Śakuntalā in the GDR: Gender Dynamics in Vijaya Mehta’s Leipzig Production of Kālidāsa’s Play

Abstract

In the context of extensive collaborations between the prominent Indian theater director Vijaya Mehta and East German director Fritz Bennewitz, the chapter examines Mehta’s direction of Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā in Leipzig in 1980 through the lens of gender. The analysis shows that Mehta’s conception for the production and the resulting performance presented a significant counter-narrative to both Indian and German patriarchal interpretations of the protagonist Sakuntala as representative of female passivity, submissiveness, naturalness, and social naiveté. Esleben argues that the production’s challenge to this gender-normative interpretation history, developed and presented by a female Indian director, made a significant political statement about ambivalent attitudes toward women’s emancipation in both cultural contexts, that of GDR socialism and of Indian nationalism.