Portrayal of Women and their Mental Trauma in the Patriarchal Society through the Play ‘Kamala’ by Vijay Dhondopant Tendulkar

Abstract

Women, the ones to whom equal importance should be given to men in this world are always portrayed as weaker sex throughout centuries. In the play ‘KAMALA’ (1981), the playwright picturises the status and the position of women and how they were treated and viewed by the male community as a pawn to attain their aim and desires. In this play, the characters ‘Kamala’ and ‘Saritha’ have continuously been treated as slaves by the society and by her husband who was a journalist ‘Jaisingh’ respectively. The physical and mental traumas which the characters undergo throughout the play represent the pain and the sufferings of the whole female community in male-dominated society. The society itself creates such an ideology to see women only as a body which provides sexual pleasures and not as a human with emotions and feelings. The research paper vividly examines how women were socially tuned by society as a commodity and the conflict between master and slave.