Play Reading: Maya Bazar

AFB and Bangalore Little Theatre are back with the monthly play reading sessions for 2016.

This play reading is a part of the Alliance française de Bangalore and Bangalore Little Theatre partnership. And this is how it unfolds. Some highly imaginative and enterprising playwright of yore, created a character non-existent in the epic Mahabharatha and got her married to the Pandava prince Abhimanyu amidst a mélange of mystery, mischief and magic spells and made the theatre buffs of the time in the western Hindi belt believe that such a character really existed! In the epic, there is no daughter of Yadava lord Balarama by the name Sasirekha or Surekha or Vatsala. The popular play found its way to cinema. In his 2013 book, Bollywood Nation: India through Its Cinema, Vamsee Juluri wrote, “Maya Bazar’s appeal is of course as much in its story as in its stars. But the performances and the beautiful songs and sets aside, the film also reveals an interesting feature of the Telugu mythological in its Golden Age—it is a story about something not very important from a doctrinal view of religion at all”.