Boiled Beans on Toast: A Play

One of the finest playwrights of our time, Girish Karnad’s plays present a critical sense of history, myth, and time. This new play by Karnad has a reference to the founding lore of Bangalore, in which an 11th century king was saved by an old woman who offered him boiled beans. The grateful king desired to name the spot ‘Bendakalooru’, the place of boiled beans, which would symbolize hospitality and welcome for a weary traveller. However, over the period of time the place has emerged as Bangalore, India’s ‘Silicon Valley’. The play makes this impersonal city and its humongous growth in the last two decades its subject. Portraying the story of a cross section of those who live in the city-well-off housewives and their maid servants with hidden and complicated lives; lower middle class strugglers desperate to climb the corporate ladder; privileged rich kids rebelling against their fathers’ money-this play is a direct and realistic gaze at contemporary India.