A tint of religion in Bahuroopi theatre festival ?

The theatre repertory Rangayana, known for espousing social issues in its national theatre festival Bahuroopi, is set to court controversy by injecting a shade of religion in it.

The topics for a national seminar as part of the theatre festival used to mirror socio-economic issues and some of the themes in the recent past were migration, gender equality, expression, motherhood, celebration of Jnanapeetha awardees of the State etc. The topic for the seminar used to broadly reflect the theme of the theatre festival as well.

This year, there will be two topics for discussion in the national seminar and one of the topics is ‘’Sanatana Dharma and Indianness’’ which is bound to raise eyebrows. This is besides another subject which is more general and is titled ‘’Future of Indian Culture’’.

Rangayana director .Cariappa, who is known to espouse views reflective of the ideology of the BJP, recently penned a play ‘’Tipu’s Real Dreams’’ which drew flak and was controversial but is being enacted during the theatre festival.

At a press conference here on Friday Mr. Cariappa touched upon the Indian traditions and religions and said that it had a history of thousands of years and listed Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Narayana Guru, Basavanna, Guru Nanak. B.R.Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi as representative of such a hoary tradition.

Mr. Cariappa expressed ‘’concern’’ that ‘’things have come to such a pass that there were attempts to negate and reject Indian traditions under the garb of secularism’’, and added that it was imperative to reject the false ideologies being propounded by ‘’Macaulay’s children’’ so as to strengthen nationalism by infusing the new generation with a sense of history, culture and patriotism.