From Ancestral Burden To Existential Dilemma: The Theatre Of Disillusion In Alekar’s Dynasts

Abstract

Satish Alekar’s Dynasts (Pidhijat) emerges as a profound commentary on the fragmented moral and emotional fabric of postmodern India. The play dramatizes the decay of inherited values and the futility of ritual continuity within an urban, middle-class milieu caught between reverence for ancestry and the exhaustion of meaning. Through the portrayal of characters trapped in inherited expectations, Alekar exposes the psychological burden of lineage that transforms duty into despair and faith into farce. This paper examines Dynasts as a “theatre of disillusion,” where the performance of tradition becomes a metaphor for existential paralysis. Employing the theoretical frameworks of existentialism and postmodern Indian consciousness, the study explores how Alekar reconfigures ritual, memory, and identity to mirror a society in moral freefall. His dramaturgy, marked by irony, minimalism, and symbolic realism, reveals not mere cynicism but a quest for authenticity amid cultural fatigue. The paper argues that Alekar’s Dynasts articulates an indigenous postmodernism rooted in lived experience—an aesthetic of disillusionment that transforms the theatre into a site of introspection and renewal.