India Song | Literary Criticism & Book Review

India Song Critical Overview

India Song is hailed as an experimental feminist text that simultaneously critiques colonial culture, women's status in society, and representations of the female body. Feminist critics make much of the fact that all of the voices in the play/film are disembodied and that the characters are seen as physical bodies devoid of direct dialogue. This experimental technique is regarded as a critique of traditional representations of women. As Gabrielle H. Cody, in Impossible Performances remarks:

Duras's drama consistently features female protagonists who exist in a relationship of struggle with the representational frame and who "speak back" to the viewing authorities of a masculine symbolic.

Critics are also impressed with Duras's complex use of "offstage" sounds in India Song. Lib Taylor in "Sound Tracks" observes that

The verbal text is woven into a complex, orchestrated soundscape of instrumental music, songs, non-verbal cries and utterances, screams...
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