Communicating a third space: “the poetics of exile” in manjula padmanabhan’s lights out!

Manjula Padmanabhan’s oeuvres are often branded as ‘feminist’ since they primarily focus on social issues that are totally women centric and told from their point of view. Her scripts penned realism like ‘dowry deaths’, gang rape, alienation, and marginalization of Indian women in a patriarchal discourse. Her well-acclaimed dramatic piece Lights Out! (2000), delineates the darker side of patriarchy that is insensitive to female sensibility. It forefingers on the trial and tribulations of a macabre crime, i.e. the daily rape of an anonymous woman, that is never shown onstage combined with routine tea, candlelight dinner and the gracious conversations of hosts and guests in a middle-class flat. This paper attempts to read beyond the narrative where this ‘space in erasure’ is viewed through the ‘Third Space theory,’ enunciated by the social theorist Homi Bhabha. This ‘in-between’ space provides an emancipated terrain for the subjugated women to extend their novel strategies of selfhood or resistance there by breaking the First space-Second space dualism.