Elkunchwar’s Sonata dramatizes that liquid middle of inference
and transference.

Typical human sensorium of cultural embodiment has been reconfigured through

the messy and chaotic affair of seasonal adjustment. Dolon may accuse Aruna for
‘misinterpreting’ her and Aruna can criticize Dolon for ‘overreacting’ (280). Aruna has

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one living style; Dolon has another because she does not ‘fit into’ Aruna’s “concept of
correct living” (266). In fact, diagnostic insight of the third eye projects the essence of
cultural equipment that oft was thought but never so well expressed by the characters of
the drama. Aruna now expresses to Dolon the proposed view of cultural reformulation:
“No no. Don’t misunderstand me please. You love with abandon, shower it on people. I
can’t. I keep distance. Hunting you is the last thing I’ll ever do” (280). Definitely, in such

axcross pollinating cultural complacency, there is an element of desire even in distance. In

the house of thousand cultural doors, an unadjusted tune is not a surprise package.
Conflict of colours makes a fine balance of cultural substantiality when Subhadra says:
“See how happy we three are!” (269). And Aruna comments later about the essence of
cultural unison, in spite of its numerous fragmentation: “We three will live together. The
two of us have been together. Now it will be three. The more the merrier” (276). To
“Build life brick by brick”, to “Make it a thing of beauty” (277) we need positive fluidity
of such cultural scape and space, making possible the ever changing fatal spin of shared
culture. Through some ‘irradiating’ (Forster’s word) scapes, the drama and the dramatist
are issuing both the concurrence and the convergence of cultural cringe – its ons and offs.
Dramatist’s condensed concentration on the conditional unification injects a visual sense
of scale, scape and scope. In fact, the text becomes a citational process of cultural
formulation – an unshakable presence of constructed and reconstructed configuration of
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cultural dependency. Though “in Sonata Elkunchwar had come a long way from his
disturbing/disturbed playscapes in the earlier phases, and achieved an almost perfectly
orchestrated play of tones against tones rising to a height to crash to a quiet restoration of
the disrupted quotidian” (Bandyopadhyay, xxix-xxx), he now falls into the another trap of
scapes – this time it is cultural scapes of fragmentation in an overall unified drama of
concentration.
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Notes and References:

1. From Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Collected Plays of Mahesh Elkunchwar (New Delhi:

Oxford UP, 2009, pp 243-86. Print.). Page reference has been made from this edition.

2. Mike Featherstone’s Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and

Identity. (London: Sage, 1995. Print.), M. Miyoshi’s Off Centre: Power and Cultural
Relation between Japan and the United States (Cambridge: Havard UP, 1991. Print.)
Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton UP, Princeton: New Jersy,

y
1993. Print.) and C. Gupta’s Disrupted Borders (London: Rivers Oram P, 1993. Print.).

3. Zygmunt Bauman observes in Modern Liquidity (MA Malden: Polity, 2000.

Print.): “Light modernity let one partner out of cage. ‘Solid’ modernity was an era of
mutual engagement. ‘Fluid’ modernity is the epoch of disengagement, elusiveness, facile
escape and hopeless chase. In ‘liquid’ modernity, it is the most elusive, those free to

4.
ax move without notice, who rule.” (120)

Nicos Mouzelis writes in the “Introduction” to Sociological Theory: What Went

Wrong? Diagnosis and Remedies (London and New York: Routledge, Indian Reprint,
1995. Print.) : “While boundaries and distinctions should not be rejected dogmatically or
mindlessly, sociological theory should also make sure that boundaries are not turned into
impregnable barriers, and that distinctions do not become dichotomic essence.” (10)

Works Cited
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Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Delhi:
Oxford UP, 1997. Print.
Bandyopadhyay, Samik. “Introduction.” Collected Plays of Mahesh Elkunchwar. New
Delhi: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Bauman, Zygmunt. “Liquid Sociality.” Ed. Gane N. The Future of Social Theory.
London: Continuum, 2004. Print.
Blackshaw, Tony. Zygmunt Bauman. Routledge, London and New York: Indian Reprint,
2007. Print.
Featherstone, Mike, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity.
London: Sage, 2007. Print.
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Malpas, Simon. The Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge, Indian Reprint,
2007. Print.
Smith, P and A. Riley. Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Blackwell, 2009.
Print.

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