The emergence of women playwrights in the domain of Indian English Drama might have been a recent development but the contribution of the women playwrights has left an indelible mark on the oeuvre of Indian English plays. Playwrights like Dina Mehta, Manjula Padmanabhan and Poile Sengupta have portrayed the plight of women in the contemporary Indian society from various perspectives. The present paper would like to consider Manjula Padmanabhan’s play Lights Out (1984) in the light of trauma studies and try to locate the responses of the witnesses on the issue of gangrape, which forms the crux of the play. Any solution to the ongoing incident is deferred and the repetitive act of violence questions the position of both the victim of and the witnesses to the horrifying incident. The victim becomes an object of pleasure, and the scopophilic gazers evade the incident and fail to accept a social responsibility to change the reality. The play focusses on the sexual exploitation of women and how this exploitation takes the form of severe posttraumatic stress disorder where the victims as well as the spectators fail to combat social inequality and injustice. (190 Words)
Assistant Professor of English, Malda Women?s College, Malda, West Bengal
