Indian song marguerite duras biography

Copyrights India Song from Gale. All rights reserved. Toggle navigation. Sign Up. Sign In. This Study Guide consists of approximately 26 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of India Song. Get India Song from Amazon. View the Study Pack. He is known to have suffered a mental breakdown and shot his gun off his balcony in Lahore and then tried to shoot himself.

His suffering is so great that he even expresses a wish that he might contract leprosy and die. The vice-consul's mental and emotional instability seem to be an expression of the despair he witnesses all around him in India. While most of the Europeans are capable of ignoring this death and suffering, the vice-consul, like Anne-Marie, is particularly sensitive to it, and is driven to despair and attempted suicide as a result.

Duras uses the central character of Anne-Marie Stretter in India Song as a symbol for exploring the status of women in society.

Indian song marguerite duras biography

Anne-Marie serves as an object of fantasy for the other characters in the play and for the four voices who narrate her story. Duras specifically constructed India Song such that Anne-Marie is never heard to utter a single word throughout the play. She appears as a passive figure, a physical body and an object of obsession for others that has no opportunity to speak for herself.

Duras seems to be suggesting that women's status in society is similar to that of Anne-Marie, in that women's voices are often stifled by the dominant forces of a society, and women are often subjected to the fantasies projected on them by others, particularly men. Anne-Marie's decision to commit suicide is the only way she succeeds in taking action or escaping her position in life.

Anne-Marie thus sees self-destruction as her only option for protesting her status within her society. Duras suggests that women's status in society renders them almost totally powerless to take positive action toward self-empowerment or to alter the conditions of their lives. Experimental theater refers to dramatic works, usually written for the stage, that question and expand the definition of the play as a literary form.

India Song is a work of experimental theatre in which Duras experiments with generally accepted categories of genre, traditional expectations of action and dialogue, and an unusual use of disembodied voices to narrate her play. India Song was originally published in book form in Duras thus questions and expands upon generally accepted definitions of, and distinctions between, plays, screenplays, and novels.

One of the most striking experimental elements of India Song is the fact that none of the characters who appear on stage are ever seen actually speaking their lines before the audience. Much of the dialogue that is heard during the play is made up of bits and pieces of fragmentary conversation of the guests at the reception, who gossip among themselves about Anne-Marie, her husband, and the various men who are in love with her.

When they do appear on stage, the characters mime their actions without ever speaking. Rather, all dialogue and voices that are heard throughout the play come from offstage. In one live performance of India Song , for example, all of the dialogue was prerecorded, and then broadcast over a loudspeaker, while the live actors performed their silent roles.

Yet another experimental element of India Song is Duras's use of four separate disembodied voices to narrate the story of Anne-Marie Stretter. While these voices are never identified specifically, Duras describes some qualities of the voices and the different manner in which each voice tells the story. These voices recall the story in bits and fragments, as they slowly come to remember various details and facts about it.

While stage plays often have a character who serves as narrator to the central events of the play, it is unusual to have narrators who are never actually seen onstage, embodied by an actor. From to , India was a colony under the rule of the British crown. When it first came under the domain of the United Kingdom, Queen Victoria was in power. The highest government position in India was the viceroy, a post appointed by the British government and always held by white British politicians.

Originally, the British capital of India was located in Calcutta. In , the capital was relocated to Delhi. From the beginning of colonization, many Indian citizens protested against British domination. During the twentieth century, two major political organizations devoted to the struggle for Indian national independence emerged: the Indian National Congress , primarily made up of Indians of Hindu faith, and the All-India Muslim League , primarily made up of Indians of Muslim faith.

Though these organizations sometimes formed a coalition, they were often divided because of ongoing tensions between the Hindu and Muslim populations of India. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was a major leader of the Muslim League. In the Indian Independence Act, passed by the British parliament in , India was partitioned into two sovereign nations. The largest was India, in which the majority of the population was Hindu; and the smaller was Pakistan, in which the majority was Muslim.

After the India-Pakistan war of , Pakistan and India sign a peace accord resolving to settle the dispute peacefully. However, beginning in , Kashmir again becomes a major source of tension between the two nations. Today: Escalating tensions between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir raise international fears of nuclear war between the two nations, both of which now possess nuclear weapons.

Voting rights are extended to all adult men and women. Today: The French government remains in the era of the Fifth Republic, a constitutional democracy with universal suffrage. The newly formed government of India was established on the British model of parliamentary democracy. The national languages of independent India were designated as Hindi and English, while 14 additional regional languages were also recognized.

The first Prime Minister of India was Nehru, who presided from to Mahatma Gandhi, though he never served in political office, continued to be a revered and influential advocate of nonviolence, until he was assassinated in Independent Pakistan established a parliamentary democracy based on the British system, and Jinnah served as the nation's first governor-general.

Military coups, the suspension of government, and the imposition of martial law have characterized the history of Pakistan since gaining independence. The Pakistani legal system has increasingly been determined by the tenets of Islamic law. In , with the establishment of independent India and Pakistan, the region of Bengal was divided. In , after a civil war in which India intervened, East Pakistan was granted national independence as the new nation of Bangladesh "Bengal land".

