Gunamukha: Namaz of a Dying Empire

In Gunamukha, pioneering Kannada writer P Lankesh walks into the ruins of empire and finds not glorious history, but widespread fever: a conqueror unable to sleep, ministers choking on their own lies, a city trembling beneath the weight of fear. Nothing here arrives clothed in heroic grandeur. Violence leaves behind exhausted bodies, infected language, and consciences that rot slowly in silence. At the heart of the play stands a dying emperor and an old hakim who possesses neither army nor throne. Between them unfolds one of the most unsettling confrontations in modern Indian theatre: power facing, perhaps for the first time, the unbearable intimacy of being human. Written in a spare, contemporary Kannada idiom, Gunamukha bypasses the spectacle of history to dwell on its human residue: exhausted bodies, moral decay, institutional cowardice, and the uneasy persistence of ethical attention. H S Komalesha’s evocative English translation retains the play’s stark beauty, moral unease, and dangerous tenderness. Three decades after it was written, Gunamukha returns with prophetic force to a world once again haunted by authoritarian power, institutional fatigue, and the spectacle of public cruelty.