Broken Images by Girish Karnad (Summary)

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BROKEN IMAGES

‘Broken Images’ has one set – a TV studio – but a multi-layered theme. It weaves in issues as far apart as the hegemony of English over Indian languages and the hollowness of a media which bestows greatness on a work that lay unnoticed in its original language but when translated into English becomes the toast of the global literary world.  It also deals with psychological repression of an inverted kind.  The central character Manjula, the now successful, Kannada-turned-English writer has a handicapped, wheelchair bound sister, Malini.  But it is the disabled Malini who turns out to be the really healthy and whole person.  It is Malini who not only wins the love of Manjula’s husband, Pramod, but is far more centered and happy than her caretaker sister, Manjula.Not just that.  After her death, it is Manjula whose loveless married life ends by Pramod walking out and moving to Los Angeles and the phenomenal success that she has wrested from Malini by stealing Malini’s unpublished MSS tasting like poison. 

The metaphor of Manjula talking about her heroic exploits with the book on a live television show ends with her finding that her image just does not leave the monitor. It is not her, of course.  It looks like her but it is Malini and the conflict between the self and the image, between delusion and reality, between the outer mask and the inner truth that emerges in the tussle between the sisters and is the very stuff of the drama.

Broken Images takes many a side swipe at all those writers in English who are constantly in the news, for fat advances from foreign publishers, for works that are many years away to seeing the light of day, for invitations to foreign colleges, lecture tours and autograph signing sprees. There are also the questions that stare in the face: are the Indian English  cut off from the "smell of the soil," have they sold out to a market-driven economy, have they struck a trade-off with their conscience by not writing in their native language, etc. etc.

In appropriating the stolen novel, one in which her sister has caricatured her and made her out to be a pushy, conniving, duplicitous relative, a defiant Manjula shouts: "I wrote the novel in English because it burst out in English....What baffles me - actually, hurts me - is why our intellectuals can't grasp this simple fact." We see Manjula Nayak subjected to an interrogation that teases, taunts and finally strips the secrets from her soul.  The TV image reveals the sordid truth about Manjula's marriage, her far from easy relationship with her dead sister Malini and the mysterious circumstances in which the best-selling novel that was written by Malini (with the help of Pramod who, too, was always at home) and now published by Manjula, finds her conceits punctured and her deceptions gradually unravelled.

Finally she is forced into anger or emotional collapse. The 55-minute play progresses towards a tight and stirring finish as Manjula seems to morph into Malini as "differences of ink and blood and language" are obliterated in a Babel of voices and a jumble of television images. 

 

 

 

The story of Broken Images starts with the author, Manjula, giving a short presentation introducing the movie version of her now-bestselling book. In the talk, she explains how she's been criticized for writing it in English instead of her native language, why she chose that language (because, she explains, that's how it came to her), and how much her family supported her through its writing. At the end of her presentation, she prepares to leave the set but her image on the monitor televising her presentation keeps talking. Only this time, her image on screen is addressing herself on the stage. The audience doesn't know exactly who the character on the screen is supposed to represent—Manjula’s inner self or her outer one, her conscience or her ego—but regardless, the TV Manjula begins probing her on-stage self about the same issues she’d discussed in the presentation, slowly unraveling the real story of how and why the book came about and the role her family played in it.

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