गिरीश कर्नाड म्हणतात : "... In the years following Independence, the presiding deity of Indian theatre was the English playwright, George Bernard Shaw. Shaw believed that theatre’s responsibility was to discuss social issues and the playwright’s aim was social upliftment. This corresponded with a philosophical belief underpinning the Indian independence movement: ‘To become eligible for independence we must wash away traditionally handed down evils from society and purify ourselves.’ Further, it was possible to sit back and enjoy Shaw’s plays since they were mainly comedies. From beginning to end, his dialogue threw up lines that elicited laughter. To him, humour and irony were devices to bring about social change.
There was the practical aspect as well: since Shaw’s plays were all about middle-class family troubles, they only required a living room set. This was in contrast to company theatre, which demanded elaborate sets and scenery, costumes, accompanying music, and so on. Plays in Shaw’s style were affordable to middle-class organizers of performances. The middle-class audience could relate to them since they were seeing on stage the problems of their own living rooms, and it was palatable to them since it was sugar-coated with humour.
In Marathi, beginning with the generation of playwrights that moved away from the company tradition to write exclusively for cultured audiences – Mama Varerkar, P.K. Atre, Mo Ga Rangnekar – and continuing into my own generation – Vasant Kanetkar and Vijay Tendulkar – almost every play was written in this style. In Kannada, it was Kailasam and Sriranga who wrote plays in this tradition.
As a result, our epics and the puranas found no place in contemporary urban theatre. To this ‘modern’ sensibility of theatre, stories from the puranas or our folk literature were not only ridiculous but also politically regressive. At a 1956 seminar on Indian theatre organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, left-leaning critics branded traditional forms and literature a regressive temptation that would take us away from contemporary reality...."
('This Life At Play: memoirs', २०२१)
वरील मराठी नाटककारांत एक नाव नाहीये : 'ती फुलराणी' ह्या शॉ यांच्या Pygmalion वर आधारित प्रचंड लोकप्रिय नाटकाचे लेखक पु ल देशपांडे.
हे वाचून मी थक्क झालो. किती खुजेपणा हा की त्याने आपले लोकसाहित्य, महाकाव्ये आणि पुराणे झिडकारले...आणि पुरोगामी, ज्या शॉ चा उदोउदो करत होते , ते शॉ कसे होते, या बद्दल जॉन ग्रे लिहतात :
“…For George Bernard Shaw, Nazi Germany was not a reactionary dictatorship but a legitimate heir to the European Enlightenment….”
“…Shaw’s view of Nazism was not so far-fetched. It chimed with Hitler’s self-image as a fearless progressive and modernist.
Shaw viewed both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as progressive regimes. As such, he held, they were entitled to kill off obstructive or superfluous people. Throughout his life, the great playwright argued in favour of mass extermination as an alternative to imprisonment. It was better to kill the socially useless, he urged, than to waste public money locking them up…” (‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals’, 2002)
"...In a speech to the Eugenics Education Society in 1910, Shaw declared: “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time looking after them.” Here Shaw was not speculating about a hypothetical future society. In his introduction to Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s English Prisons Under Local Government (1921), he explicitly advocated large-scale use of the lethal chamber as an alternative to imprisonment. In The Crime of Imprisonment (1946), he reiterated his view of how anti-social elements should be treated: “If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way.”
Shaw’s belief that many human beings were “not fit to live” was a recurring theme among early-20th-century progressive thinkers...." (‘A History of the Future: how writers envisioned tomorrow’s world’, New Statesman, November 12 2017)
'Pygmalion and Galatea' by Ernest Normand
