Published by Botsotso Publishing 2004
P O Box 23910, Joubert Park, 2044
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Copyright  C   Muthal Naidoo 2004

ISBN No. 0-620-33399-5

Cover design and layout by Vivienne Preston


The publication of this book has been made possible by
a grant from the National Arts Council.

    In the years that  she was involved in theatre, Muthal Naidoo, a retired teacher, was an actor, director and playwright. Most of her work was done in Durban between 1977 and 1983.
    Her plays include We 3 Kings, Ikhayalethu (originally Coming Home), Masks, Of No Account, Nobody’s Hero, Outside-In and a number of short plays and revues. Of No Account and Coming Home (Ikhayalethu) were nominated for the Critics’ Circle Award in Durban. In 1983 her revue  The Master Plan - a satire based on the Tri-Cameral elections and proposals and performed at UDF meetings in the Durban area - was banned. We 3 Kings was published by the University of Durban-Westville in 1992. Flight from the Mahabarath was published by UCT in an anthology edited by Dr Kathy Perkins, Black South African Women: An Anthology of Plays. In 2002 Outside-In was published in an anthology by Rajendra Chetty entitled South African Indian Writings in English. In 2004, she published  A Little Book of Tamil Religious Rituals, a concise book on Hinduism and the symbols and symbolic processes of Tamil rituals.

This book is dedicated to the late Seetha Ray.

Seetha Ray, younger sister of Muthal Naidoo, also a teacher, was involved in the Shah Theatre Academy in 1963
and 1964 as an actor and playwright.
She took up a teaching post in London in 1965. In 1969 she married and went to live in Calcutta. In 1972, with her husband and baby daughter, she emigrated to the USA where she began to write about her experiences in India. Her story
Meera is included in this collection.
Seetha Ray died in 1993.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Brenda George for her invaluable advice and constructive criticism of the manuscript.

Thank you to Allan Kolski Horwitz for his encouragement and
support, to MPL A.R. Dawood for endorsing my application to the NAC for funding and to Carol Parsons for reading the first draft.