Book Review: Mumbai Traps- Collected Plays by Anju Makhija

Poet and Critic Gopal Lahiri reviews Anju Makhija’s Mumbai Traps: Collected Plays ( Dhauli Books, 2022) and calls the book a collection of incisive and engaging plays.

• ISBN: 978-81-9545-605-5
• Author: Anju Makhija
• Publisher: Dhauli Books, Bhubaneshwar, India
• Price: INR-595/-

‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with to shape it.’ so said Bertolt Brecht. Playwriting is an oral art where a writer is expected to be heard rather than be read. The point of theatre is the transformation from making an extraordinary event out of ordinary material right in front of an audience’s eyes to speaking clearly before the audience right now.

Anju Makhija’s collection of plays, titled, ‘Mumbai Traps’ demonstrates a captivating and convincing assemblage of characters spiralling into new shapes that turn towards the readers/audiences and challenge them in no uncertain terms. She makes highly effective use of metonymical imagery in her plays as a vehicle for conveying her responses to the urban cartographies they evoke. This collection of six plays (including a poetic drama and a musical) depicts social and cultural shifts in the city of Mumbai.