The majority of the Bangladesh population was Muslim, and the national language was designated as Bengali. Bangladesh was established as a parliamentary democracy, after the British model. But many military coups and institutions of martial law since independence have hampered the democratic process. In , a national referendum determined that Islam would be the official state religion of Bangladesh.

When the independent nations of Pakistan and India were created in , the northern region of Kashmir, like the Bengal region, was divided between the two countries. The southern and southeastern portion was incorporated into India, becoming the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The northern and western portions of Kashmir became a part of Pakistan.

Ever since this time, Kashmir has been a subject of hostile border disputes between India and Pakistan. In the late s and early s, international concern over the escalation of tensions between the two nations increased due to the fact that both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons. India Song is hailed as an experimental feminist text that simultaneously critiques colonial culture, women's status in society, and representations of the female body.

This experimental technique is regarded as a critique of traditional representations of women. As Gabrielle H. Cody, in Impossible Performances remarks:. Duras's drama consistently features female protagonists who exist in a relationship of struggle with the representational frame and who "speak back" to the viewing authorities of a masculine symbolic.

Critics are also impressed with Duras's complex use of "offstage" sounds in India Song. Lib Taylor in "Sound Tracks" observes that. The verbal text is woven into a complex, orchestrated soundscape of instrumental music, songs, non-verbal cries and utterances, screams of pain and wretchedness, sounds of street shouting, and screeches of exotic birds and animals.

These elements together become a score functioning alongside the visual text. India Song is further praised as a critique of British colonial rule in India and of the subjugation of the Indian people by western imperial powers. Taylor notes that Duras intentionally focuses the action of her play on the luxurious settings of colonial white culture, while portraying the world of the Indian people through offstage sounds.

Thus, Taylor argues, this dissonance between sound and image "rents the curtain of the visual spectacle of imperial power and disrupts the refined mask of western civilization. Marie-Paule Ha, in "Duras on the Margins," similarly argues that India Song puts forth a critique of colonial society by demonstrating the ways in which the white colonizers try to insulate themselves within the confines of their privileged enclave, while striving to keep the Indian population on the margins of "white India.

Thus, she asserts:. One of the external signs of the fissuring of the seemingly watertight compartmentalized colonial society is the deep sense of malaise and maladjustment which is wearing out its white inhabitants. In spite of the vast paraphernalia of protective artifices … the Europeans find their presence in the colony quite intolerable. Thirty years after its initial publication, India Song continues to be the subject of extensive analysis by critics concerned with issues of postcolonial literature and the representation of women on the dramatic stage.

As Cody notes, "Duras is one of the most important figures in the landscape of twentieth century theatre. Brent has a Ph. She works as a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, Brent discusses the relationships between the disembodied narrative voices in Duras's play. Voice 1 and voice 2 serve as the principal narrators in act 1 of India Song and return again briefly in acts 3 and 5.

Although neither is identified directly and neither appears bodily on stage, their verbal interactions subtly convey the complex and emotionally charged relationship between them. Voices 1 and 2 are both described as young and female. Both voices, though sweet, are tinged with madness, delirium, and desire. As Duras explains in her notes that precede the play, these voices "are linked together by a love story":.

Sometimes they speak of this love, their own. Most of the time they speak of another love, another story. But this other story leads us back to theirs. And vice versa. Voice 1 and voice 2 each express somewhat different feelings about the story they are telling. Voice 1 is utterly absorbed in the love story of Anne-Marie Stretter while voice 2 is passionately concerned with love for voice 1.

Voice 2 expresses fear that voice 1 is so wrapped up in Anne-Marie's story that she is in danger of losing herself in it. Voice 2 is thus afraid of losing the love of voice 1. In recalling the story of Anne-Marie Stretter, voice 2 remembers the facts more clearly than voice 1. Voice 1 often asks about the details, and when voice 2 fills her in on this information, voice 1's memory is sparked.

Thus, voice 1 seems to be responding to Anne-Marie's story more emotionally, while voice 2 expresses a greater degree of emotional distance from the story she tells. With the full knowledge of the French ambassador, Anne-Marie has many affairs while the world they inhabit decays from the inside out. The Vice-Consul of Lahore Michael Lonsdale discusses a love affair with her, one that is impossible due to an earlier scandal where he fired on lepers, mirrors and himself.

Anne-Marie finally succeeds in the suicide they had initially attempted many years before. The script for India Song was based on an unproduced play which Marguerite Duras finished in July The film cost , francs to produce, of which , came from the CNC. Dominique Sanda was the first choice for the leading role, but dropped out and was replaced by Seyrig.

The Rothschild family had abandoned the building after World War II and it had started to dilapidate. Other scenes were shot at the Grand Trianon in Versailles, and in two Paris apartments which were about to be demolished. Filming began on 13 May and lasted two months. The voices were pre-recorded. Vincent Canby , writing for The New York Times , gave the film a negative review, finding that it was aesthetically pleasing but shallow.

Canby described India Song as "no content and all style", although he felt that Seyrig's portrayal of Anne-Marie was "marvelous to contemplate". However, the film did not win in any of the nominated categories. Today the film is seen more favourably by critics and it is included in the book Movies You Must See Before You Die , where Travis Crawford cites it as the director's best film, describing the film as "fascinating" in its use of language and sound in contrast to imagery, and calling it an "elliptical dream poem rather than linear narrative".

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