Phantoms, Phantasms and Fantasies of Beckett’s Tramps and Ashfaq Ahmed’s Pakhiwaars: Game of the Seen and the Unseen in East and West
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Collaboration of performing arts, whether in film or in drama, not only keep the dramatic as well as the cinematic imagination going but also provide an experience that cannot be found elsewhere. While Beckett is renowned for shaping his work through repetition of themes, images, visual gestures and certain phrases in the English drama, Ashfaq Ahmed, a giant among Pakistani dramatists, is well known for his use of phantoms and phantasms for the purpose of delivering the most sensitive predicaments of life. His plays, performed on television in the 70s and the 80s, were the highlight of the golden era of Urdu Drama in Pakistani Literature. This chapter attempts to show that despite their different cultural and social, and sociological backgrounds, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Ahmed’s Phantasm [Ishtebah-e-Nazar] exhibit unique similarities. It also tries to exhibit how both of these inventors of unique prose in drama bring out unbelievable symbolisms and metaphors by giving life and presence to waiting. The desires of the characters in both plays are the same and so are the end results they face. Their actions and moving images give expression to their hopes and aspirations, helping them imagine what they might be. Beckett’s Tramps and Ahmed’s Pakhiwaars educate us and make us reflect and shape a sense of identity by enhancing our understanding of the world in which we actually live. Elements of fantasy, fear and desolation as part of the lives of two Tramps and the Pakhiwaars bring East and West together.