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- Title
Ritual Suicide and the Paradoxical Nature of Regeneration: A Comparative Study of Tagore's Sacrifice and Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman.
- Authors
Panda, Ujjwal Kr.
- Abstract
Does religion advocate violence ? In the light of two fundamentally contradictory notions about the practice of ritual sacrifice I would try to seek the answer by dint of a comparative study of two plays belonging to two radically different cultures but dealing with the same theme -- the ritual suicide. The first play under consideration is Rabindranath Tagore's Sacrifice (1917 ; from original Bengali play, Visarjan published in 1889-90) and the second one is Wole Soyinka's 1975-play Death and the King's Horseman. The mythical and symbolic significance associated to the ancient practice of ritual sacrifice has come vis-à-vis with the modern and secular interpretation of all these as mere religious savagery in both of these plays. The scuffle between the religion and the state is the crux of tension here. The plays are similar in a number of ways- the plots sound identical.
- Subjects
SUICIDE; RITUALISM; RELIGION; VIOLENCE; TAGORE, Rabindranath, 1861-1941; SOYINKA, Wole, 1934-
- Publication
Labyrinth: An International Refereed Journal of Postmodern Studies, 2012, Vol 3, Issue 3, p55
- ISSN
0976-0814
- Publication type
Article