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Chandrasekhara Kambar’s plays matter because they draw on Kannada folk myths, local speech and dramatic traditions to examine modern concerns and historical experience. The English collection Two Plays, translated by Krishna Manavalli, brings together two works with sharply different settings and voices: The Bringer of Rain: Rishyashringa and Mahmoud Gawan.
What is in Two Plays?
The collection pairs Kambar’s myth-inflected The Bringer of Rain: Rishyashringa with the historical-political drama Mahmoud Gawan. Krishna Manavalli translated both from Kannada into English. Penguin Random House India lists the edition as a 240-page paperback published in March 2020, ISBN 9780143447788; its catalogue page lists buying options, including Amazon.
How does Rishyashringa transform a rain myth?
Kambar’s Rishyashringa relocates the pan-Indian story of the bringer of rain to Shivapura, a fictional village familiar from his earlier poem Helathena Kela. The village is in famine. Its people look to Balagonda, the chieftain’s son and a rakshasa, as someone who might restore not only fertility but also the community’s creative life.
In T. P. Ashoka’s review, Balagonda is not simply a ready-made saviour. Kambar complicates the expected promise of redemption: liberation comes with violence and sacrifice. The myth therefore becomes a way to dramatize the costs of hope and renewal in a specific community, rather than a distant legend retold unchanged.
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What makes Mahmoud Gawan different?
Mahmoud Gawan turns from famine and myth to the fifteenth-century Bahamani Sultanate. Gawan comes to Hindustan after hearing of the Sufi saint Bande Nawaz, rises to become the empire’s Diwan and is ultimately undone by political jealousy. The play combines historical material with local myths and legends.
Ashoka emphasizes the tension between Gawan’s idealism and the political realities that destroy him. Where Rishyashringa asks what a community’s hoped-for renewal demands, Mahmoud Gawan explores what happens when political vision confronts courtly intrigue. The publisher’s description of the collection likewise frames Gawan’s rise against civil strife.
Why do the plays feel rooted and contemporary?
Kambar’s distinctive achievement, as Ashoka reads it, is to bring folk narrative and local dramaturgy into conversation with a modern sensibility. The plays do not use tradition as decoration: their older stories and settings become material for thinking about present human and political problems. One builds its dramatic world through famine, fertility and myth; the other through history, ambition and the instability of power.
Kambar has also connected The Bringer of Rain: Rishyashringa to his own childhood experience of colonial rule. In a 2020 interview, he said, “Our English education in India, and the resulting cultural conditioning of our minds, splintered our sense of self”. That is Kambar’s account of cultural conditioning, not a neutral explanation of every reader’s experience. It helps clarify why grounding literary work in local languages and traditions mattered to him.
What does Manavalli’s translation add?
The plays have different linguistic flavours and rhythms of speech. Ashoka praises Manavalli for preserving those distinctions in English, allowing the two works to retain separate dramatic identities rather than sound like variations of one voice. This is a reviewer’s assessment of the translation, not a claim that any translation can be definitive.
Manavalli has described translation as “similar to mastering a raga. Over time, it becomes your own but it still exists in the context of the classical,” emphasizing both the translator’s creative involvement and the work’s continuing connection to its source. A 2020 report said she spent six to seven months translating these two plays and noted that they belong to different genres.
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- Young Women's Edition Book/Online Audio
- Pages: 160
- Instrumentation: Vocal
How the two plays work as a pair
| Aspect | The Bringer of Rain: Rishyashringa | Mahmoud Gawan |
|---|---|---|
| Dramatic material | A rain-bringer myth localized in fictional Shivapura | Historical material from the fifteenth-century Bahamani Sultanate, combined with local myth and legend |
| Central pressure | Famine and the hope that fertility and creativity can return | Political jealousy and the collision of idealism with courtly reality |
| Kambar’s transformation | Complicates the promise of rescue with violence and sacrifice | Shapes a historical rise and downfall through local narrative and theatrical imagination |
The contrast makes the collection a useful introduction to Kambar’s range: he draws on inherited stories in one play and a historical political world in the other, while making both serve his own dramatic purposes.
Quick Recap
Best Value
- Book Only
- Pages: 188
- Instrumentation: Vocal
- Instrumentation: Piano Accompaniment
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