Broken Images
The celebrity's speech
Read a performance critically.
'Broken Images' is a play by Girish Karnad, a playwright, actor and film-maker who wrote in Kannada and English. He often used history and myth to explore modern issues. This play explores personal values and the question of writing in two languages.
The setting is a high-tech television studio, with no camera in sight. Manjula Nayak, a Kannada story-writer and former English lecturer, comes in to introduce the Kannada telefilm made from her English bestseller.
She answers critics who say that writing in English is a betrayal of Kannada. The novel simply 'burst out in English', she says; writers look for readers wherever they can find them; and if she earns money from it, why not?
She mocks those who condemn English while speaking in English themselves, and notes that the Kannada word for meaning, artha, also means money.
She says the novel's heroine is drawn from her late sister Malini, disabled from birth, whom she nursed for years. She thanks her husband Pramod, and closes proudly as a Kannada writer. It is a polished public face.
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