Discourse of Power and Resistance in Poile Sengupta’s Samara’s Song: A Foucauldian Reading
| Author |
| Samim Aktar Molla |
| Date of Publication: June, 2026 |
| Volume: XXIII |
| DOI:10.65734/tgi.ssei.avp.ijcsss.ti.23.8 |
| Abstract |
| Poile Sengupta’s play Samara’s Song delves into the complex relationship between power, truth, memory, and resistance in a nation gripped by authoritarian politics. It is not simply a political drama about authoritarian rule; it is a searching theatrical inquiry into the ways by which power enters language, history, memory, bodies, and everyday behaviour. The play imagines a nation where democracy survives asvocabulary while its ethical substance is steadily hollowed out. Through the Thandwai’s invisible command, Uri’s administrative violence, Hamun’s manipulation of documents, Gandava’s remaking into a political instrument, and Samara’s wordless song, Sengupta stages power as something more diffuse than the will of a ruler. It travels through announcements, rituals of mourning, police intelligence, classed speech, family secrecy, gendered obedience, and the official production of truth. Read through Michel Foucault’s ideas of discourse, power/knowledge, discipline, normalization, and resistance, the play reveals how subjects are made governable not only by fear but also by narrative, visibility, and self-regulation. Yet the drama does not end by granting power the last word. Resistance appears in Arrah’s memory, Gandava’s troubled conscience, the damaged testimony of the three historians, and, most hauntingly, Samara’s song. The play’s achievement lies in showing that resistance does not come from a pure space outside power; it rises from the same wounded field in which power operates. |
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