Staging the Demon Minor in Arun Mukherjee’s Mareech, the Legend
| Author |
| Bidisha Munshi |
| Date of Publication: June, 2026 |
| Volume: XXIII |
| DOI:10.65734/tgi.ssei.avp.ijcsss.ti.23.2 |
| Abstract |
| This paper examines Arun Mukherjee’s Mareech, the Legend as a politically charged revisionist drama that reworks the Ramayana episode of Mareech to interrogate the structures of power hidden within both mythic and modern narratives. In this play, Mareech is not a marginal demon remembered only for his deception as the golden deer, but he is a creature who displays interiority, reluctance, vulnerability as well as moral conflict. Here our attention is shifted from epic heroism to the expendable intermediary as we witness how authority recruits minor figures into systems of violence while disguising oppression as duty, patriotism, democracy, or divine order. Through its jatra-like frame, Brechtian interruptions, songs, chorus, conscience figures, and metatheatrical questioning of Valmiki’s authority, the drama unsettles the stability of inherited myth and turns performance itself into a mode of critique. The paper argues that the parallel plots involving landlord oppression, electoral manipulation, American imperialism, and nationalist rhetoric are not incidental modern additions but interpretive doubles of the mythic action. The playwright unmasks the recurring historical cycle in which vulnerable subjects become instruments of power by linking Mareech with figures such as Ishwar and Gregory. Eventually, Mareech, the Legend speaks not only of myth and politics, but of the painful human condition of being drawn into. |
| View Full Article |
