A Geocritical Reading of the Playwright Ramu Ramanathan’s Play The Boy Who Stopped Smiling
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56062/gtrs.2024.2.10.499Keywords:
Grips Theatre, Production of Space, Third Space, Heterotopia, Geo-criticism, Geo-pathologyAbstract
Today’s education system is more focused on the development of the infrastructure of the institution than the mental and insightful development of the students. Rabindranath Tagore in his short story titled Tota kahinee or The Bird’s Tale said that “the cage is improving, but what news of the bird?” (Tagore, 4). The playwright Ramu Ramanathan is an excellent vocal or throaty of these issues. Most of the writers in general and the playwright in particular associate children’s stories with fairy tales. They don’t often even write any sort of drama or any piece of writing from a small child’s perspective. Their questions and queries are sidelined. The writers are least bothered about the mental space of the characters. We the people force the children to memorize our school syllabi, courses, formative and summative exams, and class work. According to Nehal Hardik Thakkar, “The children aren’t given a proper individual space, and their issues have remained socially invisible”. We don’t often push them to enjoy and learn something. We never ask them to forget about marks and all. We don’t also encourage them not to chase success. We insist and compel them to pursue success. If we critically think about it, we will come to know that we push them to get traumatized and assist them to stop their smiling. The epoch-making playwright Ramu Ramanathan in his play called The Boy Who Stopped Smiling talked about all these exact things. He breaks the traditional way of drama writing and here in this play, he uses the concept or the style of Grips theatre. The study of this paper will attempt to discuss this play from a geocritical perspective. Here the researcher will try to spend a maximum amount of time to discuss about the space, place, and several other things. Through the central character named Malhar, the playwright endeavored to provide a lifelong lesson to all the parents' community. Here in this play, other characters make fun of the protagonist named Malhar. They called him mad and also wanted him to be sent to a mental asylum. Nobody in this play thinks from Malhar's perspective; even the mother of Malhar avoids visiting the space and place of Malhar’s mental faculty. All of the other characters stigmatized him as mental and crazy and also considered him as poorly weak.
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