Sex tapes and acid attacks: Anupama Chandrasekhar, the playwright shocking India.

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Her dramas confront the growing horrors facing women in India today. Now she’s reworked Ibsen’s Ghosts, taking out the syphilis and putting in the Delhi bus gang rape of 2012.

‘Women grew up freer 30 years ago’ ... Anupama Chandrasekhar, writer of When the Crows Visit. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
▼ Anupama Chandrasekhar isn’t one to shy away from a tough subject. The Indian playwright has written about acid attacks, sex tapes and her home country’s culture of patriarchal violence. “I have been asked so many times, mostly by men, ‘Why don’t you write comedies, or plays that celebrate India?’” she says. “I tell them: on the day that these things don’t happen any more, I will happily start writing bedroom farces.”
Her latest play, When the Crows  Visit, takes Ibsen’s Ghostsas its inspiration. This may seem something of a departure, but Chandrasekhar found a surprising degree of affinity within the drama. “Here is a white, male, Norwegian playwright from the 19th century,” she says, “and yet, as an Indian woman in Chennai in the 21st, I find so much resonance in his work.” It is a brilliantly creepy play, building up tension and horror through the crows that bridge the worlds of the living and the dead.
There is one vital – and shocking – twist in her splicing of India with Ibsen. The original featured Mrs Alving and her syphilitic son Oswald, grappling with the awful disease handed down from his father. But in When the Crows Visit, the toxic inheritance comes in the form of sexual violence against women. What’s more, the mother figure, played by Ayesha Dharker, is both a victim of this violence and an enabler. One reference point in the play is the Delhi bus gang  rape of 2012. Even though this takes place off stage, the horror is palpable, spreading through the script like a contagion.

Shocking twist … When the Crows Visit, based on Ibsen’s Ghosts. Photograph: Photo by Mark Douet
The play is directed by Indhu  Rubasingham, artistic director at London’s Kiln theatre, and as the three of us sit in her attic office we talk about turning such inflammatory material into charged drama. It was imperative that the play be conceived by someone rooted in Indian society, says Rubasingham. “Anu’s not only a brilliant playwright – she is writing from a place of knowledge and lived experience. Immediately after I got this job, I wanted to commission her.”You sense the media fatigue around crimes against women. Outside of the cities, it's just another incident … candlelit vigils don't happen
Chandrasekhar has an important reason to return to the Delhirape. Sexual violence, she says, has become more rife in India since 2012, despite all the national and international hand-wringing that followed the case. “It was not a one-off incident. It has happened over and over again since, and has just become more gory, more brutal. But you can sense the media fatigue around the reporting of crimes against women. If it happens outside of the cities, it’s just another incident. The candlelit vigils don’t happen for women in small towns and villages.”
The resurgence of violence in the country has coincided with (▪ ▪ ▪)

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chanakyakripa

These incidences need to be published and the gory details too. Then probably the general public may wake up from their slumber and apathy to the victims. Kudos to the writer for such bold steps and initiatives.
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